# Conservative Revolution The **Conservative Revolution** (*Konservative Revolution*) is the label — coined in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's 1927 Munich address and fixed by Armin Mohler's 1950 dissertation, written under Karl Jaspers — for the interwar German intellectuals who rejected the Weimar Republic from the right without wanting the old monarchy back: [[Oswald Spengler]], [[Ernst Jünger]], Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Edgar Julius Jung, Hans Freyer, Ernst Niekisch, and at its juridical edge [[Carl Schmitt]]. They wanted a revolution *for* hierarchy, nation and myth against liberalism, parliament and the bourgeois world — Jeffrey Herf's "reactionary modernism," embracing technology and total mobilization while rejecting the Enlightenment that produced them. Most of them despised the Nazis as vulgar; the Nazis took what they needed and discarded the rest. ## The canon - **Spengler**, *The Decline of the West* (1918–22) and *Prussianism and Socialism* (1919): civilizations as organisms with life-spans; the West in its winter; a "Prussian socialism" of duty and rank against Marxist socialism of class. - **Moeller van den Bruck**, *Das Dritte Reich* (1923): the title the Nazis stole. Co-founder of the June Club (later the Herrenklub that helped make Papen chancellor in 1932); met Hitler in 1922 and dismissed him for his "proletarian primitiveness"; killed himself in 1925. - **Jünger**, *Storm of Steel* (1920) and *The Worker* (1932): war as inner experience; the coming age of the technician-soldier. He refused Nazi honors, served in occupied Paris, and outlived the century. - **Schmitt**, *Political Theology* (1922), *The Concept of the Political* (1932): sovereignty as the decision on the exception; politics as friend and enemy. The one who joined, in 1933. - **Jung**, the young-conservative who wrote Papen's Marburg speech against Nazi excess (June 1934) and was murdered in the Night of the Long Knives for it; **Niekisch**, the "National Bolshevik," imprisoned from 1937. ## What it is for, in this vault The Conservative Revolution is the source code for three things the vault tracks. [[Traditionalism]] — [[Julius Evola]]'s [[Revolt Against the Modern World]] (1934) is its Italian cousin. The European [[New Right]] — Alain de Benoist's Nouvelle Droite reissued Mohler's canon in the 1970s and passed it to [[Alexander Dugin]], whose Eurasianism is Moeller's geopolitics with Russia in Germany's place. And [[Neoreaction]] — the Silicon Valley strain that reads Schmitt and Jünger for the same reason the 1920s did: as the philosophy of a technical class that has given up on democracy but not on power. The movement's fate is the lesson the vault draws from it: intellectuals who thought they could ride a mass movement to a revolution of their own design were used, and then Jung was shot. See [[Nazi Party]] and [[Weimar Republic]] for the history, [[Philosophy in Right-Wing Thought Hub]] for the lineage. ## See Also - [[Oswald Spengler]] · [[Ernst Jünger]] · [[Carl Schmitt]] · [[Julius Evola]] · [[Alexander Dugin]] - [[Traditionalism]] · [[New Right]] · [[Neoreaction]] · [[Revolt Against the Modern World]] - [[Weimar Republic]] · [[Nazi Party]] · [[Philosophy in Right-Wing Thought Hub]]