The Reactionary Mind, 2nd edition – Meet The New Boss

When the conservative looks upon a democratic movement from below, this (and the exercise of agency) is what he sees: a terrible disturbance in the private life of power.

If the whole thesis of the Reactionary Mind revolves around this as the effective definition of ‘conservative’, it seems uninteresting at best, since it’s just a complaint against those with historical privilege seeking to maintain it and/or keep ‘the mob’ at bay, rather than a debate about what intelligent conservatives (Lilla, Scruton, etc) actually seek to conserve (and why they are generally against table rasa revolutionaries who want to erase history and culture).

The latter is a far deeper discussion about what matters, and is like to cross paths with e.g. postmodernists and their spawn, who think the answer is ‘nothing’.

I was going to ask you about the Nietzsche reading, because it seemed so obviously bad to me when Robin put it out before (and doesn’t fit at all well with, at least, recent people who are serious Nietzsche scholars.) I’ll admit that this post was a bit too round-about for me to know if I was completely following it, but it seems to me that you’re saying, “Well, Robin is probably not right on Nietzsche, but you can see how he could be right!” Is it more than that? (There’s more that I might want to say, but I’ve not read the book, nor do I think I’m likely to do so, so I’m a bit hesitant. Still, the Nietzsche reading seems to me to be, at best, too reductive to be useful. That doesn’t make me all that hopeful that, at best, someone such as myself is likely to find the book very useful.

Garrison Keillor

I’m conservative. I feel that what is inherited — family, community, culture and language — is more crucial than what is acquired — tattoos, an Armani suit, a taste for artisan beers, a cat who loves you — and there are as many conservatives on the left as on the right, maybe even more. I want my daughter’s school bus driver to be conservative, obsessively checking his rearview mirrors, and not resenting the rules of the road as an infringement of his liberties. I’d like her English teacher to correct grammar and usage rather than urging the kids to write about their upbringings and never mind if they misspell “abysmal” or “horrendous.”

Martin Luther Smiled

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops chose a conservative archbishop for a key post Tuesday, signaling resistance to Pope Francis’s vision for the church among the Catholic hierarchy in the U.S.. Archbishop Joseph Naumann, of Kansas City, was elected chairman of the committee on Pro-Life Activities. In a vote of 96 to 82, he defeated Cardinal Blase Cupich, of Chicago, who is seen as a liberal in the church and a close ally of the pope.

The vote breaks a longstanding tradition of the position being held by a cardinal—an unusual lapse of deference in a highly rank-conscious body—and suggests that Catholic leaders in the U.S. remain largely resistant to the changes Pope Francis is trying to bring to the church.

See also Robin’s brief remark on Burke’s supposed ultramontanism (Chap 5.) vs. Emily Jones’ 2017 argument that Burke’s conservatism was essentially ‘a catholic vision’ of history, and that Burke in fact sought to liberate the Irish catholic underclass from their protestant overlords. (pp. 45-46)

I’ve been instantly convinced by Corey’s thesis myself, and I wonder if part of the resistance might be culture-dependent (that is to say, maybe one’s reaction to the word “conservative” or “reactionary” may depend on the general implicit cultural environment).

Conservativism as philosophy is what happens only after leftist politics gets intolerably but unavoidably personal in the sense that it is felt to threaten some or other private hierarchy of power that rightfully should stand as a rock against it.

I find it helpful to think about it in terms of the historical distribution of power within the Western social world. From the mid-17th century to the late 20th, there has been a historical movement of people asking for their share of power. Reactionary politics is the fight against this movement (seen from this perspective, I would slightly dispute the adjective leftist, though; surely leftist politics is a proper subset of the movement).

what are we feeling when we feel that way?

I think we feel all the people seated at Corey’s table were all on the same side in that fight. (And as usual, I don’t see that Nietzsche is particularly problematic: sure he wrote many vitriolic criticisms of both sides of that fight and, sure, the very tool his philosophy provides proved very useful for both sides, but I don’t think he himself wrote anything but demeaning insults about one side whereas he regularly writes that the other has at least some potential for greatness.)

@5

“I want my daughter’s school bus driver to be conservative, obsessively checking his rearview mirrors, and not resenting the rules of the road as an infringement of his liberties.”

Thank you for confirming what I’ve suspected for 30 years: I’m not missing anything good by not reading Keillor.

@6

This is where I got to when reading Ted Honderich’s book on the subject 20 years ago. There is nothing to say about “conservatism” as an abstraction raised to the same level as “socialism” or “liberalism”. This is because nobody is a “political conservative” in an abstract sense – they are Spanish conservative, French conservative, US conservative, etc. Each of those traditions has histories and owns what it regards as its achievements, regardless of whether anyone could construct a transnational political theory that validated all of them.

In Anglo-American political commentary there nowadays appears to be a presumption that Tories will endorse Republicans and vice versa, but there is no reason why either side should do this. A British Conservative could regard the NHS as an achievement not to be dismantled for the sake of arid Randian doctrine. Some of them already do, it’s not a thought experiment.

Nice try, John -I say it in the nicest way possible.
“I use the words conservative, reactionary, and counterrevolutionary interchangeably: not all counterrevolutionaries are conservative — Walt Rostow immediately comes to mind — but all conservatives are, in one way or another, counterrevolutionary”. That´s precisely why those words are not interchangeable; it´s not the best choice to use them like that. Scandinavian socialdemocracy is not Revolutionary (with capital “R”), it has counterrevolutionary effects and implications (democratic, liberal and prosocial too), and it´s not conservative per se nor reactionary. Is Gunnar Myrdal conservative, reactionary AND counterrevolutionary?

– somehow – and as there is the ”Närrische Zeit” in Germany –
(each year from 11/11 to ”Aschermittwoch” – mostly end of february) –
and in this time everybody who likes to pick something else instead of the good ole Cowboy or Indian costume – the question really HIT us -(some so called ”Ex-pats”) –

Who to be?

There are Trump-Masks and Trump-Costumes around – and for sure at the Kölner (Cologne) Fasnacht there will be some HUUUGE floats again pretending to be US Conservatives – but who will still believe it as there is the ”Närrische Zeit” all year long in ”TEH homeland” and nobody of us can pretend anymore to (still) take it seriously in any way…?

casmilus 11.15.17 at 2:57 pm @ 15 —
But that’s small-c, archaic-meaning conservative — one who or that which prefers to maintain the old and distrusts change. Just so, the Democratic Party in the US is, or used to be, conservative about the New Deal. This is not how the word is most often used in contemporary political discussions, from the barking and grunting on Twitter up. Often the meanings are contradictory or at least incoherent. Reactionary used to mean not conservative but desiring return to an often imaginary previous state of affairs — which in the US at least would be a radical change from the present.

I did Burke using the plummy voice I use to do Nanny Ogg when we read discworld novels.

My understanding of the deal with Burke and his family is that they were going either the crypto-Catholic or the assimilationist route (take your pick). But, seeing as though he was apparently raised in an environment where he became a fluent Irish speaker, he would have had a brogue in at least his younger years.

My only point of disagreement with Corey is that it seems to me that Oakeshott actually was conservative primarily in the temperamental sense. From what I can tell, he didn’t reciprocate the admiration of Thatcher (an archetypal radical reactionary).

What’s interesting is the eagerness of political conservatives to claim Oakeshott and a fictionalised version of Burke as their intellectual forebears, rather than, say de Maistre or Carlyle.

Ugh. A fallacious method of analysis is fallacious even if done toward a good cause.

“Would it really be surprising if Nietzsche were great, and Hayek were great and Burke were great, but the common denominator, such as it is, is this distinctly dicey thing: reactionary attitude?”

To me, no. To you, no. To Robin, my impression (willing to be educated) is that he uses his typology dismissively. He links people together again and again for the purpose of dismissing them. And his linking method is eyerollingly conspiratorial. People who never seem to have read each other or interacted in any way get counted not just in the same lump, but get dinged for each other’s crimes (and often using interpretations that are incredibly uncharitable). Now his response appears to be something along the lines of: that’s fair because I’m identifying a nasty strain. But that’s a method we whine about incessantly with regard to the left.

So the left table under his methods would be what? Historically eugenicists obviously (clearly Sanger and the whole poor (often black) people shouldn’t be breeding crew counts since the way philosophies drift over time IS NOT CREDITED to conservatives it shouldn’t be credited to progressives either). Marx and Mao and Che I would think (I won’t require Stalin since he wasn’t much of thinker though I’m not actually sure he is out of bounds since Pinochet is considered in bounds). Mills obviously, so it isn’t all bad, and if you were put off Mills because of Mao it would probably be a bad thing.

The problem is that Corey falls into the classic tribalist trap–our group has lots of fine distinctions so we clearly can’t attribute faults X, Y, and Z to US, but their group is all one big lump so everyone is basically a secret Hitler.

Thomas Beale, have you read Scruton on the WHO? He’s not “intelligent”, he’s clearly a ridiculous idiot. What he writes on modern music is also a cringeworthy joke. It’s telling that your first example of someone who shouldn’t be lumped in with he rest is exactly the kind of raving loony who really should be. Why did you select this idiot as your example?

Which is part of a bigger problem a few people have here – they say you can’t just lump a bunch of arseholes together for being arseholes, then either can’t say why they’re not arseholes, or present counter examples who are obvious arseholes (Keillor above is another good example of this).

Then others do the same thing in their liberal counter example: Sebastian says things about Dangerous that aren’t true and says we should include Stalin because Robin included Pinochet, only Robin didn’t, and holbo said we shouldn’t.

Conservative defences can surely be better than this?

Very vigorous post John, which led me to wonder something about the nature of Robin’s characterization and criticism: is it at bottom expressivist? In other words, does Robin find an underlying “me-first” emotional tone that sweeps across many other conceptual distinctions but genuinely captures them all as an attitude? This is in part a reply to Sebastian H’s @27 very sharp final comment.

– which actually reminds me on this… ”article” I once read about ”WHAT TRUMP AND KIM KARDASHIAN HAVE IN COMMON” and it was -(more or less) about this video of Kanye West ”Famous” which put a lot of naked people in the same bed like Bush and Hobbes and Hayek and Nietzsche, Rand, Scalia, Reagan, Tocqueville, Roosevelt, Thatcher,
Jünger, Schmitt, Churchill, Schlafly, Nixon, Kristol, Fukuyama, and Taylor Swift – and Taylor really didn’t like that…?

FaustusNotes @ 29
“Thomas Beale, have you read Scruton on the WHO? He’s not “intelligent”, he’s clearly a ridiculous idiot. What he writes on modern music is also a cringeworthy joke. It’s telling that your first example of someone who shouldn’t be lumped in with he rest is exactly the kind of raving loony who really should be. Why did you select this idiot as your example?”

I have no idea if you mean the W.H.O. or The Who or what he might have said about either. He’s certainly said intelligent things about modern non-music (Boulez etc), but that’s pretty far from the basis of his conservatism, which isn’t rooted in his musical aesthetics (it’s the other way round).

His general philosophy is sound and his conservative viewpoint entirely coherent. Actually I just picked him as a representative of still living non-ideologues who have useful things to say about the definition of the classifier ‘conservative’; I could have picked Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple) or Christopher Hitchens or any other writer or philosopher who doesn’t buy into class warfare. I’m sorry but you’ll have to do better than ‘ridiculous idiot’.

FWIW I have never voted right wing in my life. But the one thing I could agree with Peter Hitchens on is that the Tories haven’t got a clue about how to be conservative, and that in fact in the UK, true conservatism has no representative. (If it did, that party would be centrist / rationalist, rather than emotional / subjectivist, which describes both wings of today’s spectrum here and everywhere right now).

The original comment was merely to say that the likely thesis of the book is founded upon an obviously straw-man definition of ‘conservative’ that (probably) has no meaning. And at the end of the day, Reactionaries aren’t interesting, they’re usually just angry, and probably are defending their inherited interests – as expected. A good definition of ‘conservative’, which isn’t to do with temperament (merely a kind of subjective character-assignment), would be far more interesting.

