``try 'Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck' by Geoff Eley'' Ira Glazer
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Here is an except from the book you suggested by Geoff Eley:
``...I have commented on the consequesnces of this conceptual slippage from the bourgeoisie as a social category to liberalism as a political tradition extensively elsewhere. For one thing, the understanding of liberalims tends to be abstracted inappropriately from the strong forms of liberal democracy (including the latter's welfare-statism) in the late twentieth century, whose possibility is then projected quite unhistorically onto the collective agency of the bourgeoisie of a hundred years before. In the process, the more appropriate context for judging German liberalism, namely ``modernity'' of the time---the European conjuncture of constitutional revision, nation forming, and the state making of the 1860s, together with the culture of progress and the general remaking of the social environment for capitalism---get confused. The demonstrable affinities between a liberal political outlook and a specific configuration of bourgeois interests and aspirations at this particular time is also allowed a license stronger assumptions about the conceptual unity of bourgeois and liberal identities in general, whereas really these are separate phenomena. The common equation of ``liberalism'' and ``democracy'' compounds the conceptual mixing of ``liberal'' and ``bourgeois'' still further, making the connotative continuum of ``bourgeoisie = liberalism = democracy'' into an implied causal chain. But specifically democratic impulses originated elsewhere, namely, in the labor movement and other popular traditions. Indeed, the articulation of bourgeois aspirations in the late nineteenth century, including their liberal forms, usually took an exclusionary antidemocratic turn (as Wehler also sees), and were no less bourgeois for that.
In other words, we should perhaps be willing to consider the possibility that bourgeois interests and aspirations were becoming dominant in the political as well as the socioeconomic and cultural realms, because at present the main argument against this is that failure of the imperial state to acquire a liberal or even a liberal-democratic form. If we can free ourselves from the assumption that the achievement of bourgeois hegemony (in the sense of the political dominance of bourgeois values) can only be conceptualized via the organization of the bourgeoisie's collective political agency within a specific liberal movement or party, then the way would be clear to consider other, nonliberal forms of political articulation; and the social coding of ``authoritarianism'' in the pre-1914 state as ``aristocratic'', ``pre-industrial,'' and ``traditional'' rather than ``bougeois'' and ``modern'' would start to look more questionable. In other words, ``bougeois'' interests and values could be at work and ``modern'' political forms be in play, even if ``liberal'' ones were not...''
Which was certainly the case with Strauss and a host of others like Thomas Mann who immediately after the was (WWI) changed his political opinions to liberal while he managed to keep his asethetic ideals more or less intact. There is a fascinating split along the lines noted above between Thomas and his older brother Heinrich who wrote a parody of his brother's ideal Burgher, called Man of Straw...
Anyway, thanks. I'll get it and see.