Intellectual and moral turnaround: The end of conservatism as a government program

Dr. Thomas Biebricher

Duration of the research project: 11/2017 – 12/2019

The aim of the project was to critically examine and review the history of German conservatism since the so-called ‘intellectual-moral turn’ of the early 1980s, whereby conservatism was examined both in its politically organized form and as a social-intellectual milieu. The methodological approach consisted primarily of qualitative text analysis of various genres, from academic monographs and newspaper articles to speeches and addresses by political protagonists, with particular emphasis being placed on relating the two dimensions of conservatism to each other in order to capture and analyze a conservative discourse that is quite heterogeneous in itself. The central thesis of this longitudinal study is that we are by no means dealing with a crisis of conservatism that erupted out of nowhere in the short term, but rather with a long-term process of erosion, depletion and, ultimately, exhaustion, for which a number of factors are responsible. The current state of German conservatism, according to the contemporary diagnostic thesis, can be described as a kind of substantially gutted procedural conservatism, which by no means rules out the possibility of continuing to generate a certain degree of approval at the level of political representation, but does raise the question of how long such a purified conservatism-as-pragmatism will be able to keep right-wing populist tendencies and forces in check.
The transfer of knowledge took the form of a large number of (semi-)public lectures, for example at the Demokratie-Stiftung Saarland or the Deutsche Bundesbank, as well as around ten newspaper articles/commentaries/interviews in national newspapers such as ZEIT, Tagesspiegel or Freitag.