Michael Millerman (b. 1984) occupies a hybrid position in contemporary intellectual life. Trained in political philosophy yet operating outside the research university, he combines scholarship, teaching, translation, and digital entrepreneurship into a single career. His project traces philosophical questions about ontology, civilization, and political order from their origins in continental thought down to present geopolitical conflicts. The work resists the tendency of modern political science to reduce ideological dispute to interest, incentive, or demographic alignment. It insists that political orders carry metaphysical commitments and cannot be understood apart from them.
Millerman grew up in Windsor, Ontario, and earned his PhD in political science at the University of Toronto in 2018. His doctoral dissertation focused on Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and the political consequences of fundamental ontology. He worked under conditions that shaped his later course. The analytic–continental divide had weakened. Yet professional incentives in political theory pushed graduate students toward narrow specialization, methodological caution, and disciplinary insulation from civilizational or theological questions. Millerman moved against these currents. He treated philosophy as the hidden architecture of political life rather than as a technical subfield serving the credentialing apparatus of the modern university.
This commitment found mature statement in Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, Dugin and the Philosophical Constitution of the Political (Arktos, 2020). The book argues that Heidegger’s importance extends past philosophy departments. Heidegger reshaped the conceptual ground beneath modern political thought, and thinkers as different as Leo Strauss (1899–1973), Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), Richard Rorty (1931–2007), and Aleksandr Dugin (b. 1962) each inherit elements of his critique of metaphysics and turn them toward distinct political ends. The argument has two layers. On the surface, it offers comparative readings of five major thinkers. Beneath that, it advances a thesis about how political ontologies organize what counts as politically thinkable. Liberalism, communism, traditionalism, postmodernism, and Eurasianist civilizational thought each rest on assumptions about history, technology, truth, and human nature. Millerman treats these assumptions as the proper object of political philosophy.
The visibility of the book owes much to Millerman’s role as principal English-language interpreter of Dugin’s work. He has translated seven of Dugin’s major books, including The Fourth Political Theory, The Rise of the Fourth Political Theory, Ethnos and Society, and Theory of a Multipolar World. His position in this translation work is distinctive. Western journalists and policy analysts often treat Dugin as a geopolitical propagandist, a malign whisperer behind the Kremlin. Millerman argues that this framing misses the philosophical substance of Dugin’s project. In his reading, Dugin’s concepts of multipolarity, civilization-state identity, and anti-liberal traditionalism cannot be parsed apart from deeper disputes over Heideggerian ontology, Eurasianist intellectual history, and the metaphysical status of modernity.
This interpretive position attracted controversy before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the controversy intensified after. Critics treat sustained engagement with Dugin as politically suspect on its face. Millerman defends a distinction between interpretation and endorsement. He argues that liberal institutions have lost the conceptual vocabulary needed to recognize metaphysical critiques of liberal order as such, and that the resulting analytical blindness has practical costs in foreign policy, journalism, and intellectual history. His second book, Inside “Putin’s Brain”: The Political Philosophy of Alexander Dugin (2022), develops the case at greater length and reached a wider audience during the early phase of the war.
Reactions to Millerman’s work follow predictable lines. Sympathetic readers see him as a corrective to reductive analyses of Dugin and to the broader incapacity of mainstream political commentary to take metaphysical claims seriously. Hostile readers, including Matthew Sharpe in Critical Horizons and reviewers at Commonweal and Merion West, accuse him of treating an ideologue with undue philosophical seriousness, of granting Dugin a philosopher’s dignity that the work does not earn, and of neglecting the practical consequences of Duginist politics. The disagreement is partly about Dugin’s stature and partly about whether sympathetic interpretation of an anti-liberal thinker carries an implicit political endorsement. Millerman’s position throughout has held that the question of philosophical content can be settled apart from the question of political consequence, and that the refusal to make this distinction reflects a narrowing of intellectual life rather than a defense of liberal values.
Beyond his work on Dugin, Millerman has developed a wider canon of teaching and writing. His public lectures and online courses move across Plato (c. 427–347 BCE), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), Heidegger, Strauss, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). He has also engaged the work of Henri Corbin (1903–1978), the French scholar of Shi’ite mysticism and imaginal metaphysics, whose writings on the mundus imaginalis and sacred cosmology shaped twentieth-century phenomenological and traditionalist thought. The Corbin connection broadens the scope of Millerman’s project past geopolitics. It places him within a longer lineage of twentieth-century critics of secular disenchantment that includes René Guénon (1886–1951), Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), and Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998). Millerman does not adopt the traditionalist position as a confessional commitment. He treats its critique of technological modernity as a serious philosophical resource.
This emphasis on metaphysical seriousness gives his work a distinctive grammar. Concepts that mainstream political discourse has driven out, such as transcendence, sacred order, myth, destiny, civilizational memory, and spiritual hierarchy, return in Millerman’s lectures and essays as legitimate categories of political analysis. In academic political science, such terms are translated into sociological or psychological proxies, where they can be measured and tested. Millerman refuses the translation. He argues that the proxies miss the substance and that no adequate account of political life can be built without restoring the original vocabulary to philosophical inquiry.
The institutional form of his career is as instructive as its content. Millerman did not take an academic post after his doctorate. He founded Millerman School, an online platform offering more than twenty structured courses on Heidegger, Strauss, Schmitt, Dugin, Nietzsche, and other figures in the canon of political philosophy. The school formalizes his critique of the contemporary research university by building an alternative outside its credentialing system. Students pay for access to lecture series, seminars, and textual analysis rather than for degrees. Authority within the school derives from interpretive coherence, audience cultivation, and sustained engagement with difficult texts rather than from institutional certification.
This model reflects a wider shift in the political economy of knowledge production. Trust in legacy academic and media institutions has weakened over the past two decades, and decentralized platforms now perform many functions once monopolized by universities and major magazines. Podcasts, subscription newsletters, online seminar systems, and independent publishers have created parallel intellectual networks that operate outside conventional gatekeeping. Millerman writes a Substack newsletter, Michael’s Musings, with more than a thousand subscribers, hosts a YouTube channel with around 36,000 subscribers, advises private clients including hedge fund managers and technology executives, and teaches private students in seminar formats. The line between philosopher, lecturer, translator, publisher, and entrepreneur has collapsed into a single hybrid role.
His pedagogical method also revives older traditions of philosophical formation. The emphasis falls on close reading of canonical texts in extended seminar settings rather than on credential accumulation or vocational training. This approach has more in common with the pre-bureaucratic philosophical schools, religious study circles, and tutorial systems of an earlier era than with the mass administrative university. It aligns with the Straussian understanding of philosophical education as initiation into a way of inquiry rather than as professional preparation.
Millerman’s intellectual location is double. On one side, he belongs to a small group of contemporary political theorists who take continental and traditionalist sources seriously as live philosophical options rather than as historical curiosities. On the other, he belongs to a decentralized digital intellectual milieu that emerged in reaction to the narrowing ideological range of mainstream academic and media institutions. Within this milieu, intellectual status derives from audience formation, interpretive range, and the capacity to sustain long-form discourse across digital platforms rather than from departmental affiliation.
