The Concept of Rationality in Kondylis’s Historical and Political Works, Part 2. From Conservatism to Mass Democracy

By Sebastian Edinger

III. Transformations of Conservatism in the Conflict Between Collective and Autonomous Reason

Kondylis’s observations on the intricate interweaving of reason and rationality in Western philosophy and culture of European Modernity¹ serve as the necessary theoretical background for his analysis of the gradual decline of Western conservatism in the course of its conflict with the liberal idea of sovereignty. In his monumental book Conservatism. Historical Content and Decline (Konservativismus. Geschichtlicher Gehalt und Untergang), this conflict is presented in the form of the opposition between the autonomous, historically rootless reason and the historically grounded reason whose foundation lies in a people’s collective experience (Kondylis 1986; 25; 63). Against many of his predecessors who studied the history of conservatism in Europe, arguing that the ideology of conservatism was formed no earlier than in the 18th century, as a reaction to the individualistic rationalism of the European Enlightenment, Kondylis presents the struggle of conservative collective reason against individual liberal reason as a crucial stage in its development but not its historical origin – since the actual origin of conservative thought can be traced back to the late Middle Ages and is deeply immersed in the history of European aristocracy.²

According to Kondylis, the “ideological pillars” of traditional European conservatism prior to the French Revolution were the priority of tradition with its collective experience, the unity of law and ethics, an ontologically justified concept of politics, and the rejection of the separation of state and society (Kondylis 1986: 12). In this light, the idea of abstract and individual reason was, for Kondylis, one of the biggest threats to conservatism, as it presented the counterpart for most of its basic principles. One prominent example of this conflict is the theologically rooted idea of natural law, which initially formed the basis for understanding why obeying laws was basically tantamount to obeying God (ibid., 65–6).Applying natural law would mean interpreting the law not as an application of individual will but rather as an application "of divine commandments and principles," although this application, in the form of positive human law, could never achieve the perfection of the divine ideal (ibid., 66).³ Conversely, the idea of individually formulating one’s principles simply according to one’s will and needs undermines the whole concept of natural law, since, from a theological perspective, it represents the same human hubris that natural law was intended to restrict. Moreover, for conservatism, the question of whether a law is old is not just quantitative (as it would seem from the perspective of individual autonomy) but a crucial ontological question concerning the extent of the fusion of the realm of rights and the order of being, as the right should ideally coincide “with the customs of the community” (ibid., 66). Always a result of the long-term collective work of the community over several generations, customs represent a special, overarching, and grounded kind of rationality that reflects the order of being rather than being merely postulated, more or less ex nihilo, based on arbitrary and superficial reasoning. However, according to several key conservative thinkers from the 16th and 17th centuries (for example, Edward Coke, whose work receives much attention in Kondylis’s Konservativismus), the role of an individual is not relegated to a blind subordination to the tradition. Instead, its goal would be to observe the ever-changing reality of things and to contribute to gradual changes in rules according to the spirit of tradition-oriented law, against all attempts to grant binding power to arbitrary and voluntarist decisions (ibid., 150–151).⁴ The crystallization and preservation of this type of rationality throughout history and tradition from the late Middle Ages to the 17th century are essential components of what Kondylis refers to as anti-absolutist conservatism (ibid., 124). Its main feature is the utmost restriction of voluntarism in the political sphere since “the management of the community […] coincides with religion and morality par excellence," resulting in the unity of ethics and politics and in the natural character of social hierarchies (ibid.).

During the early European Modernity, the gradual decline of the political and social role of religion and the development of the exact sciences contributed to the autonomization of human beings and the separation of politics and ethics (ibid., 141). The new, drastically changed political reason that emerged as a result of this separation was secular, i.e., human-only, and goal-oriented and instrumental (zweckrational). In the wake of its political emancipation, reason started making considerable efforts to subordinate religion to its interests, as manifested in the conflict between those who still insisted on the primacy of natural law and those who now operated under the premise that common goals should be defined by the instrumental "reason of the state" (ibid., 141-2). These transformations were manifested in the emerging and gradually sharpening conflict between conservative (socially-oriented) and autonomous reason. Kondylis summarizes the origins and key elements of the conflict in his notion of ‘hubris of the autonomous reason’ (ibid., 149). As the criteria of good and evil were now defined individually by the emancipated human reason, human reason was now freed from the obligation to submit to the God-created order of things in the world – envisioning itself as the master of its own affairs, which by all religious accounts would be an epitome of hubris, a subversion of the hierarchical (social) order of things (ibid., 149). Citing several figures from the classical conservative tradition of the 16th and 17th centuries, including Richard Hooker, Edward Coke, and Matthew Hale, Kondylis shows that the dilemma – the choice between traditional morals and private morals, between natural law and emancipated state law – can be thus summarized in the opposition between “partial, or private, and collective, or public reason that is incorporated in the existing institutions” (ibid., 150).

