The Conservative Revolution (保守革命)
The Conservative Revolution (Konservative Revolution) is a general name that Armin Mohler, a German intellectual historian, gave to a set of anti-Nazi and nationalist intellectual trends during the Weimar Republic. It also refers to the title of Mohler's book written about it ("The Conservative Revolution in Germany" [Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland]).
Categories of the Conservative Revolution
Friedrich Engels used the word 'conservative revolution' (konservative revolution) for the first time in 1848. Then, in the late 1920's, Hugo von Hofmannsthal used the word in his speech, 'Literature as the Nation's Spiritual Space' ('Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation'), at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München).
Mohler categorized the conservative revolution into the following five trends;
Conservative Youth faction: advocating the reconstruction of an 'empire' (Reich) in the supranational space of medieval Germany.
National Revolutionary faction: advocating the creation of a nihilist revolutionary and a labor state through full mobilization.
National Ethnic faction: advocating the national and ethnic superiority of ancient Germanic peoples.
Youth League: nationalist and militaristic youth movement that was spiritually under the influence of various youth movements and the George Circle (George-kreis).
Peasants and Villagers' Movements: peasants' movements in northern Germany that built up illegal campaigns against the state using force.
The Meiji Restoration in Japan is regarded as a typical conservative revolution, and Yukio MISHIMA's 'bunka boei ron' (Discussion on the Defense of Culture) is also said to have been a conservative revolutionary ideology.
Thinkers of the Conservative Revolution
Arthur Moeller van den Bruck
Oswald Spengler
Ernst Jünger
Carl Schmitt
Ernst Niekisch
Edgar Julius Jung
Hans Zehrer
Franz Schauwecker
Hermann Ehrhardt
Ernst von Salomon
Friedrich Nietzsche
Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Stefan George
Armin Mohler
Alain de Benoist
Henning Eichberg