@22

Many socialist movements, and some liberals, are committed to internationalism and ever closer integration, at least notionally. Marxist movements are going to be in favour of world unity in the long run, even if they are presently concerned with national liberation struggles.

Which is why some conservatives vilify them as “globalisers”. One commonality of conservatives would be that they want to keep the nation/nation-state united and apart, though of course that is not unique to conservatives. I’ve been at meetings with “People’s Brexit” campaigners over the last few years.

Well then Thomas Beale, I suggest you dig it out, because it’s a classic in the genre of bullshit about how the WHO is going to take over the world and send black helicopters to get everyone. It’s also funded by a tobacco company, I think. (And I was obviously talking about the World Health Organization, there is no need to be facetious). If your supposed intellectual buys into every single ridiculous line about transnational government and suppression of democracy, then he’s an idiot not an intellectual. Perhaps this is the indication of how these people all share the temperament that Robin identifies – not what they say when talking about topics in the core of their attention, but their willingness to completely uncritically regurgitate absolute bullshit when they’re paid to do so by a tobacco company on a topic slightly outside their core discipline. His work on the WHO shows that he is not a serious thinker, and you should question whether anything he has ever written was anything except hackery.

Sebastian H He links people together again and again for the purpose of dismissing them. And his linking method is eyerollingly conspiratorial. […] Now his response appears to be something along the lines of: that’s fair because I’m identifying a nasty strain.

All this seems to me quite unfair to Corey. Corey can of course correct me if I misunderstood, but it seems to me he links people according to a simple criteria: whether they want to roll back the movement towards more autonomy of the dominated part of society, even (or in fact especially) if this entails destroying the social fabric. Call this the reactionary mind. Now, does X profess principles according to the reactionary mind? Nothing is conspiratorial in that question, and whether the reactionary mind is nasty and worthy of dismissal is an evaluation of the reactionary mind which is logically completely independent of whether a given X has it or not. Among the list above, there are people I don’t know at all or don’t know enough about but I think a very strong case can be made (often an obvious one) that Hobbes, Hayek, Burke, Donald Trump, Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, Antonin Scalia, Ronald Reagan, Tocqueville, Margaret Thatcher, Carl Schmitt, Winston Churchill, Phyllis Schlafly, Richard Nixon, and George W. Bush all have a reactionary mind in this sense. What’s your problem with that?

So the left table under his methods would be what?

In order to answer this question, you should specify which trait you consider the fundamental common link of the “left table”, as not having a reactionary mind is merely a negative property. Jesus, Erasmus and Levi-Strauss did not have a reactionary mind. That doesn’t tell you much about what they have in common.

What you could imagine is lumping together all the people who on the contrary embraced the movement towards autonomy of the dominated parts of society, even (or especially) if this entailed destroying the social fabric. Arguably, you would seat there for instance Rousseau, Robespierre, Marx, Frederick Douglass, Louise Michel, Durkheim, Rosa Luxemburg, Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Fanon, Bourdieu, Chomsky but not for instance Voltaire, Hume, Lenine (certainly in his practice of power but arguably already in his writings) or of course Staline. It is an interesting question which head of state could qualify. FDR, perhaps? Mandela?

Since Scruton has come up, this may be of interest: https://platofootnote.wordpress.com/category/nature-of-philosophy/
I found that by way of this: https://platofootnote.wordpress.com/2017/11/13/the-nature-of-philosophy-scruton-vs-williamson-edition/#comments

John Holbo no doubt would greatly enjoy the way Pigliucci vindicates philosophy against the vulgar. He creams the assholes. Nonetheless, I think the centrality of religion in this discussion highlights the non-centrality of religion in Robin’s book (first edition, at least.) Absent a coherent critique of relgion (or objective understanding, if you will,) I suspect Robin’s work ultimately is too shallow to serve as an advance in political science/philosophy.

Also, quite aside from the questionable value in distinguishing personal psychological flaw like reactionary minds from religion, or even actual politics, is hard. Conservatives believe some people are better than others, but reactionaries get crazy mad about it? Actually using this idea is stressing my telepathy big time.

And, in many respects the real muscle behind conservatism is women, especially (though not exclusively) religious women. Can’t say I’m finding much help in Robin on how that works.

And lastly, it just seems to me any practical politics has to address how conservatives decide which people are in the inner circle, and which are not. Personally I’m inclined to think part of the problem for conservatives in practical politics is that when the budgets get written, altogether too many of the good people, as they flattered themselves, discovered they were not. It is sort of the opposite problem to left politics, where personal costs in pursuing collective action are a barrier to success. In conservatism, it is the costs of collective action to the person that threaten an insurmountable wall.

I agree with the book’s thesis for the most part. Probably the psychologizing has to be supplemented. Like others, I occasionally thought, isn’t this true of a lot of liberals and leftists too? But none of that means the analysis of the stream of thought is wrong. I also think the reactionary nature of today’s conservatism/right wing is wrongly concealed by the blander aspects of Burke and Oakeshott. But I think populism is a big problem for he argument.

Maybe Corey’s identified a sadistic reactionary, and we ought to consider the possible existence of a masochistic reactionary, as well? The idea that a subordinate position, consciously understood, is inherently a leftist one, doesn’t seem fruitful or persuasive to me. It’s just factually not true. Or maybe rightwing populism is just incoherent and has never been successfully theorized–except that right-populists do seem to think it has been.

It really isn’t clear though why so many self-declared liberals, like Lilla, jumped to the “defense” of the conservatives the book supposedly “attacked.”

If I were trying to make an actually useful, super-broad statement I would try something in this vein:

Conservatives tend to make errors in judgment about how the current society is doing things poorly. Their errors tend to justify the current structure because they downplay the current harms.

Leftists tend to make errors in judgment about what the current society is actually good at. Their errors tend to amplify the existing problems and downplay the bad sides of the solutions.

Both sides would do well to pay close attention to the types of errors that their mindset makes, but in reality they play close attention to the types of errors the other side makes compounding their own errors time and time again.

That is a super rough first pass, but much more useful.

It does have the distinct downside of not making it easy to demonize people, so I understand that is a fatal flaw in pursuing it further.

So did G.K. Chesteron stand for Garrison Keillor Chesterton?

Z@41: If the Left involves “movement towards autonomy of the dominated parts of society, even (or especially) if this entailed destroying the social fabric”, does that mean that the Right includes everybody who doubts whether destroying the social fabric is a good idea? Rather a large number, I would suggest.

Incidentally, given their viewpoint that the Jews dominated society, was not “autonomy of the dominated parts of society” exactly what the unspeakably evil Nazis wanted?

@30: To say that Cardinal Cupich is seen as liberal and he is viewed as an ally of the Pope seems unobjectionable. Given that polarization between liberals and conservatives is very much a front-burner issue in the modern Church, and those conflicts play out in U.S. party politics, why should anyone “leave Catholics out of it”? Both sides were at play in the fight over the Affordable Care Act in the United States, with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops leading the charge against and the Catholic Health Association backing the law. The latter gave the Administration political cover that was important at the time. That’s only one example.

“why does this pattern exist?” (The pattern in question being different characteristic “errors of judgment” typical of Left and Right tendencies, proposed by Sebastian above.)

I would say that politics expresses human ambivalence. Most of us are wishy-washy or conflicted, and uncertain about a great many things. It is a psychic stimulus to encounter anyone with definite opinions about how things should be, and it can be a relief of sorts on our cognitive load to be able to reduce our own political will to simplified support or opposition. The great division in the French National Assembly was not left and right of the speaker, but floor to rafters. The spirited mountaineers of the upper rows of seats drove the plainsmen in the lower rows. The former had a passionate rhetoric, full of certain and radical conviction; the latter swayed from pole to pole.

That many people, perhaps most people, can have many contradictory opinions about the direction in which lies the public good is not the least obstacle to sorting people into symmetric ideological bins by Type label, though. A greater obstacle than ambivalence is sincerity. Sincerity is the key to great theatrical acting, if you can fake that you have got it made. Just so, politics, which is just another form of show business. Sebastian’s symmetry requires left and right to be sincere in their judgments, so their differing Type errors of judgment balance. But, I suspect that many people are ambivalent about any public good at all or invested in the politics of contradiction or negligence, not conservation or design. A bank robber is not usually a revolutionary; she attacks the institution, true, but wants the money she stole to be good for payments the morning after — she wills money capitalism to go on and is in that sense a conservative, even if she acts to disrupt the system ephmerally. We speak of the vested interest as defining a kind of conservatism, but we might think of a vested interest in parasitism as being the essence of reactionary conservatism — a politics of bank robbers yesterday, depositors and lenders today. What error of judgement should we apply to the livery of such a partisan configuration?

Was Milton Friedman “sincere” in his political argumentation on behalf of his vision of “classical liberalism”, the American public good, or neoclassical economics? Was his economics or politics a continuation of tendencies traceable at least to the 17th century?

I do not think Friedman was a trustworthy narrator of his own understanding of the economy; he was too good a polemicist to risk any but a fake sincerity in political combat. His power as a public intellectual rested on his cynical willingness to lie in order to win the argument, something he did frequently and with verve. If he was winning the political battle, he felt no need to win the argument for the sake of truth. If gold bugs were applauding him, he was not about to disabuse them of their faith; if the liberals were on him about the importance of an active, countercyclic fiscal policy, he was ready with a sophisticated narrative of economic history and theory.

Did Friedman have anything in common with hard money conservatives going back to Hume or Turgot? Not in the details of either his economics or his political positioning. And, yet, there is an outline of a perennial outlook there. A lodestone at work orienting him.

I find Corey’s work most useful in penetrating that layer of tactical concession to the times and effective opposition and revealing the perennial sentiments and orienting lodestones. I am convinced that the core of reactionary conservatism is the desire to dominate in a social and economic hierarchy. Not an error of judgment per se, though errors of judgment may be revealing of the truth of that core desideratum. This is where I think Corey scores, in penetrating to a common orienting desire.

Like other commenters, I think populism can be a bit problematic, because while the demagogues of populist rebellion may well, like Trump, epitomize the amoral seeking after social domination arguably typical of reactionary conservatives in every age and place, populism entails a body of followers invested in egalitarianism, even if it is only the egalitarianism of membership in their in-group’s club.

“The Insider as Outsider” does seem a very good subtitle for Corey’s book. The history of conservatism, in a philosophical sense, expounded in texts for a literate class of the like-minded and the persuadable, is an apology/defense for the most part for the values of tradition and proven methods.

If we move our terminology from conservatism to those of Confucianism, a very conservative social and political philosophy, we understand this ‘conservatism’ as explicit and codified respect and veneration for the proven successes and practices of our ancestors, those who provided us literally with the right to venerate, or dismiss their experiences, values, and practices. Indigenous peoples are often very resistant to change, in many cases because proven practices appeared to increase chances of group survival in often hostile environments. There’s normally some logic to beliefs and practices.

I’m not sure that deploying negative, or positive terms adds anything to our understanding of the familiar, or the new.

Thomas Beale, we aren’t here to defend scrutons record, were here to see if he should sit at robin’s table. You argued he shouldn’t, but I’m saying we can infer the truth of his reactionary principles from his errors of judgement in defenseman of conservatism, because from that we can see what his real social preferences are, unrestricted by the conventions of a field he knows well. And in that we see he will take money from the worst corporate actors oft he 20th century in order to present a bullshit conspiracy theory in defense of their right to poison as many people as they can. I think that tells us whether he should sit at that table. And no writing a while book paid for by the worst corporate scoundrels to defend their right to destroy the health of billions is not an “error of judgement” – it’s an illustration of the person’s judgement.

Scruton’s big political statements are in “The Meaning Of Conservatism”, and also “Thinkers Of The New Left” (the original edition is more interesting than the recent reworking). He was a thing in the 80s, where his schtick was being one of the few outspoken pro-Thatcher anti-Left academics. Some of the essays in “The Philosopher On Dover Beach” (the 1990 collection, not the book about him by Mark Dooley, with the same title) are interesting, for example “Hegel As A Conservative Thinker” and “Analytic Philosophy And The Neglect Of Aesthetics”.

I think he may have changed his mind about homosexuality, from the notorious opinions expressed in “Sexual Love” and elsewhere.