The radical premises of autonomous reason, which were already steadily gaining the upper hand even before the French Revolution of 1789, are for Kondylis a tabula rasa insofar as its emancipation from tradition and from the primacy of empirical orientation grants it absolute, sovereign power in defining the very foundations of the world (ibid., 154). Its bold ‘activism’ is the one marching toward the new creation that defies the ‘old’ social structures and differences, and, with them, the rationality and axiology they were embedded in. These features explain why autonomous reason was historically tied to anti-aristocratic, egalitarian movements, among them specific revolutionary movements, but also absolutist tendencies in European monarchies (ibid., 160).⁵

After the French Revolution, during the 19th century, conservative reasoning, with its rejection of rationalism as the idea of the predominance of reason in human beings,⁶ was mainly on the defense, viewed by many as an obsolete relic of the past. For instance, in Hegel’s concept of societas civilis, it was only an interim period in the development of the state. Despite the growing “aversion to absolutism” (Kondylis 1986: 208), the anti-absolutist rationale of conservatism does not make a comeback, gradually losing its position due to the weakening social and political role of the aristocracy, as well as the emerging concept of nation-states. This concept is essentially a sovereign idea of creating a state ex nihilo, based on the principles of a contract theory – one of the fiercest adversaries of traditional conservatism (ibid., 211–2). In this process of “autonomization of theoretical and practical reason” (ibid., 212), a significant number of conservative thinkers of the late 18th and of the 19th century (such as Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, Franz von Baader, Carl Ernst Jarcke, and Joseph Maria von Radowitz) took on a new, reactionary position that is essentially hostile to all revolutions (including social revolutions in the broad sense of the word), in some cases aligning themselves with advocates of dictatorships, as long as these could preemptively suppress revolutions (ibid., 208–29). Viewing revolutions as a further development of absolutism, manifesting itself in the idea of national sovereignty (and the national assembly as its legislative instrument), they argued against the new, centralized, but at the same time divided, system of power distribution as opposed to the older principles of parliamentary monarchy (ibid., 232–233). This significant turn during the crisis of the epoch is, as Kondylis consistently argues, mistakenly viewed by many as the foundational period in the history of conservative thought. Whereas, in his view, genuine conservative thought ends with the historical reign of nobility and the emergence of the idea of sovereignty in the 16^th century.

According to Kondylis, the mainstream tendencies of conservative thought after the mentioned turn of the late 18th and 19th centuries are twofold. First, it is the idea of the priority of nature (and natural order in society) against the priority of human reason. Second, it is the reborn Aristotelian idea of Oikos as a “fundamental [social] unit and at the same time a miniature of societas” (ibid., 264) and thus a perfect manifestation of conservative reason. Mainly based on the first premise, conservative anthropology counters the idea of the human being as simply an animal rationale, fiercely insisting that individual reason is not the most significant part of human nature, as can be seen in the example of Burke’s concept of ‘wisdom’, or ‘[good] reason’ (as an accumulated “entirety of human assets” needed for the cognition of truth), that, together with his other fundamental notions, was widely used in subsequent traditions, for instance by Friedrich von Gentz and August Wilhelm Rehberg (ibid., 331–2).

As a whole, Kondylis’s depiction of the development of collective (conservative) reason in Konservativismus implies at least two major stages – before and after the French Revolution. Before it, collective reason was on the same level as autonomous reason, being part of major oppositions and controversies that defined the political and cultural development of European countries. Conversely, after the French Revolution, collective reason is much weaker, limited, and reactive, trying to transform itself and adapt to the new reality of bourgeois society, in which the aristocratic worldview gives way to the ideas of the European Enlightenment.

