He presents mass democracy as a total way of life that develops in a favorable political and economic climate. He does not use the term simply to express contempt for what he dislikes. Nor does he try to reduce mass democracy to a side effect of some material transformation, for example, by treating it as a byproduct of industrial growth or of the shifting of population toward cities. Kondylis does note certain political and economic preconditions for the rise of mass democracy, most particularly universal suffrage, material abundance, and the identification of self-government with public administration. But he also stresses its cultural and intellectual presuppositions. Among those that preoccupy him are the avant-garde artistic movements of the early twentieth century and the kind of experimental theater that began shortly thereafter. Unlike the Marxist Lukacs, who viewed such movements as sources of bourgeois amusement, Kondylis interprets them as the beginnings of a cultural war. Artists and playwrights collaborated in bringing down the bourgeois liberal world. For they despised precisely what it exalted, social constraint, rationally comprehensible art, and a coherent view of life and civic responsibility.