Exhaustion of conservatism: Goethe Lecture on 16.05.2019
On Thursday, March 16, PD Dr. Thomas Biebricher, postdoctoral researcher at the Cluster of Excellence "The Formation of Normative Orders" at Goethe University Frankfurt, spoke on the topic: From the "Intellectual-Moral Turn" to the Exhaustion of German Conservatism.
From the "intellectual and moral turnaround" to the exhaustion of German conservatism
Following the Union's sobering result in the Bundestag elections and the AfD's simultaneous entry into the Bundestag, an acute crisis of Christian Democratic conservatism was quickly diagnosed in the feuilletons. The corresponding debate about the need to sharpen the conservative profile of the CDU/CSU flared up again in the course of the selection of Angela Merkel's successor as party leader, when the opponents Spahn and Merz in particular were supposed to stand for a conservative change of direction - but ultimately, as is well known, were defeated by the then Secretary General Kramp-Karrenbauer.
The lecture takes these discussions, some of which were conducted with considerable acrimony, as an opportunity to take a closer look at the history of German conservatism in the recent past in order to clarify the extent to which it is actually in crisis, what exactly this crisis may consist of and where its origins lie.
The starting point is a few introductory observations on the concept of conservatism and the development of this political tradition in the German post-war period, before moving on to the so-called 'intellectual-moral turn', which was announced by the Kohl/Genscher government at the beginning of the 1980s - and was interpreted as an almost vigorous commitment to a conservative political project. However, this turnaround, the exact direction of which needs to be explained in more detail, largely failed, and it can therefore be argued in a nutshell that the plight of Christian Democratic conservatism actually began at the moment of its supposed zenith.
Since then, the history of political conservatism has been the history of a continuous emaciation, the reasons for which are explained in the following argument. Finally, the lecture outlines the possible future prospects of such a substantially exhausted conservatism and the corresponding effects on liberal democracy in Germany as a whole.
More about PD Dr. Thomas Biebricher
Thomas Biebricher studied academic politics, economic policy and public law at the Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg and Queen's University in Kingston/Canada.
After completing his master's degree in 2000, he obtained his doctorate in 2003, also in Freiburg, with a dissertation entitled 'Selbstkritik der Moderne. Habermas and Foucault in Comparison', published by Campus Verlag in 2005.
From 2003 to 2009 he was a DAAD Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
From 2009 to 2012, he led a junior research group at the Cluster of Excellence on 'Crisis and Normative Order - Variations of Neoliberalism and their Transformation' (members: Frieder Vogelmann, Greta Wagner, Michael Walter).
In 2012 and 2013 he represented the professorships for Political Theory and Philosophy and International Political Theory at the Cluster of Excellence.
In the winter term 2014 he was DAAD Visiting Assistant Professor at the Institute for European Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
From 2014 to 2017, he held the Chair of Political Theory and Philosophy at Goethe University.
He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Cluster of Excellence.