Panajotis Kondylis (1943-), a Greek scholar who lives in Heidelberg and writes in German, may be, unbeknownst to himself, one of the great conservative thinkers of our age. Describing Kondylis as a conservative might leave him and his readers puzzled. His five-hundred page work Conservatism (1986) examines “the historical content and decline” of its subject. For Kondylis, conservatism had already declined in the last century as a major political force. It was the ideal of an essentially medieval hierarchical society defended by landed aristocrats and their intellectual followers. What Americans have usually presented as conservative values, Kondylis explains, belongs to a “bourgeois world of thought.” Indeed the historical constructions of American traditionalists have been at most attempts to “exalt an older conceptual legacy and a long dead way of life against the newest developments in the direction of a consumerist mass democracy.”[1] Kondylis cites Russell Kirk and the Southern Agrarians as examples of this tendency to conjure up an ideal organic past in a society that has always been nearer to mass democracy than it has to European traditionalism.