Negative views of Scruton are a great source of delight though, and not all of them come from the Left. Eric Griffiths’s review of his “Guide To Modern Culture” (TLS, 1999) is a classic of the genre, and Stefan Collini has had numerous swipes. Neither of those gentlemen are the stereotype post-68 trendy cultural studies academic that is Roger’s preferred opponent.

Faustusnotes @ 59
you argue that his behaviour rather than his mainstream writing (i.e. philo, etc) is the guide to his real thoughts. Maybe you are right, but then, if that’s the bar for anyone, we can just ignore writing and philosophy altogether, and examine everyone’s documented interactions with society, the corporate class etc. Which of course isn’t practically possible for the vast majority of writers / philosophers in history. Although Newton still doesn’t look good…

And we still don’t have anything close to a meaningful definition of ‘conservatism’ that isn’t either a question of ‘temperament’, or a question of self-interest and tribal allegiance. An interesting and useful definition would be one that a true philosopher would want to see applied universally, i.e. in the sense of Kant. Any other definition is just going to be in the service of self-interest (according to most here) and it thus just an excuse, not a real ‘position’.

Just started Georg Lukacs The Destruction of Reason, 1952, which I guess could also be subtitled The Reactionary Mind. From the intro:

For what ulti­mately determines an ideologist’s philosophical level is the
depth to which he fathoms the questions of his day, his ability to raise
these to the peak of philosophical abstraction, and the extent to which the
standpoint derived from his class base allows him to explore these questions
in their full depth and breadth.

1) Lukacs of course engages in immanent critique, embedded in history, economics, sociolology. The reactions he studies are partly determined, first by the bourgeois revolutions French Revolution etc, and later by the reaction to the Paris Commune; and partly determined by each stage of capitalism and imperialism. Lukacs “reactionary mind” is a defense against liberation movements and after 1870 an attempt to repress socialism. The reactionary mind is the anti-communist mind, and bourgeois liberal capitalism is simply a more subtle holding action.

2) It is also a modernism. The current forces in might be an the various multicultural movements as a bourgeois reaction, and the “Right” as their opposition. The 1960s-70s, in anti-colonialism, 2nd wave feminism, and black nationalism were revolutionary movements with socialist bases and support from global communism; the current manifestations I think are reactionary.

3) I have read an excerpt, and Lukacs turned me against Nietzsche in one paragraph.

4) I should try again to read Corey Robin’s book symptomatically and comparatively to the Lukacs. And should also read Mayer’s Persistence of the Ancien Regime. Busy busy.

I haven’t read Corey’s book but I wonder how an explaining conservatism as the world view of dominators who want to cling on to power explains its popularity? For me, an analysis of conservatism would start from the fact that it’s a modern ideology and needs to enable an alliance between elites and sections of the masses numerous enough to win elections….

There seems to be two different kinds of conservatives, social and economic.

Social conservatives think there may be a systemic value in the continuation of ancient mores: of race, tribe, religion, sexual preference, etc. However, almost all social conservatives also accept the tenets of individual self-determination and democratic redress. (Contemporary social conservatives, at least.) This sets up a tension inside their camp, because we all learn more, and the mores change, and some change quickly.

Economic conservatives carry the premise, really the slogan, that everyone can be rich — if only people will put enough effort into it! Their more refined restatement of this premise is that everyone’s best efforts will put each one into the proper level of a material hierarchy of just deserts. But these ideal premises are empirically false and theoretically unprovable. It hasn’t happened in the 350 years of the market system, and there are a handful of reasons why it cannot.

Perhaps this is one thing that causes the economic conservatives to favor organized religion (making a connection to social conservatism). Poorer individuals will remain economically conservative by accepting their “failure” to make good as a part of Providence, “some are born to sing the blues”, and so they will not question the structure of the economic system. Thus religion is not only an opioid of the masses, it is a protective cloak that the whole system needs for justification, and which the rich use to justify their achievements. The hierarchy of just deserts is accepted by a wide social agreement that is arrived at from different avenues, rich or poor.

Economic distress causes both kinds of conservatism, social and economic, to reassert themselves (and so does war and personal existential crisis). Thus “social insiders realizing they are outsiders” makes a good subtitle for the history of published reactionary expression. But the published expression is not the ding an sich. There is something underneath it all. We may be forced to bring in the psychoanalyst’s couch because it is not addressed by intellectual argument. It is deeper than self-interest or need to dominate. It is bodily fear, comforted by having a bank account.

66:that volume comes in for special scorn

I was aware of some of the controversy, and had hesitated for a long while. DoR is by its nature antagonistic to many trends in Western Philosophy and Western Marxism.

Here is a qualified defense by Janos Kelemen in 2005.

Although not dedicated or committed, I do find myself more open to approved Soviet science and philosophy than most, or than I used to be. They were not all robots, all the time.

John, you write “Sebastian, why does this pattern exist? Not to be dumb about it, but it isn’t exactly an accident, looks to me. This doesn’t look to me like a more useful correction to Corey’s stuff. It looks like an observed regularity one would like to explain, and Corey’s stuff is an attempted explanation.”

I wonder if maybe we disagree about the general direction of Corey’s book. You write as if he was aiming at a clear minded sociological or psychological investigation of conservatives. The book strikes me as much more in the vein of 18th and 19th century imperialist tracts–“Meet the scary savages and why we must conquer them Volume IX”. You don’t expect the imperialist tract to fairly and usefully discuss anything very deep about ‘the savages’. Sometimes they come across some tidbit that is insightful, but the general thrust of it isn’t meant to come to understanding them. Sometimes a very good author of such tracts accidentally end up humanizing their subjects, but generally the idea is to play up the differences so we can feel superior to them.

Why do conservatives tend to downplay the harms of the current order and fail to see the safer changes that could be made to it?

Why do leftists tend to downplay the value of the current order and fail to see the risks of changes that they want to make to it?

I don’t know. But but I’m pretty sure that the approach Corey takes in his book and most of the time in his posts isn’t helping us figure it out.

From the OP though helpful reminder from LFC “So this project could be a stinker. Or maybe it’s done well and you see enlightening, heretofore unnoticed features of these figures, forced to sit cheek-by-jowl for the duration of the exercise. You don’t just dismiss this as ‘lumping’.”

This feels like an unfair reduction of the criticism of Corey’s book. The objection is that it isn’t useful lumping. It isn’t useful in a number of ways.

First, it divides the left and the right and then makes a number of points which are if not equally applicable to both, are largely applicable to both. This ends up being intensified by–

Second, when drawing his distinctions he draws them broadly about the right and narrowly about the left.

So on authoritarian impulses we end up lumping everybody on the right as closet Hitlers drawing on numerous wide ranging historical examples, but on the left we have to be sure to limit ourselves only to the most modern non-authoritarian examples such that Mao and Stalin don’t count against our side. The problem with doing that is that you are only making things seem PARTICULARLY attached to the right wing by ignoring all the left wing examples.

This all gets horribly mushed up as soon as you realize that what he ends up describing as ‘reactionary’ could easily be applied to leftists in power. Stalin and Mao and Hugo Chavez act in many of the same ways that he describes as right wing reactionary once they gain power. But that doesn’t mean that they suddenly have mapped onto the right wing of most discussions. “People in power try to thwart people who challenge their power” is often a correct formulation, but it applies to Hillary Clinton vs. Sanders too, as well as Obama vs. Romney and Stalin vs. nearly everyone, so the right/left progressive/reactionary lens isn’t very informative there.

Third, or maybe 2a) he is super tribal about distinctions. Our side has millions of distinctions that let us escape ‘lumping’, theirs has none. Is that just super convenient or is it great analysis?

“3) I have read an excerpt, and Lukacs turned me against Nietzsche in one paragraph.”
mcmanus @65

Can you drop a quotation of the excerpt here, or is it too long? I perused the link to Kelemen, but the few references to Nietzsche in it mostly have to do with Irrationalism. A term/concept that is useful (but rarely deployed in a way that’s actually useful) as a tentative and initial approach to some nasty metaphysical problems, but it is also aggressively vague and freighted with normative biases. As an analytical object it’s often called upon in such a way as to remove it from the plane of phenomena it seeks to address.

….Not that it’s surprising that Lukacs has problems with N. The antagonism many left thinkers have always found in N.’s thought is no real mystery, but it’s fascinating how consistently they have misperceived (or at least misrepresented) the basis of that antagonism.

[…]see Kenneth Minogue, The Liberal Mind

What? Even the names match.

I can understand the impulse. You think hard about the most important issues, spend years preparing yourself to apply the best and most erudite lore that there is.

And finally, you win the argument by multiple obliteration.

But then the other side basically doesn’t give a damn. What could be the reason? Ah! I know! They must be dysfunctional in some sense!

It seems to me that contemporary “conservatives” are mainly interested in money and power with a bit of casual cruelty towards supposed inferiors thrown in.

They’re over-privileged fuckups who depend on the glass floors inherent in stratified societies for whatever place or role they’ve been able to maintain. Exactly what privilege they’re defending depends on the privileges that that society recognises; back when market economics were growing, the big reactionary thing was to defend the privileges of the aristocracy, but now money is king.

[thus the big push for inherited wealth, specifically: not a one of them has the talent/drive/social-skills to become or even remain rich on their own merits. Real-world markets depend on personal qualities, and the people who can succeed through personal effort aren’t the ones who need or support social ossification. But their children… ]

Reaction is the political equivalent of incessantly making monty-python quotes and wondering why nobody laughs.

Robin and Wilkinson (who must please Holbo by affirming the libertarian affinity with feudalism) both want to construct a theory of politics that is part historical/situationist and part ideological. To use an arboreal analogy, the roots are a particular ideology of authority and the branches and leaves are historical/situationist strategies of acting upon that ideology. Strains of conservatism (and, by implication, liberalism) represent strategies to either strengthen social hierarchies (or loosen them). And this hierarchical dualism is, again, rooted in ideology.

But this is rather old fashioned, no? Are we not forced to reckon with scientism? That is: if we are to take the modernist step and see that beliefs arise out some combination of historical circumstance and self-interest, we are equally compelled to see that beliefs themselves are rooted in biological veracities, not merely conceptual realities. This is necessary because we can no longer perceive a conceptual realm (anti/authoritarianism ) as anything but an emergent phenomenon of neurology and psychology.

So, when we say “conservatives are like this” and “liberals are like this” we must speculate on the naturalistic, biological grounds of this distinction.

My partner and I, for instance, were thinking about the typical way in which victims of sexual harassment or worse often describe freezing in the moment of violation. I suspect, as I think you must, that if someone perceived to be a social inferior to were to harass or abuse you sexually you would be less likely to freeze. A well-to-do woman being cat-called by construction workers might take offense but anxiety or panic would be less likely to arise. If your boss does this, however, it is more likely that the heart beats, the skin cools, and we are shocked into inaction.

Would this divergent responsiveness to stress, if empirically confirmed, not give us a window into some innate capacity to perceive and a react to authority? My partner equated the freezing to a conflicting impetus to fight/flight and, like a canine, lay down and show one’s belly to the alpha.

Our politics must be some manifestation of our nature as social primates. Obviously this is the subject of much recent and on-going research. Can any conclusions from these fields shed light on the topic of political typology?

I’d suggest the psychologizing is useful by reference to Alison’s reference to reactionaries’ “feeling.” We go wrong in assuming they are upset because of equal hiring practices. We probably go wrong in assuming they’re upset because of hiring practices at all–that they are worried about losing privilege in the sense that they were in line for a promotion that went to a woman or African-American they assumed they’d always be able to boss around. They are upset about *something*, though, and there is always an idealized image of the past ready to show them how this or that thing that happened yesterday, not only wouldn’t have happened before the fall, but is inherently related to the cause of everything bad.

They are not especially conservative in any sense an objective observer would recognize. All the people around them love the community, and continuity, as much as they do. They aren’t objectively more committed to conserving things. They’re “conservative” only in the sense that “conservative” is the word that’s important to them. If they got an actually conservative regime, they would still be miserable, and would have to find some new ideology to explain their misery.

