Anna von der Goltz, Georgetown University, Washington D.C.; Martina Steber, Universität Konstanz; Tobias Becker, Deutsches Historisches Institut London (Web)

Venue: German Historical Institute London
Time: 14.-16.09.2017
Bewerbungsschluss: 05.08.2016

In recent research the decades between the 1970s and the 1990s are interpreted as a time of revolutionary change triggered by economic crises, in which the parameters and conditions for our present times were set. Conservatism looms large in this quite influential narrative; after all, the Reagan and Thatcher governments in the US and in Britain implemented economic and social policies that fundamentally changed the welfare state economies of the boom years. Conservatism is therefore often interpreted as neoliberalism in conservative guise, as the defining political ideology of finance capitalism.

However, conservatism was a much more diverse phenomenon than these interpretations suggest. While economics and politics were certainly crucial in the fashioning of a new conservatism in Western Europe and the US, conservatism was also a diverse cultural phenomenon, which is not adequately reflected in historical research to date. The conference seeks to fill this historiographical gap by questioning the primacy of economics and debating alternative interpretations of this age of change. Read more and source … (Web)