The Conservative Revolution in Great Britain? British Radical Conservatism in European Context, 1906-1939

This project aims to fill a gap in the history of British conservatism. Responses by radical conservatives to imperial contraction and democratic expansion in early 20th-century Britain shaped the development of categories that still govern contemporary political contests over the ethics of social and racial inequality, Europe as a political project, and the compatibility of commitments to ecological responsibility and social justice. Achieving a clear picture of the transmissions and transformations of these ideas is therefore crucial. And, given the recent return to relevance of categories like ""extreme right"" and ""fascist,"" it is worth understanding how contemporary polarization emerged from the contingent development of such complex categories. Yet current scholarship on British radical conservatism suffers from a tendency to construe its subject as an ill-defined ""grey area"" between mainstream party-conservatism and fascism or as a ""proto"" or ""quasi"" form of fascist totalitarianism.

To remedy this, I borrow approaches from the study of conservatism in other national contexts. First, the analysis, developed in the German context, that posits a ""conservative-revolutionary"" tendency in early 20th-century thought, defined by the abstraction of values from historical conservatism and the attempt to express those values in ways proper to mass-democratic, technological modernity. Second, Panagiotis Kondylis's account of the history of conservatism, according to which the decline of the power of the nobility in the 19th century split conservatism into mainstream party-conservatism, advocating moderation within the new mass-democratic framework, and radical conservatisms which ""aestheticized"" conservative categories that had lost their concrete basis.

Adopting these approaches:
Provides a concrete understanding of radical (""revolutionary"") conservatism as a specific response to specific circumstances, not a median between mainstream conservatism and...