3 Nov. 2025
The below is from Kondylis’ Konservatismus (1986, 433–46), his monograph on conservatism using a polemological approach.
It is a mistake to take conservative ideology (the articulation of the nobility’s interests) at face value; it must be concretized by considering the bearers and their constellation of relations.
One of the chief conservative objections to the modern secular state was that it established itself based on the welfare of all and legitimated itself through eudaimonist teachings. Therefore the capitalist system (“finance” or “industrialism”), legitimated by secular and “materialist” ideology and hinging on key words such as “happiness” and “wants” as well as the anthropological construction of homo economicus, could be seen as a sibling of the modern state, as its necessary corollary, and dismissed with the same arguments. Evidence for conscious and regular collaboration between capitalism and the state was hardly lacking. Conservatives cited the government’s tendency to promote taxable economic sectors and the their desire “that all work in the state be evaluated on the basis of the money it brings in.” They also complained that the state, by the expansion of bureaucracy and the increase of expenditures, had become slaves to “monetary oligarchs” and “usurers,” fretting over the “power of money, that entangles and permeates all nations, having many footholds and roots therein, being fundamentally unregulated by state power for precisely this reason.” They were repulsed by the “worship of industry”–“trade exhibitions are treated like the highest affairs, adulation from the king down to his lowliest servants, decorations and accolades for each man seeking his own advantage by any means.”
The effects of state and capitalism in concerto disintegrated societas civilis jointly and in complement. Capitalism could only develop nested in the divisions created by the consolidation of the modern state. Autonomy and self-legislation in the economic sphere, ideologically and practically vital, could only flourish in the division of the political (state) and (apolitical) society, just as capitalist comportment encouraged by anthropology of Homo Economicus—intertwined with the profane demand for happiness and (tacitly) set apart from the Christian subsumption of all human endeavors under salvation of the soul— came about only as a consequence of the distinctions between legality and morality, private and public. While the highest ethical ideal under societas civilis was coexistence and the mutual dependence of all social spheres, the aforementioned divisions now allowed the independence of the economic; thus, in concert with the modern state as purely political, these could turn against societas civilis as the ethical-political. Thus, when conservatives advocate the unity of economics and politics on ethical grounds, they take aim at the autonomous development of the capitalist economy and the bourgeoisie’s control of authorities—traditionally the domain of the nobility. Thus, it is no coincidence that conservative critics of capitalism begin in rejecting the notion that the state has no ethical duty and should instead only fulfill external requirements. Apart from the anthropological implications, this promoted the independence of the economic, insofar as the state, in its total retreat from the domain of ethics, only recognized positive law it had put in place as law, which no longer regulated the relations between persons as ethical figures but rather the interactions between primarily economic, thinking subjects. By contrast, societas civilis placed divine law above, the unity of politics and ethics resting on it, thereby unable to recognize the autonomy, to say nothing of priority, of the economic. Properly conceived, life in the state could not be a matter of positive law or national economics, but should result from a part historical and part lawful (in the sense of aforementioned higher law) standpoint. The (higher) law functioned to legitimate societas civilis and the authority of the nobility, so it is not hard to understand see what the conservatives meant and wanted concretely when they made the assertion that the decisive viewpoint should be “not the economic, but the lawful,” or that the well-being of the state rested upon moral and not economic principles.
Transferring sociopolitical demands for a unified (ethically oriented) politics and economics to the scientific-theoretical domain helped conservatives to significant methodological insights. Adam Müller opposed any isolated consideration of the political and the economic and ascribed the dissolution of societas civilis and the autonomization of social spheres to similar approaches. When political science no longer concerned the preservation of the state, he reckoned, the national economy cannot be addressed except as a matter of pure profit and dead goods, with its pursuit of welfare and prosperity. Adam Smith considers only products of economic subjects, so that personal services, which technically have nothing to do with economic activity, are only treated in their capacity as national-economic products. According to Müller, this leads not to efficiency but inner impoverishment. In view of the objective fact that all social spheres are interdependent, the one-sided way of considering the modern economy cannot get at economic products in their being; production is “the great, deeply involved and yet so simple movement of the spirit and the hands, through which national prosperity is conceived in eternal becoming. Anyone who wishes to consider these, cannot ignore the profound influence of inner or life forces”—thus, one cannot ignore the state as a whole, the power of naturally social men being bound to it from the beginning. National-economic and lawful or constitutional political considerations are taken together, in view of the fact “that the existing constitutional state itself,” and the sum of all relations between men in a state “is the real national capital.” Behind economic quantities lies the social in its entirety, which specifies the rules of play and scope for the former. In this vein, Coleridge takes issue with national-economics, in its acceptance of self-legislation in the economic sphere: “what they truly state, they do not truly understand in its ultimate grounds and causes”; above “political economy” stands “political philosophy.” This approach to economic theory indeed does have an ideological background and a sociopolitical edge. Thus, the proposition that the economic should not be evaluated by purely economic criteria, but rather considered from a higher social and lawful standpoint, means concretely that the direction should be determined not by the concerns of the bearers of the autonomous economic, but rather the interests of all who act for the community under the auspices of traditional law. Government intervention for the purpose of preventing the enrichment of the bourgeoisie at the cost of other classes was understood and requested concretely as rejection of the autonomy of the economic with implied subjugation of it under higher law. Such intervention crops up in many conservative polemics against the autonomy of the economic as its increasing importance with respect to the political came to be recognized. Following the formidable upheavals of the 19th century, a conservative could endorse the idea that “dominance of the economic and social spheres inevitably brings political dominance” just like a Marxist.
