Vanguard or rearguard? Views on technification in the so-called 'reactionary modernism'.

Abstract

This article aims to recover, synthetically, the theoretical positions on technification during the interwar period of two of the most prominent exponents of what Jeffrey Herf called 'reactionary modernism'. We choose that category precisely in order to highlight what it itself might conceal or obscure: theoretical considerations on modern technification that are more robust, complex and less linear than the label -inherent to a conservative epochal climate, inclined towards the rejection of nineteenth-century liberalism, radical nationalism and the ideology of war- alludes to. It is not just the acceptance of modern technology by German thinkers who rejected the reason of the Enlightenment, as defined by Herf.

For this purpose, we reconstruct some of the ideas of two of the main referents of that current, who are also much less revisited authors than other members of that tradition, such as the jurist Carl Schmitt or the philosopher Martin Heidegger: we will focus on the literary scholar Ernst Jünger and the heterodox historian Oswald Spengler. Specifically, on the positions they held when confronted with the imminent reality of modern technification after the Great War, insofar as we consider them to be sufficient proof that it is possible to find there more than German irrationalism, anti-modernism and romanticism; much more than the appropriation of technology in the service of nationalism. Thus, rather than a whim for the discussion with the author of Reactionary Modernism, the task and the debate make sense precisely in the light of the impact that the book and the category coined by Herf had on the literature on the authors, far exceeding its explanatory power.