Conservative Revolution

Template:Short description Template:Use dmy dates Template:Use Oxford spelling Template:Conservatism in Germany The Conservative Revolution (Template:Langx), also known as the German neoconservative movement ({{#invoke:Lang|lang}}),<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> or new nationalism ({{#invoke:Lang|lang}}),<ref name="Breuer 1993 194–198">Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> was a German national-conservative and ultraconservative movement prominent in Germany and Austria between 1918 and 1933 (from the end of World War I up to the Nazi seizure of power).

Conservative revolutionaries were involved in a cultural counter-revolution and showed a wide range of diverging positions concerning the nature of the institutions Germany had to instate, labelled by historian Roger Woods the "conservative dilemma". Nonetheless, they were generally opposed to traditional Wilhelmine Christian conservatism, egalitarianism, liberalism and parliamentarian democracy as well as the cultural spirit of the bourgeoisie and modernity. Plunged into what historian Fritz Stern has named a deep "cultural despair", uprooted as they felt within the rationalism and scientism of the modern world, theorists of the Conservative Revolution drew inspiration from various elements of the 19th century, including Friedrich Nietzsche's contempt for Christian ethics, democracy and egalitarianism; the anti-modern and anti-rationalist tendencies of German Romanticism; the vision of an organic and naturally-organized folk community cultivated by the Völkisch movement; the Prussian tradition of militaristic and authoritarian nationalism; and their own experience of comradeship and irrational violence on the front lines of World War I.

The Conservative Revolution held an ambiguous relationship with Nazism from the 1920s to the early 1930s, which has led scholars to describe it as a form of "German pre-fascism"Template:Sfn or "non-Nazi fascism".<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> Although they share common roots in 19th-century anti-Enlightenment ideologies, the disparate movement cannot be easily confused with Nazism.Template:Sfn Conservative Revolutionaries were not necessarily racialist as the movement cannot be reduced to its Völkisch component.Template:Sfn Although they participated in preparing the German society to the rule of the Nazi Party with their antidemocratic and organicist theories,<ref name="Woods 1996 2–4">Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> and did not really oppose their rise to power,Template:Sfn Conservative Revolutionary writings did not have a decisive influence on Nazism,Template:Sfn and the movement was brought to heel like the rest of the society when Adolf Hitler seized power in 1933, culminating in the assassination of prominent thinker Edgar Jung by the Nazis during the Night of the Long Knives in the following year.Template:Sfn Many of them eventually rejected the antisemitic or the totalitarian nature of the Nazi regime,<ref name="Stern 1961 298">Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> with the notable exception of Carl Schmitt and some others.

From the 1960–1970s onwards, the Conservative Revolution has largely influenced the European New Right, in particular the French Nouvelle Droite and the German Neue Rechte,<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> and through them the contemporary European Identitarian movement.<ref name="Gudrun">Hentges, Gudrun; Kökgiran, Gürcan; Nottbohm, Kristina. "Die Identitäre Bewegung Deutschland (IBD)–Bewegung oder virtuelles Phänomen" Template:Webarchive. Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen 27, no. 3 (2014): 1–26.</ref><ref name="Teitelbaum">Template:Cite book</ref>

Name and definition

Although conservative essayists of the Weimar Republic like Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Hugo von Hofmannsthal or Edgar Jung had already described their political project as a Konservative Revolution ("Conservative Revolution"),Template:Sfn the name saw a revival after the 1949 doctoral thesis of Neue Rechte philosopher Armin Mohler on the movement.Template:Sfn Molher's post-war ideological reconstruction of the "Conservative Revolution" has been widely criticized by scholars, but the validity of a redefined concept of "neo-conservative"Template:Sfn or "new nationalist" movement active during the Weimar period (1918–1933),<ref name="Breuer 1993 194–198"/> whose lifetime is sometimes extended to the years 1890s–1910s,Template:Sfn and which differed in particular from the "old nationalism" of the 19th century, is now generally accepted in scholarship.<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref>

File:Arthur Moeller van den Bruck.jpg

Undated portrait of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck

The name "Conservative Revolution" has appeared as a paradox, sometimes as a "semantic absurdity", for many modern historians, and some of them have suggested "neo-conservative" as a more easily justifiable label for the movement.Template:Sfn Sociologist Stefan Breuer wrote that he would have preferred the substitute "new nationalism" to name a charismatic and holistic cultural movement that differed from the "old nationalism" of the previous century, whose essential role was limited to the preservation of the German institutions and their influence in the world.<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> Despite the apparent contradiction, however, the association of the terms "Conservative" and "Revolution" is justified in Moeller van den Bruck's writings by his definition of the movement as a will to preserve eternal values while favouring at the same time the redesign of ideal and institutional forms in response to the "insecurities of the modern world".Template:Sfn

Historian Louis Dupeux, a specialist of the Conservative Revolution, saw the movement as an intellectual project with its own consistent logic, namely the striving for an Intellektueller Macht ("intellectual power"), if necessary via the use of modern technique and concepts, which would allow them to promote and gain wider support to conservative and revolutionary ideas directed against liberalism, egalitarianism, and traditional conservatism. This change of attitude, compared to 19th-century conservatism, is described as a Bejahung ("affirmation") by Dupeux: Conservative Revolutionaries said "yes" to their time as long as they could find the ways to facilitate the resurgence of anti-liberal and what they saw as "eternal values" within modern societies. Dupeux conceded at the same time that the Conservative Revolution was rather a counter-cultural movement than an actual philosophical proposition, relying more on non-rationalistic "feeling, images and myths" than on scientific analysis and concepts. He also admitted the necessity to distinguish several leanings, sometimes with contradictory views, within its diverse ideological spectrum.<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref>

[Conservative Revolutionaries] are, admittedly, as reactionary in politics as their pre-war predecessors, but they stand out by their optimism — or at least by their voluntarism — in front of the modern world. They do not really fear the masses, nor the technique anymore. Yet this change of Haltung ("attitude") had significant consequences — the backward-looking regret is replaced by a juvenile energy — and led to a wide-ranging political and cultural initiative.{{#if:Louis Dupeux, 1994Template:Sfn|{{#if:|}}

