Fergus Cullen (QMUL) - 2024-25 Students
f.p.j.cullen@qmul.ac.uk

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 fascism;
Avoids eliding radical conservatism with “fascism” as commonly understood, itself an elision of distinct phenomena;
Uncovers the Pan-European phenomenon of which British radical conservatism was a part, the transnational development of the nationalisms that defined the inter-War period; and
Responds to recent scholarship concerning the transnational history of conservatism, the relation of literary modernism to radical conservatism, and the legitimacy of “conservative revolution” or “revolutionary conservatism” as intellectual-historical categories.

This research centres on five thematic categories (aristocracy, town and country, socialism, nation and Europe, classicism and romanticism), examining how radical conservatives reworked them in distinctly modern ways. I examine various milieux linked by collaboration and controversy, including literary modernists (Eliot, Hulme, Lewis, Lawrence, Pound), Nietzscheans (J. M. Kennedy, Oscar Levy), “Neo-Tories” (Douglas Jerrold, A. M. Ludovici, Charles Petrie, William Sanderson) and environmentalists (Rolf Gardiner, Lord Lymington). I also focus on cross-border influence and collaboration with modernist, fascist, German Völkisch and French classicist milieux among others.

Beyond its scholarly interest, exploring the “conservative revolution in Britain” uncovers crucial stages in the development of contemporary contests. Though post-War developments neutralized radical conservative ideas politically, their influence survives in contemporary conceptions of the “intellectual” and the relation of intelligence to political participation; radical conservative idealizations survive politically in the post-War imagination of Europe as political reality and project; and fundamental concepts of contemporary ecology bear the marks of their development from radical conservative conceptions of “organic” order.

Primary supervisor: Professor Georgios Varouxakis