AEven if the publisher’s announcement would have it otherwise: You can hardly call this book a classic. If only not because even historians of ideas, to whom the work could most likely be assigned to a discipline, usually look questioningly when the name Panajotis Kondylis is mentioned. There are certainly many reasons for this. One of them is quite profane in nature: Kondylis’ most important books are out of print, hardly antiquarian and if so only available at high prices. In one of the most urgent cases, his study on the “historical content and decline” of conservatism, a remedy has now been found: Thirty-six years after it first appeared, it is available as a new edition.
The life of the Greek-German private scholar, who died in 1998, took place outside of established academic philosophy at the latest after he received his doctorate in Heidelberg. He deliberately refrained from attempting an academic career – including all the considerations that it requires. Existing as an outsider allowed Kondylis to buck academic expectations. Undermining them, reproaching the academic establishment for its social need for meaning, was where he found his real field of action.
After Enlightenment historians, who were too gripped by the euphoria of their subject, Kondylis found the closest victims of his critique of ideology in authors devoted to political and academic revivals of a conservative tradition of thought. The very first chapter recommends them to initiate the mummification of their subject: “The impossibility of a substantial definition of contemporary ‘conservatism’, and indeed qua conservatism, becomes visible precisely in the banalities with which one tries to describe its essence.” As often heard do you think right-of-centre today that individuals should have a little more sense of responsibility, that reformers should be a little more leisurely and that the capitalist world system should be given a few homely values? – Always associated with the claim that a conservatism for the 21st century was proclaimed. The aim of Kondylis’ investigation is to prove that this tendency towards the banal is not a coincidence, but the result of an irreversible emptying and antiquatedness.
No universal psychological type
The basis of the argument is a model of the history of ideas that sees ideas as “available weapons; who will use them, and the when and how do not depend on them”. For Kondylis, it is always concrete groups that refer to ideas in order to have an effect in a certain “seriousness of the situation”. In this way, however, they acquire a peculiar list, a polemical distortion. They are drawn into a socio-political struggle that follows its “own logic”, “to which the logic of the texts” has to submit. The political idea is thus first and foremost a polemical element in the historical conflicts of an epoch. This methodology, admittedly only appropriate for certain concepts, dares to go far beyond those measly “contexts” and mild “author intentions” with which some academic schools of “intellectual history” are content today.