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Political scientist Tamir Bar-On has defined the Conservative Revolution as a combination of "German ultra-nationalism, defence of the organic folk community, technological modernity, and socialist revisionism, which perceived the worker and soldier as models for a reborn authoritarian state superseding the egalitarian "decadence" of liberalism, socialism, and traditional conservatism."Template:Sfn

Origin and development

The Conservative Revolution is encompassed in a larger and older counter-movement to the French Revolution of 1789, influenced by the anti-modernity and anti-rationalism of early 19th-century romanticism, in the context of a German, especially Prussian, "tradition of militaristic, authoritarian nationalism which rejected liberalism, socialism, democracy and internationalism."Template:Sfn Historian Fritz Stern described the movement as disoriented intellectuals plunged into a profound "cultural despair": they felt alienated and uprooted within a world dominated by what they saw as "bourgeois rationalism and science". Their hatred of modernity, Stern follows, led them to the naive confidence that all these modern evils could be fought and resolved by a "Conservative Revolution".Template:Sfn

File:Nietzsche187a.jpg

Many Conservative Revolutionaries cited Friedrich Nietzsche (c. 1875) as their mentor.<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref>

Although terms such as Konservative Kraft ("conservative power") and schöpferische Restauration ("creative restoration") began to spread across German-speaking Europe from the 1900s to the 1920s,Template:Efn the Konservative Revolution ("Conservative Revolution") became an established concept in the Weimar Republic (1918–1933) through the writings of essayists like Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Hermann Rauschning, Edgar Jung and Oswald Spengler.Template:Sfn

The creation of the Alldeutscher Verband ("Pan-German League") by Alfred Hugenberg in 1891 and the Jugendbewegung ("youth movement") in 1896 are cited as conducive to the emergence of the Conservative Revolution in the following decades.Template:Sfn Moeller van den Bruck was the dominant figure of the movement until his suicide on 30 May 1925.<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> His ideas were initially spread through the Juniklub he had founded on 28 June 1919, on the day of the signing of Treaty of Versailles.Template:Sfn

Conservative Revolutionaries frequently referred to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche as their mentor and as the main intellectual influence on their movement.<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb; see for instance: Oswald Spengler, "Nietzsche und sein Jahrhundert" (speech of October 1924), in Reden und Aufsiitze, 3rd ed. (Munich: Beck, 1951), pp. 110–24 (pp. 12–13); Template:Cite book</ref> Despite Nietzsche's philosophy being often misinterpreted, or wrongly appropriated by thinkers of the Conservative Revolution,<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> they retained his contempt for Christian ethics, democracy, modernity and egalitarianism as the cornerstone of their ideology. Historian Roger Woods writes that Conservative Revolutionaries "constructed", in response to the war and the unstable Weimar period, a Nietzsche "who advocated a self-justifying activism, unbridled self-assertion, war over peace, and the elevation of instinct over reason."Template:Sfn

Many of the intellectuals involved in the movement were born in the last decades of the nineteenth century and experienced WWI as a formative event (Kriegserlebnis, "war experience") for the foundation of their political beliefs.Template:Sfn The life on the front line, with its violence and irrationality, caused most of them to search a posteriori for a meaning to what they had to endure during the conflict.Template:Sfn Ernst Jünger is the major figure of that branch of the Conservative Revolution which wanted to uphold military structures and values in peacetime society, and saw in the community of front line comradeship (Frontgemeinschaft) the true nature of German socialism.<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb; see Template:Harvnb.</ref>

Main thinkers

According to Armin Mohler and other sources, prominent members of the Conservative Revolution included:

Oswald Spengler<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> Edgar Julius Jung<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> Carl Schmitt<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb; see also Template:Cite journal</ref> Thomas Mann (until 1922);<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> Ernst Jünger and his brother Friedrich Georg Jünger<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> Arthur Moeller van den Bruck<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> Stefan George Ernst Niekisch<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> Martin NiemöllerTemplate:Sfn Wilhelm Stapel<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> Hans Freyer<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref>

Othmar Spann<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Lensch-Cunow-Haenisch group<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> Ernst von SalomonTemplate:Sfn Ludwig Klages August WinnigTemplate:Sfn Georg QuabbeTemplate:Sfn Hans Zehrer Werner Sombart<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> Hermann Rauschning<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> Gottfried Reinhold TreviranusTemplate:Sfn Julius Evola<ref name=":0"/> (Italian)Template:Clarify Martin Heidegger<ref name="Feldman 2006 304">Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref>

Gottfried Benn<ref name="Feldman 2006 304"/> Fiedrich HielscherTemplate:Sfn Karl HaushoferTemplate:Sfn Alfred BaeumlerTemplate:Sfn Paul ErnstTemplate:Sfn Paul LenschTemplate:Sfn Mathilde LudendorffTemplate:Sfn<ref name="Poewe">Template:Cite book</ref> Sigrid Hunke<ref name="Poewe"/> Jakob Wilhelm Hauer<ref name="Poewe"/> Hans GrimmTemplate:Sfn Ernst ForsthoffTemplate:Sfn Werner BestTemplate:Sfn Hans Blüher

Ideology

Despite a broad range of political positions that historian Roger Woods has labelled the "conservative dilemma",Template:Sfn the German Conservative Revolution can be defined by its disapproval of:

• the traditional conservative values of the German Empire (1871–1918), including the egalitarian ethics of Christianity; and a rejection of the project of a restoration of the defunct Wilhelmine empire within its historical political and cultural structures,Template:Sfn
• the political regime and commercialist culture of the Weimar Republic; and the parliamentary system and democracy in general, because the national community (Volksgemeinschaft) shall "transcend the conventional divisions of left and right",Template:Sfn
• the class analysis of socialism; with the defence of an anti-Marxist "socialist revisionism";Template:Sfn labelled by Oswald Spengler the "socialism of the blood", it drew inspiration from the front line comradeship of World War I.Template:Sfn

New nationalism and morality

File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-R06610, Oswald Spengler.jpg

Oswald Spengler, author of The Decline of the West, embodied the Kulturpessimismus that partly characterised the Conservative Revolution.

