Studies in East European Thought https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-024-09656-z Conservatism and the dialectic of ideology Artemy Magun 1 Accepted: 13 June 2024 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2024 Abstract This essay applies the dialectical method to the phenomenon of conservatism by putting it into a coherent system of modern ideologies. It draws attention to three groups of dialectical phenomena: the mutual reflection of modern ideologies in each other, which leads to the partial syntheses of their hybridization; the dialectic of form and content that changes situational conservatism into a substantive one, and vice versa, and the historical dialectic of progress and regress that makes conservatism constituent of many modern institutions that otherwise look “progressive.” Keywords Conservatism · Dialectic · Reaction · Liberalism · The left · Perestroika Introduction Political conflict in the contemporary world is marked by reflection. This means that situational and interest-driven controversies tend to gradually acquire ideolog- ical grounds; and also that these grounds legitimize and justify each side, in reinforc- ing their claims and at the same time making possible an argumentative discussion. The task of intellectuals, in this context, is to take such ideological positions seri- ously, instead of buying into pejorative, dismissive and/or hyperbolizing labels, such as “populism,” “fundamentalism,” “reaction,” “bolshevism,” or “Gnosticism,” which are understandably put forward by the opposing camps in their rhetorical polemics. The ideological perspective is interpretive, in the sense that it attempts to understand the political actors, individually and collectively. The fact that they predominantly are not conscious of their ideology, does not mean they do not have one and that it is not implicitly defining their choices. Ideology is a subject-oriented and positioned idea (or a coherent set of ideas). In this sense, it is beneficial to use the old vectors “left” and “right” to understand this positionality. Certainly, almost each contempo- rary ideology is more complex than the simple “Left” or “Right” as they had emerged  A. Magun amagun@gmail.com 1 Institute for Global Reconstitution, Berlin, Germany