Kondylis on Conservatism with Notes on Conservative Revolution

Notes on Panagiotis Kondylis, “Conservatism as a Historical Phenomenon.” This is to my knowledge the only substantial excerpt from Kondylis’ Konservativismus (Stuttgart, 1986) available in English. The translation is by “C.F.” from “Ὁ συντηρητισμὸς ὡς ἱστορικὸ φαινόμενο,” Λεβιάθαν, 15 (1994), pp. 51–67, and remains unpublished, but discoverable in PDF format online. Page references below are to that PDF. I have altered the translation very slightly in some places.

Kondylis aims to understand conservatism not as a “historical” or “anthropological constant,” but as a “concrete historical phenomenon” bound to, and thus coterminous with, a time and a place (pp. 1–2). But even such historicist scholarship often takes too narrow a view, according to which conservatism is a reaction against, and thus “derivative” of, the Revolution, or, at best, against Enlightenment rationalism (pp. 2–3).

Stefan Breuer, Panagiotis Kondylis and the Question of “Conservative Revolution”

Alain de Benoist, “Intervista sulla rivoluzione conservatrice,” Terra Insubre (2007):

Stefan Breuer disputed that one can speak of “conservatism” or of “neo-conservatism” when it comes to the Conservative Revolution. He depended for this purpose upon the works of Panagiotis Kondylis, who, in a large work published in 1986, declared that conservatism, entering into an irreversible decline in the second half of the nineteenth century, was unable to rejuvenate itself in Germany on account of its historical links with the Ancien Régime. For Kondylis, the progressive elimination of the nobility, the caste that sustained historical conservatism, doomed political conservatism, which could not survive on its own, except by accommodating liberalism, or by “aestheticizing” certain of its foundations.