Conservative Revolutionaries argued that their nationalism was fundamentally different from the precedent forms of German nationalism or conservatism.Template:Sfn They condemned the reactionary outlook of traditional Wilhelmine conservatives and their failure to fully understand the emerging concepts of the modern world, such as technology, the city and the proletariat.Template:Sfn

Moeller van den Bruck defined the Conservative Revolution as the will to conserve a set of values seen as inseparable from a Volk ("people, ethnic group"). These eternal values were able to survive through the fluctuations of the ages because of innovations in their institutional and ideal forms.Template:Sfn Distant from the pure reactionary who, in Moeller van den Bruck's eyes, does not create (and from the pure revolutionary who does nothing but destroys everything), the Conservative Revolutionary sought to give a form to phenomena in an eternal space, a shape that could guarantee their survival among the few things that cannot be lost:Template:Sfn

Conserving is not receiving to hand down, but rather innovating the forms, institutional or ideal, which agree to remain rooted in a solid world of values in the face of continuous historical setbacks. In the face of modernity as an era of insecurity, opposing the securities of the past is no longer enough; instead it is necessary to redesign new safety by adopting and taking on the same risky conditions with which it is defined.{{#if:Arthur Moeller van den BruckTemplate:Sfn|{{#if:|}}

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Edgar Jung indeed dismissed the idea that true conservatives wanted to "stop the wheel of history".<ref>Template:Harvnb; see Template:Harvnb.</ref> The chivalric way of life they were seeking to achieve was, according to Oswald Spengler, not governed by any moral code, but rather by "a noble, self-evident morality, based on that natural sense of tact which comes from good breeding". This morality was not the product of a conscious reflection, but rather "something innate which one senses and which has its own organic logic."Template:Sfn Conservative revolutionaries saw the values of morality as instinctive and eternal, and as such embodied in rural life. The latter became challenged, Spengler believed, by the rise of the artificial world of the city, where theories and observations were needed to understand life itself, either coming from liberal democrats or scientific socialists. What Conservative Revolutionaries were aiming to achieve was the restoration, within the modern world, of what they saw as natural laws and values:Template:Sfn

We call Conservative Revolution the restoration of all those elementary laws and values, without which man loses his connection with Nature and with God and cannot establish a true order.{{#if:Edgar Jung, 1932Template:Sfn|{{#if:|}}

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Influenced by Nietzsche, most of them were opposed to the Christian ethics of solidarity and equality. Although many Conservative Revolutionaries described themselves as Protestant or Catholics, they saw Christian ethical premise as structurally indenturing the strong into mandatory, rather than optional, service to the weak.<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> On a geopolitical scale, theorists of the movement adopted a vision of the world (Weltanschauung) where nations would abandon moral standards in their relationship to each others, only guided by their natural self-interest.Template:Sfn

Let thousands, nay millions, die; what meaning have these rivers of blood in comparison with a state, into which flow all the disquiet and longing of the German being!{{#if:Friedrich Georg Jünger, 1926<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>|{{#if:|}}

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Völkischen were involved in a racialist and occultist movement dating back to the middle of the 19th century and had an influence on the Conservative Revolution. Their priority was the fight against Christianity and the return to a (reconstructed) Germanic pagan faith, or the "Germanization" of Christianity to purge it from foreign (Semitic) influence.<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref>

Volksgemeinschaft and dictatorship

File:Thomas Mann 1929.jpg

Thomas Mann, novelist and laureate of 1929 Nobel Prize, had been in his youth a vibrant opponent of democracy, although he later became one of the Weimar Republic's most prominent defenders.<ref name="Lee"/>

Thomas Mann believed that if German military resistance to the West during World War I was stronger than its spiritual resistance, it was primarily because the ethos ("character") of the German Volksgemeinschaft ("national community") cannot quickly express itself in words, and as a result is not able to counter effectively the solid rhetoric of the West.Template:Sfn Since German culture was "of the soul, something which could not be grasped by the intellect",Template:Sfn the authoritarian state was the natural order desired by the German people. Politics, Mann argued, was inevitably a commitment to democracy and therefore alien to the German spirit:Template:Sfn

There is no such thing as a democratic or a conservative politician. Either you are a politician or you are not, and if you are, you are a democrat.{{#if:Thomas Mann, 1915Template:Sfn|{{#if:|}}

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While scholars have debated whether these formulations should be considered artistic and idealistic, or rather a serious attempt to draw a political analysis of that period, young Mann's writings have been influential on many Conservative Revolutionaries.Template:Sfn Mann was accused by the right of watering down his undemocratic views in 1922 after he removed some paragraphs from the republication of Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen ("Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man"), originally released in 1918.<ref>Template:Cite book; Template:Cite book</ref> In a speech delivered the same year ("On the German Republic" [{{#invoke:Lang|lang}}]), Mann publicly became a staunch defender of the Weimar Republic and attacked many of the figures associated with the Conservative Revolution such as Oswald Spengler, whom he depicted as intellectually dishonest and irresponsibly immoral.<ref name="Lee">Template:Cite book</ref> In 1933, he described National Socialism as the politische Wirklichkeit jener konservativen Revolution, that is to say the "political reality of that Conservative Revolution".<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

In 1921, Carl Schmitt published his essay Die Diktatur ("The Dictatorship"), in which he studied the foundations of the recently established Weimar Republic. Comparing what he saw as the effective and ineffective elements of the new constitution, he highlighted the office of the Reichspräsident as a valuable position, essentially due to the power granted to the president by the Article 48 to declare an Ausnahmezustand ("state of emergency"), which Schmitt implicitly praised as dictatorial.Template:Sfn

If the constitution of a state is democratic, then every exceptional negation of democratic principles, every exercise of state power independent of the approval of the majority, can be called dictatorship.{{#if:Carl Schmitt, 1921<ref>Die Diktatur Template:Webarchive § XV p. 11.</ref>|{{#if:|}}

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Schmitt further advanced in Politische Theologie (1922) that there cannot be any functioning legal order without a sovereign authority. He defined sovereignty as the possibility, or the power, to decide on the triggering of a "state of emergency", in other words a state of exception regarding the law: "There is some person or institution, in a given polity, capable of bringing about a total suspension of the law and then to use extra-legal force to normalize the situation, then that person or institution is the sovereign in that polity."Template:Sfn According to him, every government should include within its constitution that dictatorial possibility to allow, when necessary, for faster and more effective decisions than going through parliamentary discussion and compromise.Template:Sfn Referring to Adolf Hitler, he later used in 1934 the following formulation to justify the legitimacy of the Night of the Long Knives: Der Führer schützt das Recht ("The leader defends the law").Template:Sfn