Will Wilkinson’s piece is very good. I don’t see it as a piece with Corey’s at all because Will tries to understand the different nuances and break points instead of lumping everyone together. He mentions something that has been on my mind for a few years: the libertarian CRITIQUE of liberalism is very strong. Libertarianism as a stand alone philosophy sucks. That analysis is true of quite a few modern critiques. The Marxist critique is very useful. Raise Marxism to its own philosophy and it is more terrible than the systems it was developed to critique.

” I get why psychologizing, plus ideological hostility (no point denying it) leads to some uncharity. But I still think the psychology is important for understanding conservatism, and even if you think Corey is painting in a few too many blacks, the picture is still basically right.”

Ehhhh, I don’t think so. Corey isn’t good at understanding the psychology of conservatism and the picture he paints of THAT isn’t basically even close. What he is writing about would be much better characterized as a cluster of psychological techniques for defending the current order WHATEVER IT IS. If you look at it that way, suddenly it isn’t mysterious that a bunch of things he attributes to the right are often just as present on the left when the left is in power. It involves techniques that Hugo Chavez used but that isn’t shocking–not because Chavez wasn’t a ‘true leftist’, but rather because Corey isn’t identifying things that actually cleave along the right/left political axis. He’s identifying anti-democratic ways of maintaining power structures. The left uses that when they have the power structures (for modern tendencies in that direction see US university cultures as well as Communist countries). But like the right, there are different degrees of that (which Corey pretty much ignores).

If he had improved his book on any of the dimensions (properly labeling what he was talking about, understanding the different degrees of what he was talking about, or understanding the different cleavage points of conservatism) it would have been more useful. But he doesn’t really want to understand conservatives, the project is to demonize them. Because of that he can’t really notice that his labels are wrong, and he definitely can’t draw attention to when his critique applies to his side.

politics, as I wrote earlier, is human uncertainty and ambivalence projected outward from the individual psyche into the political society

I’d say politics is an activity people do in groups. We don’t get to define political parties for ourselves personally, and we don’t get to define what the important political questions of our time are, either. I may feel that I’m importantly “conservative” because I like Shakespeare more than Jonathan Franzen, or importantly “liberal” because I like Lydia Davis more than I like Alice Hoffman, but I can’t exactly speak for “conservatives” or “liberals” on that basis. Or if I like living where my parents did versus moving to a city far away. We could develop an entire psychological system based on those definitions of “liberal” and “conservative” and it still would have nothing to do with actual politics; people who insisted on it would not and should not be taken seriously on the subject.

If we did, we’d probably have a lot of trouble understanding Corey Robin, though.

There is a lot here to digest.
I have not read Corey’s revised edition.
But referring to the original, I agree with his conclusion. I don’t always follow how he got there.
It seems to me that Conservatives view public goods as scarce resources. Particularly abstract goods. And you could agree that hierarchy and status are zero sum.
They also seem to see liberty as zero sum.
For a group of people who talk about liberty so much, they seem determined to prevent anyone else from using any.

Another thing about conservatism, of course, which as I recall Corey incorporates but it isn’t original w/ him as he wd no doubt acknowledge, is that conservatives, again with the qualifier “at least historically,” have believed in the notion of a governing class: i.e., that some people, by virtue of having been born into circumstances permitting the acquisition of a certain kind of education and attitudes etc., are fit to rule in both public and private spheres.

This is not the same as e.g. the Soviet nomenklatura, who were party members and others who had accumulated power and/or wealth under the Soviet system. They were a sort of ruling class, but they were not a governing class as conservatives have thought of it, b.c the latter involves the significant accident of having been born into it. An archetypal historical instance is the centrality of the idea of a governing class in the worldview/ideology of British Conservatism (at least before Thatcherism), well described by Samuel Beer in his classic British Politics in the Collectivist Age.

Sebastian H at 87: Obviously the psychological pattern of being resentful toward people who challenge your power isn’t confined to one part of the political spectrum. But I take it that the account has a few more pieces than that. So, we might say something like:

“Conservatism is characterized by affirmation of traditional social hierarchies and intense opposition to disrupting them, an attitude/worldview often accompanied by a psychological component of perceived victimhood by one’s inferiors.”

You might resist people who challenge your power regardless of where you are in politics. But the stories you tell about it are going to look pretty different. To take your example, defenders of the Chavez government justified its authoritarian actions precisely as a defense of the “revolutionary” effort to upset Venezuela’s economic hierarchies in the face of determined opposition from the beneficiaries of those hierarchies. Compare to this, say, the classic conservative worry about democracy that it will lead to the poor unjustly seizing property from the rich. Equality is a justifying norm in the first case (even if used cynically to prop up deeply unequal power structures); it is the danger to be avoided in the second case.

Your earlier account of the biases of progressives and conservatives, however, does seem to be vulnerable to this type of objection. “Progressives” and “conservatives” alike are biased toward discounting the flaws of those aspects of our society that are congenial to them, and also toward discounting the flaws of proposed reforms to those aspects of society that are uncongenial to them. This is why (as other commenters have pointed out) the literal meaning of “conservative” as “someone who wants to conserve” is totally unhelpful.

Sebastian H:

But Wilkinson’s piece is of a piece with Robin’s: the ideologies of reaction take different forms based on historical circumstance. It’s right there in W’s insistence that “modern classical liberal worries about democracy largely motivated [propertarianism].” It’s precisely the mode of analysis that Robin engages in when he situates conservative political theory in contemporary circumstances. In both cases, what’s at play is status, authority, hierarchy. The ideologies are clothing for the true interest, and change with the historical weather.

And so I find your critique confused. First, your version of “conservatives are like this / liberals are like this” ignores Robin’s key finding: namely, that conservative ideological leaders aren’t weary of change, over-cautious of social changes as such.

Secondly, while I agree that we, as individual psyches identifying as discrete individuals who are making individual decisions (“should I wear this outfit”, “should I apply for this job”), exhibit a temperment that exists on a conservative/liberal axis, Corey’s topic is mass politics. Here, we identify with a collective. We are not considering our next play in the game, we are considering the rules of the game, as it were. Corey’s analysis suggests that, in this realm, another temperamental axis is equally or more relevant to predicting our behavior: our relationship to authority, our attraction to or resistance to explicit, stark social hierarchies.

Alison P @ 80

I would change “these methods reduce conflict” to “these methods appear to reduce conflict”. Surely, in any age, a disinterested observer could see that civil wars and their inverse, wars of conquest, as well as dynamic episodes of violent repression were all ubiquitous regardless of any preponderance of belief in orderliness and stability.

The exception proves the rule: in the capitalist democracies, elections supposedly show us the peaceful transfer of power. But this peacefulness really only indicates that power isn’t being transferred at all. A cop plants drugs on a citizen and arrests him: there’s your transfer of power.

We should likewise beware lest our apparent peacefulness isn’t a homogenized subordination, a tragic pacification.

bianca steele

“they are upset about *something* though.”

& that’s enough to know. The story about their ill-at-ease is fiction (“god damn libruls!”) and will just be a diversion, but the pain is real. An unmet need for…?

LFC & JWH

I’d argue that Stalinists and Chavezistas other cultists of mass politics are exhibiting the exact same attachment to their projections of status and hierarchy that, for instance, US racists show. Instrumental support for these regimes would not manifest the passion and cults of personality that are in evidence.

The Reactionary Mind is us.

Z, I’m not arguing that Corey doesn’t have a thesis which he faithfully follows. For any two criteria you can make a 2×2 logic box and make intellectually ‘interesting’ statements about the sections of the box. But you can do that for literally any criteria. That doesn’t make the analysis helpful or useful. You can choose “People born early in the year vs people born late in the year”. You can create charts. You can manipulate p values to get apparent statistical significance. You can notice that people born under Gemini get more of their bones broken in Australia but people born under Taurus get more bones broken in the US (because when you divide into bins and then sort for something else you can often find ‘differences’). That doesn’t make the exercise actually useful.

I’m saying that much of the dividing line criteria Corey uses is actually not very dividing across the dimensions he asserts (i.e. both sides of it are perfectly happy to try to enforce things through private structures and public so long as they are successful in doing so at a given time). I’m also saying that his method of sweeping disparate things together while making those ‘dividing lines’ (broad stereotypes for conservatives, super narrow characterizations of progressives) makes it worse. As such, by the time he gets to his logic square, he can find whatever he wants to find because it doesn’t really map onto a useful description of the landscape he claims to be describing.

I’m not saying that any attempt at describing broad things like ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ is doomed to complete failure. But I am saying that it is the kind of project that needs something very different from what Corey puts into it. At the very minimum it would need to use similar styles of characterization on both sides of the divide. But that’s only because we are talking about it as if it were intended to be some sort of deep discussion of trying to figure that out. So far as I can tell it really isn’t intended to be that at all. It seems much more like what I described above: an imperialist “these are the savages and why we must defeat them” tract. It does a great job of that.

It is only when we insist on treating it as some sort of serious exploration of the human psyche that things fall apart–and only because we are treating it under the standards of a serious exploration of the human psyche. Accept it for what it is: an attempt at “The Road to Serfdom”. Both have an actual insight or two, mixed in with loads of unfair characterizations, dramatic misunderstandings, and confusion about how things link together because it is written by an outsider who isn’t really interested in understanding the side he is demonizing. You don’t go to “The Road to Serfdom” to get a deep understanding of socialist thought or why people might be attracted to it. And Hayek wrote other more fair/penetrating things too so it isn’t as if writing an unfairly polemic tract means you can’t do otherwise at other points.

But reading “The Road to Serfdom” to understand people with ‘socialist tendencies’ would be silly.

B9n10nt: “But Wilkinson’s piece is of a piece with Robin’s: the ideologies of reaction take different forms based on historical circumstance. It’s right there in W’s insistence that “modern classical liberal worries about democracy largely motivated [propertarianism].” It’s precisely the mode of analysis that Robin engages in when he situates conservative political theory in contemporary circumstances.”

I’m not proposing that psychological analysis is IMPOSSIBLE. I’m suggesting that it has to be undertaken with extreme care, especially with groups you aren’t a part of because:

A) you may think you understand them but be wrong;
B) you may attribute in whole things that are at most a part because of A);
C) you need to take lots of care when making your dividing lines because psychological analysis is very prone to in group/out group biases in which you play up the out group’s faults and play down the in group faults which ends up muddying your analysis;
D) you need to take care to choose your dividing lines because psychological analysis lets you select from millions of possible dividing lines, so you can often create a story that looks statistically interesting on naive analysis simply because when given enough degrees of freedom you can tend to find 1/20 chances all the time.

Corey doesn’t really take care with any of that. My short view would be that most of his dividing lines aren’t actually very clear differences between conservatives and progressives. This ends up being illustrated in all sorts of ways across is argument. He also seems to link VERY disparate things together without exhibiting an understanding of how disparate they are–which means he can’t (and really doesn’t try very hard) to explain why his psychological lines are the meaningful place we should draw lines instead of paying attention to the things that are dramatically different. There may be various explanations for why he does this and I’m not totally sure which one is correct. That one that seems most correct to me is that the purpose of the book isn’t really to deeply figure these things out, but rather to create a polemic meant to inspire his side by demonizing the other side. But I fully admit that I might be overreacting to it, and really he just has been very inattentive to the pitfalls of attempting a psychological understanding of people.

Sebastian H:

Granted, your suspicion is welcome and reasonable. But now I’d say it’s time for a “For example,…”. When Corey argues that political conservatives aren’t conservative, he supports his thesis with examples. You are heartily invited to deconstruct his thesis with examples of your own: examples showing that conservatives really were/are conservative in the sense you originally proposed, or examples showing that other ridiculous criteria could also group these thinkers that Corey lumps and produce novel findings.

“But now I’d say it’s time for a “For example,…”. When Corey argues that political conservatives aren’t conservative, he supports his thesis with examples.”

Sure. For example, Corey only excludes Mao, Stalin and Hugo Chavez from being ‘conservative’ by making a hyper technical private/public distinction that feels like the kind of add-on you make to manufacture statistical relevance. It doesn’t seem to be the kind of natural psychological distinction that he tries to hang much of the rest of thesis on. But they clearly aren’t ‘conservative’ in a politically useful way to him, so that won’t do.

