Core Texts: The Conservative Revolution

From The Decline of the West (1918)

Is there a logic to history? Beyond everything coincidental and unpredictable in the singular events, is there a metaphysical structure of historical mankind that is essentially independent from the commonly visible, popular, intellectual-political forms of the surface?

The decline of the West, initially a spatially and temporally limited phenomenon like that corresponding to the decline of antiquity, is a philosophical theme, which, understood in all its gravity, includes all great questions of existence.

But "mankind" has no goal, no idea, no plan, just as little as the genus of butterflies or orchids has a goal. "Mankind" is an empty word.

There are blossoming and aging cultures, peoples, languages, truths, gods, landscapes, just as there are young and old oaks and pines, blossoms, branches, leaves, but there is no aging "mankind." Every culture has its own possibilities of expression that appear, ripen, wither, and never return. There are many sculptures, paintings, mathematics, physics that are completely different from one another in their deepest being, each of a limited life span, each self-contained, just as each plant species has its own flowers and fruits, its own type of growth and decline.

These cultures, living beings of the highest order, grow up in a sublime purposelessness, like flowers in the field. Like plants and animals, they belong to Goethe's living nature, not to Newton's dead nature. I see in world history the image of an eternal shaping and transformation, a wonderful development and decay of organic forms.

From Prussianism and Socialism (1919)

In the future, shall business rule the state, or the state rule business?

Prussiandom and socialism stand together against the inner England, against the worldview that infuses our entire life as a people, crippling it and stealing its soul. There is salvation either for conservatives and workers together, or for neither.

The working class must liberate itself from the illusions of Marxism. Marx is dead. As a form of existence, socialism is just beginning, but the socialism of the German proletariat is at an end. For the worker, there is only Prussian socialism or nothing.

For conservatives, there is only conscious socialism or destruction. But we need liberation from the forms of Anglo-French democracy. We have our own.

The meaning of socialism is that life is controlled not by the opposition between rich and poor, but by the rank that achievement and talent bestow. That is our freedom, freedom from the economic despotism of the individual.

Socialism means being able to, not wanting to. What matters is not the quality of intentions but the quality of accomplishments. I turn to our youth. I call upon all who have marrow in their bones and blood in their veins. Train yourselves! Become men! We need no more ideologues, no more talk of education and cosmopolitanism and Germany's spiritual mission. We need hardness, we need a valiant skepticism, we need a class of socialistic masters by nature.

Socialism means power, power, and power over and over again. Plans and schemes are nothing without power.

The way to power has already been laid out: the valuable parts of the German workforce in combination with the best representatives of the Old Prussian state idea, both determined to found a strictly socialist state, to democratize in the Prussian manner; both forged together by the same sense of duty, by the awareness of a great obligation, by the will to obey in order to rule, to die in order to win, by the strength to make tremendous sacrifices in order to accomplish what we were born for, what we are, what could not be without us.

We are socialists. We do not want it to have been in vain.

We and the Intellectuals

The intellectual speaks and writes "I." He feels no connections. His work is dissolution. It is the dissolution of the mass of individual beings into separate individual beings, which from now on stand not below and not above the Volk, but apart.

The emphasized "we" of the newer generation is a clear rejection of intellectualism. The "we" of the young nationalist generation occurs consciously. We—that is, the still small group of men and, in the broad sense of the term, male youth who, beyond mere rejection, are already putting new values in place of the old or in the empty spaces.

We have no intellectuals—we say it with pride; we say it because we are mockingly accused of this alleged deficiency.

The spiritual in nationalism is of a different kind than the spiritual of the past period. It is linked to blood. It knows no dialectics, and where it looks for new connections, it does so in the sense of a responsibility toward the whole.

The individuals who leap out from our ranks and whom we praise do not stand aside as a result, because they have the strength for the leap in the consciousness of being connected with the community and they are never detached in the most exalted moments, but above us, before us; they are leaders.

The knowledge of the unconditionality of leadership and the purification of this concept from all slag—that is what separates us primarily from liberalism.

