Starting from the paradox of thought and the historical reality that the recognition of the right to life and dignity of existential outsiders was best secured in the era when noble Enlighteners represented bourgeois demands under the Ancien Régime, Mayer discovers the failure of the bourgeoisie in its attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable: the demand for securing bourgeois rule with that for free individual realization - however outsider-like this may seem as an existentially motivated deviation from norms. While Mayer's gaze also looks forward from historical experience, he calls for the continuation of Enlightenment detached from its bourgeois and historical origins as a permanent revolution, yet in clear opposition to an abstractly engaged utopianism of general societal emphasis, in its orientation.