Rudolf Kjelléns nationalsocialism: unghögern och den konservativa revolutionen

Abstract

There is little doubt that Rudolf Kjellén (1864-1922) was an important political thinker in his own time, and that his writings have gained renewed interest during the last decade. However, today’s reception often skirts thorough investigation of Kjellén’s ideological coordinates. This article addresses these shortcomings by examining the history of far-right political thought in pre-fascist Europe. It works through a problematization of Kjellén’s reception and identifies a potential context sometimes mentioned there but left underexamined: the so-called German Conservative Revolution. Through a reconstruction of this field of political thought, the article finds a wider field of ideological significance in the conceptual history of ‘national socialism’—a term Kjellén himself used—before the Hitler movement. The political imaginary associated with this semantic field provides a more solid framework for understanding the theoretical and ideological context of Kjellén’s thought—as well as that of the European far right over the long term.