I liked Robin’s book, found it far more convincing than any of the rebuttals. I don’t think that its thesis is perfect but I do think one of its core points is resoundingly correct – all rightist ideologies originate as responses to the left. It’s his interpretation of the left that is flawed. The left is not just the revolt of the lower orders, but specifically the revolt of (or at least ostensibly on behalf of) the lower orders in the name of reason – its core contention being that the existing unequal order of society should be altered or abolished on account of its unreasonableness. The right’s raison d’etre is to provide reasons for the unreasonable, and this is why they talk a big game about prudence and caution and respect for tradition and all that jazz. All this is conceived as principled irrationalism and they do this entirely deliberately.

The presence of high-strung nutjobs advocating even-keeled temperamental “conservatism” is not at all a contradiction from this POV – it’s not the actual possession of an even keel that defines the conservative, but the idea of such a temperament and its supposed preferability to left-wing rationalist fanaticism which the conservative is concerned to defend in theory and practice, to whether he himself possesses it or not. (Much as in Robin’s first book he talked about not “fear” per se, but about the idea of fear and the ideological function it serves.)

Collin, no.

The whole problem with Corey’s method is that it was going to find SOMETHING because you can always find SOMETHING when you can divide things across hundreds of possible dimensions and then compare it to something else that you can divide across hundreds of possible dimensions. That’s what the garden of forking paths IS, which is why you have to be careful about it.

If you boil it down, Corey is asking us to believe that there is a whole constellation of things that adhere to a deep psychological trait dividing conservatives and progressives based on a public/private power dichotomy. Now I’m no big fan of psychological just so stories anyway, but we should note that he doesn’t come to this public/private distinction because of loads of psychological data which supports the dichotomy.

There are at least three major objections to this method. First, since we don’t have good data on this potentially misidentified deep psychological trait anyway, it would probably be better to just identify whatever you’re trying to identify based on the constellation of nasty things that you say are linked to that trait. But Corey can’t do that, because the left has done nearly all of the nasty things too. So he HAS TO come up with some distinction which gets to exclude Mao and Stalin. The distinction didn’t come from psychological research. It came from a gap in his argument. Which is fine as an academic “I wanted to talk about THIS and not THAT so I will draw distinctions until I can exclude THAT” exercise.

But just because his argument requires a deep psychological distinction doesn’t mean that he actually found a deep psychological distinction. And even if there is a deep psychological distinction between conservatives and progressives (which there very well may be) it doesn’t have to divide on the public/private power distinctions that he is making.

Second, the public/private power distinction is a weird place to find a deep psychological distinction. It sounds a lot more like another symptom of a deep psychological distinction than the locus of one. “I’m afraid of change” vs. “Trying something new can’t be worse than this shit” sounds like closer to a deep psychological distinction. “I want to control people through governmental power” vs. “I want to control people through non-governmental power” doesn’t sound like one at all.

I’m not saying that the distinction he is making is a useless thing to notice either. But he’s really looking at it from the wrong direction. The public/private distinction is something sort of imposed from a leftist point of view so it might be a poor descriptor for conservative thinking. Shooting from the hip, if he is on to something it isn’t so much that private/public is the right place to look for a deep seated psychological trait, but something more like “it feels like family/not family” might be.

Third, he is always willing to take progressive at their word, but conservatives are always full of hidden meaning. So when progressives SAY that they want to publicly take over power for the purpose of helping the disadvantaged, they are taken at their word even when what really happens is Soviet Russia or Chavez-Venezuala or Mao’s China. While when conservatives SAY that they want the market to help people out with the invisible hand, they get slammed for less than perfect outcomes in the US.

Why isn’t it possible that historically BOTH are deluded about how their ideals work out in practice. Now we certainly wish that neither of them were so deluded, but Corey’s thesis is that the delusion is damning evidence of deception for conservatives, but merely an ‘oops sorry about that’ for progressives.

I could definitely get behind a much more limited version of Corey’s thesis. Something along the lines of: the current political moment involves conservatives doubling down on their traditional weaknesses WAY MORE than usual, and progressives are much more level headed than usual such that we don’t need to worry much about progressives wrecking good things and conservatives seem to be losing their collective minds. That would probably make interesting reading involving why progressives have felt the need to tone it down, and why conservatives have not. But his actual approach seems much less fruitful because it piles on unsupported group bias on top of unsupported psychological speculation, on top of a big dose of not even trying to understand the people he’s describing.

Alternatively, it is possible that both progressives and conservatives are really about aggrandizing their own power potential and just do it through different lies. So when Mao’s lies and Stalin’s lies are exposed through the events that happen as they consolidate their power just as conservatives have their lies exposed through the events that happen as they consolidate their power.

But Corey’s thesis appears to suggest that conservatives have lies that are exposed, while progressives merely have unfortunate mistakes. That seems suspiciously like a tribal bias, not an actual explanation.

What he is writing about would be much better characterized as a cluster of psychological techniques for defending the current order WHATEVER IT IS

How so? No seriously, how so? Corey writes about people like Maurice Barrès who famously proclaimed that “[t]he first condition of social peace is that poor people should feel their powerlessness.” Whatever Mao or Chavez did while in power doesn’t look like that to me at all. Corey writes about people advocating violent disruption of the social order so that formerly dominated part of the society go back to their erstwhile position. What does this have to do with entrenching one’s power by crushing every élites in the Cultural Revolution? Everyone likes power, granted, and political violence is the most common thing in the world, granted, but there is a distinction between those who want to exercise brutal power to keep the riffraffs in place and those who rely on the brutal power of the riffraffs, isn’t there?

both sides of it are perfectly happy to try to enforce things through private structures and public so long as they are successful in doing so at a given time

But that is not what Corey is saying. Corey is saying that many people we call conservative thinkers or who were influential people in the conservative movement have in fact very little interest in conserving things and are vey explicit about that in their writings. What they cared about was to put back inferiors in their place and if that entails some destruction of the social order, so much the better.

Now maybe you disagree about this about a given thinker. Then you should say who. But it is patently absurd to say that this statement is so sweeping that it applies equally to Marx – a thinker who prophesied and welcomed the dictatorial power of dominated classes – or to Mao.

Above, you also said “he can find whatever he wants to find because it doesn’t really map onto a useful description of the landscape he claims to be describing” but again how so? Personally, I found the observation that influential thinkers on the “conservative” side to be very keen on destroying existing social institutions if that could put back the inferiors in their rightful place quite interesting. There is a complacent tendency on the Right to say “the Left wants to destroy everything to achieve equality and progress, we say wait a minute before destroying everything” and Corey argues that actual thinkers on the Right actually very explicitly say “the Left wants to destroy everything to achieve equality and progress, and they are right that everything should be destroyed, but to restore inequality and hierarchies.” I find this quite an interesting observation in intellectual history. Do you think this observation is incorrect? If so, how so? Do you think Corey gets the priorities of the thinkers he discusses wrong? Or maybe you think it is correct but uninteresting? Or do you dispute that this is what Corey argues at all?

@115

James Burnham, after he gave up on Marx and Trotsky, seems to have settled on his particular strand of American Conservatism as an alternative to the otherwise inevitable domination by the Managerial Revolutionaries who were advancing under various disguises in the USSR and elsewhere. His line seemed to be that the poor are going to get crushed anyway, so it’s better to choose the least-worse option for them, which will be something like what America already had.

His thought underwent considerable evolution, but he gave a review of various historical personages in “The Macchiavellians” and then reached his final position in “Congress And The American Tradition”. And also gave us “Suicide Of The West”, the template for post-1950 loony anti-liberalism.

One note: IMHO the difference between people who want to mantain micro power structures (“The place of the woman is in the kitchen”) and people who want to break them down is not a “psychological” difference, it’s a sociological one.

So if Robin uses this as a discriminant (I didn’t read the book) I don’t think he is “psychologizing” conservatives.

In my opinion, Robin is making things more complex than they really are.

In general since the enlightenment to now we have:

1) lefties: egalitarians (in various flavours and with various opinion on how to reach equality);
2) righties: anti egalitarians (in various flavours and with various opinion on how much inequality they want).

Here I’m speaking of the left and the right in general, not of the single person who might have different and personal takes on politics.

The reason that this correlates with private power structures is that, if we go back to the middle ages, people had a specific role depending on their birth, and this was the whole basis of society, and we are still slowly growing out of this.

Now it’s obvious that if someone, say Stalin, causes deaths in the millions in the name of equality, he is still a bad guy, but he is a different flavour of bad guy than Hitler, who caused deaths in the millions in the name of inequality (from his official statements in the Mein Kampf).

Z “Corey writes about people like Maurice Barrès who famously proclaimed that “[t]he first condition of social peace is that poor people should feel their powerlessness.” Whatever Mao or Chavez did while in power doesn’t look like that to me at all. Corey writes about people advocating violent disruption of the social order so that formerly dominated part of the society go back to their erstwhile position. What does this have to do with entrenching one’s power by crushing every élites in the Cultural Revolution?”

Mao was pretty good at making sure that the people he didn’t like “felt their powerlessness” often unto death. You seem to to accept the propaganda of Mao and Stalin and Chavez as truth for the purposes of this discussion. Yes they *claim* to be speaking on behalf of the powerless. But in actual reality they tore down their elite, and the second that the structures they tried to replace stopped performing the poor got thrown under the wheels of the state again–only this time more brutally. If you want to assert that the main distinction between conservatives run amok and progressives run amok is which propaganda they mouth while crushing people’s lives into the dirt you might be on to something with the public/private distinction. But that isn’t a deep seated psychological trait which makes conservatives want to plot to crush people while progressives just do it by ‘accident’ again and again. That would be a comment on which lies they tell while they are doing the crushing (probably much more formed by societal opportunity when they seize power rather than a consistently mapping internal psychological state). Which may be interesting in some respect, but is a rather different project than the one that Corey is engaged in.

If there is a reason to believe that when conservatives say one thing and bad other things happen its a hidden plot to seize power, but when progressives say one thing and end up sitting on a mountain of skulls it is just an accident but they really really weren’t interested in power, Corey certainly hasn’t established anything beyond tribalism to trust that.

If I had to make a grand stylized attempt at narrative (which to be clear I’m not sure is wise) I’d say that progressives aren’t currently running amok because their attempts with communism were so utterly disasterous that fear of that keeps the bad side of their “chuck it” instincts more in check–especially in response to the collapse of Chavez’s regime into murderous chaos. Conservatives haven’t had disasters on that level so firmly attached to them in the recent past (though an outside observer could certainly wonder why the Iraq thing didn’t do more damage) so they don’t see a reason to control their worse instincts and biases. But that would be an argument about historically contingent losses or something, not a deep psychological argument meant to span decades or hundreds of years.

Murali @ 120:

There is a difference between destroying it in order to return to a social order which in fact existed in the past and destroying it in order to try and create a never before seen social order

This defense of conservatism -that social upheaval in the name of reaction is indeed conservative- assumes that even the earliest conservatives that Robin cites held a pre-modern (& perhaps even pre-historical) notion of social stasis. That is, once we observe substantive social change as a historical fact, we know there is no going back. Just as Christ teaches Christendom that God has a historical design for mankind, all Western thought accepts that the past can be a model for the future, either as a guide or a warning, but it cannot return accept as a literal end to history. The past does not in fact exist. Time is a river, not a lake. And once we see it’s a river, then Conservatives and Liberals alike are moving along it. What is to be preserved is not the past, but qualities of the past that can help our future.

So, for example, by all means let us modernize agriculture, improve the beaurocracy, expand trade and empire, and support science and innovation. But we should preserve the rights of Lord over serf, or King over subjects, etc…

Anyway, that’s the argument that I think Robin would and should make in rebuttal.

Sebastian H

If there is a reason to believe that when conservatives say one thing and bad other things happen its a hidden plot to seize power, but when progressives say one thing and end up sitting on a mountain of skulls it is just an accident but they really really weren’t interested in power, Corey certainly hasn’t established anything beyond tribalism to trust that.

Since Corey never says this or implies it, there’s no issue here.

