Ethnos, People, Nation: A Forgotten Hierarchy

The Fate of Identity and Belonging

Alexander Markovics uncovers the ethnosociological roots of human society, dismantling the illusions of liberal modernity by tracing the evolution from tribal unity to national atomization and urging a conscious return to organic, hierarchical forms of belonging beyond the brittle fiction of the social contract.

Is There a Concept of the People beyond Modernity?

In Germany, France, and all over Europe, a debate is unfolding that can be summed up with one simple question: Who is the people? What is striking is that this debate, conducted against the backdrop of modern democracy, is not only important for defining the identity of a society shaken by liberal-capitalist globalization but also for answering the modern question of sovereignty: Who may participate in democratic decision-making? Is “the people” primarily a community of descent, in the nationalist sense, or primarily a community of will and values, in the liberal sense? Regardless of how one answers this question, one remains within the framework of modern thought — especially the kind of sociology defined by Max Weber, which made the nation-state the norm for human coexistence and the individual its subject.

What is entirely ignored in the process, however, is the question of the original meanings of the term “people” beyond modern frameworks of thought, and whether the nation-state, which has increasingly come under fire, especially from the liberal avant-garde in favor of a liberal world state (see Francis Fukuyama’s End of History but also the “Great Reset” of the WEF and Klaus Schwab), can still be considered the measure of all things, even for advocates of a genuine New Right. We will not find an answer to what “people” originally means in modern sociology but in another discipline that begins its study of human societies from a different standpoint: ethnosociology.

Ethnosociology: Thinking Human Societies from the Ethnos

While ethnosociology has largely been forgotten in Europe, it has been rediscovered in Russia, especially through the philosopher, geopolitician, and sociologist Alexander Dugin (b. 1962), whose textbook Ethnosociology: The Foundations (Arktos, 2019) and his work Ethnos and Society (Arktos, 2019) are available in English. Unlike modern sociology, which introduced the term ethnos but assigned it little significance, ethnosociology places the ethnos at the center. Among its founders are the Russian ethnologist Sergei Mikhailovich Shirokogoroff (1887–1939) and the Viennese scholar Richard Thurnwald (1869–1954), who coined the term. According to Shirokogoroff, the ethnos is defined by three characteristics:

1. A common language

2. Belief in common ancestry

3. Shared customs, traditions, and culture.

Since every form of society encompasses at least one of these three traits, all societies are ethnic in the eyes of ethnosociology. If one imagines human societies along an X and Y axis — X representing differentiation by groups, and Y the hierarchical distinction — then the ethnos represents the origin point. It is the simplest form of human society, from which all subsequent forms develop, from simpler, organic societies to more complex, mechanically functioning ones.

The Ethnos as Collective Identity: Total and All-Encompassing

Within the ethnos, all members are unified into something whole, cohesive, and indivisible. Equality and unity prevail among all. It is no coincidence, then, that Karl Marx identified the tribal society of the ethnos with primordial communism. Here, collective identity is maximally pronounced — total and all-encompassing. French ethnologist and structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) also plays a major role in ethnosociology. He described the myth that underlies ethnic society as a combination of mythemes — the smallest indivisible kernels of mythological storytelling. In parallel, Dugin sees the koineme¹ as the indivisible origin at the foundation of every society.

In this simplest form of human society, the question “Who am I?” is answered with: “The ethnos.” In ethnic societies, the whole dominates over its parts; the particular exists only as a function of the whole and has no independent meaning or being. People live in a life-world² where myths, spirits, and deceased ancestors are just as much part of reality as the living members of the tribe.

Holomorphism: The Lizard Tail of Human Societies

The ethnos also possesses an inherent quality known as holomorphism: the ability of a society to regenerate parts that have been torn away from it, just as a lizard can regrow a lost part of its tail. In simple societies, this regeneration is achieved by the society itself; in more complex societies, it is managed by a bureaucratic apparatus. In the ethnos, the shaman fulfills this role: warding off evil spirits, conducting rituals, healing wounds, and embodying spiritual functions.

This describes the simplest form of human society, but what more complex forms of communal life follow?

The People: The First Derivative of the Ethnos

The first derivative of the ethnos is the people (das Volk in German, equivalent to the Russian term narod). The people is the ethnos that has entered into history. It no longer experiences an eternal recurrence of the same but instead knows linear time. The people, in its essence, is tragic and aware of death as the final reality. Derived from the Greek word laos, the term originally referred to a group of persons organized for a military campaign or some other purpose. While the ethnos is static and strives to conserve its condition, the people is dynamic — more artificial, better organized, and usually oriented towards a goal, often of a military nature.