The liberal system has no leadership. Instead of leaders, it had intellectuals. Marxism knows no leadership. Its first leaders and masters were intellectuals of foreign origin, and what was then endured with discomfort as "leaders" were elected, flung-up philistines; the Marxist himself calls them "bigwigs." The system, which collapsed in the November days of 1918, had "representatives" who derived their leadership from "tradition" alone. This system was thoroughly liberal and therefore collapsed.

We reject intellectualism. It has been weighed and found to be too light. Our "we" grows out of our will and our service. And our will and our service belong to the final fanaticism of the German Volk.

The Third Reich

This book contains a critique of parties. And it is addressed to the Germans in all parties. It deals with their ideologies and with people as party types.

The attempt made in this book was only possible from a point of view that is not dedicated to any party, but rather covers the whole range of problems that run through the politics of our time, from the extreme left to the extreme right: only from a third point of view, which includes every other partisan German—from the point of view of a third party that already exists.

In place of party patronage, we set the idea of the Third Reich. It is an old and grand German concept. It emerged with the fall of our first Reich. Early on, it was associated with the expectation of a thousand-year Reich.

In the years that followed the collapse of our second Reich, we had our experience with Germans. We experienced that the nation has its enemy within itself, in its credulity, in its carefreeness, in its good faith, and, if we want to express these peculiarities of the soul ideologically, in an innate, extremely fatal, and, as it seems, utterly unshakeable optimism.

If we speak of a third Reich to this Volk, then we must give ourselves a clear and cold account that not even the slightest certainty is connected with it. The concept of the third Reich is a worldview concept that transcends reality. It is no coincidence that the notions that arise with the term itself are ideologically exposed from the outset, are strangely cloudy, emotional, and floating away, and completely otherworldly.

The Third Reich could become the greatest of all self-delusions it has ever made. It would be very German if they trusted it and if they felt calmed by it. They could be ruined by it.

This must be said here.

Today we do not call this revolution conservative. We call it nationalist. It desires the conservation of all that is worth conserving in Germany. It wills the preservation of Germany for Germany's sake. And it knows what it wills.

Nationalism does not say, as patriotism does, that Germany is worth preserving because it is German. For the nationalist, the nation is not an end in itself that is clear and visible from the past and lies before us already fulfilled. Nationalism is entirely directed toward the future of the nation. It is conservative because it knows that there is no future without being rooted in the past. And it is political because it knows that it can only be sure of the past and the future insofar as it secures the nation in the present.

The Third Reich will not descend beneficently from above. The Third Reich will be a realm of stability that will succeed politically for us within the European chaos.

German nationalism is an expression of German universalism and is directed entirely at the European whole, but not to "float away into universality," but to assert the nation as something distinct. It is the expression of a German will for self-preservation and instead permeated by experience.

Germany and the Conservative Revolution

The German revolution in which we find ourselves will hardly take on manifest forms like the French one in the storming of the Bastille. It will be protracted like the Reformation, but it will determine the face of humanity all the more thoroughly.

It will be opposed to the intellectual driving forces, formulas, and goals brought about by the French Revolution. It will be the great conservative counterrevolution that prevents the dissolution of Occidental humanity, establishing a new order, a new ethos, and a new Occidental unity under German leadership.

We call the conservative revolution the reinstatement of all those elementary laws and values without which man loses his connection with nature and with God and cannot build up any true system.

In place of equality comes intrinsic value, in place of social sentiment the just integration into the tiered society, in place of mechanical elections the organic growth of leadership, in place of bureaucratic compulsion the inner responsibility of real self-administration, in place of mass happiness the right of the personality of the Volk.

The basic attitude of the new person, who establishes this order, is a religious one. The humble person, who can be master precisely because he feels himself to be an instrument of God, will be the bearer of the coming new formation.

I measure the suitability of a person to pave the way for the German revolution by the degree of inner humility, which is proportional to the unbroken pride in relation to the mass currents of the time.