The critical literature on his work clusters around three lines of objection. The first holds that he grants excessive depth to anti-liberal traditions and risks aestheticizing them. The second holds that he downplays the historical and practical dangers attached to authoritarian and reactionary movements that draw on the thinkers he interprets. The third holds that the wider online dissident milieu is structurally prone to oppositional identity formation and conspiratorial thinking. Even these criticisms, taken on their own terms, register Millerman as a significant figure rather than a marginal one. He has done enough sustained work, in enough domains, that the responses to him have to engage the work rather than dismiss it.
Millerman says liberal proceduralism, technological rationality, and administrative governance do not eliminate the older questions about truth, transcendence, destiny, and collective identity. They suppress them for a season. The questions return when institutional confidence weakens, as it has in recent decades, and when the suppressed sources of meaning find new spokesmen. Millerman’s career rests on the conviction that political philosophy has a responsibility to confront these questions in their full philosophical seriousness rather than to translate them into more manageable terms.
Whether one regards this project as a corrective to liberal reductionism or as part of a wider anti-liberal intellectual revival depends on prior commitments that Millerman acknowledges as philosophical rather than political. What is harder to dispute is that he has built a coherent and sustained body of work outside the institutional structures that once monopolized this kind of inquiry, and that his career documents a wider migration of philosophy from the university seminar into the decentralized intellectual ecosystems of the present.
Alliance Theory
Millerman’s allies include the post-liberal and dissident right intellectual milieu (Curtis Yarvin, Bronze Age Pervert, Nick Land, and the wider Substack and podcast network of which Millerman is a node), the post-academic publishing world that includes Arktos, Compact Magazine, IM-1776, and Athwart, the audience of hedge fund managers and technology executives who pay for his advisory practice, his subscribers and students, and the intellectual figures he treats with sympathetic interpretation: Heidegger, Leo Strauss (1899–1973), Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Dugin, Henri Corbin (1903–1978), and the wider traditionalist school of René Guénon (1886–1951), Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), and Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998). His rivals are the orthodox academic political theory field, the mainstream foreign-policy commentariat that treats Dugin as a propagandist, the reviewers at Commonweal, Merion West, and Critical Horizons who have attacked his work, and the wider class of liberal procedural-managerial elites whose dominance over legitimate intellectual life he treats as an exhausted regime.
The first test of Alliance Theory is whether this alliance structure exhibits the strange bedfellows the theory predicts. It does. Straussians and Heideggerians sit together inside the canon Millerman teaches, even though the Strauss-Heidegger relationship is one of the great unresolved philosophical quarrels of the twentieth century. Strauss defends natural right; Heidegger rejects it as a metaphysical residue. Strauss’s recovery of classical political philosophy is in part a defense against the historicism Heidegger advances. Millerman’s own Beginning with Heidegger devotes a chapter to the Strauss-Heidegger encounter on the Idea of the Good in Plato (c. 427–347 BCE), where the disagreement is sharp. Yet in his pedagogical and public practice, Strauss and Heidegger are arrayed as parts of a single canon transmitted to students. The alliance binds them. Philosophy does not.
The same point holds elsewhere in the canon. The American Straussians have historically been defenders of natural right, constitutionalism, and American political theology. Dugin is anti-American, anti-Atlanticist, and a partisan of multipolarity against American hegemony. A philosophical coalition might not contain both at full strength. An alliance coalition can, because the binding principle is shared opposition to liberal proceduralism rather than shared positive commitments. The same applies to the inclusion of Russian Orthodox traditionalism alongside Catholic integralism, of Corbin’s Shi’ite imaginal metaphysics alongside Schmittian Catholic political theology, and of esoteric Traditionalism alongside Strauss’s rationalist defense of philosophical inquiry. These thinkers fall on different sides of fundamental metaphysical disputes. The canon coheres as a coalition, not as a school.
Pinsof’s second prediction is that allies receive propagandistic biases of three kinds: perpetrator biases that downplay the ally’s transgressions, victim biases that embellish the ally’s grievances, and attributional biases that assign internal causes to the ally’s goods and external causes to the ally’s harms. Each appears in Millerman’s work.
Take perpetrator biases first. Heidegger’s membership in the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and his actions as rector of Freiburg are facts Millerman acknowledges and brackets. The bracketing happens through a distinction between philosophical content and political affiliation, with philosophical content described as separable from and weightier than political affiliation. Schmitt receives the same treatment. So does Dugin. In Millerman’s “Dugin Decade” essay, he addresses Dugin’s support for Russia’s war on Ukraine by writing that Dugin is “not perfect” and that “people affected by communism are rightly wary of Marx, while those whose countries suffered under the influence of global liberalism may understandably not want to study liberalism’s greatest minds sympathetically. Some Jews are hesitant to read Nazi theorists, even when they are as significant as Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger.” The structural move is the perpetrator bias Pinsof names: minimize the severity, embellish the legitimacy of engagement, point to mitigating considerations, distribute the harm across other cases. Millerman acknowledges Dugin’s role in Russian state violence as one of those things some communities might be wary of, then proceeds to defend continued engagement. A liberal scholar who treated an American academic ally’s support for state violence in the same way would be making the same move.
Victim biases follow the same pattern. Heidegger has been suppressed by the political prejudices of liberal academia. Dugin has been misunderstood because Western analysts lack the philosophical vocabulary to read him. The canon Millerman teaches has been pushed out by technocratic narrowing, professional specialization, and ideological gatekeeping. The post-liberal intellectual scene faces exclusion from mainstream venues. Each of these claims has some empirical grounding, in the way Alliance Theory’s victim biases usually do. The point is not that the grievances are wholly invented but that they are amplified and that competing grievances (the costs of right-wing anti-liberal political projects, the experience of Ukrainians under Russian invasion, the historical reality of European Jewry under National Socialism) are minimized or treated as distractions from the philosophical question.
Attributional biases run through Millerman’s interpretive practice. The success of his allies is attributed to internal philosophical depth (Heidegger reshaped the foundations of modern thought; Dugin engages the deepest questions; Strauss recovers what moderns lost). The marginalization of his allies is attributed to external causes (academic gatekeeping, ideological prejudice, the narrowing of liberal institutions, the cowardice of professors). The success of his opponents is attributed to external causes (credentialing apparatus, conformity pressures, institutional incentives). The failures of his opponents are attributed to internal causes (they are hollowed out, unimaginative, ideologically captured, philosophically unserious). The pattern fits the self-serving attributional bias Pinsof describes, as the theory predicts for any partisan operating within an alliance structure.
The Pinsof test that does the most work is the substitution test. If a philosophical principle is held for principled reasons, it should apply to all relevant cases. If it is held for alliance reasons, it should track allies and rivals. Millerman holds several principles that fail the substitution test.
The first principle is that engagement is not endorsement. Millerman insists on this when defending his interpretive work on Dugin and Heidegger. He does not extend it to figures the milieu opposes. Sympathetic interpretation of Michel Foucault (1926–1984), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), or the liberation theologians is not protected by the same shield in the post-liberal scene. The principle holds when his allies need it and weakens when his rivals might benefit.