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IV. From Pragmatic to Technical Reason: The Rise of Mass Democracy

The turning point in the understanding of rationality from the standpoint of the development of European culture between the 19th and late 20th centuries is among the critical subjects of Kondylis’s work, The Decline of Bourgeois Thought- and Life-Forms. The Liberal Modern and the Mass-Democratic Post-Modern Age (1991, 2^nd ed. 2010). Together with Konservativismus, this book completes Kondylis’s depiction of how not only conservative collective reason but also the classical liberal idea of emancipated, autonomous reason gradually became obsolete as a result of a long series of labyrinthine transformations during the new age of mass society (beginning around 1900) and, after World War II, of hedonistic mass democracy, with mass production and mass consumption as its core elements (Kondylis 2010: 13).⁷ In this work, as well as in his small political essays of the same period, Kondylis's historical-descriptive analysis of reason as a concept of European culture is intertwined with his opposition to bourgeois and post-bourgeois (post-modern) culture.

According to Kondylis, the bourgeois idea of reason was closely related to the universalist elements of the ideology of the European Enlightenment:

As a concept and buzzword, reason was from the beginning, and then already, fundamentally opposed to what is called “faith” and "authority,"  i.e., to the heteronomous determination of human thought and action. From this perspective, the focus was not so much on the cognitive capabilities of reason but on its suitability to sovereignly represent the normative principles and demands of a bourgeois modern worldview. Reason did not have to coincide with the pure intellect, but it definitely had to take sides in the ideological and social struggle. As an advocate of norms that were universal by their very nature, it raised universal claims, and in this universality, it possessed the power of natural law (Kondylis 2010: 31–2).

Reason established a new kind of harmony, as it defined, through “commands and prohibitions,"  the role of each part in the whole (ibid., 32). Reason became the harmonic principle that was even able to reconcile some very different material factors with each other (“human rationality, rationality of the market, or legal rationality”; ibid., 36).⁸ This very pragmatic harmonization between “reason and drive (Trieb), culture and nature” (ibid., 37–8),⁹ coupled with the belief in the progress of the social sphere and humankind in general, had its important enemy in all kinds of irrationality and unpredictability, associated with random events and actions that evade explanation by the principles of cause and effect. The process of “channeling the drives through reason” was affecting not only ethics and politics but also the sphere of art, i.e., “individual inspiration and fantasy” (ibid., 47).

The 19th century was marked by the increasingly radical questioning of the bourgeois synthesis. The focus now shifted towards the "irrational, elementary, irreducible, and therefore incalculable, or even potentially explosive and dangerous" (Kondylis 2010: 57). The continuous attacks on the bourgeois idea of human being, and with it on the bourgeois “conventions and institutions”,¹⁰ are illustrated by Kondylis through various examples, such as “the fatal domination of blind instincts and passions over human reason,” which has been a crucial topic in intellectual history since the second half of the 19th century (ibid., 80). The result of this new “dominance of the instinctive, or the irrational,” was that it “detached the individual from the social and cultural context and threw it back into the dark regions of his existence, in which one could basically only be by oneself” (ibid., 81). On the cognitive level, the synthetic and harmonic bourgeois system in which reason worked in concert with “(reflected) experience” gave way to the “immediacy of sensation that internalizes external stimuli” – not in order to relativize the big picture of the world but to preserve those stimuli in their “initial freshness” (ibid., 92–3).

Kondylis observes the same process in the sciences of the 20th century. He points out, for instance, that sociology played an essential role in rendering obsolete the idea that “the animal rationale could overcome the relativity of values on the ethical level and the barriers of subjective perspectives on the cognitive level” (ibid., 147–8). The result was a complete downfall of the bourgeois Weltbild, as sociology “has generally consolidated the impression that world views are not the products of reason and reflected experience but ideologemes that are projecting claims to power and social interests into the nature of being and thus are fundamentally determined by an (individual or collective) subjective perspective” (ibid., 148). Consequently, reason was now viewed not as a “sovereign legislator” but merely as “an instrument in the service of individual or collective self-preservation – in the service of power in the broadest sense of the word” (ibid., 149). This relativization of values leads to a “freedom from values” (Wertfreiheit) – a principle that Kondylis follows himself as the guiding methodological principle of his “descriptive decisionism," as he explicitly points out in many works of the 1980s, especially in Power and Decision (Macht und Entscheidung, 1984).

