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.

Stefan Breuer, Anatomie de la révolution conservatrice (Paris, 1996), pp. 5–6:

But the premise (shared, moreover, by Mohler) according to which the Conservative Revolution is a prolongation of conservatism has been shaken by Panagiotis Kondylis. In a voluminous comparative study of European conservatism, Kondylis has plausibly demonstrated why this phenomenon ought to be understood in the same way as the Reformation or the Enlightenment: as a concrete concept, tied to a given historical epoch; and that it is impossible to generalize, except at the price of an utter desubstantiation. The history of conservatism, according to this thesis, “coincides to a great extent with the history of the nobility, which manifestly indicates that the end of the nobility as a traditionally dominant category (in the Weberian sense), must unavoidably bring about the end of the social relevance and conceptual force of conservatism.

[…The] history of conservatism has already come to an end with the nineteenth century; and it has not undergone a mutation, of whatever nature, permitting conservatism to be reborn from its ashes after the fashion of the phoenix. In figures as complex as those of the Conservative Revolution, we are not dealing with a new variant of conservatism, nor with a conservatism “of the axial age” (Mohler), but with a phenomenon of a peculiar nature: an ensemble of attempts at orientation and of exploratory movements within modernity, which oppose, no doubt, the mainstream defined by the Enlightenment and by liberalism, but which are so profoundly infused by the voluntarism and aestheticism typical of modernity that one can no longer speak in this connection of conservatism in the specific and historical sense of the term (Kondylis). This applies as much to the necessary archaism of certain propagandists of the Reich and of the State of Orders as it does to the defenders of a quasi-Futurist dynamism that attempts to topple modernity using its own tools—conceptions that, opposed as they are, clearly show thought to have entered irrevocably into the stage of l’arbitraire, which must, according to Sorel, be considered the central characteristic of modernity. Whatever the Conservative Revolution might have been, it was by no means a conservative revolution.

Breuer’s critique (and it is not Kondylis’ critique, but only Breuer’s critical deployment of Kondylis’ analysis) is very fine; and one can make good use of it without accepting his central message—that the Conservative Revolution was not conservative—a point made already by Klemens von Klemperer in Germany’s New Conservatism (Princeton, 1968), and even, in a funny sort of way, by Hermann Rauschning in Make and Break with the Nazis: Letters on a Conservative Revolution (London, 1941), which is a helpful book, Rauschning’s abysmal reputation notwithstanding.

The essential points:

1. The nobility is (was) the vector of conservatism. Conservatism is (was) the effort to preserve ancient privileges and the political structure into (out of) which these were woven.
2. With the fall of the nobility, conservatism, in this primary sense, falls. It does not disappear in those countries, such as England, where the nobility remains, but becomes marginalised as they become marginalised. Conservatives’ options at this point (in Benoist’s paraphrase, supra): (1) “accommodation” to liberalism or (2) “aestheticization.”

Klemperer’s conservatism falls under the first heading (“accommodation”: see op. cit., pp. 17–21).

The second seems to take a part (“aestheticization”) for a whole. We might better say “abstraction.” Conservatism no longer being anchored in the particular, concrete privileges of a particular, concrete caste, it is abstracted into the aesthetic realm, indeed, but also the realm of “principles.” And so it is that even the die-hard Willoughby de Broke can pledge himself to what is “vital and eternal.” The exigencies of the moment, of modernity, are “vital”; but principles are “eternal.” The conservative revolutionary no longer has the authority of a particular, concrete hierarchy to which to pledge himself; so he must turn to the principles of authority, hierarchy, and so on. And seeing these so imperfectly realised in the basically liberal-capitalist order defended by type 1 conservatives, he must resort to radical action (or “revolutionary,” sensu lato). (And on this very account disqualifies himself as a conservative in Klemperer’s analysis.)