The second principle is that philosophical content should be considered apart from political consequences. Millerman applies this to Heidegger, Schmitt, and Dugin. He does not apply it to liberal philosophers whose work he treats as exhausted, where the political consequences (managerial governance, technological administration, civilizational flattening) are foregrounded as the central feature. The same principle, applied to allies and rivals, yields opposite verdicts.
The third principle is that metaphysical seriousness should be taken seriously. Millerman applies this to thinkers in his canon. Karl Marx (1818–1883) is a deep metaphysical thinker about history, alienation, and the conditions of human flourishing. The Frankfurt School engages the question of metaphysics after Auschwitz, the technological reduction of life, and the conditions for transcendence under modern capitalism. These are the questions Millerman names as ones he wants restored to public discourse. They appear in his canon as opponents rather than as fellow inquirers. The selection follows alliance lines, not the avowed principle.
The fourth principle is suspicion of credentialing and academic gatekeeping. Millerman builds an alternative outside the credentialing system and treats the university’s credentialing apparatus as a corruption of philosophical inquiry. His own authority rests in part on a University of Toronto PhD, which he displays in his biographical materials and which his publishers and clients value. The credential is corrupt when it certifies others and legitimating when it certifies him.
The fifth principle is critique of managerial elites. Millerman’s advisory practice serves hedge fund managers, technology executives, and startup founders, who are the contemporary instantiation of the managerial elite his canon critiques. He frames the service as transmitting philosophical seriousness to people who run things. A liberal theorist who served the same clientele while critiquing managerial governance would be charged with hypocrisy. The principle holds in one direction and not the other.
Alliance Theory predicts these double standards as the normal output of any alliance structure, not as evidence of personal failure. Millerman is not unusually inconsistent. He is consistent in the way the theory says partisans always are: at the level of alliances rather than at the level of stated principles. The principles are mobilization tools for the alliance, not the source from which alliance positions flow.
The competing explanations Pinsof tests underperform here. Intolerance Theory does not fit Millerman well, since he engages a wide range of thinkers and audiences. He is not generally intolerant. He is selective in a pattern that tracks allies and rivals. Authoritarianism Theory does not fit, since his pattern of deference to authority is selective: he defers to certain teachers and certain texts and resists institutional authority where it sits with his rivals. Egalitarianism is not in play as the explanatory variable. A simple commitment to metaphysical seriousness, taken at its word, cannot account for the canonical exclusions and inclusions. Alliance Theory captures the pattern more economically than any of these.
Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) developed field theory most fully in The Field of Cultural Production, The Rules of Art, and Homo Academicus. He treats intellectual life as a structured social space with its own stakes, hierarchies, and rules of legitimation. The objects in motion are not free-floating ideas but positioned agents, each endowed with particular forms of capital (cultural, social, symbolic, economic) and disposed to act in accordance with a habitus shaped by their location. Field theory yields more on Michael Millerman than any other frame, his own stack included, because Millerman’s career is a case study in capital conversion across the boundary between an established field and a forming one.
Begin with the academic philosophy field. Bourdieu describes it in Homo Academicus as a structured space with its own doxa, hierarchies, and reproduction apparatus. The doxa includes assumptions about what counts as a philosophical question, what counts as a legitimate method of pursuing it, which figures merit serious engagement, and which can be dismissed without argument. The reproduction apparatus runs through doctoral training, dissertation defense, peer-reviewed journals, university hiring committees, conference circuits, and the small group of senior figures who confer recognition. The political theory sub-field, where Millerman did his work, has its own variants: a canon weighted toward John Rawls (1921–2002) and his interlocutors, a methodological preference for the analytic style, a doxa around liberal proceduralism, and a peer-policed boundary around what counts as a serious entry. Heidegger sits at the edge of this sub-field. Schmitt sits further out. Dugin is outside.
Millerman was formed inside this field. His doctoral training at the University of Toronto gave him the embodied cultural capital Bourdieu identifies as the most durable kind: not the credential itself but the long internalization of canonical texts, scholarly habits, languages, citation norms, and reading practices. He acquired institutionalized cultural capital in the form of his PhD. He acquired modest social capital through doctoral and postdoctoral networks. He acquired some symbolic capital through his publications. None of these stood out inside the field. His thesis treated Heidegger and Dugin together, which already marked him as a heterodox figure: an academic insider whose object of study sat near the field’s boundary.
Then came the strategic move that field theory reads as a textbook case of capital conversion. Rather than competing for a tenure-track position inside the orthodoxy, Millerman exited the academic field and entered a forming field, where the rules of legitimation are not yet settled and where his accumulated capital could be redeployed at higher rates of return. The new field is the post-academic intellectual ecology Bourdieu’s theory predicts whenever institutional confidence weakens: a field of independent publishers (Arktos, Compact, Athwart, IM-1776), online education platforms, Substack newsletters, podcast networks, and small advisory practices. The field is real, in the Bourdieusian sense, because it has stakes, players, hierarchies, and emerging rules of legitimation, even though its institutional shape remains fluid.
In this forming field, Millerman’s academic capital is worth more than it would be inside the academy. Inside the academy, a Toronto PhD is one among thousands and confers only entry. Inside the post-academic field, a Toronto PhD with a Heidegger thesis is a scarce and high-prestige asset, since most players in the field do not have one. The same credential converts at a higher rate when transferred across the boundary. Bourdieu calls this the strategy of moving toward sub-fields where one’s species of capital is dominant. Millerman has executed the strategy with discipline.
The capital conversion goes further. His embodied cultural capital, the fluency in Heidegger’s vocabulary that he acquired over years of doctoral work, becomes a distinguishing feature in a field where most players cannot read Heidegger in any sustained way. His ability to translate Dugin from Russian, with editing and collaboration, converts academic linguistic capital into a scarce skill in a market hungry for Dugin in English. His seminar style, internalized from years inside the doctoral classroom, converts into a pedagogical asset for online courses, where the form of close reading and structured commentary is rare. Each of these conversions raises his symbolic capital inside the new field, which he then converts into economic capital through subscriptions, course fees, advisory contracts, and book sales.
Millerman School is the institutional crystallization of this strategy. In Homo Academicus, Bourdieu shows that the founding of an alternative school is the classic move of a heterodox figure attempting to establish a parallel regime of legitimation. Strauss did it inside the academy, building a school whose disciples reproduced his readings across institutions. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) did it outside the academy, building psychoanalytic institutes whose certification depended on submission to the master’s reading. Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) did it twice, founding and re-founding schools whose certification depended on his personal authority. Millerman has built his version at smaller scale: a paid course platform whose students are certified by completion rather than by degree, and whose canonical readings are determined by Millerman rather than by departmental committees. The school is field-building. It produces alumni who will spread Millerman’s canon and his interpretive style, generating new players for the field who carry his habitus.
The Dugin fight is a Bourdieusian boundary struggle. The question of whether Dugin counts as a serious philosopher worth sustained engagement is not a question about Dugin’s intrinsic merits. It is a question about where the field draws its limits. The orthodox position is that Dugin sits outside the boundary and that any sustained engagement with him is a transgression. The heterodox position, which Millerman champions, is that Dugin belongs inside the boundary, treated alongside Heidegger and Strauss as a thinker whose work rewards careful reading. The dispute is over jurisdiction. Whoever wins the boundary struggle wins the right to define what the field admits as legitimate.
