The western-driven wave of globalization that began with the liberalization of financial markets from the 1970s onward, and strengthened even further with the collapse of the Eastern bloc, has come to an end. It is widely acknowledged that the financial crisis of 2007–09 represents the tipping point, even though it seemed at first that the architecture of the financial markets—with economic liberalism as its ideological frame—had survived largely unquestioned (Crouch 2011). It accelerated the much discussed “crisis of democracy,” becoming manifest in a deteriorating relationship between what were once mass political parties and their supporters. The further rise of China; Russia’s return to the table of global powers; the unsolved crisis of the Eurozone: all indicate the tectonic shifts that are well under way. The struggle over the future of existing institutional arrangements has also become an ideological battlefield, seeing increasingly developed arguments formulated by right-wing or even far-right forces. This departure from the recent liberal vision of the polity as well as criticism of market economies are often characterized as illiberalism, nationalism, and populism. While these concepts highlight important commonalities, they do not capture the sweeping contestation that liberalism now has to face. A central thesis of this book is that we are witnessing a “renaissance of conservatism,” an attempt to create a new, illiberal, and activating conservatism aiming to change the status quo from within the capitalist order and the traditional cleavage between left and right. This holds especially for East Central Europe (ECE), where communism interrupted the conservative tradition of thought, and where conservatism is being redeployed against communism and liberalism. The literature on Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (“Law and Justice,” PiS) and Fidesz (Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége,“Alliance of Young Democrats”), the right-wing parties in power in Poland and Hungary, stresses that the agenda of these parties is more systematic and comprehensive than the concept of “populism” would suggest. However, there has been little research done so far to study the genesis of these parties’ agendas and the conservative milieus and intellectual circles that have given the political turn in Poland and Hungary its intellectual foundation and legitimacy.