Thoughts on "Konservativismus"

The corpse of conservatism and the online right.

Political categories inflame passions precisely because they are conceptually confused. Terms are used with a carelessness that betrays a total misunderstanding of their history, their evolution, and their social bearers.

“Leftism” is difficult to define (I mean here in a coherent trans-historical way that doesn’t lead one into contradictions—many positions are taken opportunistically and can switch social bearers, depending on immediate demands of a historical struggle), but it possesses a “you know it when you see it” quality.

“Rightism”, by contrast, feels practically undefinable. You know the tropes by now: conservative, traditionalist, right-winger, partisan of the True, the Good, the Noble—catchy slogans, but this is little more than dramatic rhetoric carried to lofty heights of abstraction, disconnected from social reality.

I have just finished reading Panagiotis Kondylis’ masterfully erudite Konservativismus, which I had the pleasure (and tedious labor) of machine translating last year. Kondylis reveals, with his ever incisive and penetrating intellect, that to understand these terms, we must strip away the polemics and look at the concrete historical phenomena.

Societas Civilis

The premise of Konservativismus is stark: what we call “Conservatism” today is, in terms of the history of ideas, as dead as classical Liberalism.¹

Historically, Conservatism was the intellectual world-picture of the European hereditary nobility. It was the dominant ideology of a specific social formation: the societas civilis. At its core, this world was concerned with Law.

In this view, Law flows from the commands of God. It gives structure to the world and organizes it hierarchically through the Great Chain of Being. Following this, The King, although worldly representative of the divine, is not himself a legislator; he is a judge. As primus inter pares, his role is to ensure that divine justice reigns on earth and to uphold the ancient prerogatives and privileges of the nobility. Because Law is time-immemorial and divine, it cannot be modified by the will of man. There is no distinction between public and private; the ethical and the political are intertwined. Building on scholastic interpretations of Aristotle, the commonwealth is an assemblage of households, oriented towards the good (as telos of man and the political). In this world, there can never really be anything new under the sun. Time immemorial custom and tradition, accumulated wisdom, and its interpretation, is all that is necessary for the maintenance of the social order.

Modern Sovereignty and the Voluntaristic State

Ideologies wake up only when confronted with a threat. For the nobility, this threat appeared in the 16th century with the rise of the modern concept of Sovereignty, best formulated by Jean Bodin, as the highest and absolute, perpetual power in a commonwealth—essentially an authority which recognizes no higher legal authority above its own.

Modern Sovereignty was a radical rupture. It reinterpreted Law on a voluntaristic basis. The Sovereign was no longer merely upholding eternal law, but he could now legislate. He could create valid law ex nihilo.

This was the death knell for the conservative worldview. If the King could create law based on his will (or the needs of the State), he could legislate away the privileges of the nobility. The “State” began to treat everyone equally as subjects—the early seeds of equality before the law, which is fundamentally at odds with the conservative defense of privilege and hierarchy. The public sphere developed, the State as its guarantor, and morality was relegated to the private individual conscience. Religious toleration became the virtue, and secularization was now not in the too distant future.

From Estate to Interest Group

As the modern state expanded—driven by Raison d’État, geopolitical pressure, and the rise of the bourgeoisie and capitalism—the nobility was slowly crushed. The rise of industry was the final nail in the coffin for the land-based aristocracy.

Here, Kondylis makes a crucial observation about the degradation of conservative thought. As the nobility was integrated into parliamentary politics, they were forced to engage in the logic of interests. They ceased to be the guardians of a divine order and became merely one interest group among many, arguing for tax breaks and tariffs.

Aestheticism and the Caesarist Fantasy

As the nobility lost its concrete power, its articulation of its own position weakened. It turned to aestheticism, Romanticism, and mythical reinterpretations of the past. This brings us to the “Right” as we recognize it today—and specifically to figures like Charles Maurras and Action Française, who is its ideological forbearer.

Maurras represents the spiritual predecessor of the modern online Right: a belief in hierarchy and “elite” (redefined as aristocracy, but without the hereditary nobility, more discretely meritocratic in orientation), and a belief in the value of work and industrial progress. But this is a mutation from the worldviews defended by counterrevolutionaries like De Maistre or Bonald.