Bourdieu predicts that boundary struggles produce disproportionate reactions from defenders of orthodoxy, because the doxa at stake is bigger than the case in question. This accounts for why Millerman’s critics in Commonweal, Critical Horizons, and Merion West react with such force to what might appear, on its face, a niche philosophical concern about a Russian thinker. Matthew Sharpe’s hostility, Ronald Beiner’s (b. 1953) hostility, the Commonweal reviewer’s hostility: these are not responses to Dugin so much as defenses of the academic philosophy field’s monopoly over what counts as serious philosophical work. If a credentialed PhD with a respected dissertation can exit the academy and run a successful alternative school built around figures the academy excludes, the academy’s monopoly on legitimate philosophy is no longer secure. The harder Millerman’s critics work to keep him outside the field, the more they reveal the stakes of the struggle.
The hostility runs in both directions, as field theory predicts. Millerman’s repeated attacks on the academy (“hollowed out professors,” “unimaginative,” “narrowed by professional incentives”) are the symmetrical position-takings of a heterodox player attacking the doxa of the field he exited. Bourdieu calls these subversive strategies. They are not personal grievances. They are structural moves a player in his position is expected to make, regardless of biography. The avant-garde always attacks the orthodoxy in roughly the same vocabulary.
The most useful Bourdieusian distinction for understanding Millerman’s hybrid position is the one between the autonomous and heteronomous poles of a cultural field. The autonomous pole organizes itself by criteria internal to the field (philosophical rigor, careful reading, methodological sophistication). The heteronomous pole organizes itself by criteria imported from outside the field (market success, political relevance, public visibility, ideological alignment with a constituency). Most players in a field sit somewhere on the spectrum between the two poles. Millerman occupies an unusual hybrid position: he claims the autonomous pole’s standards (his work is serious philosophy, his readings are rigorous, his canon merits engagement on its own terms) while operating at the heteronomous pole (his audience is built through political alignment, his revenue depends on a market of clients with particular ideological appetites, his publishers are positioned in the political field).
This hybridity is not a contradiction. It is the standard position of a successful heterodox cultural producer at a moment of field formation. Bourdieu’s analysis of Édouard Manet (1832–1883) shows the same pattern: claims to pure aesthetic autonomy combined with practical reliance on a developing market of buyers, dealers, and critics aligned with a particular cultural-political faction. Heterodox players need both wings to operate. Pure autonomy without a market gives them no resources to sustain the work. Pure heteronomy without claims to autonomous standards strips them of the symbolic capital that makes their work attractive in the first place. Millerman has both wings working at once, which is the source of his success and the source of the charges of hypocrisy his critics raise.
Field theory also illuminates the function of Millerman’s strategic distinctions. He sets himself apart from purely academic political theorists by claiming engagement with metaphysical seriousness the academy cannot supply. He sets himself apart from purely political-vibes intellectuals on the right by claiming philosophical training the vibes-side cannot supply. Each distinction marks out a position in the field that no other player can quite fill. Bourdieu calls this the construction of a position through strategic differentiation. The position has value because it is unoccupied. If too many players entered the same niche, the value of occupying it might fall, and Millerman might have to differentiate further. The threat to his position is not from the orthodoxy he attacks but from other heterodox players who might occupy adjacent niches.
The reproduction question is where Bourdieu’s theory cuts deepest. Academic fields reproduce themselves through socialization: students absorb the doxa, internalize the habitus, and become the next generation of producers who reproduce the field. Millerman’s school is an attempt to build a parallel reproduction system. The students who pay for his courses are absorbing his canon, his interpretive style, his sense of which thinkers count, and his sense of what counts as serious engagement. If the school continues for another decade, it will have produced a cohort of alumni who carry his habitus into their own writing, podcasting, and teaching, generating second-order players for the field who treat Millerman as their patron rather than as a peer. This is field-building at the generational level, which is the level at which Bourdieusian fields consolidate. Whether the field will harden to the point of having durable institutional shape, or whether it will dissipate as institutional confidence in the academy recovers, is the open question. Field formations of this kind sometimes consolidate into recognized cultural sub-fields, as the analytic philosophy field consolidated over the early twentieth century. Sometimes they dissipate without leaving permanent institutional residue.
The implication of Bourdieusian analysis for the substantive questions Millerman’s work raises is not that the questions are illusory. Bourdieu does not reduce intellectual content to position-taking, though his critics sometimes accuse him of this. He treats content and position as mutually constitutive: the position shapes what content the agent is structurally pushed to produce, and the content reinforces the position. Millerman’s philosophical claims about Heidegger, Strauss, Dugin, and the metaphysical conditions of modern politics are real claims with real arguments and real stakes. They are also position-takings inside a field, produced by an agent whose habitus and capital portfolio dispose him to make them. Both descriptions are true at once. Bourdieu’s frame holds the two together better than any alternative on offer.
What field theory yields, finally, is an account of why the same set of intellectual moves looks like serious philosophical recovery from one position in the field and looks like ideological positioning from another. Both readings are right. They differ because the readers occupy different positions. The field is the structured space inside which the readings make sense to those who hold them. Bourdieu’s contribution is to name the structure and show how the readings track positions. The structure is not a frame the readers can step outside of to settle the dispute. The dispute is the structure operating.
Max Weber
Max Weber’s (1864–1920) sociology offers the deepest single account of what Michael Millerman is doing and why. The substantive diagnosis of disenchantment in “Science as a Vocation” and the typology of authority in Economy and Society together capture both the problem Millerman names and the form he has chosen to address it. Pairing the substantive and institutional Weberian frames produces a portrait sharper than any combination of more recent theories.
Begin with the substantive level. Weber’s famous formulation: “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.” The phrase carries definite content. Disenchantment names the historical process by which the world has been drained of magic, mystery, sacred order, and transcendent meaning. The procedures of empirical science, the procedures of bureaucratic administration, the procedures of legal-rational governance, the procedures of capitalist accounting, all converge on a single result: the explicable, calculable, predictable, manageable world. There are no longer mysterious incalculable forces. There are only causal sequences awaiting more data. Weber traced the long Protestant and pre-Protestant roots of this development in his sociology of religion. He saw it as the fate of modern humanity. He did not celebrate it.
What he diagnosed in 1917 and 1919 has only intensified. Modern governance is administered through bureaucratic procedure. Modern knowledge is produced through credentialed specialization. Modern economy is organized through the rationalized firm and the rationalized market. Modern civic life is structured through legal-rational authority. The cosmos of meaning that once located man inside a larger sacred order has been replaced by a network of operations that does its work without reference to any such order. The result is what Weber called, in his most prophetic passage at the end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart,” a nullity that imagines it has reached a civilizational peak it has not earned.
