The International of Conservative Intellectuals

Based on a sociology of ideas approach, this chapter emphasises the relevance of the transnational level for the analysis of conservative intellectuals and ideologies. This approach allows us to understand their simultaneous successes in various countries and environments as a collective rather than an individual endeavour. It permits us to break with a history of ideas focused on the “great intellectual figures” and national case studies and to study contemporary conservative elites as a transnational group of “petty” and multi-positioned intellectuals, whose political interventions take various forms. Under specific circumstances, their ideology appears as a tool to legitimate illiberal parties and their policies. After reviewing the scholarship on conservatism and conservative intellectuals and the methods to study them, this chapter provides an account of the formation of the “International of Conservative Intellectuals”, before discussing relevant topics for a future research agenda.