Mao wasn’t a progressive; he was a revolutionary. Part of Corey’s argument is that all conservatives are counter-revolutionaries, but nowhere to the best of my recollection does Corey argue the inverse: i.e., that all progressives are revolutionaries (or that all revolutionaries are progressives).

All sides have their mountains of skulls, but these refs of Sebastian to the mountains of skulls associated w Mao and Pol Pot etc are, afaict, pretty much irrelevant to the book.

Nietzsche’s politics are atrocious, and he is many things, but not a reactionary. He was, as branded by Brandes, an “aristocratic radical”–aristocratic because he saw inequality as a goal, but a radical because he saw it as a goal at odds with the general development of history and, ultimately, at odds with nature and natural selection. For Nietzsche, the ideal of aristocracy is not reached by conservation or reaction, because it is not an original state but an exception. One doesn’t preserve or return to social inequality as a status quo; one achieves it as a stroke of luck against all the forces of history and nature.

Of course, he does think inequality is a natural given, but *valuable* forms of inequality are not. Nietzsche doesn’t admire just any hierarchy, only those he thinks are grounded in artistic and spiritual superiority (the Renaissance is his usual go to), and those are rare, almost flukes.

The status quo in his worldview is mediocrity, the status quo is the small man, the failure of aristocracy, which can only be achieved through radicalism–through an engineering of society according to an unnatural order, not through a return to an original or natural order:

“Anti-Darwin. …. Assuming, however, that there is such a struggle for existence — and, indeed, it occurs — its result is unfortunately the opposite of what Darwin’s school desires, and of what one might perhaps desire with them — namely, in favor of the strong, the privileged, the fortunate exceptions. The species do not grow in perfection: the weak prevail over the strong again and again, for they are the great majority — and they are also more intelligent.”

“I too speak of a ‘return to nature,’ although it is really not a going back but a going up — an ascent to the high, free, even terrible nature and naturalness where great tasks are something one plays with, one may play with.”

This is not meant as a pedantic quibble about Nietzsche’s interpretation, but instead as a concern about how we define conservatism. To be conservative is to believe one’s moral idea is somehow written into the order of the world, to believe that the domination of many by some is paradoxically both ordained and endangered, justified and guaranteed by the very structure of human nature and the universe. To be radical is precisely to reject such natural justifications of morality, to recognize moral ideals as inventions, the overthrow of the divine order rather than an appeal to it. That radical position is radically open to the forms it invented ideals may take–as open to domination as to equality, to aristocracy as democracy, precisely because the appeal to moral absolutes and a moral order is the highest form of conservatism.

That is why almost all political philosophers–with perhaps the exception of Macchiavelli, Marx, and Nietzsche–are truly conservative: because they are moralists.

J-D @ 112:

Is this an empirical claim?

“Exactly the same due process applies to (and is applied in) rape trials as in other criminal trials, and any suggestion to the contrary arises either out of misunderstanding or out of dishonesty.”

If so, I don’t think it’s anywhere near true. But I expect I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying.

Corey seems to suggest that a strong distinction between conservatives and progressives is that conservatives (and NOT progressives) conceal their will to power behind a facade of concepts.

Seems to suggest? Does he now? It seems to me he is doing exactly the converse (about conservatives), namely point out that far from concealing their will to power, they exhibit it plainly. Part of the interest of Corey’s work to me is in his talent for finding interesting quotes, in which reactionaries lay out very clearly their plans and priorities.

Both are either fooled by their own rhetoric or are actively lying about it, or hide from the way things actually turn out.

Yeah, you already mentioned something to that effect above “If there is a reason to believe that when conservatives say one thing and bad other things happen its a hidden plot to seize power” but again, it seems to me you’re getting Corey exactly 180° wrong here. Corey isn’t saying reactionaries are lying, or advocate some things and then bad other things happen. Corey is saying influential thinkers in the reactionary movement laid out their plans very clearly and when “bad” (your choice of words, not mine) things happen, it was exactly the plan, not an unfortunate side effect.

So, for example, Hayek is not saying “the market is great because of its catallactic properties but unfortunately it can produce a greatly unequal society in which a few individuals hold disproportionate powers” he says (very, very explicitly) “the market is great because of its catallactic properties and because it can produce a greatly unequal society in which a few individuals hold disproportionate powers” or Barrès is not saying “I’m against redistributive policies because property rights are good so should be defended, even though poor people may then find themselves helpless” he is saying (very, very explicitly) “I would be against redistributive policies even if they were sound economically because poor people will then find themselves helpless.”

So your distinction between rhetoric and reality gets Corey’s work completely backwards, it seems to me. He says reactionary are very open about their project, you say he says the difference between reactionaries and progressives is that the former conceal something while the latter are merely mistaken.

So there is no need to make up a weird psychological explanation to explain something that isn’t a distinction.

Well, since the distinction you think he makes is the exact opposite of what I take him to mean, I agree with you that there is no need to cook up any explanation at all. The being said, you have used “psychological” many, many times in this thread, but on that point again, I think you got Corey wrong. As MisterMr aptly observes, “the difference between people who want to mantain micro power structures and people who want to break them down is not a “psychological” difference, it’s a sociological (or political) one.”

Finally, I agree with everything LFC wrote in this thread, in particular the irrelevance of you dragging Mao, Stalin and Chavez (they did not try to maintain traditional private hierarchies, they tried to shatter and replace them by public revolutionary ones*, they did not believe in a governing class, but in a ruling class…) or when (s)he points out that, obviously, reactionaries according to Corey are not just interested in maintaining private hierarchies of power.

*Above, you called the distinction between tradition private hierarchies and public (possibly recent or even revolutionaries) hierarchies a “hyper technical” one. Words fail me. I completely agree with Murali above that we shouldn’t moralize this distinction, but to say there is no analytical distinction is to me like saying that the difference between up and down is hyper technical in the context of a discussion about mountain climbing. To begin with, if you see almost no difference between traditional private hierarchies and revolutionary public hierarchies, how do you begin to explain Burke’s vehement hostility towards the French Revolution? Or Buckley’s hatred of the Soviet Union? According to you, the distinction between their respective tenets is hyper technical, isn’t it?

Since I brought up the point of due process for men accused of rape – let me clarify a bit.

Firstly, a google search for ‘rape due process’ gives enough results that show that there is actually a discussion on this. It includes this article at The Atlantic, among other items. It includes news of Betsy DeVos reinstating due process in cases of alleged campus rape. (It’s an interesting rabbit hole, see here.)

Either way, what I was saying is that insisting on due process for those accused of rape nowadays is widely recognized as a conservative position. And that this does not obviously fit in any of the categorical boundaries put forward by this thread, to say the least. For that argument to work it doesn’t matter whether due process applies or not, it is about the argument thrust and the mental state of those arguing that, when in doubt, it’s better to punish the accused men anyway, and that if they are innocent, then so be it.

@casmilus 134
“His [Nietzsche’s] low regard for Bismarck’s Germany would be an example of him despising a hierarchical society, one that was also quite successful at projecting its power.”

according to Lukacs from the link posted above by Mcmanus:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/destruction-reason/ch03.htm

Nietsche first disliked Bismark’s Germany because he tought that it was too weak against socialists, then liked it when he tought that it was a defence from socialism, then again disliked it when he tought it couldn’t hold, so I don’t think your argument is correct (I trust Lukacs here as I have zero firsthand knowledge of Nietsche).

In Nietzsche’s opinion — one which fully harmonized with the views just quoted — the positive value of such ‘democratic evolution’ rested in its ability to rear a new ‘elite’. Thus in completing the turn to ‘democracy’ à la Bismarck, Nietzsche gave up none of his youthful aristocratic convictions. For now he still saw the salvation of culture solely in a more resolute bestowal of privileges on a minority, one whose leisure was based on the hard physical labour of the majority, the masses. He wrote: ‘A higher civilization can only come about when there are two distinct social castes: that of the working people and that of the leisured, those capable of true leisure; or, to put it more strongly, the caste of forced labour and the caste of free labour.’[28] So close to liberalism was he coming that temporarily he even appropriated its concept of the State. He wrote the oft-quoted sentence: ‘Modern democracy is the historical form of the decay of the State.’ But just how Nietzsche amplified this idea is seldom quoted: ‘The prospect opened up by this assured decay is not, however, a gloomy one in every respect: of all human attributes, shrewdness and self-seeking are the most highly developed; when the State is no longer a match for these forces’ demands, chaos will be the least likely result. It is more likely that the State will be defeated by an even more practical invention than itself.’[29]

Mario: “Either way, what I was saying is that insisting on due process for those accused of rape nowadays is widely recognized as a conservative position. And that this does not obviously fit in any of the categorical boundaries put forward by this thread, to say the least.”

This position suffers from narrow thinking. The actual widely recognized conservative position is the insistence that those accused of rape are denied due process; that they are somehow mistreated by contemporary society. Conservatives take this position because they find they’re losing the power to assault women with impunity, a personal power they have historically had and that they want to retain. If you think that’s not the case, point to the widespread condemnation by conservatives of the lack of due process afforded to accused black drug dealers. The silence is deafening.

Z “Seems to suggest? Does he now? It seems to me he is doing exactly the converse (about conservatives), namely point out that far from concealing their will to power, they exhibit it plainly. Part of the interest of Corey’s work to me is in his talent for finding interesting quotes, in which reactionaries lay out very clearly their plans and priorities.”

No. You’re definitely wrong on this. Corey is indeed very good at finding quotes , but his method is to implicate all of the quotes to all of the people that he calls conservative. He does this whether or not they disagree about significant things, whether or not they use similar terminology, whether or not they talked in similar circles, and whether or not they talked about the particular issue at all. It isn’t just that he can find a quote by Hayek that he doesn’t like. It is that he can attach that to everyone in history who he labels conservative that makes the methodology unsound.

“So your distinction between rhetoric and reality gets Corey’s work completely backwards, it seems to me. He says reactionary are very open about their project, you say he says the difference between reactionaries and progressives is that the former conceal something while the latter are merely mistaken.”

No. He saying that if they are open enough to get labelled conservative, they get to have every other ‘bad’ thing that any other person said stuck to them like it was a giant conspiracy. Which is exactly why I bring up Mao and Stalin and Chavez. Because if conservatives can have every thing attributed to all, so can progressives.

“Above, you called the distinction between tradition private hierarchies and public (possibly recent or even revolutionaries) hierarchies a “hyper technical” one. Words fail me. I completely agree with Murali above that we shouldn’t moralize this distinction, but to say there is no analytical distinction is to me like saying that the difference between up and down is hyper technical in the context of a discussion about mountain climbing. ”

You either aren’t understanding what I’m saying, or you aren’t understanding how statistics work. I’m not saying that there is no distinction there. I’m saying that in the context of Corey’s argument it only serves to screen out those he doesn’t walk to talk about. He’s positing a deep psychological difference that lets us attribute all sorts of ‘bad’ things that some conservatives say to all conservatives. Something so deep that it spans a huge variety of cultures, languages, and at least hundreds of years. But when you start looking for deep psychological differences between conservatives and progressives who sometimes say bad things and sometimes support nasty regimes, it becomes difficult to cleanly sort them into progressives and conservatives. The reason it is difficult is because both progressives and conservatives have publicly supported relatively nasty things at certain points, and have actually done lots of nasty things.

Which brings us to statistics. If you have hundreds of dimensions to choose from, you can almost always find one to screen out the things you don’t want to talk about and include the one you do. That is just how large numbers work. This is especially true when you are dealing with ill defined psychological components. This is also why things like astrology have a feel like they work. Given enough degrees of freedom you could probably show that the conservatives he thinks are *most important* have some astrological similarity that progressives don’t have. You just keep looking for a linkage until you find it. P value 1/20 means that if you search 100 things you can find at least 5 completely spurious but statistically significant ‘connections’. And Corey doesn’t even do the statistical work, he is just ‘suggestive’. What I’m saying is that the private/public distinction he is hanging things on *doesn’t sound like a deep psychological linkage*. Saying “I don’t like people who aren’t personally known to me to be in charge of me” might plausibly be a deep psychological trait. “I don’t like people who aren’t personally known to me to be in charge of me if I call them the government but don’t care if we call them any other thing (church, market, etc.)” doesn’t sound like a deep psychological trait. That sounds like a highly contingent political fact.

