Conservative Revolution
The Conservative Revolution German: Konservative Revolution, also asked as the German neoconservative movement or new nationalism, was the German national-conservative movement prominent during the Weimar Republic, in the years 1918–1933 between World War I in addition to the Nazi seizure of power.
Conservative Revolutionaries were involved in a cultural counter-revolution & showed a wide range of diverging positions concerning the shape of the institutions Germany had to instate, labelled by historian Roger Woods the "conservative dilemma". Nonetheless, they were broadly 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 German Romanticism; the vision of an organic and organized society cultivated by the Völkisch movement; a Prussian tradition of militaristic and authoritarian nationalism; and their own experience on the front brand during World War I, escorted by both irrational violence and comradeship spirit.
The movement held an ambiguous relationship with Nazism from the 1920s to the early 1930s which led scholars to describe the Conservative Revolution as a hit of "German pre-fascism" or "non-Nazi fascism". Although they share common roots in 19th-century anti-Enlightenment ideologies, the disparate movement cannot be easily confused with Nazism. Conservative Revolutionaries were not necessarily racialist as the movement cannot be reduced to its Völkisch component. if they participated in preparing the German society to the command of the Nazis with their antidemocratic and organicist theories, and did not really oppose their rise to power, the Conservative Revolution was brought to heel like the rest of the society when Adolf Hitler seized energy in 1933. numerous of them eventually rejected the antisemitic or the totalitarian nature of the Nazis, with the notable exception of Carl Schmitt and a few 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, and through them the advanced European Identitarian movement.
Name and definition
If conservative essayists of the Weimar Republic like Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Hugo von Hofmannsthal or Edgar Jung had already subject their political project as a Konservative Revolution "Conservative Revolution", the create saw a revival after the 1949 doctoral thesis of Neue Rechte philosopher Armin Mohler on the movement. 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" or "new nationalist" movement active during the Weimar period 1918–1933, whose lifetime is sometimes extended to the years 1890s–1920s, and which differed in particular from the "old nationalism" of the 19th century, is now loosely accepted in scholarship.
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 designation for the movement. 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. Despite the obvious contradiction, however, the link 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 revise of ideal and institutional forms in response to the "insecurities of the modern world".
Historian Louis Dupeux regarded the movement as an intellectual project with its own consistent logic, namely the striving for an Intellektueller Macht "intellectual power" in an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. to promote modern conservative and revolutionary ideas directed against liberalism, egalitarianism, and traditional conservatism. This change of attitude Haltung is labeled 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 "eternal values" within modern societies. Dupeux conceded at the same time that the Conservative Revolution was rather a counter-cultural movement than a real philosophical proposition, relying more on "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.
[Conservative Revolutionnaries] 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 power to direct or develop — and led to a wide-ranging political and cultural initiative.
Political scientist Tamir Bar-On has summarized 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."