Front-line socialism

Conservative Revolutionaries asserted that they were not guided by the "sterile resentment of the class struggle".<ref>Template:Harvnb, quoting "Die nationale Revolution", Deutsches Volkstum, 11 August 1929, p. 575.</ref> Many of them invoked the community of front line comradeship (Frontgemeinschaft) of World War I as the model for the national community (Volksgemeinschaft) to follow in peaceful times, hoping in that project to transcend the established political categories of right and left.Template:Sfn For that purpose, they tried to remove the concept of revolution from November 1918 in order to attach it to August 1914. Conservative Revolutionaries indeed painted the November Revolution, which led to the foundation of the Weimar Republic, as a betrayal of the true revolution and, at best, hunger protests by the mob.Template:Sfn

The common agreement with socialists was the abolition of the excesses of capitalism.Template:Sfn Jung claimed that, while the economy should remain in private hands, the "greed of capital" should at the same time be controlled,Template:Sfn and that a community based on shared interests had to be set up between workers and employers. Another source of aversion for capitalism was rooted in the profits made from the war and inflation, and a last concern can be found in the fact that most of Conservative Revolutionaries belonged to the middle class, in which they felt crushed at the centre of an economic struggle between the ruling capitalists and the potentially dangerous masses.Template:Sfn

File:Ernst Niekisch.jpg

Portrait of Ernst Niekisch

Although they dismissed communism as mere idealism, many of them showed their dependence on some Marxist terminology in their writings.Template:Sfn For instance, Jung emphasized the "historical inevitability" of conservatism taking over from the liberal era,Template:Sfn in a mirror-image of the historical materialism developed by Karl Marx. Spengler also wrote about the decline of the West as an ineluctable phenomenon, but his intention was to provide modern readers with a "new socialism" that would enable them to realize the meaninglessness of life, contrasting with Marx's idea of the coming of paradise on earth.Template:Sfn Above all, the Conservative Revolution drew influences from vitalism (Lebensphilosophie) and irrationalism, not from materialism.Template:Sfn Spengler argued that the materialist vision of Marx was based on nineteenth-century science, while the twentieth century would be the age of psychology.Template:Sfn

We no longer believe in the power of reason over life. We feel that it is life which dominates reason.{{#if:Oswald Spengler, 1932Template:Sfn|{{#if:|}}

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Along with Karl Otto Paetel and Heinrich Laufenberg, Ernst Niekisch (from 1926 onwards)<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> was one of the main advocates of National Bolshevism,Template:Sfn a minor branch of the Conservative Revolution described as the "left-wing-people of the right" (Linke Leute von rechts).<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> They defended an ultra-nationalist form of socialism that took its roots in both Völkisch extremism and nihilistic Kulturpessimismus, rejecting any Western influence on German society: liberalism and democracy, capitalism and Marxism, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, Christianity and humanism.Template:Sfn Niekisch and National Bolsheviks were even ready to build a temporary alliance with German communists and the Soviet Union in order to annihilate the capitalist West.<ref>Template:Harvnb; see for instance: Lt. Richard Scheringer, "Revolutionare Weltpolitik", Die sozialistische Nation: Blatter der Deutschen Revolution, 6 June 1931.</ref>

Currents

In his PhD thesis supervised by Karl Jaspers, Armin Mohler distinguished five currents inside the nebula of the Conservative Revolution: the Jungkonservativen ("young conservatives"), the Nationalrevolutionäre ("national revolutionaries"), the Völkischen (from the "folkish movement"), the Bündischen ("leaguists") and the Landvolksbewegung ("rural people's movement"). According to Mohler, the last two groups were less theory- and more action-oriented, the Landvolks movement offering concrete resistance in the form of demonstrations and tax boycotts.Template:Sfn

French historian Louis Dupeux saw five lines of divisions that can be drawn inside the Conservative Revolutionaries: the small farmers were different from the cultural pessimists and the "pseudo-moderns", who belonged for the most part to the middle class; while the proponent of an "organic" society diverged from those of an "organized" society. A third division split the supporters of deep and lengthy political and cultural transformations from those who endorsed a quick and erupting social revolution, as far as challenging economic freedom and private property. The fourth rift resided in the question of the Drang nach Osten ("drive to the East") and the attitude to adopt towards Bolshevik Russia, escorted by a debate on the place of Germany between a so-called "senile" West and "young and barbaric" Orient; the last division being a deep opposition between the Völkischen and the pre-fascist thinkers.Template:Sfn

In 1995, historian Rolf Peter Sieferle described what he labelled five "complexes" in the Conservative Revolution: the "völkischen", the "national socialists", the "revolutionary nationalists" as such, the "vital-activists" (aktivistisch-vitalen), and, a minority in the movement, the "biological naturalists".Template:Sfn

Building on the previous studies conducted by Mohler and Dupeux, French political scientist Stéphane François summarized the three main currents within the Conservative Revolution, this broad division being the most widely shared among analysts of the movement:<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref>

• the "young conservatives" (Jungkonservativen);<ref name="Mohler 1950">Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref>
• the "national revolutionaries" (Nationalrevolutionäre);<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb}.</ref>
• the Völkischen (from the Völkisch movement).<ref name="Mohler 1950"/>

Young conservatives

File:EdgarJung0002.jpg

Edgar Jung (c. 1925), a prominent thinker of the Jungkonservativen,<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> was murdered by the SS during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.