Millerman’s substantive project is a sustained protest against the condition Weber names. The vocabulary is different. Millerman speaks of the closing off of the question concerning man, of technological civilization, of the metaphysical flattening of modernity, of the suppression of the porous self, of the loss of imaginal experience, of the substitution of managerial governance for political theology. The vocabulary is Heideggerian, Straussian, Schmittian, and Corbinian rather than Weberian. The diagnosis is the same. Disenchantment is the conceptual ancestor of nearly every diagnosis Millerman issues. When he calls contemporary professors hollowed out, he is naming the specialists without spirit. When he describes the modern technocrat, he is naming the sensualists without heart. When he calls for the recovery of metaphysical seriousness, he is calling for the recovery of what disenchantment expelled. Weber is the unspoken framework inside which Millerman’s protest makes sense.
The canon Millerman teaches confirms the diagnosis. Each major figure on his syllabus is a thinker who took the disenchantment problem with full seriousness and tried to push back. Heidegger’s whole project from Sein und Zeit through the later writings on technology is a reckoning with the loss of Being under the regime of calculative thought. Heidegger’s “Only a god can save us” interview in Der Spiegel is the canonical post-Weberian statement of the disenchantment problem in its full intractability. Strauss’s recovery of classical political philosophy, his defense of natural right, his hermeneutic of esoteric writing, are attempts to restore an order of reason connected to questions of human flourishing that modern positive science cannot answer. Schmitt’s political theology is the claim that all significant concepts of modern political theory are secularized theological concepts, which is to say that the disenchantment is incomplete and that the enchanted forms persist beneath the procedural surface. Dugin’s Eurasianism and Fourth Political Theory present a civilizational alternative to liberal universalism on grounds that take the sacred and the rooted seriously rather than as residues to be administered away. Corbin’s recovery of the mundus imaginalis is an attempt to restore a domain of experience that disenchanted epistemology cannot accommodate. Guénon, Eliade, and Schuon constitute a school whose purpose is to maintain the symbolic and metaphysical heritage that rationalization has eroded.
The canon hangs together as a post-disenchantment canon. Each figure offers a different strategy of resistance. Heidegger waits for the gods. Strauss recovers the ancients. Schmitt names the political theology underneath the procedural surface. Dugin proposes civilizational pluralism. Corbin opens the imaginal. The traditionalists conserve the symbolic heritage. The disagreements among them are real and philosophically deep. What unifies them is the shared diagnosis Weber issued first and the shared refusal to accept disenchantment as the unappealable fate of modernity. Millerman is the curator and transmitter of this canon. His project makes sense as a continuation of Weber’s diagnostic work pressed past the point where Weber stopped.
Now turn to the institutional level. Weber’s typology of authority distinguishes three pure types: traditional authority resting on the sanctity of immemorial custom, charismatic authority resting on devotion to extraordinary qualities of an individual leader, and legal-rational authority resting on the legitimacy of impersonal procedure. The three types correspond to different forms of social organization. Traditional authority is the form of patrimonial states, hereditary monarchies, customary law. Legal-rational authority is the form of the modern bureaucratic state and the modern bureaucratic university. Charismatic authority is the form of the prophet, the war-leader, the philosophical school gathered around a master.
The modern university is the purest institutional case of legal-rational authority in the realm of knowledge. Certification proceeds by procedure: doctoral committees, dissertation defenses, peer-reviewed publication, hiring committees, tenure reviews, grant panels, accreditation bodies. The individual scholar’s authority derives from his position inside the procedural apparatus, not from his personal extraordinary qualities. The system is designed to function regardless of who occupies the positions, which is the mark of full bureaucratization. The university is the disenchantment of higher learning. Where the medieval university still carried traditional elements (guild membership, charismatic teachers, sacred mission), the modern research university has rationalized these residues into procedures.
Millerman has built an institution whose form is structurally opposed to the rationalized university. Millerman School functions on charismatic authority. Students come because of Millerman personally: his readings, his pedagogical style, his canon, his interpretive judgment. Certification, where it exists, is by completion of his courses, which means by his word. There is no committee. There is no peer review of his teaching. There is no procedural backstop against his authority. The form is the pre-bureaucratic charismatic form Weber associated with philosophical schools, religious sects, and prophetic movements. Plato’s Academy, the Lyceum, the Stoic schools, the medieval studia, the rabbinic yeshiva, the Lacanian seminar, all share this structural feature. The master gathers disciples around personal authority and transmits a teaching whose legitimacy rests on his charisma rather than on procedure.
This is not a defect from Millerman’s perspective. It is by design. He sees the procedural form of the modern university as part of the disenchantment apparatus to be resisted. The university produces specialists without spirit because its bureaucratic form selects against the charismatic intensity that produces philosophical formation. Systems that certify by procedure select against the charismatic teacher. The qualities that make a teacher charismatic (personal authority, intensity of conviction, willingness to assert judgment, capacity to draw devotion from students) are the qualities the bureaucratic system marks as unprofessional. Millerman’s pedagogical form is his sharpest rejection of the regime he opposes.
Weber would predict several features of Millerman’s institutional position that empirical observation confirms. First, the audience that gathers around a charismatic teacher exhibits a devotion students of a bureaucratic university do not show. Millerman’s subscribers, students, and clients speak of him in the language Weber identified as characteristic of charismatic following: he sees what others cannot, he reads texts at a depth others cannot reach, his judgment is to be trusted in matters where others equivocate. The language is not exaggerated by his admirers. It is structurally produced by the institutional form. Charisma generates such language wherever it appears.
Second, Weber’s analysis predicts that charismatic authority is structurally unstable. It cannot survive its founder without transformation. To persist, charisma must be routinized, and routinization takes one of two forms. Traditional routinization transmits the charisma through lineage: the disciples become masters in turn, the school becomes a tradition of teachers and students, the charisma passes through hereditary or quasi-hereditary chains. Legal-rational routinization transmits the charisma through procedure: certifications, accreditations, standardized curricula, examinations, written rules. Either form is a partial loss of the original charismatic intensity. The Straussian school routinized partly through both routes. Lacan’s school routinized through traditional means (master-disciple chains) and fractured repeatedly along those chains. Whether Millerman School will routinize at all, and if so by which route, is an open question whose answer will determine whether the school outlives him.
Third, Weber’s vocation lectures bear on Millerman’s position. “Science as a Vocation” insists that the scholar in the classroom cannot also be the prophet. The integrity of intellectual work requires that the scholar suspend his ultimate value commitments inside the lecture hall, present the partial truths his discipline can establish, and leave students to make their own decisions about questions of meaning. The classroom is not the place for prophecy. Millerman violates this principle by design. He sees the value-neutral scholar as a product of the disenchantment apparatus, and he rejects the separation of scholarship from prophecy as a procedural fiction that disguises the substantive commitments of the modern academy. His classroom is a place where philosophical recovery is preached, not bracketed. Weber would have recognized this as the move of a charismatic teacher who has rejected the vocational ethics of modern scholarship.
