Conservatism is usually understood as an ideological movement that was born as a reaction to the French Revolution and its bourgeois-liberal ideas. In this monumental study, translated here for the first time into Greek, Panagiotis Kondylis shows that, on the contrary, conservatism should be understood in a much broader way, as a comprehensive ideological and socio-political reaction (of the upper strata) of pre-modern society against its dissolution, initially marked by the emergence of the modern centralized state, and later completed by the displacement of the agricultural economy by the industrial-capitalist one. After the definitive disintegration of pre-modern society, the representatives of conservatism ally with their former arch-enemies, the liberals, against radical democracy, which in turn simply radicalizes liberal ideals while simultaneously adapting patterns of conservative criticism of capitalism for its purposes. Conservatism has long been dead, says Kondylis; it died along with the era and society that gave birth to it. Thanks to the comprehensiveness of its perspective, the book constitutes a synthetic historical presentation of the major ideological and political developments that marked modern times, from their beginnings up to the 20th century.