"Young conservatives" were deeply influenced by 19th-century intellectual and aesthetic movements such as German romanticism and Kulturpessimismus ("cultural pessimism"). Contrary to traditional Wilhelmine conservatives, Jungkonservativen aimed at assisting the re-emergence of "persistent and fundamental structures"—authority, the state, the community, the nation, the people—while "espousing their times" in the very same movement.Template:Sfn

Moeller van den Bruck tried to overcome the Kulturpessimismus dilemma by fighting decadency to build a new political order over it.Template:Sfn In 1923, he published the influential book Das Dritte Reich ("The Third Reich"), in which he went further from theoretical analysis to introduce a practical revolutionary programme as a remedy to the political situation: a "Third Reich" that would unite all classes under an authoritarian rule based on a combination of the nationalism of the right and the socialism of the left.Template:Sfn<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Rejecting both the nation-state narrowed to one unified people and the imperialistic structure based on different ethnic groups,<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> the goal of Jungkonservativen was to fulfil the Volksmission ("mission of the Volk") through the edification of a new Reich, i.e. "the organization of all the peoples in a supra-state, dominated by a superior principle, under the supreme responsibility of only one people" in the words of Armin Mohler.Template:Sfn As summarized by Edgar Jung in 1933:

The concept of the nation-state is the transfer of individualistic doctrines from the individuals to the individual state. [...] The super-state (the Reich) is a form of rule that rises above the Volkstum and can leave it untouched. But it shall not want to be total, and shall recognize autonomies (Autonomien) and sovereignties (Eigenständigkeiten).{{#if:Edgar Jung, 1933<ref>Template:Harvnb, quoting: Edgar Julius Jung, Sinndeutung der deutschen Revolution. In: Schriften an die Nation, Band 55. Oldenburg 1933, pp. 78, 95.</ref>|{{#if:|}}

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Although Moeller van der Bruck killed himself in despair in May 1925, his ideas continued to influence his contemporaries. Among them was Edgar Jung, who advocated the creation of a corporatist organic state, free from class struggle and parliamentary democracy, which would make way for a return to the spirit of the Middle Ages with a new Holy Roman Empire federating central Europe.Template:Sfn The theme of a return to medieval values and aesthetics among "young conservatives" was inherited from a Romantic fascination for that period, which they believed to be simpler and more integrated than the modern world.<ref>Template:Harvnb; see also Joachim H. Knoll, "Der Autoritare Staat. Konservative Ideologie und Staatstheorien am Ende der Weimarer Republik," in Lebendiger Geist, 1959. pp. 200-224.</ref> Oswald Spengler praised medieval chivalry as the philosophical and moral attitude to adopt against a modern decadent spirit.Template:Sfn Jung perceived this return as a gradual and lengthy transformation, similar to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, rather than a sudden revolutionary eruption like the French Revolution.Template:Sfn

National revolutionaries

File:Ernst Jünger in First World War uniform from Storm of Steel 1922.png

Ernst Jünger (c. 1922), soldier and novelist, considered a major figure of the "National Revolutionaries"<ref name="Mohler 1950 176–181">Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref>

Other Conservative Revolutionaries rather drew influence from their life at the front line ({{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, "war experience") during the First World War. Far from the {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} concern of the "young conservatives", Ernst Jünger and the other "national revolutionaries" advocated total acceptance of modern technique and endorsed the use of any modern phenomena that could help them overcome modernity—such as propaganda or mass organizations—and eventually achieve a new political order.<ref name="Mohler 1950 176–181"/> The latter would have been based on life itself rather than the intellect, founded on organic, naturally structured and hierarchical communities, and led by a new aristocracy of merit and action.<ref>Template:Harvnb; see also Template:Cite book</ref> Historian Jeffrey Herf used the term "reactionary modernism" to describe that "great enthusiasm for modern technology with a rejection of the Enlightenment and the values and institutions of liberal democracy".Template:Sfn

That time is only worth destroying. But to destroy it, you have to know it first. [...] You had to completely submit yourself to the technique, by shaping it at last. [...] The apparatus itself deserved no admiration — that was the dangerous thing to do — it just had to be used.{{#if:Franz Schauwecker, 1931<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>|{{#if:|}}

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Jünger supported the emergence of a young intellectual elite that would spring out from the trenches of WWI, ready to oppose bourgeois capitalism and to embody a new nationalist revolutionary spirit. In the 1920s, he wrote more than 130 articles in various nationalist magazines, mostly in {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} or, less frequently, in {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, the National-Bolshevik publication of Ernst Niekisch. However, as Dupeux pointed out, Jünger wanted to use nationalism as an "explosive" and not as an "absolute", to eventually let the new order arise by itself.Template:Sfn The association of Jünger to the Conservative Revolutionaries is still a matter of debate among scholars.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

The entry of Germany in the League of Nations in 1926 participated in radicalizing the revolutionary wing of the movement during the late 1920s. The event was seen as a "sign of a Western orientation" in a country Conservative Revolutionaries had conceived as the future {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} ("Empire of Central Europe").Template:Sfn

Völkischen

The adjective völkisch derives from the German concept of Volk (cognate with English folk), which has overtones of "nation", "race" and "tribe".<ref>James Webb. 1976. The Occult Establishment. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court. Template:ISBN. pp. 276–277</ref> The Völkisch movement emerged in the mid-19th century, influenced by German Romanticism. Erected on the concept of Blut und Boden ("blood and soil"), it was a racialist, populist, agrarian, romantic nationalist and, from the 1900s, an antisemitic movement.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> According to Armin Mohler, the Völkischen aimed at opposing the "process of desegregation" that was threatening the Volk by providing him means to generate a consciousness of itself.Template:Sfn

Influenced by authors like Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936), Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), and Ludwig Woltmann (1871–1907), the Völkischen had conceptualised a racialist and hierarchical definition of human peoples where Aryans (or Germans) were set at the summit of the "white race". But while they used terms like Nordische Rasse ("Nordic race") and Germanentum ("Germanic peoples"), their concept of Volk could also be more flexible and understood as a Gemeinsame Sprache ("common language"),<ref>Georg Schmidt-Rohr: Die Sprache als Bildnerin. 1932.</ref> or as an Ausdruck einer Landschaftsseele ("expression of a landscape's soul") in the words of geographer Ewald Banse.Template:Sfn The Völkischen indeed idealized the myth of an "original nation"–which they thought could still be found in German rural regions–organised as a form of "primitive democracy freely subjected to their natural elites."Template:Sfn The notion of "people" (Volk) subsequently turned into the idea of a birth-giving and eternal entity among Völkischen—in the same way as they would have written on "the Nature"—rather than a sociological category.Template:Sfn

