
Series
Volume 9
Studies in British and Imperial History
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The Guardians of Concepts
Political Languages of Conservatism in Britain and West Germany, 1945-1980
Martina Steber
Translated from the German by David Dichelle
682 pages, bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-80073-826-3 $179.00/£132.00 / Hb / Not Yet Published (January 2023)
eISBN 978-1-80073-827-0 eBook Not Yet Published
Description
National and transnational debates in Britain and Germany surrounding the meaning of the word “conservative” continue to have far-reaching political consequences. After 1945, even while the term was an accepted part of the political vocabulary of Great Britain, in the Federal Republic of Germany their young democracy was conflicted due to anti-democratic instability. The Guardians of Concepts analyzes the historical changes in the political languages of conservatism in the United Kingdom and the Federal Republic of Germany between 1945 and the early 1980s which plagued intellectuals, politicians, and entire parties. As one of the most difficult concepts in both the political and historiographical vocabulary of the German language, conservatism’s analysis takes a linguistically focused path through comprehensive and transnational connection of intellectual history with the history of politics, which are subjects that are otherwise commonly addressed separately from each other.
Martina Steber is Second Deputy Director of the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, Munich, and Professor of Modern History at the University of Augsburg. Beforehand she held positions at the German Historical Institute London, the University of Konstanz and the University of Wuppertal. Her publications include: Ethnische Gewissheiten. Die Ordnung des Regionalen im bayerischen Schwaben vom Kaiserreich bis zum NS-Regime (2010); Visions of Community in Nazi Germany. Social Engineering and Private Lives (ed. with B. Gotto, 2014); and Germany and 'the West': The History of a Modern Concept (ed. with R. Bavaj, 2015).