Social History of Conservative Ideas

Talk by Valentin Behr (Université de Strasbourg, 2021-2022 Paris IAS Fellow) as part of the 16th Congrès de l'Association Française de Science Politique.

Presentation

This thematic section seeks to pave the way for a social history of conservative ideas, understood here as “a current of opposition to the contestation of traditional, religious, moral or state authorities” (Hayat and Weisbein, 2020: 63). The first session questions the social roots of these ideas and of conservative “turning points”. It brings together contributions analyzing these dynamics in several historical and spatial configurations : conservative bifurcation of former revolutionaries under the Directoire period, effects of the decline of Marxism on the rise of conservative ideas in the 1980s, influence of transnational networks in the conversion to conservatism of Romanian intellectuals, appropriation of the theme of ecology by French conservatives, and role of the profession in supporting “conspiracy theories”. The second session examines in more details a few figures of intellectuals thanks to which conservative ideas circulate nowadays in different fields and from one field to another, thus questioning the conditions of dissemination of these ideas: Renaud Camus, theoretician of « great replacement », Eric Zemmour, journalist and candidate for the French presidential election, Laurent Bouvet, academic and co-founder of the « Printemps républicain », popularizer of the concept of « cultural insecurity », and other neo-reactionary writers committed against anti-racism, feminism and the May 68 legacy.

Practical informations

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