THE CONCEPTUAL-POSITIONAL STATUS OF THE «CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION» IN THE IDEOLOGICAL TOPOLOGY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Abstract

This article demonstrates that the ‘conservative revolution’ is a sui generis phenomenon of the ideological landscape of the 20th century: it cannot, in principle, be reduced to classical conservatism, National Socialism, reactionary conservatism or progressive utopianism. Drawing on the works of A. Müller van den Broek, O. Spengler, E. Jünger and K. Schmitt, and applying R. Koselleck’s categorical-conceptual history, M. Friedan’s morphological theory of ideologies and the discourse-analytical approach of E. Laclau and S. Mouffe, it has been established that the positional status of this phenomenon is determined by a specific configuration: maximum values along the axes of anti-liberalism, decisionism and palingenesis, alongside a fundamentally minimal level of biological racism, which is not replicated by any other ideological system of the era. The deep metaphysical foundation of conservative-revolutionary thought turns out to be temporal ontology: the rejection of linear, progressively directed time in favour of cyclical or palingenetic time, which constitutes a rejection of the very temporal form of the liberal-Enlightenment project, and not merely its content. A principled demarcation from National Socialism is argued: whilst Nazi anthropology reduced the nation to a racial-biological substrate, the conservative revolution constituted it as a spiritual-cultural organism, which attests to the different ontological foundations and the incompatibility of both phenomena. Within the ideological topography of the twentieth century, the conservative revolution occupies the position of a radical ‘third way’: not a moderate synthesis between conservatism and revolutionism, but their simultaneous rejection. This specific positioning determines both the breadth of the phenomenon’s intellectual influence and its fundamental ideological ambivalence as an open field of conceptual tension. Against the backdrop of the current crisis of liberal constitutionalism, a conceptually rigorous study of this phenomenon is a prerequisite for understanding contemporary forms of illiberal thought.