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Abstract

This article presents a critical position of the German conservative thinker Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) on modern Western civilization. During his over a century-long life, Jünger covered the most significant events of the past century in his works, reflecting a whole palette of his assessments and opinions. The paper analyses the content and dynamics of Jünger’s conservative views, his evaluations of various spheres of contemporary world order and global social order through a number of his philosophical, sociopolitical and literary works, which best reflected his pessimistic outlook on the modern world after the Second World War. The following works were used: The Peace (1944), Over the Line (1950), The Forest Passage (1951), Author and Authorship (1982), Eumeswil (1997) and others. The analysis has shown the important role of Ernst Jünger in the formation of wide conservative views on the West and his contribution to the paradigm of criticism of modern Western civilization. The author of this paper demonstrates Jünger’s assessment of contemporary civilizational threats, as well as the evils of statistics, technology and social prejudice revealed by him. Jünger’s criticism is made more credible by an arsenal of arguments comprised of various components of the traditionalist, right-wing and liberal-conservative trends of conservatism. Jünger remains faithful to the cult of natural development, enhancing his anti-civilizational pathos in the 1960s – 1990s. This paper presents the results of Jünger’s criticism, which during the final period of his work were included in the belief system called integral conservatism.

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References

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