With the end of European Modernity (according to Kondylis, it coincides with the start of the Cold War after the Second World War), and in a state of alienation from its foundations, the rise of mass-democratic axiology was able to capture and conquer Western societies without having to pick a fight, as it utilized all the previous criticism against the “bourgeois anthropology of reason” (Kondylis 2010: 221). The ideal of the new age, with its different economic model based on mass consumption (and not on the accumulation of resources), is the self-realization of the atomized individual, whose creativity is now freed from the constraints of bourgeois rationality but who is also obliged to create his own individual telos, and the need to take on the task of "self-creation," which, after the elimination of bourgeois rationality and religious ties, tends to coincide with the enactment of a creatio ex nihilo (ibid., 221). The bourgeois “ethics of reason” is replaced by “value pluralism and ethical permissiveness,” while even values themselves are now seen as consumer products and items of personal choice (ibid.).

The new age of mass democracy, which emerged after World War II as the successor of mass society, is, at least in its 20^th-century gestalt, the age of ‘performance ethics’ (Leistungsethik) and technical, or instrumental, reason (ibid., 229), as this is precisely the type of reason an ‘entrepreneur’ or a ‘manager’, who definitively replaces the bourgeois (Bürger) after the post-war cultural revolution, would need (ibid., 208). The atomized individual uses communication as his or her primary instrument of reaching consensus with others, under the imagined condition that all people are equally reasonable beings (ibid., 281–2).¹¹ In other words, the liberal topoi of emancipated rationality were endowed with new meaning during the age of mass democracy. Pragmatic reason is replaced by technical reason¹² that connects all human beings in an ‘analytic-combinatory’ way (ibid., 268–9).¹³ At the same time, technical reason becomes part of a dichotomy with the hedonism of mass society. The ensuing conflict, whose origins, according to Kondylis, lie in the instrumentalization of reason due to the development of natural and exact sciences but also in the rehabilitation of sensuality and its reconciliation of rationality during the Enlightenment, was mitigated by the constant blurring of the boundaries between the rational and the irrational due to previous developments in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

From the standpoint of technical rationality, it is fitting that the dominance of ethical universalism marks the age of mass democracy, as it is necessarily coupled with the reinvigorated (and recontextualized) anthropological idea of man as primarily a rational being:

The reduction of man to his mere rational humanity translates into the idealizing language of philosophy the fact of extreme atomization that is constitutive of democratic mass society. This reduction and this atomization make the transition to universalism possible since the proclamation of reason as the only decisive human disposition eliminates all substantial ties (e.g., to the family or the nation) and thus all barriers and boundaries between all individuals on this planet. Only if the process of atomization is advanced enough can reason unite all individual human beings with one another with ethical absoluteness. (Kondylis 2010: 110–11)

From the perspective of the history of conservatism presented by Kondylis in his book from 1986, this dominance of universalism, with its particular understanding of emancipated reason, marks the final stage of the gradual dissolution of classical conservatism, as the absence of all ties to family or nation removes all of its last pillars that were still intact, though not untouched, after the crisis at the turn of the 19th century. In light of the history of Western metaphysics that was the focus of Kondylis’s earlier works, it represents its new period of dominance after a prolonged crisis that lasted at least from the mid-19th century until the mid-20th century. From an anthropological perspective, the Kantian understanding of human beings as animal rationabile, whose objective is to become an incorporation of the animal rationale, seems to be relevant again, this time not from the perspective of the European Enlightenment but in the framework of mass democracy, the consequence being that the “animal” now devolves into what the word designates in its blatant zoological meaning.

Kondylis’s diagnosis is also relevant for his analysis of contemporary history and politics after 1990, as laid out specifically in Planetary Politics after the Cold War in 1992. While the end of the Cold War may be perceived by some as a triumph of reason and a new path to global peace, for Kondylis, it is one of the many misinterpretations caused by the Euro-centric standpoint of Western philosophy, which fails to recognize the absence of conflicts in Western Europe as an indication of its diminishing role on the global, planetary stage, caused by a number of factors, such as severe demographic weakness (Kondylis 1992: 7-8). More importantly, Kondylis regards the idea that classical liberal concepts of rationality are largely applicable to mass democratic society as woefully misleading. In the global perspective, the long process of the economization of the political, that is, the “absorption of political functions into economic functions,"  resulted in the instrumentalization and technologization of political reason as the economy became the primary concern for politics (ibid., 21–24). This process, in turn, rendered obsolete “the traditional liberal distinction between the political and the economic” (ibid., 27).

