Golo Mann on the Conservative Revolution in Germany

Golo Mann’s discussion of the Conservative Revolution in The History of Germany since 1789 (Penguin, 1985) begins with Oswald Spengler, whose positions (anti-Hohenzollern, socialist, anti-progressive, militarist…), mark the beginning of a novel movement, “overthrowing conventional ways of thinking in politics.” For Mann, the C.R. is “confused,” a “strange combination of words,” and yet somehow, perfectly simple: Conservative Revolutionists “rejected not certain aspects of the Republic but the whole of it, and the whole present; they […] wanted to ask completely new questions and offer completely new ideas” (p. 620).

Their temperament was unsuited to parliamentarism or the new international order, though suited to poetry and the formation of groupuscules (pp. 620–1). Mann provides a perfect, lapidary, aphoristic précis of “the conservative-revolutionary attitude” (Mohler): “They wanted a new Reich without party squabbles, a Reich of the young and of masculine virtues, a great, proud gathering around a camp-fire instead of the capital Berlin. They expected much more from the modern state than it can give them at the best of times” (p. 621). Here we have their anti-parliamentarism, the spirit of the Freikorps (“the Ideas of 1914”), the bündisch spirit. And of course “the best of times,” measured by “quality of life,” which strikes them as the coming of the Last Man: see Leo Strauss on “German Nihilism” Interpretation, 26.3 (spring, 1999), specifically p. 360.

Kondylis on Conservatism with Notes on Conservative Revolution

Notes on Panagiotis Kondylis, “Conservatism as a Historical Phenomenon.” This is to my knowledge the only substantial excerpt from Kondylis’ Konservativismus (Stuttgart, 1986) available in English. The translation is by “C.F.” from “Ὁ συντηρητισμὸς ὡς ἱστορικὸ φαινόμενο,” Λεβιάθαν, 15 (1994), pp. 51–67, and remains unpublished, but discoverable in PDF format online. Page references below are to that PDF. I have altered the translation very slightly in some places.

Kondylis aims to understand conservatism not as a “historical” or “anthropological constant,” but as a “concrete historical phenomenon” bound to, and thus coterminous with, a time and a place (pp. 1–2). But even such historicist scholarship often takes too narrow a view, according to which conservatism is a reaction against, and thus “derivative” of, the Revolution, or, at best, against Enlightenment rationalism (pp. 2–3).

Stefan Breuer, Panagiotis Kondylis and the Question of “Conservative Revolution”

Alain de Benoist, “Intervista sulla rivoluzione conservatrice,” Terra Insubre (2007):

Stefan Breuer disputed that one can speak of “conservatism” or of “neo-conservatism” when it comes to the Conservative Revolution. He depended for this purpose upon the works of Panagiotis Kondylis, who, in a large work published in 1986, declared that conservatism, entering into an irreversible decline in the second half of the nineteenth century, was unable to rejuvenate itself in Germany on account of its historical links with the Ancien Régime. For Kondylis, the progressive elimination of the nobility, the caste that sustained historical conservatism, doomed political conservatism, which could not survive on its own, except by accommodating liberalism, or by “aestheticizing” certain of its foundations.