Wartime Pamphlets, Anti-English Metaphors, and the Intensification of Antidemocratic Discourse in Germany after the First World War

The article establishes so far neglected links between the German anti-English pamphlets during WWI, on the one hand, and right-wing antidemocratic theory after the war, on the other, by engaging with their central argumentative forms. Particularly the metaphors of the English as “merchants” or “peddlers” as well as England as a mechanical civilization in contradistinction to German organic culture facilitated the transfer of arguments between the discourses on war and democracy, respectively. The metaphors were old, but they were intensified by the concrete enmity – and further intensified the domestic constitutional arguments by underscoring the fundamental unsuitability of democracy for Germany.Peer reviewe

The Language of Postwar Intellectual Schmittianism

The article analyzes the work of Hanno Kesting, Reinhart Koselleck, Roman Schnur, and Nicolaus Sombartfour young followers of Carl Schmitt in postwar Germany. Their intellectual Schmittianism was less than a full commitment to Schmitt's political positions, yet had more than an arbitrary similarity with them: it pertained to assumptions, categories, and modes of thought. Drawing on Pocock's terminology, I identify a particular language of intellectual Schmittianism, introduce its key components, and analyze their interaction. I focus on six categories derived from Schmitt's narrative of European political modernity: discrimination, historical parallels, secularization, global civil war, open/latent civil war, and category blurs. The analysis shows that these categories were interlinked argumentative devices rather than mere rhetoric and that they systematically upheld the postwar scholars' arguments. While the Schmittian language enabled the young scholars to express their political skepticism without necessarily rejecting the newly adopted institutional forms, it also constrained their choices. Linguistic resources can always be used for novel purposes, yet the dense internal structure of the language of postwar intellectual Schmittianism hindered revaluation and selective utilization. Kesting excluded, the young scholars gradually grew critical of Schmitt to varying degrees, but they never directly confronted his problematic language.Peer reviewe

The Long Goodbye : Recent Perspectives on the Koselleck/Schmitt Question

The publication of the correspondence between Reinhart Koselleck and Carl Schmitt enables readers to assess the relation between the conceptual historian and his radically conservative mentor, a topic of some longstanding controversy. In this review essay, I discuss their correspondence in relation to Gennaro Imbriano's book on Koselleck, which also relies on the correspondence to argue that Koselleck gradually transcended his earlier Schmittian beliefs. I seek to capture the current state of scholarship regarding this particular issue and anticipate possible future developments in the field. Although they do not offer major revelations about Koselleck and Schmitt's relationship, the recently published letters add welcome nuance to earlier scholarly estimations thereof and show how Koselleck gradually assumed a more equal role in the exchange. The most fertile theoretical points in the letters pertain, first, to Schmitt's observations about the uniqueness of history and the repetition of key questions in history and, second, to Koselleck's remarks on the need for a proper theoretical basis for historiography, including readjusted historicism and criticism on the philosophy of history's ideological ramifications. Imbriano's book characterizes Koselleck as a systematic thinker of history's political aspect who differed from Schmitt in making the distinction between politics (as a regulating process) and "the political" (as a principle in need of containment). As I argue, this distinction is not sufficient to set Koselleck's moderate conservatism apart from Schmitt's radical conservatism because Schmitt also took both aspects into account. I also predict that future scholarship will display a balanced use of archival material that further clarifies the genesis of Koselleck's theorems, in turn directly serving historical theory by examining its emergence out of concrete historical, political, and intellectual contexts.Peer reviewe

Peaceful Strife : Dolf Sternberger's Concept of the Political Revisited

This article revisits Dolf Sternberger’s 1960 theory, which, in explicit opposition to Carl Schmitt’s friend/enemy thesis, found the essence of politics and the political in peace. The essay contextualizes Sternberger’s propositions by relating them to his immediate post-1945 considerations – such as normalizing domestic politics, jettisoning authoritarianism, and laying the conceptual foundations for the nascent political science – and thereby reconstructs the questions his theory of the political sought to answer. The analysis shows in detail how the key elements of Sternberger’s 1960 theory derived from the late-1940s: rather than reflecting an already normalized political situation or proposing naïve pacifism, Sternberger’s text took political conflicts seriously and provided an outline of a desired but only prospective political peace amidst a crisis. Despite substantial polarity, Sternberger’s view is largely compatible with Schmitt’s theory once we remove context-induced polemics and grave misinterpretations – and carries potential for systematic political theorizing.Peer reviewe

What is conservative and revolutionary about the “conservative revolution”? Argument-level evidence from three thinkers

