The Conservative Revolution as a Worldview

by Antoine Dresse

Sep 11, 2026

Nearly thirty-five years after its first French translation — long since impossible to find — Armin Mohler’s La Révolution conservatrice en Allemagne (1918–1932) (German original: Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932)1 has at last been reissued by Éditions Ars Magna, in a new edition enriched with a previously unpublished preface and afterword by Alain de Benoist.
Far more than a historical summa on the German right under Weimar, this major work offers nothing less than a morphology of worldviews. Behind the diversity of authors and schools, Mohler brings to light a single way of thinking about time, history, and action. This is essential reading for understanding one of the most fertile intellectual matrices of the twentieth century.

There are books that time surrounds with an almost legendary aura, especially when their rarity turns them into objects of quest for the most curious readers. Such was long the fate of Armin Mohler’s study devoted to the Conservative Revolution in Germany. Defended in 1949 as a doctoral thesis under the supervision of Karl Jaspers and published the following year, the book quickly became one of the major references for anyone seeking to understand the intellectual ferment of the German right under the Weimar Republic.

Reissued a first time in 1972 and expanded with an imposing bibliography, then again in 1989, it was translated into French in 1993 from that third edition, but in a print run so limited that it soon became unobtainable. If the name of Mohler and that of his book left their mark, few were those who could actually read it. Its reappearance from Éditions Ars Magna, enriched with a previously unpublished preface and afterword by Alain de Benoist, thus fills a long-standing gap.

A Worldview

The very phrase “Conservative Revolution” is enough to surprise. It seems to unite two terms we have grown accustomed to contrasting. Yet it is precisely in this apparent contradiction that the whole fertility of the formula resides. By it Mohler designates neither a conservatism eager to restore a vanished world nor a progressive revolution carrying the promises of 1789 still further, but a revolt against the modern order, waged in the name of forces older and deeper than the ones that order had claimed to surpass.

In his book, Mohler draws up the inventory of the currents, journals, circles, and figures that make up this conservative-revolutionary nebula. For the francophone reader, this abundance of names and references has at first something vertiginous about it, so much does it refer to authors and historical realities that are often unfamiliar. Mohler distinguishes, as is well known, five great families within the Conservative Revolution: the Völkischen, the Young Conservatives, the National Revolutionaries, the Bündischen, and the peasant movement.

Yet, however fascinating the study of these different currents may be, this is perhaps not where the book’s principal interest lies today. These tendencies belong, in effect, to a German context very remote from our own, marked by the defeat of 1918 and the critique of the Weimar regime. What remains truly fertile is the common worldview that Mohler manages to bring out behind this apparent dispersion.

For Wilhelm Dilthey,2 the Weltanschauung (worldview) designates something vaster than philosophy. Philosophy is only the late, conceptual form of it. Before becoming a philosophical system, a worldview is a way of seeing, feeling, and willing; it engages the whole of man, and not speculative intelligence alone. It is the Leitbilder (”guiding images”) of the conservative-revolutionary worldview that Mohler foregrounds in his essay. He does not seek to extract from them a common program, still less to reduce this constellation to a unified doctrine — which would be a fool’s errand. He attempts rather to bring out the fundamental images around which very different thoughts, styles, and commitments are ordered. As he notes:

“When one wishes to describe a movement of ideas, nothing is more sterile than to line up isolated opinions, which must, by addition, subtraction, and division, produce the final result. The only fruitful thing is the study of behavior toward the few fundamental questions whose urgency is such that it excludes the arbitrariness of mere opinion. One of these questions is that of the relation to time — and it is in accordance with this that we have constructed our inquiry.”3

Toward a Heroic Realism

The Conservative Revolution has this decisive feature: it opposes to the linear conception of history — inherited from Christianity and then secularized by modern progressive thought — a spherical conception of becoming. The distinction — the sphere against the line — may at first seem idle, even byzantine. Yet it touches the very heart of any worldview. To cite Dilthey again, a Weltanschauung is always composed of an image of the world, an evaluation of life, and an orientation of the will. In the case of the Christian vision — which profoundly shaped two millennia of Western history — the image of the world is that of a history oriented toward an end: Creation, Fall, Incarnation, Redemption, and Judgment. Earthly life is then evaluated on the basis of a beyond, or a final term, that gives it its meaning, while the human will orients itself toward salvation and the exit from history. Modern progressive thought, moreover, did not abolish this structure; it simply transferred it into immanence.

Now, if we try to understand the Leitbilder that Mohler brings to light using the same Diltheyan schema, we can say that the German Conservative Revolution inverts each of these terms. Its image of the world is no longer that of the line, but that of the sphere: past, present, and future do not succeed one another there like the stages of a march toward redemption, but answer, reactivate, and reconfigure one another at every historical moment. Its evaluation of life is not that of consolation, happiness, or final equality, but that of heroic realism. Life is worth only what it is capable of producing in the way of greatness and of confronting its destiny. Its orientation of the will, finally, is neither nostalgic restoration nor progressive flight forward, but regeneration:

“To be a conservative is to create things that deserve to be preserved.”

— Arthur Moeller van den Bruck

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck’s classic of the German Conservative Revolution, brought to you by Arktos:

Written in 1923, when Germany was in the throes of revolutionary demands from both the Left and the Right, Moeller van den Bruck envisioned a Germany that was radical, traditional and nationalistic. Angered by the harsh conditions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles which ended the First World War, and frustrated by the types of reforms being called for in the Weimar Republic, he examines all of the major political doctrines of his day and finds them wanting.

Instead, he calls for a return to empire — not the empire of the Kaiser or the Holy Roman Empire, but an empire of all German-speaking peoples, with a social hierarchy based upon strong communal values and German traditions which nurture, rather than belittle, strong individuals. Although van den Bruck was not a supporter of the National Socialists, they ended up adopting his term das dritte Reich for the state they intended to build.

With an original Foreword and Bibliography compiled by French New Right founder Alain de Benoist, who explains the book’s continuing relevance, this edition makes one of the most important works of Germany’s Conservative Revolution available again for the English-speaking world. This edition is a revised version of the condensed edition first published in 1934.

It is in this sense that the Conservative Revolution is indeed revolutionary because conservative. It is not a matter of bringing the past back to life, but of bringing back, against the world of dissolution, the powers capable of founding a new future.

For Mohler, this new worldview was neither the exclusive preserve of Germany — even if it expressed itself in that country with particular vigor for quite specific historical reasons — nor a phenomenon definitively confined to the interwar period. What the phrase “Conservative Revolution” designates is not a doctrine of the past, but a new way of apprehending the world, man, and time after the exhaustion of what Giorgio Locchi would call the “egalitarian tendency.”4

The Eternal Return

At a time when the idea of progress and emancipation no longer promises anything but the undifferentiation and dissolution of forms, Mohler’s book reminds us that there exists another path, another beginning. The line of progress may perhaps be exhausted, but we can still repeat these words of Zarathustra:

“All goes, all returns; eternally rolls the Wheel of Being. [...] Around every Here coils the Sphere of There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of Eternity.”

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