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

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

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

Political Strata and the Flows of History : Hans Freyer’s Conservatism in Light of its Metaphors

This article addresses the political nature of history and the historical aspects of politics in the work of the conservative theorist Hans Freyer. Freyer’s view of history is inseparable from his political theory because both were metaphorically conditioned. Suggesting the relevance of political metaphors as argumentation rather than mere rhetoric or cognitive basis, this article engages critically with Freyer’s metaphors of history as flow upon and within political grounds, occasionally altered by volcanic revolutionary outbursts that redirected, accelerated, or restrained the flow. By this metaphorical structure, Freyer was able to merge both conservative and radical elements in his political/historical theory, to retain the political nature of history without assuming supra-historical goals, and, finally, to readjust, rather than discard, the geological and aquatic metaphors in his eventual transition from radical to moderate conservatism.Peer reviewe

Reinhart Koselleck, sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, Translated and Edited by Sean Franzel and Stefan-ludwig Hoffman. Stanford University Press. 2019. Xxxi + 301 Pages. ISBN 9781503605978

Non peer reviewe