4. Neo-conservatism.
Since the late nineteenth cen-
tury
conservatism has in different ways moved away
from being defensive as a
result of the influence of
industrialization and capitalism, of growing
social
mobility, of advances in scientific and technological
thought,
the liberalization of state and economy, and
the secularization of thought
and public life. Even then
it has been easier for conservatives to
determine what
it is they are opposing than to design clear and
realistic
programs. The criticisms of civilization by Nietzsche,
Renan, Taine, Dostoevski, and J. Burkhardt, among
others, hardly fall under
the rubric “conservative”;
nonetheless they have
furnished the political con-
servative with
both a basic philosophy of civilization
and a wide audience. The
conservative “intellectual”
has come forward to
express the discontent felt for both
the world of bourgeois capitalism and
the programs
of socialism; in his formulating new myths, forecasts,
and schemes a skeptical, sometimes even nihilistic,
accent has not been
lacking. Appearing increasingly
less aristocratic or class-oriented than
intellectual and
elitist, this type of conservative has attained his
most
widespread influence in conjunction with militant and
integrative
nationalism.
The best known phenomenon of this type was the
Action Française, whose protagonists, Maurice
Barrès
and Charles Maurras, saw nationality as the
inalienable
distinction of man. Combining antisecular and anti-
Semitic tendencies with ideas derived
from Sorel they
promoted an authoritarian conception of the state
without undue scruples as to its legitimacy. Maurras
demanded the
establishment of an hereditary anti-
parliamentary monarchy, hierarchically structured and
corporatively organized, among whose firmest sup-
porters should be the Catholic Church.
In Germany before World War I conservatism of
this type was the program of
small and isolated, though
influential, groups. P. de Lagarde, with some
bearing
on romanticism, had demanded a state adequate to the
character
of the German people as well as a “German”
religion,
and based his hopes on a new elitist brand
of education. J. Langbehn
adopted this approach and
developed it, amplifying its antimodernistic
tenden-
cies: homeland, Volk, nature, and art constitute a
powerfully emotional
ideological syndrome in Lang-
behn that had its
effect on the youth movement.
This neo-conservatism was no longer “restora-
tionist”; it sought not to preserve the
existent, but to
eliminate what had come to be; not to restore some
medieval order, but to make room for a post-bourgeois,
post-capitalistic world. Its derivative conceptions of
social
order were by no means uniform; but there was
substantial agreement among
neo-conservatives to the
extent that they were antiliberal, antidemocratic,
and
antisocialistic. The Volk must be ranked above
the
state, the nation above mankind, community above
individual and
society. The social organization of the
Volk was conceived along occupational lines, the ad-
ministration of the state as
authoritarian: Kultur rooted
in the soil was to be
cultivated above cosmopolitan
“civilization.”
Neo-conservatism of this kind had its day on the
continent of Europe
especially after World War I. It
was able to represent itself as a new
national socialism
(solidarity) and was used as the official ideology
of
national movements and national dictatorships, so that
it sometimes
came very close to fascism. One must,
however, carefully distinguish
between the “right” and
fascism. The incorporation of
elements of conservative
thought in the wake of fascist movements and
systems
has been so damaging for the former that it is only
with the
greatest difficulty that a program of inde-
pendent political conservatism can be formulated.