This article reassesses the concept of "conservative revolution" by textual and argumentative analysis of the work of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Ernst Junger, and Hans Freyer - three prominent thinkers of the "conservative revolution" in interwar Germany. Rather than problematically conflating conservative and revolutionary elements into abstract ideological positions, which produces the "paradox" of conservative revolution observed by several scholars, I propose we must take seriously the argumentative context. What, exactly, did they mean by the apparently contradictory idea? This, I posit, can only be comprehended by analyzing the elements of conservatism and revolution in the original sources and with regard to the broader argumentative framework in which the notion of "conservative revolution" emerged. First, the article analyzes the three thinkers' idea of a future-oriented, politically creative, and genuinely historical conservatism in opposition to mere backward-looking unhistorical reactionism. Second, it addresses the question of revolution as a destructive political means for conservative ends and shows how Moeller, Junger, and Freyer linguistically constructed a continuity between the failed revolution of 1918 and the anticipated conservative revolution. The three authors spoke of continuous movement, the conservation of energy, and volcanic forces to argue for a seamless continuity between the two revolutions, thereby using the proximity of the ideologically opposing revolt for their own argumentative ends. This situatedness gives rise to doubts about the generalizability of the conservative revolution idea beyond its context of emergence: although similar ideas emerged elsewhere in the era and have been revived lately among the New Right, the particular historical dynamics of the concept of conservative revolution hinders its applicability and popular appeal in later settings that lack comparable widely shared experiences of revolutionary events.Peer reviewe

From Historical Structures to Temporal Layers : Hans Freyer and Conceptual History

The article assesses, for the first time, the significance of the sociologist, philosopher, and conservative political theorist Hans Freyer for German conceptual history. Freyer theorized historical structures as products of political activity, emphasized the presence of several historical layers in each moment, and underscored the need to read concepts with regard to accumulated structures. He thus gave significant impulses not only to German structural history but also to conceptual history emerging out of it in the work of Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and, most notably, Reinhart Koselleck, whose theories of temporal layers in history and concepts reworked the Freyerian starting points. Underscoring the openness and plurality of history, criticizing its false “plannability,” and reading world history as European history writ large, Freyer shaped the politically oriented theory of history behind Koselleckian Begriffsgeschichte. Further, Freyer theorized the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transition to the industrial society as a historical rupture or “epochal threshold”, which bears close, and by no means coincidental, similarity to Koselleck’s saddle time thesis. Freyer’s theory of history sheds light on the interrelations of many Koselleckian key ideas, including temporal layers, the contemporaneousness of the non-contemporaneous, the plannability of history, and the saddle time.This article assesses, for the first time, the significance for German conceptual history of the sociologist, philosopher, and conservative political theorist Hans Freyer. Freyer theorized historical structures as products of political activity, emphasized the presence of several historical layers in each moment, and underscored the need to read concepts with regard to accumulated structures. He thus significantly influenced not only German structural history but also conceptual history emerging from it in the work of Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and, most notably, Reinhart Koselleck, whose theories of temporal layers in history and concepts reworked the Freyerian starting points. Underscoring the openness and plurality of history, criticizing its false "plannability," and reading world history as European history writ large, Freyer shaped the politically oriented theory of history behind Koselleckian Begriffsgeschichte. Further, Freyer theorized the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transition to industrial society as a historical rupture or "epochal threshold," which bears close, and by no means coincidental, similarity to Koselleck's saddle-time thesis (Sattelzeit). Freyer's theory of history sheds light on the interrelations of many Koselleckian key ideas, including temporal layers, the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous, the plannability of history, and the Sattelzeit.Peer reviewe

Globalizing the Political: German Radical Conservatives on the Structural Transformation of the Global Order

Peer reviewe

Relativism and Radical Conservatism

The chapter tackles the complex, tension-ridden, and often paradoxical relationship between relativism and conservatism. We focus particularly on radical conservatism, an early twentieth-century German movement that arguably constitutes the climax of conservatism’s problematic relationship with relativism. We trace the shared genealogy of conservatism and historicism in nineteenth-century Counter-Enlightenment thought and interpret radical conservatism’s ambivalent relation to relativism as reflecting this heritage. Emphasizing national particularity, historical uniqueness, and global political plurality, Carl Schmitt and Hans Freyer moved in the tradition of historicism, stopping short of full relativism. Yet they utilized relativistic elements – such as seeing irrational decisions or the demands of “life” as the basis of politics – to discredit notions of universal political morality and law, thereby underpinning their authoritarian agendas. Oswald Spengler, by contrast, took the relativistic impulses to the extreme, interweaving his conservative authoritarianism and nationalism with full-fledged epistemic, moral, and political relativism. Martin Heidegger has recently been perceived as the key philosopher of radical conservatism, and his thought arguably channeled antimodern aspects of historicism into contemporary political thought. We conclude by analyzing how some radical conservative arguments involving cultural relativism and plurality still reverberate in contemporary theorists such as Samuel Huntington, Aleksandr Dugin, and Alain de Benoist