The political agitation and uncertainty that followed WWI nourished a fertile background for the renewed success of various Völkisch sects that were abundant in Berlin at the time.Template:Sfn The Völkischen became significant by the number of groups during the Weimar Republic,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> although they were not so by the number of adherents.Template:Sfn Some Völkischen tried to revive what they believed to be a true German faith (Deutschglaube), by resurrecting the cult of ancient Germanic gods.Template:Sfn Various occult movements such as Ariosophy were connected to Völkisch theories,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> and artistic circles were largely present among the Völkischen, such as the painters Ludwig Fahrenkrog (1867–1952) and Fidus (1868–1948).Template:Sfn By May 1924, Wilhelm Stapel perceived the movement as capable of embracing and reconciling the whole nation: in his view, Vökischen had an idea to spread instead of a party programme, and they were led by "heroes" rather than "calculating politicians".<ref>Wilhelm Stapel, "Das Elementare in der volkischen Bewegung", Deutsches Volkstum, 5 May 1924, pp. 213–15.</ref>

Mohler listed the following figures as belonging to the Völkisch movement: Theodor Fritsch, Otto Ammon, Willibald Hentschel, Guido von List, Erich Ludendorff, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, Herman Wirth, and Ernst Graf zu Reventlow.Template:Sfn

Relationship to Nazism

File:Arthur Moeller van den Bruck - Das Dritte Reich, Verlag Der Ring, 1923.jpg

Cover of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck's 1923 book Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich)

Despite a significant intellectual legacy in common, the disparate movement cannot be easily conflated with Nazism.Template:Sfn Their anti-democratic and militaristic thoughts certainly participated in making the idea of an authoritarian regime acceptable to the semi-educated middle-class, and even to the educated youth,<ref name="Woods 1996 2–4"/> but Conservative Revolutionary writings did not have a decisive influence on National Socialist ideology.Template:Sfn Historian Helga Grebing indeed reminds that "the question of the susceptibility to and preparation for National Socialism is not the same as the question of the roots and ideological precursors of National Socialism".Template:Sfn This ambiguous relationship has led scholars to characterize the movement as a form of "German pre-fascism"Template:Sfn or "non-Nazi fascism".<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref>

During the rise of power of the Nazi party in the 1920s up until the early 1930s, some thinkers seem to have shown, as historian Roger Woods writes, "a blindness towards the true nature of the Nazis", while their unresolved political dilemma and failure to define the content of a new German regime led to the absence of widely supported alternative propositions from the right, and eventually to a lack of resistance to the Nazi seizure of power.Template:Sfn According to historian Fritz Stern, "despite some misgivings about Hitler's demagogy, many conservative revolutionaries saw in the Führer the sole possibility of achieving their goal. In the sequel, Hitler's triumph shattered the illusions of most of Moeller's followers, and the twelve years of the Third Reich witnessed the separation of conservative revolution and national socialism again".Template:Sfn

After a few months of adulation in the aftermath of their decisive electoral victory, the Nazis disavowed Moeller van den Bruck and denied that he had been a forerunner of National Socialism: his "unrealistic ideology", as they said in 1939, had "nothing to do with the actual historical developments or with sober Realpolitik" and Hitler "was not Moeller's heir".Template:Sfn When taken individually, Conservative Revolutionaries often held ambivalent views of the Nazis,Template:Sfn but many of them eventually rejected Nazism and the Nazi party after they seized power in 1933,<ref name="Stern 1961 298"/> either owing to its totalitarian or antisemitic character (the "opponents"), or because there would have preferred another form of authoritarian or totalitarian regime (the "competitors"). Stern summarized the relationship in those terms:

But, we must ask, could there have been any other "Third Reich"? Can one abjure reason, glorify force, prophesy the age of the imperial dictator, can one condemn all existing institutions, without preparing the triumph of irresponsibility? The Germanic critics did all that, thereby demonstrating the terrible dangers of the politics of cultural despair.{{#if:Fritz Stern, 1961Template:Sfn|{{#if:|}}

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Opponents

Many Conservative Revolutionaries, while keeping on opposing liberalism and still adhering to the notion of a "strong leader",Template:Sfn rejected the totalitarian or the antisemitic nature of the Nazi regime. Martin Niemöller, initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler, opposed the Nazification of German Protestant churches in 1934, as well as the Nazis' Aryan Paragraph.<ref name="stoehr">Martin Stöhr, „...habe ich geschwiegen“. Zur Frage eines Antisemitismus bei Martin Niemöller</ref> Despite having made remarks about Jews that some scholars have called antisemitic,Template:Efn<ref name="rmichael">Template:Cite journal</ref> he was a leader of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church.<ref name="Barr"/>

We preferred to keep silent. We are certainly not without guilt, and I ask myself again and again, what would have happened, if in the year 1933 or 1934 — there must have been a possibility — 14,000 Protestant pastors and all Protestant communities in Germany had defended the truth until their deaths? If we had said back then, it is not right when Hermann Göring simply puts 100,000 Communists in the concentration camps, in order to let them die.{{#if:Martin Niemöller, 1946<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

|CitationClass=web }}</ref>|{{#if:|}}

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Rudolf Pechel and Friedrich Hielscher openly opposed the Nazi regime, while Thomas Mann went into exile in 1939 and broadcast anti-Nazi speeches to the German people via the BBC during the war. Ernst Jünger refused a seat in the Reichstag for the Nazi party both in 1927 and in 1933, despised the "blood and soil" doctrine,<ref name="Barr">Template:Cite news</ref> and his house was raided several times by the Gestapo.Template:Sfn Hermann Rauschning and Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus sought refuge abroad to keep on opposing the regime.Template:Sfn Georg Quabbe refused to collaborate with the Nazis as a lawyer.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Shortly before his death in 1936, Oswald Spengler prophesied that "in ten years, a German Reich [would] probably no longer exist" (Da ja wohl in zehn Jahren ein Deutsches Reich nicht mehr existieren wird!).<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> In his private papers, he denounced Nazi anti-Semitism in strong terms:

How much envy of the capability of other people in view of one's lack of it lies hidden in anti-Semitism! [...] when one would rather destroy business and scholarship than see Jews in them, one is an ideologue, i.e., a danger for the nation. Idiotic.{{#if:Oswald Spengler<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>|{{#if:|}}

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Others such as Claus von Stauffenberg remained inside the Reichswehr and later in the Wehrmacht to silently conspire in the 20 July plot of 1944. Fritz Stern stated that it was "a tribute to the genuine spiritual quality of the conservative revolution that the reality of the Third Reich aroused many of them to opposition, sometimes silent, often open and costly. [...] In the final plot against Hitler, in July 1944, a few former conservative revolutionaries risked and lost their lives, martyr to the genuine idealism of their earlier cause."Template:Sfn

Competitors

File:August Winnig 1920.JPG

August Winnig in 1920

Some Conservative Revolutionaries did not reject the fascist nature of Nazi rule per se, but would have preferred an alternative authoritarian State. They were often murdered or imprisoned for their deviation from the Führerprinzip.

