Kondylis’s contextualization of conservative, liberal, and mass democratic world views and his detailed analysis of mass democracy carries implications that he spells out for would-be conservatives. The term “conservative” is now being applied, he explains in an essay, “The Archaic Character of Political Concepts,” to those who have nothing to do with an agrarian aristocratic society and less and less to do with a bourgeois liberal order. Kondylis finds it useless to define conservatives as “those who defend existing institutions, no matter what they happen to be.”[14] He mocks journalists and academics who indiscriminately apply “conservative” to Chancellor Kohl or to Russian insurgents. They are accused of the same semantic opportunism as those who use “liberal” not to describe the “economic and constitutional conceptions of the European bourgeois but the right to abortion or an unlimited right to asylum.”Least of all does Kondylis accept the Marxist practice, common during the Cold War, of designating the anti-Communist West as “conservative.” Such a designation is unsuited for a “system which has revolutionized productive forces to an unprecedented extent and which places at the disposal of individuals material and mental possibilities that represent an astonishing and world-historical novum.”[15]