“Politics as a Vocation” offers the further distinction between the ethics of conviction (Gesinnungsethik), which holds that one must act on principle regardless of consequences, and the ethics of responsibility (Verantwortungsethik), which holds that one is accountable for foreseeable practical effects. Weber argues that the mature political actor must hold both ethics in tension. Millerman tilts toward the ethics of conviction. His defense of engaging Dugin regardless of practical consequences (“nothing he could say about oil prices”) is a statement in the ethics of conviction. His critics, who insist on the practical consequences of right-wing anti-liberal political projects, are pressing the ethics of responsibility. The disagreement is Weberian even where the parties do not name it as such.
The tensions Weber’s frame surfaces are productive. Millerman’s project is internally complicated in ways disenchantment theory illuminates. He protests rationalization while operating through the rationalized infrastructure of online platforms, subscription services, payment processors, search engines, and analytics. The iron cage extends to the dissident schools that try to escape it. The same metaphor Weber used to describe modern bureaucratic life applies to the apparatus through which Millerman conducts his anti-bureaucratic work. He is a prophet against disenchantment whose prophecy reaches its audience through the most disenchanted media stack the world has yet produced.
He is also a prophet who is also a priest. Weber distinguished the prophet, who proclaims new meaning, from the priest, who tends the routinized tradition. The prophet generates charisma. The priest transmits it. Millerman occupies both positions at once. He prophesies against modern disenchantment while transmitting a canon of dead masters who did the original prophesying. He cannot generate new metaphysical resources because his canon is sealed: Heidegger is dead, Strauss is dead, Schmitt is dead, Corbin is dead. His charisma rests on his fidelity to their charisma. The structural position is hybrid and unstable, which the Weberian frame predicts as a feature of post-charismatic intellectual movements during the long routinization.
What Weber’s frame finally yields is not a critique but a diagnosis. Millerman is what modernity produces in the late phase of disenchantment, when the iron cage has thickened and the procedural surface has lost its first credibility. The figure has appeared before: the medieval mystic against the rationalizing scholastic, the early modern hermeticist against the new mechanical philosophy, the Romantic against the industrial order, the existentialist against the postwar bureaucracies. Each is a charismatic protest against the dominant rationalization. Each draws disciples. Each builds a partial institution. Each leaves a residue that the next phase of rationalization either absorbs or sets aside. Whether Millerman’s protest leaves a lasting residue depends on questions of routinization that cannot be answered now. The protest is a Weberian phenomenon through and through. Weber would have understood Millerman better than Millerman is likely to understand Weber.
Buffered & Porous Selves
Charles Taylor’s distinction between the buffered and porous self, developed at length in A Secular Age, names the transformation that produced modern secular life. The pre-modern self was porous, open to spirits, divine intervention, demonic possession, sacred intrusion, charged objects, holy places, and the felt presence of higher orders. The boundary between self and cosmos was permeable. Meaning came from outside the self and entered it. The modern self is buffered, sealed against such intrusion, with a sharp boundary between inner mental life and outer physical world, immune to enchantment by definition, the source rather than the recipient of meaning. The transition happened in stages between 1500 and 1900 through what Taylor calls a complex set of reforms, disciplines, and reorientations. The result is the modern Western self, the agent who chooses his commitments, controls his attention, and finds himself in a disenchanted cosmos that does its causal work without reference to higher meaning.
Millerman’s whole project is an attempt to reopen the porous self. The vocabulary changes (he speaks of mundus imaginalis, the Fourfold, political theology, civilization-state identity, sacred order, destiny) but the underlying project is what Taylor would recognize. He wants to identify the cracks in the buffered self, name them, walk his students through them, and let what was sealed off return as a live possibility for thought.
The canon he teaches is a porous-self canon. Heidegger’s later work is one of the great twentieth-century porous-self projects. The Fourfold of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities is a porous-self ontology. Dwelling, gathering, the holy, the gods who have fled and might return: this is the vocabulary of a thinker working to reopen the channels Taylor’s modern self has sealed. The famous Der Spiegel statement “Only a god can save us” is intelligible only inside a porous-self horizon. A buffered self does not need a god to save him because he is sealed against the conditions that make salvation necessary. Heidegger’s whole later corpus is an effort to recover the conditions of porosity for a generation that has lost them.
Henri Corbin’s recovery of the mundus imaginalis is the most condensed porous-self project in Millerman’s canon. The mundus imaginalis is the intermediate realm between matter and pure abstract intellect, the domain of authentic visionary experience, the place where the imagination receives rather than constructs. The mundus imaginalis is the porous-self territory at its most articulated. Corbin’s argument is that Western philosophy after the medieval synthesis lost the ontological status of this realm, demoted imagination from a faculty of reception to a faculty of fantasy, and produced the buffered self that no longer has a place to put what visionary experience reports. Taylor traces the same loss in A Secular Age through different sources. Millerman’s investment in Corbin is not incidental. It is his most explicit identification of what the buffered self has lost and what the porous self might recover.
Carl Schmitt’s political theology operates on the same axis. Schmitt argues that all significant concepts of modern political theory are secularized theological concepts. This is a porous-self claim. It holds that the boundary between sacred and political life is more permeable than the buffered-self regime acknowledges. The sovereign is the figure who decides the exception, and the decision is the trace of the divine in the political order. Liberal proceduralism wants to seal the political off from the theological. Schmitt argues the seal does not hold. The buffered political order is haunted by the porous political theology beneath it.
Leo Strauss’s recovery of classical political philosophy is a porous-self project at the cosmological level. Strauss insists that the question of natural right cannot be settled inside the buffered-self frame, where right is whatever the rational choosers behind a veil decide on. He argues that ancient and medieval political philosophy worked inside a porous cosmos where the good was discoverable in nature, the soul had a place in a hierarchy of being, and political life was answerable to truths about the human soul that could not be invented by procedure. The modern liberal political theory Strauss attacks is buffered political theory. The ancient political theory he recovers is porous political theory.
Aleksandr Dugin’s Eurasianism extends the porous-self project to the level of civilization. The civilization-state is not a buffered collection of buffered individuals organized by neutral procedure. It is a porous order with sacred sources, historical destiny, mythic depth, and a relation to the divine that is irreducible to procedural consent. Dugin’s argument against liberal universalism is partly that liberalism imposes the buffered self on civilizations whose internal logic is porous. The defense of multipolarity is the defense of multiple porous orders against a single buffered hegemony.
The traditionalist school of René Guénon, Mircea Eliade, and Frithjof Schuon is porous-self thought at full strength. The school holds that the modern world has lost contact with the primordial tradition (perennial philosophy, sophia perennis, the metaphysical heritage transmitted through esoteric currents in all the great civilizations). The recovery requires reopening the porous channels through which the tradition was first received. This is not metaphorical for the traditionalists. They mean the channels of vision, symbol, ritual, and contemplative discipline that the modern world has either eliminated or relegated to private psychological experience.
Each major figure on Millerman’s syllabus, in other words, is a porous-self thinker working against the buffered-self regime. The canon coheres at this level even where the figures disagree philosophically. Heidegger and Strauss disagree on the recoverability of natural right but agree that buffered-self modernity has lost something essential. Corbin and Schmitt disagree on what comes through the cracks but agree the cracks exist. Dugin and the traditionalists disagree on the political implications but agree the cosmos is porous and the buffered self is a historical construction rather than the truth.