The People as a Socially Complex Phenomenon

The people possesses a more complex social structure, involving social stratification and the division into groups. The people consists of multiple ethnic groups, where one group may dominate others, forming hierarchies in the shape of castes or estates. One can imagine it like a building: the first floor houses the concept of the ethnos, including the various ethnic groups that make up the people; on the second floor resides the people itself. In this way, identity within the laos becomes a complex phenomenon — no longer purely collective and total, as in the ethnos, but both personal and collective. A tension arises between the masses and the elites: the identity of the masses remains collectivist and impersonal, while that of the elites — heroes and chieftains — is individual. The question “Who am I?” now refers to one’s caste or estate, profession, and place of residence.

State, Religion, and Civilization as Forms of the People

The mythic and ritual systems transform qualitatively in the people. While sagas and myths defined the ethnos, epic narratives now emerge. The ethnosociological category of the people produces three forms: state, religion, and civilization. These phenomena may arise in sequence, simultaneously, or in any combination within a people.

The Reversibility of the People

When considering more complex forms of the ethnos, one phenomenon becomes particularly significant: reversibility. A people may regress back into an ethnos if its social structure collapses. Thus, multiple ethnic groups may form a people, but a people can also disintegrate into multiple ethnic groups. However, the original ethnic groups that formed the people do not simply reappear; new ethnic groups emerge. At the very least, the one ethnos that formed the core of the people is irreversibly transformed in this process.

The ancient Greeks provide an example: they were a unique people composed of several ethnic groups, producing a singular Mediterranean civilization. When that civilization collapsed, new ethnic groups emerged in its place, while the civilizational core — the Greeks of the Peloponnese and Balkans — transformed into a completely new ethnos: the modern Greeks. A similar phenomenon occurred with the collapse of the Roman Empire. Conversely, ancient ethnic groups may persist, especially on the peripheries of empires. According to Dugin, the Basques are an example. These characteristics define the people as the first derivative of the ethnos. But what follows after the people?

The Nation as a Complex, Modern Society

With the advent of modernity and the increasingly complex European state system, the second derivative of the ethnos arises: the nation. While the people can still be seen as a traditional society with both collectivist and individual identities, the nation represents something entirely new. As a product of bourgeois society, the nation is purely individualistic: the individual is not just a phenomenon of the elite but the subject of the nation. While in the people heroic individuals lead collectivist masses, the nation consists entirely of merchants. The merchant identity is imposed on all its members, who are legally defined as citizens.

In the formation of the people, the ethnos is relegated to the background and remains only implicitly present. Likewise, in the formation of the nation, both the ethnos and the people recede; neither holds legal status within the nation-state.

The people represents a population mobilized for military, religious, or other purposes — the laos. The nation, by contrast, is composed of the demos, a term that in Greek referred to a politically active but ethnically and socially undefined population on the periphery of the city. This is one reason why the Greek philosopher Aristotle rejected majority rule. The nation consists of citizens whose totality forms the demos.

From the perspective of ethnosociology, the nation — like the people — is also reversible and may dissolve, as it is based merely on a social contract that can be unilaterally broken. A prime example, according to Dugin, is Yugoslavia, which during the Yugoslav wars fragmented into several ethnic groups that were then artificially molded into new nations in line with the modern European order. Thus, from the collapse of a nation, both new ethnic groups and new peoples may emerge. Thus, we can understand the phenomena of ethnos, people, and nation from an ethnosociological perspective, but what can we conclude from this?

Either “We are the People!” or “We are the Wall — the People Must Go!”

Ethnosociology shows us that every form of human society is ethnic. In contrast to modern sociology, which would have us believe that the nation-state is a natural phenomenon looking down upon supposedly regressive forms like the ethnos and the people, ethnosociology reveals that the evolution of human societies into more complex forms is not fate. It can be reversed. Society is always the product of the political will of the people living within it, whether in the organic ethnos, the historically grown people, or the purely artificial nation based on a social contract. It is therefore in our hands whether we march into the supposedly progressive future of a post-national civil society or even a transhumanist post-society. Ethnosociology reveals that a tribalist society or the hierarchical community of the people, within the framework of a civilization-state, is also a viable future. The future lies ahead. Now it is up to us, as the intellectual elite, to envision and shape it!

(Translated from the German by Constantin von Hoffmeister)

1. Translator’s note: A koineme (from Greek koinos, meaning “common” or “shared”) is the deep archetype of a society — non-individual, non-modern, irreducible, and absolute — rooted in myth, tradition, and collective memory. Introduced by Alexander Dugin, it represents the primordial essence from which all social and cultural forms emerge.

2. Trans. note: The term life-world (German: Lebenswelt) originates from Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. It refers to the pre-reflective, taken-for-granted world of everyday experience — the world as immediately lived rather than scientifically analyzed or theoretically abstracted.