The so-called conservative revolution in Germany in the Weimar period was neither conservative nor revolutionary.
That it was not revolutionary has always been fairly obvious. None of its defining movements or leading thinkers seems to have had a proper or full understanding of what revolution is, in the normal sense of the successive historical transformations of society – its political and economic systems, and its class relations – that define modernity. For all their variety, it appears none of them – Heidegger, Spengler, Schmitt, Jünger, Sombart, Moeller van den Bruck, Niekisch – had an adequate historical grasp of its causes, mechanisms, and consequences. In this respect, they all seem remarkably superficial and primitive.
They certainly understood quite a few of its social and cultural effects of the transformations of modernity, and their novel responses to them, in comparison with those of traditional conservatives, are the basis of the claim that they are revolutionary. The responses involve a partial affirmation of them, but never the kind of consistent, further systematic transformation of the material basis of society, and hence of the causes of the modern civilizational changes they address, that Marxism seeks to articulate in terms of historical Wissenschaft. Their revolution is in this decisive respect a pseudorevolution, like the “pre-knives” – if I may use that term – revolution of fascism.
The same is true of the various movements and individuals that draw inspiration from the German conservative revolutionaries today, including the French so-called New Right, identitarians, the alt-right, neo-fascists, many populist nationalists, and quite a few who are classified, and regard themselves, as more mainstream conservatives and rightists. The strength of this current of “conservative-revolutionary” influence is clearly due to the half-century of neoliberalism’s ideological hegemony in the West. It is part of the response, within the narrow confines of a new, bourgeois “end of history” mindset, to its constitutive deficiencies, to the growing problems (normally described in terms of “crisis”) they inevitably produce. And also to the challenges it faces from outside of the system, from the non-West, the non-westernized or non-neoliberally-westernized world.
The situation is ambiguous, however, inasmuch as one part of the response is that of the system itself, as it reaches for proto-fascist solutions, while another is that of its “conservative-revolutionary” opponents, who, rejecting western liberalism as a whole, align themselves with the non-western world, projecting their fascist solutions onto it.
What has been less obvious is that the conservative revolutionaries are also not conservative. What is considered their conservatism sets the limits of their revolution, and what they consider their revolution shapes and defines their conservatism. The conservative revolution is a modern reaction to modernity, a reaction by certain aspects of modernity against other aspects of it. It is what Jeffrey Herf described as a “reactionary modernism”.
This – or some aspects of it – is what I have primarily focused on in my own brief comments on the conservative revolution and related later movements. Clearly, traditional conservatives’ response to modernity is also inadequate in its insufficient comprehension of the forces at work in the successive historical revolutions and of their political and cultural import. It is pointless to – in William F. Buckley’s programmatic words – stand athwart history and yell Stop. But the substance of the values they represent is largely different from the “revolutionary” conservatives. The precise nature of this difference is what needs to be better understood.
In broad outline, what I here call western traditional conservatives build primarily on and seek to renew certain central insights of the classical and Christian traditions, assimilating modern ideas only selectively or as modified so as not to distort and contradict what is of lasting value this older civilizational legacy, whereas the conservative revolutionaries are fatally shaped by precisely such problematic modern ideas. They sometimes almost paradigmatically evince the defining modern synthesis of rationalism and romanticism. While all forms of rationalism and romanticism – and their synthesis – are not problematic, some certainly are, and the conservative revolution clearly represents one of the versions of an ominous departure from the elements of traditional western wisdom which in substance keep the west closer to the other great civilizations.
Marxism too is one of those problematic versions of excessive rational-romantic modernity. No matter how dialectically sophisticated in comparison with other modernist reductionisms, its general “scientific” materialism, its understanding of the entirety of the ideological superstructure in terms of its relation to the developing material base, its critique of religion and idealism, and not least its secular humanist view of man, are simply not philosophically tenable, and indeed often manifestly absurd from a temporally and geographically non-provincial perspective of the life, culture and thought of humanity. It is specific to a particular 19th-century context.
The material forces of history are not omni-determinant. But they must be adequately understood and taken into account. The quality of the meaningful kind of conservative thinking depends to a decisive degree on the way in which it navigates the complex material realities of modernity. Again, modern ideas can and indeed must be selectively appropriated in the course of unignorable material development, while also modified in accordance with a lasting conservative vision, the conservatism of supraordinate values.
Edmund Burke certainly tried to do that. He tried to preserve classical and Christian values, still to some extent as embodied in the feudal era, in the midst of the bourgeois revolution. To a considerable extent he succeeded in this, at least inasmuch as he became the most important founder of a current of conservative thought within western modernity which to this day seeks to continue this significant project of taming the material changes and adjusting them as far as possible to the truths of what T. S. Eliot called “the permanent things”. But to the extent to which he sought to cling to certain particular institutional embodiments of his values, and thus to the particular class structure of his age, the success could only be partial and, above all, relative. His thought was contradictory inasmuch as he was himself part of the liberal revolution set in motion and rolling on beyond his historical horizon and even his in some respects exceptional powers of predictive imagination.
His understanding of the totality of the historical forces at work simply remained too limited. And the conservative revolutionaries – as well as the fascists, of course – still had this in common with him. And so do their followers today – indeed the whole of “the right”. This is therefore where Marxism, as politically relevant partial truths of historical Wissenschaft, is in fact badly needed. And in a situation where today’s neoliberal bourgeois revolutionaries, as parts of the machine of capital in new phases of its monopolist-financial-imperialist operation, seem to be producing historically unsurpassed anti-conservative catastrophies, beyond those of any actually existing socialism, Marxism is needed precisely for the purposes of conservatism in the sense in which I want to understand that term.
The last half-century has conclusively shown that the liberal conservatism of the long consolidated bourgeois revolution is not sufficient, that it is no longer tenable for the reasons accounted for by Marxist historical scholarship. Ideal forces are significant, but conservatism as a movement of ideas – the only thing it could be – within capitalist liberal democracy was not enough to shape western society in accordance with its higher civilizational standards. For when it could no longer rely on the institutional framework of a lingering, fragmentarily preserved pre-capitalist order on the British model, it remained bound to the by now equally obsolete institutional forms of the bourgeois revolution.
The whole “end of history” vision has increasingly come to seem little more than a réchauffé version of the system perceived to be already doomed by Marx in the same way that feudalism had been, and the conservative visions of any stricter historical restaurations in material terms have inevitably remained utopian fantasies. Conservatives of the right, even when they call themselves revolutionary, remain bound to the controlling material interests of the current capitalist system.
But the powers that be change with the inexorable dynamic of world history. If the supraordinate values which a meaningful conservatism asserts, the higher spiritual, moral and humanistic values of the west, are still seriously to be defended, the powerless liberal conservatism of the current western imperialism needs to be discarded in favour of a socialist conservatism based on the higher cosmopolitanism that is adequate to the emerging multipolar order.
That alone would be a real conservative revolution.
Jan Olof Bengtsson 