Under these circumstances, especially during times of severe crises such as mass migration, politics is always in danger of biologization, in the form of a reduction to a mere distribution of goods that should secure the survival of citizens (ibid., 50). The hope that such circumstances can be avoided not only in the richest Western states but also in other countries of the world is, from Kondylis point of view, nothing more than a naive, utopian hope that does not take into account the inequality of access and distribution of goods, the population stagnation in Europe (as a deciding factor that contributed to its wealth during recent decades), the population growth in other parts of the planet, and the growth limits of the global economy (ibid., 50–1). Artificial but explosive population growth caused by unmitigated mass migration, ideologically rooted in a human rights universalism that perfectly corresponds with the logic of rigid economization, according to Kondylis, causes anomic conditions within societies, which face drastic, sudden overpopulation, ethnic fragmentation, and scarcity of resources at the same time. The logic of human rights universalism and its real-world mirror, unmitigated mass migration, follows the logic of numbers but, under the condition of wide-spread anomy, clashes with the reality of ethnic identity. Kondylis calls this clash of dynamics the dialectical turn from the “economization of the political” (Ökomomisierung des Politischen) to the “biologization of the political” (Biologisierung des Politischen).

The logic at play here is not orchestrated by reason as a principle of human progress but plays out without and against all reason, as the triumph of hedonistic mass democracy with its indifference to everything classical conservatism has not been able to defend results in animalistic anarchy (Rückkehr zum Tierreich). In other words, from the standpoint of Kondylis’s political philosophy, the triumph of formalistic rationality over substantive reason is a Pyrrhic victory. Despite all efforts to deny or diminish it, the biologization of politics is a threat to the basic ethical principles of human dignity,¹⁴ since the growing economic and ecological problems, in their development massively fueled by mass migration and ethnic conflicts, make it very probable that the “fear of quantity […] turns into a hatred of quality," giving a strong impulse to the rise of new aggressive mass ideologies (Kondylis 1992: 54–5). The global biologization of politics could also very well bring forth a post-ideological situation, marked by the fading of the need for “ideological and social divisions,” as it only considers physiological traits that a human possesses since its birth (ibid., 55).

The Western universalistic idea of reason, which is seen as the primary instrument for achieving world peace through a universalized ethical approach, is viewed by Kondylis as an illusion. According to him, this illusion is a result of the globalization of markets and the emergence of planetary politics (known as planetary politics, or planetarische Politik, in Kondylis’s late works of the 1990s). Both of these factors only seem to help strengthen, but in fact undermine the classical liberal idea of autonomous reason that serves as the foundation of this universalistic approach. As to what the future development of reason might look like from a planetary perspective, with its many intellectual traditions and concepts of rationality, Kondylis, in his typical manner, refrains from any detailed prognoses and speculations, only vaguely mentioning the possibility of a new asceticism (and “maybe a new kind of religiosity”; ibid., 57) caused by a severe lack of products and resources. This development would also mean the end of mass democracy’s hedonistic axiology and, as one could infer from Kondylis’s arguments, of its instrumental reason.

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Conclusion

In Kondylis’s philosophical and political studies, starting from the 1970s and continuing into the early 1990s, reason and Western rationality always remained a key topic, serving as a link between most (if not all) of his major works. Reason belongs to the essential elements of the theoretical foundation of Kondylis’s theory of European Modernity, which, in turn, constitutes the core of his philosophy in general. His description of the development of Western rationality combines observations on different levels and in different areas, from epistemology and ethics to the history of culture, philosophical anthropology, social ontology, and political philosophy. Coupled with Kondylis’s use of a vast range of sources (with many obscure ones among them), it results in a highly complex, multi-layered theory that is applicable to different areas – from historical theories of European Modernity and specialized studies of German idealism to political and intercultural studies. It also tells much of Kondylis’s own approach, highlighting the fundamental and interdisciplinary character of his intellectual development, as he always sticks to a small number of core themes that serve as a starting point for his analysis of an extensive range of secondary topics.

As Kondylis touches upon a wide range of topics concerning the development of European rationality since the late Middle Ages, he leaves unanswered just as many questions, such as: What is the legal and political dimension of collective rationality in the European tradition? Can European rationality overcome its universalistic claims? Could this be done by comparing it to other, non-European views of traditions? What instruments does contemporary philosophy lack in order to answer the economic and ecological challenges addressed by Kondylis? What type of rationality could succeed the supposed fall of instrumental reason? While most of these questions lie outside the main scope of Kondylis’s works, the absence of an answer to the first question reveals a blind spot in Kondylis’s argumentation.

