The Great Awakening vs the Great Reset
This short book is a declarative, manifesto-like work of political and civilizational polemic rather than a systematic treatise. Its central claim is that two global projects are now in open conflict: the “Great Reset,” which Alexander Dugin identifies as the globalist elite’s attempt to complete and enforce liberal modernity worldwide, and the “Great Awakening,” the emerging worldwide resistance of nations, cultures, religions, and sovereign states to that project. The book sets out to interpret the meaning of the Reset and to outline a program of equal scope for opposing it, framed in geopolitical terms as a struggle between the land-based “Heartland” and the maritime “coastlands,” and between “Atlantism” and a multipolar order.
The Great Reset
The opening chapter presents the Great Reset as the continuation of globalization after a series of setbacks—among them the disruption caused by anti-globalist political currents, the growing influence of a multipolar world (especially Russia and China), and the assertiveness of Islamic countries seeking to withdraw from Western influence. Dugin reads the Reset as a project of total transformation, extending from education and social contracts to working conditions and industry, and argues that its scale is intentionally unlimited: every country and every industry is expected to participate and be transformed.
The chapter examines the Reset’s public presentation, beginning with the five points associated with Prince Charles, and then turns to the question of implementation. Dugin forecasts that the Reset will be pursued through the strengthening of NATO, the consolidation of structures of world government, and the use of “demonization,” deplatforming, network ostracism, and cancel culture against those who dissent from globalist positions, both abroad and within the United States. A further section treats the geopolitics of the Reset, arguing that it entails escalation against countries and regimes that reject globalization. The overall thrust is that globalization brooks no genuine competition, whether domestically or internationally.
A Brief History of Liberal Ideology: Globalism as a Culmination
The second chapter supplies the book’s historical-philosophical argument: that contemporary globalism is the culmination of a liberal ideology whose roots lie in the medieval dispute over universals. Dugin traces this to nominalism, which he presents as the position that only individual things and beings are real and that general names are merely conventional classifications. In his account, nominalism laid the ideological and economic foundation for liberalism: the human being is seen only as an individual and nothing else, while all forms of collective identity—religion, class, and the like—are to be abolished. The thing, likewise, is treated as absolute private property attributable to an individual owner. Nominalism, he argues, prevailed first in England, spread through Protestant countries, and gradually became the philosophical matrix of modernity in religion, science, politics, economics, and ethics.
From this foundation Dugin develops a three-phase account of capitalism and globalization. The first phase is capitalism as such. The second is the twentieth century and the triumph of globalization, following the defeat of liberalism’s collectivist ideological rivals, communism and fascism. The third phase is what he calls gender and posthumanism, in which liberalism, having dissolved older collective identities, discovers and targets two further forms of collective identity—gender and humanity itself—as objects of transformation.
The chapter closes with “The Last Battle of the Liberals,” an argument that liberalism, despite presenting itself as open and tolerant, has become intolerant of any fundamental questioning of its premises. Those who oppose it are cast as forces of darkness, and the “enemies of open society” are to be treated with corresponding severity. In Dugin’s reading, the new liberal ethic permits everyone to be a liberal but permits no one to be anything else—which is why he regards the present conjuncture as a final, existential confrontation.
The Schism in the U.S.: Trumpism and Its Enemies
The third chapter turns to the United States as the central arena of the conflict. Dugin describes an internal schism between the globalist establishment and a populist revolt, and examines the phenomenon of Trumpism as the expression of that revolt. Sections on “The Enemy Within” and “Trump and the Revolt of the Deplorables” analyze how the American divide is framed by globalist forces as a struggle against internal enemies, while “Trumpism” considers the movement as a symptom of the broader anti-globalist uprising rather than merely a matter of one politician’s fortunes. The chapter closes with a discussion framed by the paired terms “individuum” and “dividuum,” elaborating Dugin’s contrast between the atomized liberal individual and the divided, relational conception of the person he associates with his own anti-liberal anthropology.
The Great Awakening
The final and longest chapter is the book’s constructive core. It opens with “The Great Awakening: A Scream in the Night,” presenting the awakening as an elemental, spontaneous reaction against the Reset, and then formulates the conflict as an “Internationale of Nations” arrayed against an “Internationale of the Elites.” From there the chapter surveys the various theaters of resistance.
Dugin discusses the American civil conflict and the necessity of choosing a camp within it. He examines European populism as a force that can overcome the exhausted categories of right and left. He considers China and its collective identity as a civilizational alternative to liberal individualism. He argues that Islamic civilization radically rejects liberal globalism and Western hegemony, and that opposition to the Great Reset could serve as a common denominator for unifying the Islamic world and forming another pole of global resistance, within limits setting aside local contradictions. He then sets out Russia’s mission as being at the forefront of the Great Awakening, and describes a Russian awakening as an imperial renaissance. The chapter concludes with a section on the road toward the victory of the Great Awakening.
Throughout, the book promotes political and cultural sovereignisms and presents Eurasianism as the doctrinal pillar of a multipolar antidote to unipolar, quasi-universalist Western modernity. The awakening is conceived not as a single organization but as a coalition of very different forces—nations, religions, and civilizations—united by their rejection of the globalist project.
Appendices
The volume is rounded out by appendices that restate the argument in more programmatic form. These include material on the Great Reset, a piece titled “The Great Awakening: The Future Starts Now,” a statement of “Theoretical Principles of the Great Awakening” grounded in Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory, and a list of twenty-one points. These appendices function as a condensed credo, translating the book’s historical narrative and geopolitical analysis into a set of principles and demands for the movement it seeks to summon.
Taken as a whole, the book is less an empirical study than a call to arms: it interprets the Great Reset as the culmination of a centuries-long liberal project rooted in nominalism, and it calls on the peoples and civilizations outside the liberal-globalist consensus—above all Russia, but also China, the Islamic world, European populists, and dissident Americans—to wage a comprehensive theoretical and practical struggle against it.
Anthropological and Civilizational Dimensions
A recurring line of argument in the book concerns the anthropology of the Reset. Dugin presents globalist technocracy as seeking to remake the human being: the liberal individual is already an abstraction, and the digital and biopolitical regime of the Reset pushes further toward a post-human condition in which the person is reduced to data, managed behavior, and economic utility. Against this he sets the awakened person as one rooted in tradition, family, religion, and a civilizational collective. The struggle is thus not only over institutions or borders but over what a human being is and whether particular cultures may continue to exist.
The book’s treatment of the Reset as an anthropological project also shapes its understanding of resistance. Because the threat is described as reaching into the fabric of personhood and culture, the Awakening is framed as requiring a recovery of traditional social forms and a politics of sovereignty capable of protecting them. Its significance is primarily as a movement text: it offers a symbolic map and an existential language of awakening rather than an empirical account or a detailed policy blueprint. The polemical style is declarative and exhortatory, aiming to convert diffuse discontent into a recognizable civilizational cause.
