In this modified conservative view that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, defenders of medieval hierarchy and civil order made common cause against revolt from below. They and bourgeois liberals opposed democratic revolutionaries and socialist reformers. In this alliance, however, the truly conservative vision of order became increasingly vestigial.[8] The major lines of division were thereafter between “bourgeois modernity” and “mass democratic postmodernity,” a topic minutely discussed in Kondylis’s book The Decline of the Bourgeois Form of Thought and Life (1991).[9] Social visions remain competitive, Kondylis reminds his reader, for only as long as they are tied to a dominant or powerful class. Once that class is overwhelmed by political or material changes, its ideas inevitably fall out of favor. Though Kondylis points out the historical precondition for the predominance of what he as well as Richard Weaver calls a “vision of order,” he does not relativize all such visions. From his descriptions it is clear that Kondylis favors the restorationist thought of the early nineteenth century over the liberal bourgeois Denkformen that replaced it. Despite his attempted detachment in surveying the end of mass democracy, Kondylis despises the disorder and boundless self-indulgence which he associates with the postmodern age.