were influencing new radical right movements, including the French Nouvelle Droite, led by Alain de Benoist. Some academics, especially in West Germany, took a new interest in the subject and began to suspect Mohler's study for his political closeness to the concept. The reactionary and anti-modern characters of the "Conservative Revolution" were largely emphasised during that decade, and the movement was seen as nothing more than a fertile ground for Nazism, speaking "the same totalitarian languages". German-American historian Fritz Stern used the term "Conservative Revolution" in his 1961 book The Politics of Cultural Despair to describe the life and ideas of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, and rather drew attention to the alienation and "cultural despair" these authors experienced in the nascent modern world, which led them to express such radical ideas in response. Stern grouped, however, Moeller van den Bruck into a larger "Germanic ideology", along with earlier thinkers from the late 19th century like Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn. Academic research since the 1980s In a 1981 symposium entitled "Conservative revolution and modernity", French historian Louis Dupeux pointed out that what Mohler had called the "Conservative Revolution" was in reality neither truly reactionary nor totally anti-modern (they could even show optimism towards the modern world), This analysis was supported three years later by American historian Jeffrey Herf in his book Reactionary Modernism, which highlighted the acceptance of modern technique beside a rejection of liberal democracy among conservative thinkers of that period. Dupeux also stressed that Conservative Revolutionaries were not only opposed to the "two forms of progressivism", namely liberalism and Marxism, but also to the "cultural pessimism" of the reactionary and conservative rights, a standoff they attempted to overcome by proposing a innovative forms of reactionary regimes that could espouse the new frameworks of the modern world. In his 1993 book Anatomie der Konservativen Revolution ("Anatomy of the Conservative Revolution"), German sociologist Stefan Breuer rejected Mohler's definition of the term "Conservative Revolution", defining "conservatism" as the aspiration to conserve the structures of feudal Germany, in fact a political project already moribund during the Weimar period. The "Conservative Revolution" constructed by Mohler was, in his view, the mirror-image of an emerging modern society that took conscious of the deadlocks and dangers of a "simple modernity" built on science and technique only. While noting the complexity that would imply an intellectual classification of that period, Breuer stated that he