The Longing for a ‘Conservative Revolution’: German Influences over the Greek Inter-war Politicization of Technology and Science

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the intellectual appropriation of technology and science by leading politicians, intellectuals, and engineers during the inter-war period in Greece. It argues that these figures were strongly influenced by certain ‘German’ developments and that they explicitly adopted key ideas of the so-called ‘Conservative Revolution’, particularly, but not only, the Kultur vs. Zivilisation motive. This chapter also argues that their appropriation of technology and science was strongly connected to the themes of national reconstruction and a new cultural orientation for the nation. The theoretical and methodological ‘tools’ through which I approach this period consist of: first, the historical sociology of Peter Wagner (1994, 1998, 2008), who conceives inter-war period as the heyday of the ‘first crisis of modernity’, as he defines the ‘passage’ from ‘restricted’ to ‘organized’ modernity; second, science and technology studies and the notion of coproduction of the societal with the scientific and the technological, and especially the notion of ‘intellectual appropriation of technology’, as it is developed by Mikael Hård and Andrew Jamison (1998, 2005); and, finally, some strands of modernist/fascist studies and of sociology of intellectuals, in particular those of Roger Griffin (2007) and Dick Pels (1998, 2000), who consider fascism as palingenetic modernism and stress the futural (Osborne, 1995: 160–196) orientation of ‘Conservative Revolution’.