Politiikan taistelumetaforiikka Max Weberin politiikan teoriassa

Only abstract. Paper copies of master’s theses are listed in the Helka database (http://www.helsinki.fi/helka). Electronic copies of master’s theses are either available as open access or only on thesis terminals in the Helsinki University Library.Vain tiivistelmä. Sidottujen gradujen saatavuuden voit tarkistaa Helka-tietokannasta (http://www.helsinki.fi/helka). Digitaaliset gradut voivat olla luettavissa avoimesti verkossa tai rajoitetusti kirjaston opinnäytekioskeilla.Endast sammandrag. Inbundna avhandlingar kan sökas i Helka-databasen (http://www.helsinki.fi/helka). Elektroniska kopior av avhandlingar finns antingen öppet på nätet eller endast tillgängliga i bibliotekets avhandlingsterminaler.Politiikan taistelumetaforiikalla tarkoitetaan sellaista kielenkäyttöä, jossa politiikka kuvataan esimerkiksi taisteluksi, kamppailuksi, sodankäynniksi tai muuksi väkivaltaiseksi toiminnaksi. Työ käsittelee politiikan taistelumetaforiikkaa saksalaisen sosiologin, taloustieteilijän ja historioitsijan Max Weberin (1864–1920) politiikan teoriassa. Tarkastelu yhdistää toisiinsa käsiteanalyyttisen lähiluvun, kontekstualisoidun aatehistoriallisen luennan, käsitehistoriaan kytkeytyvän metaforatutkimuksen sekä modernin metaforateorian näkökulmia. Työ pyrkii metaforisen kielen historiallisella ja kontekstuaalisella tulkinnalla hahmottamaan niitä merkityksiä, joita Weberin taistelumetaforat asiayhteydessään tulkittuina saavat. Osaltaan työ pyrkii myös edistämään metaforahistoriallisen lähestymistavan kehittymistä tarkastelemalla sen metodologisia lähtökohtia sekä käsittelemällä laajasti modernia metaforateoriaa. Työssä esitellään useita eri tapoja, joilla Weber käyttää taistelun (Kampf) käsitettä. Näitä ovat ainakin abstrakti ja eksistentiaalinen arvojen ja näkökantojen taistelu, yhteiskunnassa ja politiikassa esiintyvä latentti valintataistelu, Weberin sosiologisessa teoriassa esiintyvä aktiivinen ja pyrkimyksellinen taistelu sekä kirjaimellinen, fyysinen taistelu. Varsinaisten politiikan taistelumetaforien tulkintaa hahmotellaan suhteessa näihin. Politiikan taistelumetaforia luetaan myös suhteessa Weberin politiikkakäsitykseen ja perustuslailliseen teoriaan kokonaisuutena, jolloin korostuu taistelun ja valinnan (Auslese) periaatteiden sekä taistelumetaforiikan rakenteellinen funktio kokonaisteorian kannalta. Työssä käsitellään keisarillisen Saksan historiallisia erityispiirteitä, saksalaista poliittista kulttuuria sekä erityisesti konfliktuaalisuuden ajatukseen ja taistelukäsityksiin kytkeytyviä aatehistoriallisia tekijöitä. Osoitan, että ainakin osa Weberin taistelusanastosta periytyy suoraan (sosiaali-)darwinismista ja että samaa perua on myös Weberin taistelukäsitystä leimaava epämääräisen metaforisuuden ongelma. Käsittelen konfliktuaalisuuden teemaa saksalaisessa poliittisessa kulttuurissa, keisarillisen saksan aristokraattis-militaristista aatemaailmaa ja tämän suhdetta parlamentarismin edellyttämään mentaliteettiin sekä taistelun ajatukseen ja käsitteeseen Weberin aikana yleisesti liitettyjä mielteitä ja konnotaatioita. Politiikan taistelumetaforiikka nostaa esiin kysymyksen politiikan ja väkivallan suhteesta, ja Weberillä tämä ilmenee erityisesti taistelun muodonmuutosten ja väkivallan muodonmuutosten teemoissa. Weber näkee taistelun muotojen kirjaimellisesti väkivaltaisesta taistelusta metaforisiin taisteluihin muodostavan tietynlaisen jatkumon, ja tämä sama ajattelumalli heijastuu myös hänen käyttämissään taistelumetaforissa. Tulkitsen politiikan taistelumetaforien olevan eräs tapa säädellä politiikan ja väkivallan välistä suhdetta, joka Weberin teoriassa osin nimenomaan rikkaan taistelumetaforiikan vaikutuksesta jää epäselväksi ja moniselitteiseksi