Who is the Revolutionary Conservative?

Following are important excerpts from Armin Mohler’s Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland; these excerpts provide useful working definitions of conservatism and explain why the adjective revolutionary has been appendaged to it. The Conservative Revolutionary movement has long been eclipsed (and appropriated!) by Nazism, or the brand of fascism peculiar to Germany after the Weimar interregnum. This has led to the dogmatic branding of a coterie of thinkers as proto-Nazis: Julius Evola, Ernst Jünger, Gottfried Benn, Oswald Spengler and Moeller Van Den Bruck; however, this is not the case and is very reductionist. These thinkers had uncertain relationships with Nazism, and were more often than not bitterly critical of the hyperrealist biological reductionism of Nazi fascism, as well as its upending of the Prussian aristocratic order, which had been replaced by one man; the ‘Führerstaat’ (Führer’s state) as Evola called it. Hitler had, in fact, faced assassination attempts from the Prussian aristocracy and his state was considered a bourgeois revolt against the erstwhile blue-blood of Germany. For people like Thomas Mann, a noble laureate and member of the Hanseatic Mann family, Hitler was too democratic & too plebian. He called Nazism a movement “against everything noble”, a power grab by the “common scum”

Digressions aside, I recommend Mohler’s book as the best summary on the Conservative Revolution (though it is in German).

A few helpful English overviews: Critics of Modernity: The Literature of the Conservative Revolution in Germany, 1890-1933 and The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic.

Herein lie the translated excerpts:

In colloquial usage, the word "conservative" is used to denote the effort to preserve something that already exists and to hold on to it under all circumstances. This also applies to most of the German and non-German political parties which have written this word on their flags. The "Conservative Revolution", however, believes that this is misunderstood conservatism (A 1.5), and seeks to give the word a new content. What this new content is is best illustrated by the counter term "reactionary."

This word seems to have been created in the first half of the 19th century on the side of progress as an abusive nickname (Schimpfname) for all attempts to maintain or restore the conditions before the French Revolution. Which, if successful, would be a "setback" from the point of view of progress. The "Conservative Revolution" takes up this abusive nickname (of reactionary) and uses it to eliminate all insincere or bogus (unecht) conservatism.

"Reactionary" from its point of view is, for example, anyone who still clings to a restoration of the Hohenzollern kingship after the collapse of 1918. This new conservatism, then, does not share the adherence to surviving individual forms. It respects and protects what is still a living tradition, and in this it differs from the belief in progress, which fundamentally wants to replace the existing with the new.

The new conservatism thus recognizes the constant flow of individual forms. Behind this superficial (vordergründigen) movement, however, it recognizes the tranquility (Ruhe) of the whole. Moeller van den Bruck writes in the chapter Reactionary of the Third Reich: "In the history of a people, whatever wants to change may change with time: the unchangeable, which remains, is more powerful and more important than the changeable, which always consists only in the fact that something is subtracted or added." The new conservatism does not believe that anything changes at the core. Thus, for example, the idea, indispensable to progressive thinking, of a human being who is gradually perfecting himself, who is basically predisposed to the good and is only prevented from doing so by adverse circumstances, is alien to him. For him, people will always wear different clothes and cultivate different customs. But their disposition to good and evil remains the same for him. Perfection belongs only to the whole; the individual has access to perfection only through his return to this whole.

Thus, for the "Conservative Revolution" the word "preservation" has no justification in the active sense: the individual remains an individual and subject to the whole, and therefore does not possess the freedom to preserve something that is destined to perish. But passively the word becomes meaningful: everything is "preserved" and nothing can fall out of the whole. Thus it is to be understood when Moeller van den Bruck writes about the chapter ‘Conservative’ of his main work: “Conservatism has eternity to itself” (Konservatismus hat die Ewigkeit für sich).

The definition of "conservative" that most aptly illustrates the new meaning of the word comes from Moeller van den Bruck's circle. It dates from 1931 and can be found in Der Ring, the journal of the circle around Heinrich von Gleichen. Albrecht Erich Günther writes there: With Moeller van den Bruck, "we do not understand conservatism as a clinging to what was yesterday, but as a living out of what is always valid. This means that the conservative does not live in the future alone like the believer in progress and not in the past alone like the reactionary - he lives in the present, in which, insofar as it is a fulfilled present, past and future are united. The "Great Midday" (of Nietzsche) echoes.

But our movement calls itself "Conservative Revolution". What does the word "revolutionary" have to do with the word "conservative"? Doesn't it belong entirely to the space of progress? There it means the removal of obstacles to progress. If the revolution succeeds, something new is added to what has gone before. The word "revolutionary" cannot have this meaning within the "Conservative Revolution. Here, the "revolution" could rather be compared to a bloodletting (Aderlaß). The individual, whose time has passed, is not to be held on spasmodically, as the reactionary would do. Rather, it is to fall, and this is helped. A quick cut is better than slow rotting, when the downfall has been decided anyway. "Revolution" here is therefore not, as in progress thinking, an in-between faster pushing forward within the slower "evolution". What is meant is a pruning of life-inhibiting growths. "Every revolution wants to shatter constricting forms," says Rauschning in his description of this conservative "revolution".

But now it would be wrong to see in this conservative "revolution" something like "reform". "Reform" is always something bloodless, while it is not surprising to the conservative that birth must be paid for with destruction. Moreover, in "reform" something is added to the existing. For the conservative, however, everything is always already there, and "revolution" for him can only have the result of a new structuring of what is already there.

One could therefore call this kind of "revolution" "aimless," because it does not need a vision of a final kingdom in the distant future; one might call it "skeptical," because for the prudent it is by no means capable of shaping a better world; one could also call it a "passive" revolution, because it has traits of suffering attached to it and is not, like the revolution of progress, shrouded in the pathos of an arbitrary control of world history. And it should also be noted that in the "Conservative Revolution" war is often understood as revolution.

This renders the definition of revolution as civil war as opposed to national war useless for understanding our kind of revolution.

In the editorial cited in A 3.7, there is an attempt to call the revolutionary process "revolution" on the conservative side and "evolution" on the progressive side. This makes sense insofar as the distinction between revolution and evolution is superficial according to the mere presence or absence of bloodshed and the use of violence. Destruction knows many other colors than just the red of blood. Then even if jerky progress towards a certain goal is called "evolution" there. Of the "revolution," on the other hand, it is said: "Revolution, however, means: Re-volution, rolling back, reappearance of an earlier state. However, there it goes beyond our interpretation of the "Conservative Revolution" with the assertion of a rolling back to the beginning, the origin. To what extent this is also a "linear" conception, or to what extent here merely a process of the one (cyclic) world is circumscribed with the comprehensible terms of the (linear) other - that depends on the interpretation of the word "origin", which is much used in the "Conservative Revolution" and is multifaceted. But this is one of the many questions we have to leave open.

In any case, one thing becomes clear: in the "Conservative Revolution" lives a will to change certain conditions by force, which justifies the use of the word "revolutionary" and which is also repeatedly called "revolutionary" by the opposing side. Since, as already said, our task is not the establishment of a logically elaborated system, but the description of an existing world view, we can leave it at this delimitation of the words "conservative" - "reactionary" - "revolutionary".