Edgar Jung, a leading figure of the Conservative Revolution, was murdered during the Night of the Long Knives by the SS of Heinrich Himmler, who wanted to prevent competitive nationalist ideas from opposing or deviating from Hitler's doctrine. For many Conservative Revolutionaries, this event ended the ambivalence between them and the Nazis.Template:Sfn Jung promoted a collectivist version of the Conservative Revolution, speaking of nations as being singular organic entities, attacking individualism while praising militarism and war. He also supported "total mobilization" of human and industrial resources, while promoting the productive power of modernity, similar to the futurism espoused by Italian Fascism.<ref name="Griffin">Griffin, Roger (ed). 1995. "The Legal Basis of the Total State" – by Carl Schmitt. Fascism. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 108–109.</ref>

Ernst Niekisch, although anti-Jewish and in favour of a totalitarian state, rejected Adolf Hitler as he felt he lacked any real socialism, and instead found in Joseph Stalin his model for the Führer Principle. He was interned in a concentration camp from 1937 to 1945 for his criticism of the regime.<ref name="Rees2">Philip Rees, Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890, 1990, p. 279</ref> August Winnig, initially welcoming the Nazis in 1933, opposed the Third Reich for his neo-pagan tendencies. Despite a best-selling<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> essay published in 1937 defending fascism and strongly tainted by antisemitism, but that diverged from the official Nazi doctrine on race,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> he was left alone by the Nazis due to Winnig remaining mostly silent during the rule of Hitler.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Collaborators

Regarded as the "crown jurist of the Third Reich",<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Carl Schmitt remained unrepentant even after 1945 for his role in the creation of the Nazi state.Template:Sfn Although he considered Adolf Hitler too vulgar,<ref name="Griffin" /> Schmitt was party to the burning of books by Jewish authors, rejoicing in the destruction of "un-German" and "anti-German" material, and calling for a much more extensive purge, to include works by authors influenced by Jewish ideas.<ref>Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p. 59 Template:ISBN</ref>

Hans Freyer was the head of the German Institute for Culture in Budapest from 1938 to 1944. Together with Nazi historian Walter Frank, Freyer established a racist and anti-semitic völkisch historiography during that period.<ref>The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 4: 1800–1945, by Stuart Macintyre, D. Daniel R. Woolf, Andrew Feldherr, 2011, p. 178.</ref> Wilhelm Stapel joined the Deutschen Christen in July 1933, spoke vehemently against the anti-Nazi Confessing Church of Martin Niemöller and Karl Barth and advocated for the introduction of the Aryan paragraph in the Church. At the same time Stapel was committed to the policy of Reichsminister of Church Affairs (Reichskirchenminister) Hanns Kerrl, to whom he served as an advisor.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> However, under pressure from the Nazi leadership in 1938, he had to stop the publication of his monthly magazine Deutsches Volkstum.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Study and debate

The precursor of academic studies of the Conservative Revolution was the French historian Edmond Vermeil, who published in 1938 an essay entitled Doctrinaires de la révolution allemande 1918–1938 ("Doctrinarians of the German revolution 1918–1938").Template:Sfn In the first decades that followed the end of WWII, most of the political theorists who studied the Conservative Revolution and became specialists of the subject were far-right thinkers deeply influenced by Conservative Revolutionary thinkers, such as Armin Mohler and Alain de Benoist. It was not until the 1980–1990s that academic research on the movement began to spread more globally across the political spectrum, mostly due to its controversial relationship with Nazism and later influence on the post-war European New Right.Template:Sfn

Post-war revival after Armin Mohler

The contemporary concept of a "Conservative Revolution" was retrospectively reconstructed after WWII by Neue Richt philosopher Armin Mohler in his 1949 doctoral thesis Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932, written under the supervision of Karl Jaspers. Mohler called Conservative Revolutionaries the "Trotskyites of the German Revolution", and his appropriation of the concept has been recurrently accused of being a biased attempt to reconstruct a pre-WWII far-right movement acceptable in a post-fascist Europe, by downplaying the influence some of these thinkers had on the rise of Nazism.<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb; see also Eberhard Kolb, Dirk Schumann: Die Weimarer Republik (= Oldenbourg Grundriss der Geschichte, Bd. 16). 8. Auflage. Oldenbourg, München 2013, p. 225.</ref> Subtitled "a handbook", the study was conceived, in the words of historian Roger Griffin, "as a survivalist manual for those who do not wish to lose their spiritual bearings in the present age". Mohler believed that the project of the "Conservative Revolution" had only been postponed by the Nazi seizure of power.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> He was also at that time the secretary of Ernst Jünger, who had been a major figure of the movement.Template:Sfn

During the 1970s, thinkers of the Conservative Revolution were influencing new radical right movements, including the French Nouvelle Droite, led by Alain de Benoist.Template:Sfn Some academics, especially in West Germany, took a new interest in the subject and began to suspect Mohler's study for his political closeness to the concept. The reactionary and anti-modern characters of the "Conservative Revolution" were largely emphasised during that decade, and the movement was seen as nothing more than a fertile ground for Nazism, speaking "the same totalitarian languages".<ref>Template:Harvnb; see for instance: Jean-Pierre Faye, Languages totalitaires, Paris, 1972; Johannes Petzold, Konservative Theoretiker des deutschen Faschismus, Berlin-Ost, 1978.</ref>

