[H-verkko] CFP: Reaction Time: Radical Cultural Conservatism after World War II

[agricola at utu.fi]

Agricolan artikkelipyyntöihin on lähetetty uusi ilmoitus:
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Reaction Time: Radical Cultural Conservatism after World War II
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Call for Papers

Reaction Time: Radical Cultural Conservatism after World War II

Venue: House of Sciences and Letters, Helsinki, Finland

Date: June 4–5, 2015

Keynote lecture by Prof. Richard Wolin (City University of New York)

Radical cultural conservatism is one of the most significant, yet also most
overlooked, intellectual trends in 20th-century Western political thought. It
gained its classic contours in the work of Oswald Spengler, Charles Maurras,
Edgar Jung, Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Julius Evola, Mircea
Eliade and others, and is again resurfacing as a salient force in 21st-century
discourses. Radical cultural conservatism is not to be neglected if we wish to
understand the historical background of late modern political fluctuations, such
as the rise of a particular type of far-right ideology. This ideology cannot be
traced back to National Socialism and classical fascism alone. Nazism and
fascism were largely wiped out in WWII; radical cultural conservatism underwent
a crisis, too, but nevertheless survived, first in the European academic
community and later in European political life.

Many radical conservatives, such as Eliade, Heidegger, Jünger, and Schmitt as
well as their younger followers, continued to write and publish after the war.
They inspired new generations of intellectuals and politicians in Europe and
also in the United States, where the heritage of radical conservatism is visible
in authors such as Leo Strauss, Friedrich A. Hayek, and Hans Morgenthau. In the
1960s, also proponents of the intellectual left adopted ideas developed by
radical conservatives at the beginning of the century, first in Italy and
subsequently in Germany, France, and the US. Even today, a number of those
notions and concepts circulate in the academic world, including the ideas of
violence as the origin of order, of conflict as the irreducible fact of human
life, of sacrifice as the condition of meaning, and of universalism as a mask
for imperialism.

Despite such continuities, the post-WWII heritage of radical cultural
conservatism is a relatively unexplored page in modern intellectual history. The
aim of the conference is to contribute to the filling of this lacuna and to
critically examine the intellectual heritage of the radical conservative
ideology by focusing on the ways in which this ideology was preserved, affirmed,
reappropriated, and transformed in Western intellectual and political life since
the 1940s. This will help to uncover the roots and developmental origins of
contemporary radical conservative movements such as the Nouvelle Droite in
France and Neo-Eurasianism in Russia, most prominently theorized by Alain de
Benoist and Alexander Dugin, respectively.

We invite abstracts for papers related to the topic of the conference. Proposals
should include the following information: your name, academic position, contact
information, the title and the abstract (max. 300 words). The abstract should
clearly state at least the topic of the presentation, the manner in which the
paper contributes to the conference theme, and the general argument of the
paper.

Send your proposal as an email attachment to the following address:
reactiontime2015 at gmail.com. Please ensure that the subject line of the email
reads: reaction time proposal. Deadline for submission: February 15, 2015.
Decisions will communicated by the end of February.

The two-day conference is organized by the research project The Intellectual
Heritage of Radical Cultural Conservatism (funded by the Academy of Finland) in
collaboration with the Finnish Association of Researchers.

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Ilmoituksen lähetti: Agricola <agricola at utu.fi>
Ilmoitus vanhentuu: 16.2.2015