The two outlooks on the relationship between politics and economics correspond to two different notions of property. While property should be understood as the solid embodiment of (hierarchical) human relations on the basis of unity of (ethically oriented) politics and economics, it appears to be an external and arbitrarily changeable relationship between a legal subject and a thing when the autonomous economic confronts politics, underwritten by the secular state. At least this is what the conservative differentiation between “living” and “dead” property would suggest. In the former, a relationship developed over time between man and thing, solidified itself and lives on, so that the property holder is aware of his responsibility to ancestors and descendants. Here there are no dead, jointly owned things; rather, in the foreground stands tenure of things accompanying relationships between men, for example, how they concretize fiefdom and service. Economic and ethical-social considerations are not separate. In contrast to this form of property, typically found in permanent family holdings, stood the bourgeois: simple attachment to holdings by an isolated person and handled without social or ethical considerations, which could be bought and sold. The conservative insistence on the “living” aspect of property originates not in sentimental tendencies but rather the imagination of harmony that estates and stationary people under the patriarchal leadership by the head of the oikos represented. As Möser has already noted, the “old, true” notion of property includes manorial law and the separation of these two aspects, which distinguishes the new bourgeois notion of property, “has in fact had greater influence on the state and on a pure theory of law than commonly believed.” In the legal interpretation of societas civilis, property in the “old, true” sense sets forth a “moral-religious principle,” as its human aspects, that is to say the patriarchal relations bound to it, helps to eliminate the self interest inherent to property since the Fall by “love.” On the basis of the old ethically oriented conception of politics it can also be argued that “property is itself a political concept, a charge endowed by God, to maintain His law and the kingdom of His law in the state” meaning concretely that property is bound with “patronage, police, and jurisdiction.” In the language of conservatives, this lordship was called “duty,” wherein the landowner, as God’s proxy, dispatched strict and fair love for the welfare of dependents. Thus, the demand that property be bound with duties meant nothing less than a demand that patrimonial rule be perpetuated and a rejection of bourgeois impersonal property.
These juxtapositions of “living” and “dead” property, woven in to the aforementioned disparate notions of the significance of and relationship between politics and economics, now came to exemplify the contrast between landed property and mobile property, which conservatives understood to be not merely economic, but political-social, even ideological. The ideological aspect comes to be intensely emphasized the more material concerns are at risk. Landed property and mobile property embody two diametrically opposed social realities and two irreconcilable ways of life and attitudes toward life. In landed property, the conservative principle of duration can be felt; such property is passed on through generations, unwavering and living on in the family, who is conscious of continuity and responsibilities imposed by tradition rather than ephemeral material interests, letting a higher responsibility to God and man dictate. Landed property therefore means eo ipso firm ethical and material roots, averse to unrestrained and opportunistic greed. On the other hand, mobile property, which stands for the free disposition of the individual property owner and can be arbitrarily changed at any time, brings about the dissolution of all permanent points of reference, the leveling of tradition, and the subjugation of all ethical considerations under the vulgar material. In the febrile atmosphere brought about by the mobility of property and the accompanying growing thirst for new rootless property, neither time was nor appetite was left for ethical deliberation, for leisure and venture; everything was directed toward material acquisition. These justifications for a structural opposition of landed property and mobile property were admittedly not fashioned in a purely theoretical way but rather within the setting of and as inducement towards intense sociopolitical disputes. In Prussia for example, they took issue with the German Smithians orbiting Kraus and Thaer, influential in the Prussian Reform Movement; industry and agriculture obeyed the same economic laws and therefore conferring laissez-faire principles to the agricultural sector was possible, even necessary. Müller, the bullhorn of reaction opposing the Smithians and reformers, defended the singular nature of agriculture and opined that the new national-economic principles, bound to emerging division of labor and finance, did not apply to everything. The “monetary economy” established itself in the agricultural sphere only because of the unrestrained alienation from and mobility of land ownership. This division followed from its translation into money, but also the transformation of all unpaid services and natural dues into monetary matters. The nobility’s entanglement in murky monetary matters lead inevitably to catastrophic ethical and material consequences. Müller portrayed the “momentous choice” for agriculture in the following way: “either feudalism or debt. It cannot be escaped; all that remains is the choice between lords and creditors. Either a noble personal obligation as Christian law taught us, or a Roman obligatio, i.e. slavery.”
