The Conservative Answer - Institutions Against Chaos
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Movement of the Whole
The conservative reaction to 1968 is not merely defensive, but also theoretical. The conservatives understand: one cannot simply suppress the revolt by police measures - one must refute it philosophically. And for this they mobilize Hegel - though a different Hegel than the left’s.
The central thesis: 1968 was not liberation but regression. The students confused freedom with arbitrariness, critique with destruction, spontaneity with irresponsibility. What they called “revolution” was in truth infantilization - the refusal to grow up, to recognize institutions, to take on responsibility.
Arnold Gehlen - Moral und Hypermoral (1969)
Arnold Gehlen (1904-1976) is the sharpest conservative critic of 1968. His book Moral und Hypermoral (1969) appears one year after the revolt and becomes the philosophical bible of the conservatives.[1]
The central distinction: Gehlen distinguishes between morality (institutional morality) and hypermorality (humanitarian universalism). Morality is concrete - it binds people to institutions (family, occupation, nation), gives them orientation, enables reliability. Hypermorality is abstract - it proclaims universal principles (human rights, world peace, social justice), but cannot realize them, because it destroys the concrete institutions that make morality possible in the first place.[2]
The '68ers as hypermoralists: For Gehlen, the student movement is the paradigmatic example of hypermorality. It criticizes everything - capitalism, imperialism, authoritarianism - but offers no functioning alternatives. It demands self-realization, but destroys the institutions (universities, family, state) that make self-realization possible in the first place. The result is not liberation but anomie - loss of orientation, loss of attachment, loss of ground.[3]
The Hegel connection: Gehlen implicitly invokes Hegel’s ethical life. Hegel had shown: freedom needs institutions. Morality alone (abstract principles) is empty. Ethical life (concrete institutions - family, civil society, state) gives freedom reality. The '68ers confuse morality with ethical life - they want abstract freedom but destroy the concrete conditions that make freedom possible.[4]
Critique of Gehlen: But Gehlen’s conservatism is one-sided. He sees only the stability of institutions, not their injustice. Hegel had taught: institutions must develop when they violate their own principles. The nineteenth-century family (patriarchy, oppression of women) was not “natural ethical life,” but a historical form that had to be overcome. Gehlen freezes institutions in place - he turns Hegel into an anti-Hegelian.
Helmut Schelsky - Die Arbeit tun die anderen (1975)
Helmut Schelsky (1912-1984) radicalizes Gehlen’s critique. His book Die Arbeit tun die anderen (Others Do the Work, 1975) is a polemic against the new classes - intellectuals, social workers, educators, therapists - who profit from 1968.[5]
The central thesis: the '68ers were not a revolutionary movement, but the class interests of a new stratum. The “critical intelligentsia” (students, social scientists, journalists) does not want to liberate society, but to expand its own position. It criticizes “the system,” but lives off it - through state-financed positions (universities, social work, media). It demands “emancipation,” but means by this: more influence for itself.[6]
The meaning-producer apparatus: Schelsky coins the term “meaning-producer apparatus” (Sinnproduzenten-Apparat) - a new ruling class that rules not through property (like the bourgeoisie) but through interpretive authority. It defines what is “progressive,” what is “emancipatory,” what is “critical” - and excommunicates all who do not go along.[7]
The Hegel connection: Schelsky turns Hegel’s master-slave dialectic against the left. The '68ers present themselves as “slaves” (oppressed, marginalized), but are in truth new “masters” - they control universities, media, cultural institutions. They claim to speak for the workers, but the workers vote conservative. They are not liberators, but new rulers.[8]
Critique of Schelsky: Schelsky’s polemic is charged with resentment. He imputes cynical motives to the '68ers where there was often genuine conviction. But he hits on a true point: part of the movement was indeed institutionalized - as the “long march through the institutions” (Dutschke). The question is: was that betrayal - or successful transformation?