German-American historian Fritz Stern used the term "Conservative Revolution" in his 1961 book The Politics of Cultural Despair to describe the life and ideas of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, and rather drew attention to the alienation and "cultural despair" these authors experienced in the nascent modern world, which led them to express such radical ideas in response. Stern grouped, however, Moeller van den Bruck into a larger "Germanic ideology", along with earlier thinkers from the late 19th century like Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn.Template:Sfn

Academic research since the 1980s

In a 1981 symposium entitled "Conservative revolution and modernity", French historian Louis Dupeux pointed out that what Mohler had called the "Conservative Revolution" was in reality neither truly reactionary nor totally anti-modern (they could even show optimism towards the modern world).Template:Sfn This analysis was supported three years later by American historian Jeffrey Herf in his book Reactionary Modernism, which highlighted the acceptance of modern technique besides a rejection of liberal democracy among conservative thinkers of that period.<ref>Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref> Dupeux also stressed that Conservative Revolutionaries were not only opposed to the "two forms of progressivism", namely liberalism and Marxism, but also to the "cultural pessimism" of the reactionary and conservative right, a standoff they attempted to overcome by proposing an innovative form of reactionary regimes that could espouse the new frameworks of the modern world.Template:Sfn

In his 1993 book Anatomie der Konservativen Revolution ("Anatomy of the Conservative Revolution"), German sociologist Stefan Breuer rejected Mohler's definition of the term "Conservative Revolution", defining "conservatism" as the aspiration to conserve the structures of feudal Germany, in fact, a political project already moribund during the Weimar period.Template:Sfn The "Conservative Revolution" constructed by Mohler was, in his view, the mirror-image of an emerging modern society that took conscious of the deadlocks and dangers of a "simple modernity" built on science and technique only. While noting the complexity that would imply an intellectual classification of that period, Breuer stated that he would have preferred the substitute "new nationalism" to designate a more charismatic and holistic version of the German right-wing movements, contrasting with the "old nationalism" of the 19th century, a current which had essentially been aiming at preserving traditional institutions and German influence in the world.Template:Sfn

In 1996, British historian Roger Woods recognized the validity of the concept, while stressing the eclectic character of the movement and their inability to form a common agenda, a political deadlock he labelled the "conservative dilemma". Woods described the Conservative Revolution as "ideas which cannot simply be explained and summarised as if they were a political programme, but rather as expressions of tension".Template:Sfn Regarding the ambiguous relationship with Nazism, downplayed by Mohler in his 1949 thesis and accentuated by 1970s analysts, Woods argued that "regardless of individual Conservative Revolutionary criticisms of the Nazis, the deeper commitment to activism, strong leadership, hierarchy and a disregard for political programmes persists. [...] Unresolved political dilemmas result in an activism and an interest in hierarchy which mean that there can be no fundamental objection to the National Socialist assumption of power."Template:Sfn

File:Evola.jpg

Italian philosopher Julius Evola is often associated with the Conservative Revolution.<ref name=":0" />

Historian Ishay Landa has described the nature of the Conservative Revolution's "socialism" as decidedly capitalist.<ref name="Landa">Template:Cite book</ref> Landa points out that Oswald Spengler's "Prussian Socialism" strongly opposed labor strikes, trade unions, progressive taxation or any imposition of taxes on the rich, any shortening of the working day, as well as any form of government insurance for sickness, old age, accidents, or unemployment.<ref name="Landa" /> At the same time as he rejected any social democratic provisions, Spengler celebrated private property, competition, imperialism, capital accumulation, and "wealth, collected in few hands and among the ruling classes".<ref name="Landa" /> Landa describes Spengler's "Prussian Socialism" as "working a whole lot, for the absolute minimum, but — and this is a vital aspect — being happy about it."<ref name="Landa" /> Landa likewise describes Arthur Moeller van den Bruck as a "socialist champion of capitalism" who praised free trade, flourishing markets, the creative value of the entrepreneur, and the capitalist division of labor, and sought to emulate British and French imperialism.<ref name="Landa2">Template:Cite book</ref> Landa notes the similarities of Moeller's critiques of socialism with those of neoliberals such as Friedrich von Hayek and writes that "far from hostile to the bourgeois spirit, Moeller's text is suffused with such spirit."<ref name="Landa2"/>

Later influence

The movement influenced contemporary thinkers outside of German-speaking Europe. Among them, the Italian philosopher Julius Evola is often associated with the Conservative Revolution.<ref name=":0">Template:Harvnb; Template:Harvnb.</ref>

The Nouvelle Droite, a French far-right philosophical movement created in the 1960s to adapt traditionalist, ethnopluralist and illiberal politics to the European post-WWII context and to distance itself from earlier forms of far-right like fascism, mainly through a project of pan-European nationalism<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> have been deeply influenced by the Conservative Revolution,Template:Sfn<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> as well as its German counterpart the Neue Rechte.Template:Sfn<ref name="Gudrun"/>

The ideology and theoretical structure of the Identitarian movement is mainly inspired by the Nouvelle Droite, the Neue Rechte, and through them by the Conservative Revolution.<ref name="Teitelbaum"/><ref name="Gudrun"/>

Cultural Depiction

Conservative Revolution was emphatically depicted in the German TV Series Babylon Berlin.

See also

• Authoritarian conservatism
  • Para-fascism
• Conservatism in Germany
• German nationalism

References

Primary sources

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Bibliography

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Further reading

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• Hausmann, Christopher. "August Winnig und die „konservative Revolution": ein Beitrag zur ideengeschichtlichen Debatte über die Weimarer Republik". In: Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung No 32 (1996), pp. 23–46
• Horňáček, Milan. "Konservative Revolution – ein Desiderat der Literatursoziologie?" In: LiTheS Zeitschrift für Literatur- und Theatersoziologie No2 (2009), pp. 31–53.
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• Mosse, George. Corporate State and the Conservative Revolution in Weimar Germany. Éditions de la Librairie Encyclopedique, 1965.
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• Vermeil, Edmond, Doctrinaires de la révolution conservatrice allemande 1918–1938, Paris, Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1938. Second edition in 1948.

External links

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• Jung, Edgar Julius (1932). "Germany and the Conservative Revolution" (English transl.).