The conservatives had, of course, long recognized the revolutionary effects of the growing predominance of “monetary wealth” with respect to “landed property.” An significant aim of french revolutionary legislation and the Napoleonic code was to “promote the circulation of property,” from which they deduced that the “unbounded mobility of all moral relationships [is] conducive only to despotism.” The decay of corporations concomitant with the dissolution of stable property would lead to the abolition of intellectual and civil freedom—and this abolition is deemed good among the liberal bourgeoisie, who loudly object to the state’s involvement in industry, but readily welcome it when it aims to destroy immobile property in favor of mobile. From the abstract bourgeois notion of property, in which the “hatred towards all humanization of the right to a thing, against all subordination and ties between two persons” is expressed, the communist abstraction of universally owned, ultimately divided, property necessarily follows. The conservatives contrasted this despotism of property splintered and alienated from men with the organic state and organic property. But if the organic state is to be understood as unified, ethically oriented political and economic spheres, organic property as the crystallization of particular human (patriarchal) relations by particular things, then all property must be considered state property at least insofar as it serves as representation of the higher principles embodied by the state. In other words, state property is organic property, because it cannot be haphazardly disposed by whatever party. This bind to higher authorities is not state slavery, as it does not deal with the modern state, which actually can impose such through its bureaucratic apparatus, but rather societas civilis, which ensures the unity of conduct by a legal foundation resting on ideological homogeneity. Thus, when Möser held that the earth belongs to the state and its property owners may not “arbitrarily peel it apart,” as it belongs to them only in “usufruct,” he is not thinking of socialism, but rather the duty of the heads of oikos; not as free subjects in the bourgeois sense, but rather acting with propriety for the endurance of societas civilis. On the grounds of the stately nature of property, so understood, a father cannot arbitrarily carve up family property in a will—just as, conversely, the lord’s measures for the preservation of the oikos or the manor are not illegitimate violations of suum cuique, but rather acts in accordance with the law that undergirds societas civilis. Friedrich Schlegel determined, quite correctly, that the principle that the state should granted eminent domain over external things was a component of the feudal form.
To conservatives, capitalism’s essential feature appeared to be the turn against the aforementioned views on the unity of political and economic spheres and property. Thus the functioning of the capitalist system relied on two conditions. On the one hand, the autonomy of the economic sphere is assumed, bringing with it a radical transformation of the political, wherein the political is decoupled from its links to ethics and law (in the sense of societas civilis) and makes the secular state its sole bearer, opposing society. On the other hand, all areas of productive society were subjected to the same economic laws, so that the “monetary economy” eventually eliminates the traditional peculiarities of land and puts it among the common. In the place of corporatism and patriarchy stands the freedom of all economic individuals and simultaneously competition between all economic individuals. Freedom and competition now come under fire from the conservatives, as they believe they will destroy stable and ethically legitimate hierarchy and turn social life into an arena, where the law of the strongest and most sly rules. The lower strata are the main victims; for their members equality and freedom in effect mean nothing more than forfeiture of all protections that they previously enjoyed in the lap of the estates, whereas now as isolated individuals they are exposed to the oppressiveness of indiscriminate forces. All benefit from freedom, according to the preachers: the bourgeoisie, the “class of industrialists” who “by nature [think] only of buying and consumption” and concentrate the wealth of nations in their own hands; they abandon the poor to the champions of laissez-faire principles. The autonomy of the economic and the triumph of blind economic law in a society ruled by the bourgeoisie has led to a “modern feudalism,” in which the poor are even more oppressed than the old feudalism, in which women and children are possessed, corvée is imposed on them and their health is destroyed; even the lot of a negro slave, it is said, is enviable compared to such a fate. In innumerable variations and unending pitiful inflections, conservatives, beginning at the end of the 18th century, paint a picture of the wretched lives of the proletarian masses, who, suddenly uprooted and stripped of their peasant virtues, gather in the cities, multiplying excessively and falling into every possible vice, while newly invented machines or a chance change in consumer tastes and a redirection of production can cast them on the street at any time.
