KONSERVATIV UTOPI? F.C. SIBBERNS POLITIK I 1840

Resumé

ABSTRACT

The political ideology of conservatism may be defined by its defence of established social orders against utopian projects of social renewal. But conservative anti-utopianism may conceal utopian functions deriving from specifications and displacements within conservative designations of the established order. This is studied here through a series of articles written in 1840 by the Danish professor of philosophy F.C. Sibbern, defending the established absolutist rule of his country against the Liberal opposition with its demands for a fundamental change in the polity. In this case, an anti-utopian attack against Liberal visions were based on idealized and symbolically charged accounts of a so-called ‘pure’ monarchy essentially different from the concrete historical forms of the Danish absolutist rule it was supposed to defend. Thus, Sibbern’s defence of the established order of his own historical present also contained alternative utopian demands, a longing for social conditions not yet established.