The Conservative Revolution and National Socialism

Abstract

Traditionally, studies of the links between the Conservative Revolution and National Socialism have given an account of what the two have in common and what separates them. This is a relatively straightforward undertaking. When it comes to similarities they clearly share a scorn for liberalism and an insistence on the superiority of a dictatorial order. This is backed up by the elevation of militarism to the status of an ideology. The notions of self-denial and total commitment to a cause during the First World War resurface as the basis for a nationalist community, with the army providing the model for the new state. Both Conservative Revolutionaries and Nazis knew disputes over the meaning of socialism, and both claimed to have transcended reaction and traditional nationalism. Both movements argued Germany’s case in vitalist terms: struggle was the law of life, and there was no such thing as the right of the weak. On the basis of such similarities it has been suggested that the Conservative Revolution provided the ideas for all branches of German nationalism, including National Socialism.1 From here it is one short step to seeing the Conservative Revolution as a causal factor in the rise of National Socialism by virtue of the anti-democratic ferment it created. Political writers such as Oswald Spengler and Moeller van den Bruck ‘helped to make National Socialist ideology socially acceptable’.2