This capitalist system is thus not only unfair and inhumane on top of this, it is vulnerable precisely where it claims to be strongest: the economic. Initially the conservatives held that capitalism, which sidelined agriculture in favor of industry, produced no real wealth, but rather destitution and impoverishment, despite the apparent economic bustle. Particularly in the early stages of the industrial revolution, conservatives proved unable to understand the qualitative novelty of the looming economic development and accompanying transformation of notions of wealth. Bonald cannot quite see why a nation of services, such as the English for example, who need to import so much from foreign nations, should be richer than an autarkic agrarian nation, who institutions are intact and can also buy necessary industrial products in a pinch with its surplus. An autarkic nation, he believed, is just as wealthy as any other, especially since true wealth lies in “moral strength,” solidified in “morals and laws;” by contrast “all the vanity of these systems” resting on services and industry shows itself in the rapid increase in the population to be fed alongside parallel increased prices of daily needs and price reductions for luxury objects that only benefit a few— to say nothing of the intensification of social differences, which also contributes to the impoverishment and weakening of a nation. A fortiori, Bonald cannot understand why such nations should be counted as rich, when poverty increases every day in them. Nowhere is it so pronounced, he asserts, than in countries “rich by commerce,” first among them contemporary England. In light of the later development of socialist critiques of capitalism, it is interesting that the conservatives explain the mass poverty of capitalist countries not only with factors such as population increases, but in fact simultaneously formulate a theory of exploitation, if only implicitly. Baader describes the meetings and associations of factory owners in England: “which all concludes with the determination of a maximum for wages and a minimum for sale prices, being thus nothing more than a conspiracy against the proletariat, whose wages are kept perpetually below the natural value and price of their product (namely their work).” This rudimentary version of surplus value theory appears in an even simpler presentation by Villeneuve: employers retain part of the rightfully due wages to increase their own profit. Thus he arrives at capitalism’s insurmountable tendency for crisis, thereby developing a theory of crisis that foreshadows the later socialist diagnosis. The fundamental contradiction of capitalism, he believed, lay in the fact that it kept wages low in the pursuit of producing cheaper products and attaining higher profits, while on the other hand it must encourage material desires among the wide masses so that these cheaper goods can be sold at all. Thus, “it is impossible to reconcile principles this contradictory.”
The ensuing perpetual cyclic “extraction” and “contraction” of capitalist production exacerbated the material hardship of the working masses. The crisis, born from the womb of capitalism, is not only economic in nature; if capitalism asserts the self-legislation in the economic sphere and endorses the separation of the political and economic spheres, it cannot dodge the political consequences of economic development, as it depends on the support of the modern state. The foreign policy accompanying capitalism is an expansion and intensification of war. Bonald mocks the liberal theory of trade as “universal link between peoples” and points out that trade disputes provoke the bloodiest wars. In matters of domestic politics, the capitalist system is constantly at risk of revolution as it itself created revolutionary army of the proletariat and must keep it alive. If the feudal system populated the country with firmly rooted and naturally living families, “the fiscal, commercial, philosophical regime” fills the cities with agitated and rootless people: “the one, in short, gives citizens to the state, the other raises proletarians for the revolutions.” Mallet du Pan zeroes in on consequences of an alliance of “helpless men, day laborers, and manual workers” with an avant-garde of intellectuals advocating revolutionary theory: “Imagine that the dictionaries and the conventions of the Corderliers Club have become the catechism of this immeasurable crowd of Helots” and that these same are being incited to war by demagogues in the name of equality. Later conservatives agreed that such an alliance was quite likely, as they were convinced “that the revolution only has power, when almost all is dissolved, i.e. under haughty hungry writers and atomized factory workers.” What makes these workers seditious and pushes them into the arms of the avant-garde intellectuals is the atomization of community, from which inevitably follows the law of the jungle and naked self interest governing human relation. After this comes the despair of the proletarians, formally independent and equal, but in fact handed over to the strongest, without any lawful entitlement to protection and help—a situation he senses “increasingly acutely” due to his formal equalization with the rich. Following such a diagnosis, there was no shortage of voices predicting extreme concentration of wealth, an accompanying intensification of conflict between the haves and the have-nots, and finally a series of catastrophes. This perspective on the future was made less dismal by the expectation that the revolution would not be the triumph of the proletariat and socialism, but rather the fall of the whole monetary economy and bring about the return of the barter economy and feudal relations, as happened during the Roman Empire.