“they did not try to maintain traditional private hierarchies, they tried to shatter and replace them by public revolutionary ones*, they did not believe in a governing class, but in a ruling class…”

This again is just buying the rhetoric instead of the reality. Every Communist Party structure could very much be described as a private hierarchy. It was just a different private hierarchy than the people they murdered. Calling it “public revolutionary” is just begging the question.

Sorry, a correction–I’m completely wrong about the quote, they’re both from the same passage and year.

I’d confused Lukacs’ quote from Human All Too Human in 1878, with one from Twilight of the Idols in 1888, where he explicitly refers back to the 1878 passage:

“Critique of modernity. — Our institutions are no good any more: on that there is universal agreement. However, it is not their fault but ours. Once we have lost all the instincts out of which institutions grow, we lose institutions altogether because we are no longer good for them. Democracy has ever been the form of decline in organizing power. I already characterized modern democracy, together with its hybrids such as the “German Reich,” as the form of decline of the state. In order that there may be institutions, there must be a kind of will, instinct, or imperative, which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations, forward and backward ad infinitum.”

It’s curious that Lukacs uses it to suggest a similarity to liberalism, since Nietzsche uses it in a passage that is mostly a critique of liberalism. In the immediately preceding passage from 1888:

“Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. Their effects are known well enough: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic — every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization.”

@Yan 143

“It’s curious that Lukacs uses it to suggest a similarity to liberalism, since Nietzsche uses it in a passage that is mostly a critique of liberalism. ”

I don’t see the problem: we can see late 19th and early 20th european politics as three blocks:

1) Reactionaires (pro aristocracy)
2) “Liberals” (in the european sense, pro big business burgoises)
3) Socialists (commies, anarchists etc.)

with liberals in the middle, switching alliances from reactionaries to socialists and back as they saw more fit.

Nietzche was in 1, and sees liberalism and socialism as the same beast, Lukacs was in 3 and sees reactionaries and liberals as the same.

Incidentially as I wrote above Hitler too had this view, and in the “Rerum novarum” there is IIRC a passage that says that good Catholics reject democratics, communists and everyone who rejects God’s order (monarchy), so it was a common point of view for the reactionaries of the times.

“He [Nietzsche] abhors the state and he abhors his contemporary Germany’s devotion to a hierarchy of economic values rather than cultural values.”
Well yeah, but the cultural values he believes in were aristocratic values, with the assumption that in a “state of nature” they would prevail if not for the degenerate civilisation.
It’s the same as Hitler (again) and as social darwinists, social darwinism being a very common ideology at the time.

It’s also telling that he assumes that if the world is divided between masters and slaves, he is going to be among the masters (in all paragraphs of N. that I read when he says “we” he means the masters).
It is again similar to Hitler: Hitler assumes that there is a master race (aryans) that would naturally be on top, but in the world that he see they are not. Hitler then assumes that there is a decadent civilisation ruled by jews that his unnaturally holding aryans back – which is contradictory because it means that the aryans aren’t really winning, so they are not the master race.

The trick is that Hitler (and social darwinists in general) had a contradictory logic about “darwinism”: darwinism in itself is not a statement of value, but they assumed that “better” (in darwinist terms) meant “better” in terms of moral values (and thus meant “them”, as they believed to be better); they then had to hypothize an unnatural, decadent civilisation that prevented them to rule (or in the case of social darwinists they used the theory to stave off socialist demands).

Similarly N. uses a contradictory logic: on the one hand he plays the cynic, “all morality is false” guy, on the other hand he has a clear (though apparently unconscious) idea of what he believes is “good” or “beautiful” (which assumes a set of clearly defined ethic values), and assumes that such is the result of the natural “will to power”, only kept in chains by the usual degenerate civilisation.
But I think this was very common among conservatives of the period (and sometimes I see a similar logic, although not as exaggerated, in conservatives today).

MisterMr @145

“Well yeah, but the cultural values he believes in were aristocratic values, with the assumption that in a “state of nature” they would prevail if not for the degenerate civilisation.”

This is literally the *opposite* of Nietzsche’s view, as I tried to explain in an earlier post where Nietzsche explains why he is *anti-Darwin* (and anti-social Darwinism). Here’s the quote again: “The species do not grow in perfection: the weak prevail over the strong again and again, for they are the great majority — and they are also more intelligent.”

Again, Nietzsche rejects the idea of conservation or return–so if he is a “conservative”, it’s in a profoundly different way. He thinks his ideals are inventions, not values written into the order of things, and they are achieved against the grain of nature and history through social and cultural engineering, not through natural superiority or natural hierarchy.

As for your claims about similarities to Hitler, about master and servant morality, and his moral anti-realism, they’re complete misunderstandings of his work. That’s Nietzsche’s fault, mostly, since he invites, sometimes actively promotes, misunderstanding. But I strongly recommend that you read the current scholarship, which has exploded in the last 20 years, and has unanimously rejected these readings, which were once the norm and are understandable false impressions of the casual reader.

It’s interesting that Sebastian could not be bothered to reply to my point about a governing class when I made the point. Sebastian only bestirred himself to reply to the point when Z said he agreed with me about it.

LFC, I wouldn’t read too much into it though: life is short and comment threads are long. I certainly find it hard to juggle the many conversations running in parallel (for instance, I still haven’t replied to MisterMr, so now I will: Durkheim was a committed socialist and a fervent Dreyfusard, so no, in the context he was living in, he certainly wasn’t leaning to the right, but it is absolutely true that he was very wary of direct popular rule, which he equated in good late 19th century style with mob rule and thought social institutions, chief among them the State, should hold power and prevent people from wielding it).

Maybe one wants to take issue with something specific Corey says

Yeah, that would be the way to go. If I were to formulate a criticism (hopefully, a constructive one) I would say that I believe the larger social context matters in ways that is not immediately apparent (to me) in Corey’s analysis, that is to say, for instance, that an individual penning an intellectual defense of private forms of power above others does not have exactly the same meaning in a society at the outset of universal literacy (Burke), in one experiencing the waning of religious influence on a fully alphabetized society (Nietzsche and the Austrians), in one in which secondary education is universal and in which higher education is expanding rapidly (Ayn Rand and Phyllis Schlafly) and in a post-religious one in which educational achievements have again become unequal enough to really distinguish different rather rigid groups (Scalia and Trump).

@Yan 147
This is literally the *opposite* of Nietzsche’s view, as I tried to explain in an earlier post where Nietzsche explains why he is *anti-Darwin* (and anti-social Darwinism). Here’s the quote again: “The species do not grow in perfection: the weak prevail over the strong again and again, for they are the great majority — and they are also more intelligent.”

As I said, I don’t know N., nor did I read anything specific on N. . Hell, my high school history teacher skipped N. mostly because he didn’t like him on ideological grounds (he saw this openly, he was a self described marxist-leninist) so the only thing I remember is something about rational criticism that destroys its own bases or something like it. I might one day or the other read something about N. (I read weird things).

That said, I think you don’t get my point: you say that N. was an anti-darwinist because: “The species do not grow in perfection: the weak prevail over the strong again and again, for they are the great majority— and they are also more intelligent.”
But my point is exactly that Nazis and social-darwinists also weren’t real darwinists.
This is totally obvious in Hitler’s views about races: he thought that he had to defend the aryan race from the evil inferiors the jews (who were supposed to be very sneaky and abstute like in N.’s citation); this is a total nonsense in darwinist terms.
The same goes for social darwinists: they told that the rich are rich because they are “superior” by birth (remember: genetics in the strict sense didn’t yet exist) to the poor but, first of all in a darwinist view the ones who reproduce more are the winners, not the ones with more money; for second, if the poor rally together and kill all the rich they are the survivors so again they would be “superior” to the rich, so what’s the point of forbidding unions and violent socialists, and finally darwinism isn’t about moral superiority so it’s a nonsense to use darwinism as a moral justification for inequality or whatever.

The point is that both Hitler and social darwinists twisted the logical meaning of darwinism to suit their own (totally not darwinist) ethical theories, and through this they went to the idea of the “decadent civilisation” (that also doesn’t make sense in darwinist terms).

So again from the quote you give I don’t see where N. was different from Hitler or from social darwinists, it seems to me that he followed more or less the same path (that doesn’t mean that he was a nazi or a pro-rich-burgeoise like the social darwinist, only that he was part of the same “family” of theories).

P. S. I forgot to say that literary critics have noticed the similar pronouncements (although maybe not what I quoted) from Wilde and Nietzsche, adding that the former is presumed to have been ignorant of the latter.

Sebastian H, waaaay up above you make the claim that Robin lumps people together in order to dismiss them, then you accuse him (and some commenters too I assume) of “demonizing” consecutives (I think “dismiss” and “demonize” are your exact words). I’m interested why you think this is what he is doing.

First, “dismiss”: Robin had written a whole book about these people so I don’t understand how you can say he has “dismissed” them. He has actually spent a lot of time thinking about and analysing them, which is surely the opposite of dismissal. Did you mean to say “criticize”? If so, I’m confused as to why you think this is a bad thing. Presumably you accept that left wing people disagree with and thus will criticize right wing people. Assuming that, isn’t it inevitable (indeed, a minimum requirement) of this criticism that some people be lumped together? Is your real complaint that he should have analysed only one of these people, and that criticizing people as a group is impossible? Or by “dismiss” do you mean that calling people conservative is “dismissal” a priori? Why would you, a conservative, think that?

Which brings us to “demonize”. You also accuse Robin of calling them all a little Hitler, which I hope you agree is as deliberate mischaracterization of his work. He does not put Hitler at the table with them, doesn’t include Pinochet either (despite your later assertion that he does) and holbo asks us to exclude Pinochet . So what exactly is the demonization you are complaining of? Again, do you consider any criticism of conservatives to be “demonization”? Do you need a safe space? Or do you consider it demonization simply to call a conservative a conservative? Why would you, a conservative, consider (eg) Thatcher to have been demonized by being put at the same table as Hayek, a man she admires, and Reagan, a man she had close and cordial relations with?

The only impression I can get from this is that either a) you are arguing with an imagined critique of conservatism that they’re all fascists (see the little Hitler allegation) or b) you consider any criticism of conservatism to be demonization or C) you consider the word itself to be an insult. Which of these is it, and if C) why?

I’m in broad agreement with Corey’s thesis, that almost all “conservative” thought is driven by the desire to keep the lower classes as powerless as possible (noting that how possible it actually is is very much historically contingent). I do, however, have trouble mapping this onto the distinction between the private and public domains. The proponents of absolutist government – Hobbes among them – had as their cause the suppression of the aristocratic violence that so enlivens late Plantagenet, Tudor, Stuart, Valois etc history. Their enemies’ catch-cry was liberty, and the aristocrats found plenty of lower class support among those who knew that what voice they had – through manor courts, guilds, fraternities, canonries – would vanish along with noble autonomy. As indeed it did. So who was the “progressive” and who the “reactionary” here?

Public power can be used to crack open oppressive private domains. It can also be used to reinforce them. Private domains can be a refuge from oppressive public power. Neither are the exclusive concern of one side or the other.

@147, @152

“Again, Nietzsche rejects the idea of conservation or return–so if he is a “conservative”, it’s in a profoundly different way. He thinks his ideals are inventions, not values written into the order of things, and they are achieved against the grain of nature and history through social and cultural engineering, not through natural superiority or natural hierarchy.”

See also “Rogue Male” by Geoffrey Household, where we have something like:

“Quive-Smith started talking about a will to power. I didn’t tell him natural leaders don’t need one. He wouldn’t have understood.”

(In the bit where the aristocratic narrator is hiding in his bunker, and the Nazi agent QS is waiting and taunting him outside.)

Has anyone mentioned yet C.R.W.Nevinson? He did an essay on conservatism as a philosophy, which included a passage disparaging FN as a low vulgarian who didn’t get the point at all. Also the preface to the 1927 edition of “Tarr” by Wyndham Lewis had a little dig at Freddy’s fanboys.

