page_title: Panagiotis Kondylis
section_title: The Decline of the Bourgeois Thought
hierarchical_section_title: Panagiotis Kondylis / Work / The Decline of the Bourgeois Thought
caption_attribution_description: English: Book cover of Der Niedergang der bürgerlichen Denk- und Lebensformen. Die liberale Moderne und die massendemokratische Postmoderne (The Decline of Bourgeois Thought- and Life-Forms. The Liberal Modern and the mass-democratic Post-modern), by Panajotis Kondylis.
context_page_description: Panagiotis Kondylis was a Greek philosopher, intellectual historian, translator and publications manager who principally wrote in German, in addition to translating most of his work into Greek. He can be placed in a tradition of thought best exemplified by Thucydides, Niccolò Machiavelli and Max Weber.
  Kondylis produced a body of work that referred directly to primary sources in no less than six languages, and had little regard for what he considered intellectual fashions and bombastic language used to camouflage logical inconsistencies and lack of first-hand knowledge of primary sources.
context_section_description: In Der Niedergang der bürgerlichen Denk- und Lebensformen. Die liberale Moderne und die massendemokratische Postmoderne (The Decline of Bourgeois Thought- and Life-Forms. The Liberal Modern and the mass-democratic Post-modern), Kondylis used Weberian ideal-typical analysis to outline the great "paradigm shift" of post-Modernity from around 1900 onwards, in bringing to an end the previously dominant bourgeois-liberal hierarchical and humanist world-view, and ushering in a new era of mass-democratic pluralism and leveling of hierarchies based on mass-democratic social formations characterised by, inter alia, historically unprecedented mass production and mass consumption, atomisation and mobility, and, not least of all, the various forms of mass-democratic ideology. To this end, Kondylis made effective use of his distinction between the "synthetic-harmonising thought-form" and the "analytic-combinatory thought-form" in which the latter set aside the former during the same period as the setting-aside of classical bourgeois liberalism by mass democracy, which for the most part occurred as the re-interpretation and changing of liberalism in accordance with the needs of mass democracy, and not always as an open and programmatic clash between the two. The "synthetic-harmonising thought-form" and the "analytic-combinatory thought-form" distinction is applied by Kondylis to his extensive overview of developments in the arts (including literature, music, architecture, the visual arts, cinema), as well as of developments in philosophy, the sciences and commonplace mind-sets and ways of living, mainly from the second half of the 19th century until the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.
caption: Book cover of the German edition of The Decline of Bourgeois Thought- and Life-Forms.
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