Another problem is even more fundamental, since it stems from Kondylis’s methodological decisions and from his intentionally broad approach that transcends the usual confines of philosophical debates. While Kondylis’s broad use of the notion of reason (and of other related notions like ‘(ir)rationality’ and ‘universalism’) allows him to tackle very different problems and questions on very different levels, it makes his task more difficult and his arguments more vulnerable to rigorous criticism. As he turns from his analysis of philosophical and ideological developments to more general observations on bourgeois and post-bourgeois culture, we can recognize some symptoms of a theoretical, primarily conceptual, overstretch. Indeed, the connection between different parts of Kondylis’s theory of Western rationality could not be synthesized into a full-fledged theory, probably mainly due to his early death. Furthermore, Kondylis does not provide his readers with a sufficient explanation of whether, for instance, we can find noticeable signs of instrumental rationality in the European tradition long before the twentieth century (as he implies in a late interview). Despite all that, the problem does not look as grave as some of Kondylis’s opponents imply, as it demonstrates the necessity of a critical elaboration and clarification of some elements but does not undermine any of his central arguments. This is why his theory of rationality, which unfortunately is still mostly unknown even among the academic audience, could strongly impact many debates in philosophy and the social sciences in general. His political diagnosis, in all its bleakness and grim honesty, should not only be of interest for academics but also for a broader intellectual audience (or the other way around, given the state of academia?) since it does not allow us to look past either the reality we are living in or its determining forces.

References:

Bluhm, Harald (2012): Sozialphilosophie als politische Theorie – Panajotis Kondylis, in: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 60/3 (2012), 360–40.

Gottfried, Paul Edward (1999): After Liberalism. Mass Demcoracy in the Managerial State. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Greiffenhagen, Martin (1986): Das Dilemma des Konservatismus in Deutschland. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp.

Kondylis, Panajotis (1979): Die Entstehung der Dialektik. Eine Analyse der geistigen Entwicklung von Hölderlin, Schelling und Hegel bis 1802 (The Emergence of Dialectics. An Analysis of the Intellectual Development of Hölderlin, Schelling and Hegel up to 1802). Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.

Kondylis, Panajotis (1981): Die Aufklärung im Rahmen des neuzeitlichen Rationalismus. (The Enlightenment within the Framework of Modern Rationalism). München: dtv.

Kondylis, Panajotis (1984): Macht und Entscheidung. Die Herausbildung der Weltbilder und die Machtfrage. (Power and Decision. The Formation of World Images and the Problem of Values.) Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.

Kondylis, Panajotis (1990): Die neuzeitliche Metaphysikkritik. (Modern-era Critique of Metaphysics). Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.

Kondylis, Panajotis (1994): Nur Intellektuelle behaupten, dass Intellektuelle die Welt besser verstehen als alle anderen. Interview von Marin Terpstra mit Panajotis Kondylis. In: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 42/4 (1994), 683–94.

Kondylis, Panajotis (2010): Der Niedergang der bürgerlichen Denk- und Lebensform. Die liberale Moderne und die massendemokratische Postmoderne. (The Decline of Bourgeois Thought- and Life-Forms. The Liberal Modern and the mass-democratic Post-modern Age). Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

Mühlpfordt, Günter (1984): Aufklärungsphilosophie in neuer Sicht: Antiintellektualismus als Hauptströmung? In: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 32/12 (1984), 1118–24.

Valjavec, Fritz (1951): Die Entstehung der politischen Strömungen in Deutschland 1770 - 1815. Düsseldorf: Athenäum.

Zenkert, Georg (2012): Entscheidung und Macht. Kondylis als Kritiker des Normativismus. In: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 3 (2012), 383–96.

1. The term is capitalized here because of its terminological importance and its central role in Kondylis's approach to intellectual history.