What Millerman adds to the canon is the pedagogical effort to make porous-self thinking live for an audience formed inside the buffered self. His students are modern Westerners. They have smartphones. They were educated inside the buffered-self regime. They cannot just become pre-modern. The recovery has to happen inside buffered-self conditions, against the resistance of habits the buffered self has trained into them. Millerman’s seminar method addresses this difficulty. Close reading of canonical texts under the authority of a master is a pre-buffered-self pedagogical form. The student is not invited to express his authentic self in response to the text. The student is invited to suspend the buffered self, submit to the discipline of the reading, and let what the text says open channels the buffered self has closed. This is not therapy. It is formation.
Taylor’s most useful concept for understanding Millerman’s reception is the cross-pressure. The modern condition, Taylor argues, is one of cross-pressure between belief and unbelief, between the immanent frame and the openness to transcendence. The buffered self is not closed for most moderns. Cracks appear. Experiences of fullness, intimations of higher meaning, encounters with mystery, sudden registrations of grace, all leak through. The buffered self responds to these leaks in different ways. Sometimes it patches them with secular explanations. Sometimes it lets them sit unresolved. Sometimes it follows them toward a different self-form.
Millerman’s pedagogy aims at the cross-pressured student. He does not address the fully sealed buffered self, who would not be interested in him in the first place. He does not address the already porous self, who would not need him. He addresses the cross-pressured modern who feels the leaks but does not know what to do with them. The canon names the leaks and provides resources for following them. Heidegger names the leak from Being. Corbin names the leak from the imaginal. Schmitt names the leak from political theology. Strauss names the leak from natural right. Dugin names the leak from civilizational rootedness. The student who comes to Millerman often comes because he has felt these leaks in his own life and is looking for vocabulary.
This is why Millerman’s reception is so charged. His critics in mainstream academic and journalistic venues are operating from positions where the buffered self is the default and any threat to it registers as a threat to liberal modernity as a whole. The reaction is not just academic. Taylor’s analysis of secularity shows that the buffered self is the foundation of the modern liberal political order. The buffered self is the rights-bearing individual, the rational chooser, the consenter to social contract, the entrepreneur of his own life. Liberal procedure works because the parties to the procedure are buffered. If the parties were porous, with their identities bound to civilizational destiny, sacred order, or higher times, procedural neutrality would not be available because there is no neutral standpoint above the sources of meaning.
Millerman threatens this foundation. His canon and his pedagogy are recruitment efforts for the porous self against the buffered self. The political implications are downstream. If the porous self returns at scale, liberal proceduralism loses its foundation. This is why critics react to him as if he were doing more than studying obscure philosophers. He is, on the Taylor account, doing more.
The structural difficulty of Millerman’s position is also illuminated by Taylor. He cannot just become pre-modern. He is a Toronto-trained scholar working through online platforms, addressing modern audiences in English, accessing payment systems and search algorithms. The buffered-self infrastructure surrounds him. He works to crack it from inside. Taylor calls this the predicament of any post-secular thinker: there is no exit from modernity into a clean pre-modern alternative. The recovery happens inside modern conditions or not at all. Millerman accepts this. His school is not a withdrawal into a monastery. It is a teaching operation conducted on the very channels the buffered self uses, with the aim of opening porous-self resources for moderns who are stuck where they are.
This produces hybrid effects Taylor would recognize. The buffered-self student who comes to Millerman School does not become a pre-modern porous self overnight. He becomes something else: a modern who has read the porous-self canon, knows the vocabulary, recognizes the leaks, and has begun to take the cracks in his own self seriously. He may end at exclusive humanism with a richer vocabulary, at some halfway position with porous moments inside a buffered life, at a full reorientation toward one of the traditional religions or toward a non-religious form of cosmic porosity. The endpoints vary. The intermediate position, which Taylor calls cross-pressured modernity, is the actual condition in which most of Millerman’s students live and will continue to live.
The closing observation Taylor’s frame yields is about the historical position Millerman occupies. The buffered self has been the dominant self-form of Western modernity for roughly two centuries at full strength. Its dominance has weakened in the past generation through the cumulative weight of cross-pressures, the discrediting of secular grand narratives, the return of religion to public visibility, the rise of decentralized digital culture, and the institutional crises of the liberal order. Taylor wrote A Secular Age in 2007 and treated the buffered self as still dominant but pressured. The pressure has only increased since. Millerman’s project is intelligible as one of the projects produced by the late phase of the buffered-self regime, when the seal has weakened enough for porous-self alternatives to become live options for a growing audience.
Whether the buffered self will hold, fragment, or be displaced by some new self-form Taylor’s frame does not predict. What the frame predicts is that figures like Millerman appear at the historical moment they do appear because the conditions for them have ripened. The buffered self produced its own discontents in the form of cross-pressured moderns who feel the leaks but do not know what to do with them. Teachers like Millerman supply vocabulary. Whether the supply produces a durable porous-self revival or whether it produces only a marginal sub-culture inside an enduring buffered-self order is the open historical question. Taylor would say the question is open. Millerman is acting as if he can shift the answer.
Hero System
Ernest Becker’s hero system framework, developed in The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil, treats human culture as a defense against the awareness of mortality. The argument runs that man is a creature who knows he will die, that this knowledge produces an unbearable anxiety, and that culture supplies the structures (hero systems, immortality projects, vital lies, character armor) that let the anxiety remain bearable. A hero system is a cultural structure that confers cosmic significance on participants. It tells them that their lives count in the larger order of things, that they are part of something more enduring than their mortal selves, and that what they do has meaning beyond the span of their biological existence. Becker’s claim is not that this is illusory in a dismissive sense but that it is necessary. No human community survives without a working hero system. The hero system makes life livable for creatures who would otherwise be paralyzed by the recognition that they are food for worms.
Becker also argues that the twentieth century is a period of hero-system crisis. The traditional religious hero systems weakened under the impact of secular rationalization. The substitutes that arose to replace them (nationalism, communism, fascism, scientism, romantic love, consumer fulfillment, art) proved partial and often catastrophic. The crisis is not resolved. Modern man lives among the ruins of an older hero system and among the unstable substitutes. He is, in Becker’s view, structurally starved of heroism. The buffered self is also the unheroic self.
Michael Millerman supplies a hero system for the moderns Becker describes. The supply is the most useful single explanation of his appeal. His students do not pay for technical philosophical training they could not get elsewhere. They pay for access to a hero system: a story about who they are, what they are doing, what is at stake, and what their lives count for in the order of things. The hero system is well constructed for the audience it addresses.
The canon Millerman teaches is a canon of death-confronting thinkers. Heidegger’s Being and Time makes Being-toward-death the structure of authentic existence. The buffered self represses death; the authentic Dasein confronts it. Strauss’s recovery of classical political philosophy is partly a recovery of the Socratic understanding of philosophy as preparation for death, the practice of dying. Schmitt’s political theology connects sovereignty to the question of who decides on the exception, which is, in extremis, the question of who decides who lives and who dies. Dugin’s civilizational thought asks what survives across generations and what dies with the individual. The traditionalists are concerned with the soul’s metaphysical destiny across death. Corbin’s mundus imaginalis is the intermediate realm the soul might inhabit. The canon does not avoid death. It places death at the center of its concerns. This is one of the deepest reasons it has the pull it has. The modern buffered self has lost the cultural resources for facing death, and Millerman supplies a curriculum that takes the question with the seriousness Becker says it demands.