Kondylis dissects this shift mercilessly. For the classical conservative, after the French Revolution, a dictator (or King) could act in a commissarial sense—he could step in to defend or re-establish an existing or threatened social order. Maurras, however, envisioned a King who would create a social order from a vacuum.

“Yet his break from classical conservatism also shows in his concept of kingship. A dictatorship meant not to defend a threatened order but to create a new one could only appear to classical conservatives as a revolutionary - i.e., sovereign - dictatorship... But Maurras’ king emerges from a social vacuum and is to create the entire social order from scratch - no supporting forces are specified. The dictatorship thus floats in midair, and so does the idea of kingship itself... In its place is an instrumental and institutional justification... The personal bond and the vassal-like relationship to the king... are entirely absent from Maurras’ thought and psyche.”

This is also the diagnosis of the modern Right: The worship of dictatorship and Caesarism without understanding that Caesarism needs extra-constitutional social bearers. The modern Rightist waits for a Caesar to appear from the aether, compelled by mysterious forces and “the need for decisive action in the face of institutional gridlock”, ignoring the absence of the social forces required to sustain him.

The Incoherent “Conservative”

This leaves us with a Frankenstein’s monster. “Conservatism” as we know it is born out of the fusion of the nobility with their old enemy, Liberalism, against a new, more radical enemy: Social Democracy.

In this light, modern conservatives are simply Liberals who believe in normative progress and a future-oriented outlook (unlike classical conservatives), but who want to pump the brakes on redistribution. Distinct from this is the “Right,” which inherits the tropes of the “Conservative Revolution”—aesthetically radical, often nationalist/völkisch, but socially bourgeois. It is this radical Right that maintains a structural reliance on economic liberalism (the sanctity of private property and accumulation), even as it rhetorically attacks the “free market”, “free trade” and decries political liberalism. It fights the Liberal political and cultural regime to save the Liberal economic order.

The Legacy

This mutation solidified in the 20th century. As Kondylis explains, the “Right” emerged as a radicalized bourgeoisie, with very little relation to the nobility at this point. Faced with the threat of internationalist socialism, this new Right made a calculated trade: they sacrificed political liberalism (parliamentarianism, democracy) to save economic liberalism (private property). This was the specific historical function of the 20th-century Right: an emergency brake pulled by the property-owning classes.

This leaves the 21st-century Right in a state of total ontological drift. The “Right” today inherits the aesthetic radicalism of the 20th century (the worship of Caesars, the disdain for democracy) but lacks the concrete social bearer (the threatened industrial bourgeoisie) that gave those movements weight.

We are left with a political landscape of floating abstractions. The “Establishment Right” clings to the very economic liberalism that dissolves the traditions they claim to conserve. Meanwhile, the “Dissident Right” lives in a simulation. In reality, they are functionally liberal subjects (consumers of tech platforms, atomized individuals) larping as illiberal aristocrats. Platform identity and anonymity encourage purity spiraling, an ersatz aristocracy where distinction is performed through ritualized exclusion rather than grounded in any real social weight. They wait for a Caesar to appear from nothing, ignoring the total absence of the social forces required to sustain him. They lack the power to be anything else.

Only a nuanced understanding of these social forces allows us to see where we are headed, what is possible, and what can be harnessed. But this is tedious work. It requires penetrating the thought structures of foes and friends alike, and moving beyond the aesthetic larp of “Retvrn.” It requires the sober understanding that the societas civilis is gone, the 20th century is dead, and they aren’t coming back.

1. Classical Liberalism was dissolved once its social bearer, the Bourgeoisie, was dissolved into mass-democracy. Roughly mass-democracy represents the social formation of the 20th century where political questions are formulated and thought of under a logic of redistributionism, socio-political life is characterized by mobility, as there are few legal barriers to positions of power—though this would probably have to be modified in light of developments in the second half of the 20th century in many western regimes concerning questions of equity and quotas. See PK’s Decline of the Bourgeois Thought and Life Form for more.