2. Kondylis’s method and thematic focus differ significantly from those of his predecessors. In Karl Mannheim’s classical work Konservatismus (Mannheim 1984), the origins of European conservatism are implicitly connected to the French Revolution, as Mannheim regards all its prior forms as ‘pre-conservatism’, or ‘traditionalism’ (cf. Kondylis, Konservativismus, 12). In comparison to Mannheim, Fritz Valjavec (Die Entstehung der politischen Strömungen in Deutschland 1770 – 1815; Valjavec 1951) chooses a broader approach (showing more similarities to Kondylis in this regard), linking conservatism not to a specific historical event but rather to the development of the European Enlightenment in general. Nevertheless, he focuses only on Germany, intending to describe the origins of German conservatism during the last decades of the eighteenth century. Kondylis specifically criticizes his tendency to regard any reaction to the Enlightenment as part of the conservative movement, instead of seeing conservatism as a form of that reaction among other possible forms (Kondylis, Konservativismus, 12). The same problem, along with the inability to recognize the deeper historical roots of conservatism in the power structures of societas civilis, Kondylis sees in Martin Greiffenhagen’s book on German conservatism (Das Dilemma des Konservatismus in Deutschland, published first in 1971; Greiffenhagen 1986).

3. Kondylis 1986: 66. — For Kondylis, the insurmountability of this gap between natural law and positive law is marked by the biblical event of the fall of humanity after sin. Because of the intellectualistic emancipation from traditional theology and the domestication of theology by rationalism (a recurrent theme in Kondylis's early historical works), natural law has lost its cornerstone, with the socio-political result of the crisis of conservatism in the late eighteenth century.

4. Ibid., 150–1, with a reference to Coke’s Institutes of the Lawes of England (1628–1644).

5. Kondylis 1986: 154. Kondylis differentiates between the French Revolution and the English Revolution, viewing the latter as an example of how conservative and anti-absolutist tendencies can serve as a foundation even for “radical democratic demands” (ibid., 160).be

6. Kondylis explicitly points out that, at the same time, conservative reason does not abandon rational argumentation per se. Cf. ibid., 18 (with reference to his depiction of the dialectics of rationality and irrationality in Kondylis 1981: 36).

7. Kondylis 2010: 13. — For more on Kondylis notion of mass democracy in his social and political philosophy, see Bluhm 2012. Of particular note here is Paul Gottfried, whose thinking closely aligns with that of Kondylis when it comes to mass democracy and the analysis of liberalism. I will elaborate on this in a later essay on Gottfried and Kondylis, as there is a lot to unpack here; Gottfried's book with the most references to Kondylis is After Liberalism (Gottfried 1999).

8. Kondylis 2010: 36. — These arguments, together with other remarks concerning the anthropological aspects of this rationality, most likely point primarily to Kant (and not Hegel, because of the more limited role of rationality in his anthropology).

9. Kondylis 2010: 37–8. Elsewhere, Kondylis also describes this synthesis as “the bourgeois synthesis of reason and experience (on the cognitive level) or reason and instinct (on the practical-ethical level)” (ibid., 56).

10. Since Kondylis mentions family as an example of such an institution, this raises the question of whether the bourgeois idea of reason can be fully identified with the emancipated reason of the Enlightenment (as opposed to the collective reason of the conservative tradition) – primarily because, according to Kondylis in Konservativismus, family was seen as one of the new pillars of conservatism in the eighteenth–nineteenth century.

11. Kondylis 2010: 281–2. — One can easily recognize that one of Kondylis’s primary targets in his criticism of the current use of the anthropology of animal rationale is Jürgen Habermas’s communication theory. (Kondylis 1981: 53)

12. For Kondylis, this is exemplified by the rapid development and growth of the exact sciences and technical fields such as cybernetics (Kondylis 2010: 268). However, this growth is accompanied by a deepening "gap between exact science and philosophy", as "the latter increasingly takes on the task of defending hedonistic ideals of self-realization by trying to translate the humanist heritage into its language, so as not to (completely) lose contact with real events and with 'man' in an era that is particularly difficult for philosophers" (ibid., 268).

13. Kondylis 2010: 268-9: "Operations that are possible within the system are performed on individual elements of the system, which, as a result of these same operations, transform from a state from state A to state B. The transformations of the system are thus achieved by transferring each of its elements into another element or by each element of the new system being the result of the transformation of an element of the previous system.”

14. As Kondylis repeatedly points out, this perspective is mostly ignored in contemporary ethics (cf. Kondylis 2010: 53), since the latter does not have the necessary instruments to provide answers to problems such as population explosion. As of today, Kondylis’s point is still valid for the most part. Even though there were some isolated attempts (by Derek Parfit, Gustaf Arrhenius, and others) to approach this problem or even lay the foundations for a ‘population ethics’, there is no wide consensus among scholars on whether such ethics actually works.