The Ritter School - Defense of Ethical Life
The Ritter School (see Chapter 3) becomes the philosophical bastion of conservatism after 1968. Joachim Ritter had interpreted Hegel as a thinker of modernity - not of its overcoming, but of its affirmation. Civil society, the constitutional state, institutions are not to be destroyed but preserved.[9]
Hermann Lübbe (Politische Philosophie in Deutschland, 1963; Fortschritt als Orientierungsproblem, 1975) defends the compensation theory: modern society is necessarily characterized by division of labor, specialization, functional differentiation. This produces alienation - but it is compensated for by art, religion, philosophy. The '68ers want to abolish alienation - but that would mean abolishing modernity itself. That is not progress, but regression.[10]
Odo Marquard (Schwierigkeiten mit der Geschichtsphilosophie, 1973) criticizes the philosophy of history of the '68ers. They believe in progress, in revolution, in the “realm of freedom.” But these utopias lead to totalitarianism - whoever wants to realize the absolute must do violence to reality. The task is not to revolutionize the world, but to live with its imperfection.[11]
The Hegel connection: the Ritter School reads Hegel conservatively: institutions are rational because they function. The actual is rational. Philosophy always comes too late - it cannot prescribe how the world should be, but only understand how it is. The '68ers are romantic utopians - they want to remake the world according to abstract principles, but misjudge the complexity of reality.
Critique of the Ritter School: But this reading turns Hegel into a philosopher of affirmation. It overlooks that Hegel himself welcomed the French Revolution, that he criticized the Prussian state (for censorship, restoration), that his dialectic is movement, not standstill. The Ritter School domesticates Hegel - it turns him into a defender of the status quo, although he was a thinker of transformation.
Systematic Assessment - What Is True in the Conservative Critique?
The conservative critique of 1968 has three true cores:
First: institutions are necessary. The '68ers underestimated that freedom needs institutions. One cannot simply destroy all structures and expect spontaneous order to arise. Hegel was right: ethical life (concrete institutions) is the condition of the possibility of freedom.
Second: abstract critique is insufficient. The '68ers criticized “the system,” but offered no concrete alternatives. How is a university supposed to function without hierarchies? How is an economy supposed to be organized without division of labor? Abstract negation is easy - concrete construction is hard.
Third: unintended consequences. The '68ers wanted liberation, but partly produced new constraints - political correctness, ideological terror, identity-political fragmentation. That is not what they wanted - but it happened.
But: the conservatives overlook the injustice of existing institutions. The family was often patriarchal oppression. Universities were authoritarian. The state was repressive. The '68ers were right to criticize - even if they constructed wrongly. The task is neither preservation (conservatives) nor destruction (the '68ers), but transformation - preserving institutions, but making them more just.
Arnold Gehlen: Moral und Hypermoral. Eine pluralistische Ethik (1969). ↩︎
Gehlen, op. cit., chapter on “institutional morality.” ↩︎
Gehlen: “Die 68er Bewegung” in: Merkur (1969). ↩︎
On the Gehlen-Hegel connection see Karl-Siegbert Rehberg: “Arnold Gehlen und Hegel” in: Hegel-Jahrbuch (1998). ↩︎
Helmut Schelsky: Die Arbeit tun die anderen. Klassenkampf und Priesterherrschaft der Intellektuellen (1975). ↩︎
Schelsky, op. cit., chapter on “producers of meaning.” ↩︎
Schelsky, op. cit., pp. 45–67. ↩︎
On the critique of Schelsky see Jürgen Habermas: “Der Sinnproduzenten-Apparat als bloßer Überbau?” in: Merkur (1976). ↩︎
Joachim Ritter: “Hegel und die Französische Revolution” (1957), its afterlife in the 1970s. ↩︎
Hermann Lübbe: Fortschritt als Orientierungsproblem (1975). ↩︎
Odo Marquard: Schwierigkeiten mit der Geschichtsphilosophie (1973). ↩︎