THE DECLINE OF BOURGEOIS CIVILISATION
The Liberal Modern and Mass-democratic Post-modern
"IV. The Development of Mass-democracy, the Decline of the Bourgeois Way of Life and the Evolution of the Analytic-combinatory Thought-form
1. Reinterpretation and Transformation of Liberalism
The replacement of the synthetic-harmonising thought-form by the analytic-combinatory thought-form took place during the same period as the setting-aside of classical bourgeois liberalism by mass democracy - and this setting-aside was realised in turn for the most part as the reinterpretation and changing of liberalism in accordance with the needs of mass democracy, and not always as an open and programmatic clash between the two. That, of course, was not a coincidence, nor is it simply a matter of two temporally parallel processes but a deep structural correlation, which we here outline only without touching upon the methodologically prickly and perhaps infertile topic of genetic factors and priorities. It was in the analytic-combinatory thought-form that the manner of functioning of that social formation, which gradually covered over or absorbed the social formation in which the bourgeoisie prevailed or ruled and where liberalism was understood and practised mainly with the meaning given to it by the bourgeoisie, was ideally expressed. The guiding idea of the in principle ultimately equivalent elements or atoms, which all are found on one flat level and can be combined between themselves arbitrarily and incessantly, did indeed adequately yield a social reality, where politically and socially equal individuals as such can and are permitted to assume, that is independent from every other social presupposition, different social roles each time without there being any in principle limits placed on their mobility and on the ensuing game of combinations. Such a concept was completely foreign to bourgeois liberalism, i.e. to liberalism before its mass-democratic re-interpretation, and was indeed already combated in its early forms by the then liberals. Bourgeois liberalism knew barriers, which first became visible when they started to fall. Physical individuality as such was not even a sufficient condition for the political and social, not even for the legal, equality of all individuals. " (NBDL, pp.167- ; PAP, pp.211- )
The replacement of the synthetic-harmonising thought-form by the analytic-combinatory thought-form took place during the same period as the setting-aside of classical bourgeois liberalism by mass democracy - and this setting-aside was realised in turn for the most part as the reinterpretation and changing of liberalism in accordance with the needs of mass democracy, and not always as an open and programmatic clash between the two. That, of course, was not a coincidence, nor is it simply a matter of two temporally parallel processes but a deep structural correlation, which we here outline only without touching upon the methodologically prickly and perhaps infertile topic of genetic factors and priorities. It was in the analytic-combinatory thought-form that the manner of functioning of that social formation, which gradually covered over or absorbed the social formation in which the bourgeoisie prevailed or ruled and where liberalism was understood and practised mainly with the meaning given to it by the bourgeoisie, was ideally expressed. The guiding idea of the in principle ultimately equivalent elements or atoms, which all are found on one flat level and can be combined between themselves arbitrarily and incessantly, did indeed adequately yield a social reality, where politically and socially equal individuals as such can and are permitted to assume, that is independent from every other social presupposition, different social roles each time without there being any in principle limits placed on their mobility and on the ensuing game of combinations. Such a concept was completely foreign to bourgeois liberalism, i.e. to liberalism before its mass-democratic re-interpretation, and was indeed already combated in its early forms by the then liberals. Bourgeois liberalism knew barriers, which first became visible when they started to fall. Physical individuality as such was not even a sufficient condition for the political and social, not even for the legal, equality of all individuals. " (NBDL, pp.167- ; PAP, pp.211- )
"The bourgeois world-view emphasised anthropocentrism in its struggle against the theocentrism of theology, and the analytic-combinatory thought-form of mass democracy had to, for its part, fight bourgeois anthropocentrism, since the latter to a fair degree remained fixated on metaphysical essentialist thought. Thus, Man does not die, but anthropocentrism dies, just like theocentrism died earlier. Nothing shows us that after the death of anthropocentrism people will essentially behave differently than beforehand, just as the replacement of theocentrism by anthropocentrism did not bring about relatively dramatic changes - at least not the type of changes which would have fundamentally hindered us from generally understanding the motives and the way of thought of people from the past.
This similarity in behaviour is based on certain constants, amongst which the striving for self-preservation through the expanding of one's own power is determinative. However, these constants are only actualised in concrete historical situations and only in such situations do they have concrete dimension and content." (NBDL, pp.290-291;PAP, pp.328-29)
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