The school is an immortality project in Becker’s sense. The student who enters Millerman School joins a tradition. He becomes a carrier of canonical readings, an heir to the masters, a node in a network of disciples that runs back through Millerman to Strauss, Heidegger, and the masters they read. The tradition will outlast him. His participation places him inside a structure of meaning that will not die when he dies. The transmission is the immortality. Becker’s frame predicts that participants in such structures will feel renewed vitality, a settled sense of purpose, and a confident orientation toward their lives that they did not have before joining. This is a familiar effect among Millerman’s followers. They speak of the school in language Becker would recognize as the language of an effective hero system: they have found their place, they know what they are doing, they are part of something larger.
The transference relationship with Millerman is the structural feature Becker identifies in every charismatic hero system. The follower projects onto the teacher the qualities that make him a trustworthy guide through the territory of meaning. Millerman is the figure who has direct access to the masters, who can read what others cannot, whose judgment can be relied on where the follower’s own judgment falters. Becker does not treat transference as pathology. He treats it as a necessary part of the hero system: the follower needs a figure to mediate his relation to the larger order. The risk is that transference becomes total, the teacher becomes godlike, and the follower loses the capacity for independent judgment. Becker’s warning is that this risk is structural, not personal. Even teachers of good faith are placed in this position by the form of the relationship.
The hero system Millerman offers addresses both of Becker’s twin ontological motives at once. The first motive is individuation, the desire to stand out as unique, to distinguish oneself from the undifferentiated mass. The second motive is merger, the desire to belong to something larger than the self, to dissolve into a meaningful whole. Most hero systems serve one motive well and the other poorly. Romantic love serves merger but starves individuation. Bureaucratic career advancement serves individuation but starves merger. Millerman’s system serves both. The student gains individuation by separating himself from the buffered-self masses, by acquiring rare philosophical literacy, by becoming a man who reads Heidegger seriously when most cannot. He gains merger by joining the tradition, submitting to the masters, becoming a carrier of canonical thought, belonging to a lineage that runs deeper than his own biography. The doubled satisfaction is unusual and accounts for a large part of the school’s pull.
The clash with the liberal hero system is the predictable next move in Becker’s analysis. Escape from Evil argues that evil arises from the clash of hero systems. Each hero system claims to confer the cosmic significance it offers, and each treats rival hero systems as threats. The threat is not just intellectual disagreement. It is the felt threat to the cosmic significance one has staked one’s life on. When the liberal hero system encounters Millerman’s hero system, the response is not measured engagement. It is the full immune response of a hero system defending its claim to highest meaning. The liberal hero system tells its participants that they are agents of human progress, that procedural neutrality represents the highest moral achievement, that rights-bearing autonomy is what gives life dignity, that scientific advance is the secular substitute for transcendence. Millerman’s hero system says, at minimum, that this story is shallow and incomplete. The response of liberal hero-system defenders, in venues like Commonweal and Critical Horizons, has the structure Becker identifies as defense of the hero system against existential threat. The volume and tone exceed what the philosophical disagreements alone would warrant. This is the Becker prediction: hero systems do not concede ground to rivals without intense resistance, because what is at stake is not an argument but a structure of cosmic significance.
Becker also predicts the symmetrical response from Millerman’s side. He attacks the liberal hero system in terms that exceed academic disagreement. The professors are hollowed out. The journalists are unimaginative. The mainstream venues are gatekeepers without the philosophical resources to engage what they exclude. These attacks have the same structure on the other side: defense of the hero system against the rival. Both sides treat the other as a threat to meaning, not just as a different position to be assessed on the evidence. Becker would not say one side is right and the other wrong. He would say both sides are operating as hero systems do.
The vital lie operates on both sides. Becker’s term is not dismissive. He thought every hero system rests on something that cannot be verified inside the system’s own terms and that must be lived as if true. The liberal hero system rests on the vital lie that procedural neutrality is achievable, that progress is real, that the autonomous chooser is the truth of the self. Millerman’s hero system rests on the vital lie that the masters can be heard again, that the tradition is recoverable, that close reading of canonical texts opens access to a deeper reality the buffered self has lost. Becker would say both are vital lies in his sense. He would not say either is false in the ordinary sense of the word. He would say both function to make life livable for those who hold them, and that both are necessary in the form they take for the people who depend on them.
The causa sui temptation reasserts itself in Millerman’s own position. Becker treats the deepest fantasy of the human as the causa sui project: the dream of being one’s own father, one’s own ground, the author of oneself. The liberal autonomous chooser is the modern paradigm of the causa sui project. Millerman’s canon attacks this paradigm at every turn: the human is grounded in tradition, civilization, sacred order, the wisdom of the masters; he is not self-grounding. But Millerman’s institutional position recreates the causa sui project in a different form. He is the founder of his school, the master of his canon, the one who decides what is read and how. His authority is not derived from a higher institution. He is, in the institutional sense, his own father. The pattern Becker names is structural and hard to escape. Even the anti-modern teacher who rejects the modern causa sui project ends up reenacting it at the level of his own institutional position.
The fanaticism risk is what Becker would press hardest. Escape from Evil takes seriously that hero systems become dangerous when they encounter rivals on a sufficient scale. The twentieth century is the historical record of what happens when strong hero systems collide. Some of the thinkers in Millerman’s canon are associated with hero systems that ended catastrophically. Heidegger’s was National Socialism. Schmitt’s was the same. Dugin’s contemporary work feeds Russian state violence in Ukraine. The association is not accidental. Strong hero systems that promise the recovery of transcendence often produce strong actions against the rivals that block the recovery. Becker does not say this means the hero systems should not exist. He says it means they are dangerous when they take political form and encounter resistance. Millerman’s defense (the philosophical content can be considered apart from the political consequences) is the move Becker would predict from inside an active hero system. The defense protects the hero system by partitioning the dangerous applications from the inspiring content. The partition rarely holds.
Becker would recognize Millerman’s project as one of the workable hero systems available in late modernity, supplying real resources for cosmic significance to people who need them. He would also see the costs: the transference dependence on a single teacher, the structural slide toward the causa sui position, the demonization of the rival hero system, the historical track record of the canon’s political affiliates. He would say these are the standard costs of hero systems, present in every effective one. The hero system Millerman offers carries the costs Becker identifies in all effective hero systems. Whether it carries them at higher or lower magnitude than the liberal hero system it opposes is the question that participants and observers must judge case by case. Becker would treat this as the choice modern people face, and he would treat Millerman’s school as one of the choices on offer. The buffered self does not stop needing heroism when it loses contact with the older sources. It seeks substitutes. Millerman has built one. It is well constructed. It carries risks. The participants will have to decide whether the gain is worth the cost. Becker would not decide for them.