The terrible moral decay of our time cannot be explained by the level of faith found in the churches, obedience to state laws, or any superficial code of honor. Rather, the chaos stems from the fact that there is no "caste" that inexorably gives itself laws that are also inexorably exercised.

Who wonders under the rule of equality that in the end the "concept of honor" of the mob destroys that of the upper class?

The Third Reich will therefore not be possible as a continuation of the great process of secularization, but only as its end. It will be Germanic-Christian or not at all.

The new nationalism is a religious-cultural concept because it pushes toward totality and does not tolerate any restriction to the purely political. In the struggle for self-preservation we will speak for the first time a language that reaches the hearts of other Völker.

One thing is certain: the longing of all the masses who are sacrificing for National Socialism today arises from the great conservative heritage that rests in them and forces them to act in this way. Whether National Socialism bears predominantly the features of the conservative revolution or liberal liquidation, will remain unanswered at this point.

The enormous energies pulsing through the awakening German Volk are indestructible. We, who carry immovably in our hearts the approaching kingdom and the will to realize it, cannot be led astray from its basic direction by either a setback or a tumultuous mass success.

On the Contradiction between Parliamentarism and Democracy

That the parliamentary enterprise today is the lesser evil, that it will continue to be preferable to Bolshevism and dictatorship—these are interesting and in part also correct observations. But they do not constitute the intellectual foundations of a specifically intended institution.

Every reasonable person would concede such arguments. But they do not carry weight in an argument about principles.

The situation of parliamentarism is critical today because the development of modern mass democracy has made public discussion an empty formality.

The parties do not face each other today discussing opinions, but as social or economic power groups calculating their mutual interests and opportunities for power. The masses are won over through a propaganda apparatus whose maximum effect relies on an appeal to immediate interests and passions. Argument, in the real sense, ceases. In its place there appears a conscious reckoning of interests and chances for power.

What [Camillo di] Cavour identified as the great distinction between absolutism and constitutional regimes, that in an absolute regime a minister gives orders whereas in a constitutional one he persuades all those who should obey, must today be meaningless. Today parliament itself appears a gigantic antechamber in front of the bureaus or committees of invisible rulers.

The arguments of [Edmund] Burke, Bentham, [François] Guizot, and John Stuart Mill are thus antiquated today. If someone still believes in parliamentarism, that person will at least have to offer new arguments for it.

The belief in parliamentarism, in government by discussion, belongs to the intellectual world of liberalism. It does not belong to democracy. Both liberalism and democracy have to be distinguished from one another.

Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal, but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires therefore first homogeneity and second—if the need arises—elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.

A democracy demonstrates its political power by knowing how to refuse or keep at bay something foreign and unequal that threatens its homogeneity.

Since the nineteenth century, equality has existed above all in membership in a particular nation, in national homogeneity. Equality is only the possibility and the risk of inequality.

A democracy can exclude one part of those governed without ceasing to be a democracy, that until now, people who in some way were completely or partially without rights have belonged to a democracy. Neither in the Athenian city democracy nor in the British Empire are all inhabitants of the state territory politically equal.

An absolute human equality, then, would be an equality understood only in terms of itself and without risk; it would be an equality without the necessary correlate of inequality, and as a result, conceptually and practically meaningless.

The crisis of parliamentarism rests on the fact that democracy and liberalism could be allied to each other for a time, but as soon as it achieves power, liberal democracy must decide between its elements.

In democracy there is only the equality of equals, and the will of those who belong to the equals. All other institutions transform themselves into insubstantial social-technical expedients.

Bolshevism and fascism, by contrast, are, like all dictatorships, certainly antiliberal but not necessarily antidemocratic.

The crisis of contemporary parliamentarism would not be overcome even if Bolshevism were suppressed and fascism held at bay. Rather, the crisis springs from the consequences of modern mass democracy and, in the final analysis, from the contradiction of a liberal individualism burdened by moral pathos and a democratic sentiment governed essentially by political ideals.

It is, in its depths, the inescapable contradiction of liberal individualism and democratic homogeneity.