This thesis is presented by Dogancan �zsel to the University of Manchester, Faculty of Humanities, School of Social Sciences, division of Politics for the degree of Doctor of Social Sciences in 2011.The thesis focuses on the conservative canon and analyses the validity of exceptionalist claims of conservative thinking through a deconstructive reading of conservatism. The comparison of classical and radical conservatisms provides the grounds for this analysis.After the introductory chapter, the second chapter of this thesis focuses on the general characteristics of the conservative ideology. It consists of three sub-sections. The first of these presents the characteristics of classical conservatism, while the second turns to consider radical conservatism. Then, in the third sub-section, a discussion of the similarities and differences between these two conservatisms leads to a proposed definition of a core of the conservative canon. Here, it is argued that the epistemological and ontological imperfection of individuals can be regarded as the definitive core, or as the precept which the justification of conservative policies relies upon.The third chapter then focuses on the views of a number of significant figures in the development of political thought on ideology, which is used by these thinkers as a critical tool. A narrative of the historical developments in the analyses of ideology and ideologies is presented in this chapter. In the last part of the chapter, Derridian thinking is introduced. The fourth chapter problematises conservative exceptionalism, or the belief that there is a fundamental difference between conservatism and other ideologies. This chapter is founded upon the analyses of the previous two chapters, using the Derridian reading and referring to the characteristics and commonalities of the conservative canon presented. In this chapter, radicalism is argued to be a persistent theme in conservative thinking, and conservatism is claimed to be founded upon its impossibility.

Kulturkritik und konservative Revolution : zum kulturell-politischen Denken Hofmannsthals und seinem problemgeschichtlichen Kontext

Challenging the Conservative Exceptionalism: Theme of Change in the Conservative Canon

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Literary Skinheads? Writing from the Right in Reunified Germany

This dissertation traces the development of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s attempts to find solutions to what he perceived to be the crisis of meaning in his time. I focus primarily on Hofmannsthal’s fictional letters and poetological reflections from the postlyrical phase of his career, also touching on his final drama and political speeches. In the 1990s semiotic, structuralist, and poststructuralist studies of Hofmannsthal’s texts allowed critics to uncover the more radically modern dimension of his creative process and work, making possible a poetological turn in the scholarship, with critics becoming far more interested in the poetics and aesthetics of Hofmannsthal’s writings. Thanks to this work, a very different image of Hofmannsthal has appeared – one that attempts to overcome the common prejudice against the author as an elitist and cultural conservative who was out of step with his time. This dissertation participates in the latest approach to Hofmannsthal’s work inasmuch as it largely focuses on Hofmannsthal’s self-reflexive poetological writings from the Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe and on the author’s intermedial search for a language that can counteract the reification of language in a positivistic age. The central argument of this dissertation is that the crises of language, of perception, of experience and of identity that Hofmannsthal repeatedly represents in his work fundamentally express a crisis of authorship. Hofmannsthal’s preoccupation with

"Unser Dasein starrt von Büchern": Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Crisis of Authorship

This article provides a new look at Weimar Germany's Conservative Revolution by exploring its suspicion of conceptual and discursive language. It argues that Conservative Revolutionaries not only disdained intellectualism and public discourse; they also extolled their presumed opposites—instinct, intuition, self-evidence—as crucial ingredients in an “ineffable nationalism” which held that a true nation is based on unexpressed or difficult-to-articulate feelings and values. The origins of this ideology are found in a modernist crisis of representation and in sociological accounts of traditional “organic” communities. These themes were politicized by World War I, whose seeming incommunicability magnified the problem of representation and made the unspoken harmony of wartime comradeship an attractive model for a revitalized national community. The article's final section examines the early writings of Ernst Junger in order to show in detail how these issues came together to create the Conservative Revolutionary mind.

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Kulturkritik und konservative Revolution : zum kulturell-politischen Denken Hofmannsthals und seinem problemgeschichtlichen Kontext

Citations

Challenging the Conservative Exceptionalism: Theme of Change in the Conservative Canon

Literary Skinheads? Writing from the Right in Reunified Germany

"Unser Dasein starrt von Büchern": Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Crisis of Authorship

The Ineffable Conservative Revolution: The Crisis of Language as a Motive for Weimar's Radical Right

Bibliographie (in Auswahl)