MisterMr @151
“As I said, I don’t know N., nor did I read anything specific on N. . Hell, my high school history teacher skipped N. mostly because he didn’t like him on ideological grounds.”

I’m impressed reading N–or any philosopher–was an option in high school history. I really do think much of the blame for the common misreading you’ve heard falls on Nietzsche himself. But there’s a long history of motivated misinterpretations, too, starting from his own sister, an anti-Semitic nationalist who would later admire Hitler, editing criticisms of anti-semitism, Germany, and nationalism out of her edition of his phony magnum opus, “The Will to Power”–really hobbled together out of mostly discarded notes.

It’s a shame that many leftists, like your teacher and Lukacs, and like Corey Robin, have been so swayed by the old bad readings, which are not just largely false, but often the opposite of Nietzsche’s view. This is why I stress Nietzsche’s bad fit with the language of “conservation” and “reaction”–because even when his goals resemble the right’s, his metaethics and means have much more in common with the left, so there’s much the left can learn from him.

Nietzsche is the only philosopher to almost define moral badness in terms of “reactive” tendencies–reaction is his defining critical trait of so-called “slavish” forms of morality. Surely “reactionary” is not the best lens to understand him, even if we want to classify him as on the right!

Of course social Darwinism radically misunderstands real Darwinism, but the point is that Nietzsche is opposed to both. He thinks that neither fitness for survival nor moral superiority are the product of natural development. In rejecting that, he’s rejecting any moral view that would be conservative in the sense of preserving or returning to a natural and original form of group superiority.

casmilus @159,

There’s a great version of the cartoonish misreading of Nietzsche in the film Baby Face, where Barbara Stanwyck gets converted to an Ayn Randish version of Nietzscheanism.

It seems that, like some of your examples, this picture of Nietzsche has strong roots in English sources. My impression is that since Nazi scholars tried to twist Nietzsche into their home-team philosopher during WWII, afterwards it was very hard to unroot that version in the UK and the US–where it had, by way of–wait for it–reaction (reactionary !), s0mething of an idee fixe.

Non-readers and casual readers of Nietzsche like MisterMr have every excuse not to see through that cheap version, since it’s been the dominant cultural image for so long. But I’m always very disappointed when well-read scholars like Corey Robin (whose work I greatly admire) or, for that matter, Lukacs, buy into it–more than half a century after people like Walter Kaufmann and Hollingdale started it dismantling it.

Peter T@157 nicely formulates the problem with Robin’s odd distinctions between public and private domains. That said, I must disagree, both trivially and significantly.

The trivial object is on Hobbes. The phrase about “man or assembly of men” heading Leviathan means either a king or a Parliament. His issue was about submission in preference to revolution. When push comes to shove, I’m pretty sure that everyone at CT agree with Hobbes that revolution here is the greatest calamity. A thinker who does make Peter T’s point is I think Algernon Sidney. Sidney’s open commitment to the maintenance of the nobility is by Robin’s public/private domains thesis reactionary. But Sidney was a revolutionary executed with cause, if not justice.

The significant objection is that it is misleading to think that reactionaries are committed to the suppression of the lower classes. After all, so many of them are lower classes. Or the inferior sex. Even, or especially perhaps, Robin’s intellectual history should address precisely how and why so many people are openly their own enemies?

As to Sebastian H, try as I may to understand, all I’m getting is irritation that Robin dismisses the self-flattering image of conservatism as epistemic humility in morals, prudence in policy, genial skepticism about the science of man and a lively good taste in manners, dress and home, with an unseemly rage, even while ignoring the unseemly rage of leftists.

Corey’s thesis, that almost all “conservative” thought is driven by the desire to keep the lower classes as powerless as possible

Is that true? I find that claim so absurd and obviously wrong that I really hope that that isn’t his thesis. How, for example, do modern conservative ideals of family life fit into that? And that’s hardly an insignificant part of conservative thought. How does a Jordan Peterson fit into that?

Going thru the Index:

No Mosca, no Robert Miller, no Ortega y Gasset, no Pareto, no Maurras, no Norbert Elias, no Louis Dumont, I didn’t see C Wright Mills. Leaving aside the Marxists.

I don’t even.

Maybe maybe, Rand and Buckley and Hayek are more important to contemporary conservatism and a popular “intellectual history”, but then why De Maistre and Nietzsche? I do try to understand.

Whatever. I am not his reader.

I admit to overstating the case, but the point about public and private stands. The state may be defined as the ultimate point of social decision, but ultimate does not mean all-encompassing. There are many levels of authority below the state, many spheres which it is content to – or forced to – leave to themselves. One way of framing Corey’s contest is between those who would open up higher levels of authority to wider participation and those who resist this. Obviously elites have been the most prominent resisters, but they gather support from those who see either their own small sphere being over-ridden, or fear losing their existing rights at lower levels in exchange for weaker or non-existent rights at higher levels. The late 18th and early 19th centuries saw a great deal of this, as older institutions were “reformed”, ironing out the anomalies that had permitted some women, minorities and poor to participate.

1) Reactionaires (pro aristocracy)
2) “Liberals” (in the european sense, pro big business burgoises)
3) Socialists (commies, anarchists etc.)

Nietzche was in 1, and sees liberalism and socialism as the same beast, Lukacs was in 3 and sees reactionaries and liberals as the same.

Not speaking for Lukacs, but not the same. More like Thesis and Antithesis

Okay, 200 pages onto The Destruction of Reason and I am finding it very useful. This will be a terrible fail, but an attempt.

Start with Kant/Fichte. Then there are two branches, one from Schelling/Hegel to the anti-dialecticals: late, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Spengler etc. Obviously an irrationalism, to be named later.

But there is another branch, from the early Schelling tutored by Hegel onwards through the Neo-Hegelians and Pierce for instance: Objective Idealism. Google it.

Wiki: “Objective idealism accepts common sense realism (the view that material objects exist) but rejects naturalism (according to which the mind and spiritual values have emerged from material things)”

Thing is, cf Schelling, Being or Spirit is inaccessible through reason and must be apprehended through “intellectual intuition,” but can be approximated in understanding through abstract logic, intricate categories and procedures.

Or models. And this is where the Objective Idealism of Schelling shows up in the present day or 20th C.

1) The masses of Mosca Miller and Pareto, the non-rational mob that must be managed by the extra-democratic forms of liberalism and constitutionalism

and 2) the markets of Jevons, Austrian, Hayek, Neo-classicals, and New Keynesians, Krugman’s modelings, DSGE

Point being that modern economics and liberal politics are irrationalisms, different from, perhaps opposite to, but intimately connected to the irrationalism of Nietzsche and fascism.

cf:Robert H Nelson, Economics as Religion:From Samuelson to Chicago School and Beyond

I will forgo the Marxian response.

@bob mcmanus 171
Thanks.
It’s interesting that you cite Pierce, I had to study a book of him for my semiotics exam (many years ago when I got my degree) and recently I tought that there are many parallelisms between Pierce and german idealism in general.

I think that both the “irrationalism” current and this “objective idealism” come from the same source:

Kant divided knowledge in three realms: pure reason, practical (moral) reason and esthetics. But while for Kant, in some sense, moral and esthetics are pure reason plus some other stuff, Kant’s idea of pure reason is (again in some sense) that we create a model of reality in our mind.
Now this idea of knowledge as model building begs the question: how do we evaluate models one against the other?
This question leads to a “pragmaticist” answer: we keep models that in some sense “work”, so that practical (moral) reason becomes the base of “pure” reason, and not the other way around.

In my opinion, german idealism went in this direction with moral and at times almost theological elucubrations becoming the prerequisite for a theory of knowledge, whereas Peirce (and maybe others) went for a “pragmaticist” explanation.
In addition, to a large degree both morals and knowledge are a social production, so while the german idealists went for a weird undistinguished “I” that is a mix of man, society, and sometimes a sort of god-like entity, Peirce went to an undistinguished “we” that is society with his theory of unlimited semiosis (where he doesn’t really distinguish between tought processes in the mind of an individual and knowledge prodution at the level of society).

Marx too is influenced by this as knowledge sprouts from action, although he goes deeper and has a theory were knowledge sprouts from social formations too.

Analytical philosophy, on the other hand, as far as I can tell skips the problem completely.

@Stephen 166
“Umm, not, I think, if Hitler thought that the success of Jews against Aryans depended on the Aryans being constrained by deplorable modern liberalism, that prevented them from dealing with the Jews as (from his demented viewpoint) they deserved.”

Some times ago I did read part of the Mein Kampf, in a modern italian ediction that is a reprint of one of the fascist period. The book is divided in two parts, the first is Hitler’s autobiography (abridged in the italian ediction) and the second is Hitler’s political program, where he explains his theories. I only read the first chapter because it becomes very boring soon.

In short, Hitler’s idea of the “master race” is not an evolutionist idea, it’s more similar to that of a dog breeder: if you want a dobermann dog, you can’t let dogs breed naturally, you have to carefully choose “purebreed” dogs that have the carachteristics you wont, so the cubs will also have these charachteristics and will be true dobermanns; the same, according to Hitler, is true for humans.

This is in fact more similar to eugenics than to natural selection, and in facts eugenics is totally the opposite of natural selection.

Hitler also believed that the “master race” was the one that created civilisations, and then when it mixed with lesser ones civilisations became decadent: for example the Romans were originally an aryan “master race” (by which I think Hitler meant more or less what we called indoeuropeans) but then mixed with oriental lesser races and the roman empire became decadent and orientalising, and finally fell (Hitler believed that the different kinds of civilisations directly depended on racial charachteristics of the people).

So on the whole I think that Hitler’s “theory” can be summarized this way:

1) There are some people who are good according to some judgement of value, and this goodness depends on their racial predisposition;
2) But this racial predisposition doesn’t really dominate in nature, so we have to force it eugenically;
3) And this is totally scientific, so we call this “scientific racism”.

“Given a modern liberal state that subsidises the breeding poor, that’s true. Given a pre-modern state, some would argue the rich reproduced more.”
Totally not what Malthus believed, and he lived well before the “liberal” state.

“Maybe the point might be to prevent unions and violent socialists killing the rich?”
Totally yes, but this isn’t a darwinist principle at all. There was, I believe, also a need for self justification.

“I’m afraid you’ve lost me here.”
My point is that all these ideologies, while they had many practical differences (Nietzsche for example didn’t believe that all Germans were the master race, as far as I can understand) had one thing in common: they started with an implicit judgement value where some people were “better” than others, in a moral sense; then they went on with weird and sometimes pseudoscientific arguments to pretend that this judgement value arised from some material, real circumstance.
Darwinism simply doesn’t work this way, because the “survival of the fittest” is not a judgement of value: if tomorrow because of global warming humanity becomes extint, but cockroaches survive, then cockroaches are “fitter” than humans for the new environment, but this doesn’t mean that cockroaches are “better” than humans in a moral sense.

engels

I thought Conservatives _are_ the bulk of the population (in the US)

By self-identification, according to opinion surveys, a plurality but not a majority.

Peter T @ 157, 167

I was thinking about how your theses might apply to 17th century Britain and I have met some difficulties. MisterMr seems to me to have a point with regard to the anachronism of projecting a public-private distinction back in time to a point where it had not yet emerged in modern form. (and, maybe the fact that that distinction was an emergent solution to problems of political conflict is relevant to how we should use it today to sort out conservative and other views?)

Hobbes of the Behemoth wasn’t worried about rampaging nobles. First of all, the landed gentry in the Commons in the time of Charles I could buy and sell the aristocrats of the Lords twice over, so it wasn’t always clear who was on top. But, beyond that, Hobbes saw the great cause of trouble to be the contentiousness of the (in his view) half-educated sectarians. The spread of grammar schools and expansion of Oxford, Cambridge and the Inns of Court under the Tudors had produced Shakespeare, the University wits and a remarkably educated society. The proportion of people with some exposure to college (including legal training at the Inns of Court) would not reach the same level again until the red brick universities took real hold in late 19th century Britain. Religious ideas among the Protestant Priesthood of All Believers were spreading, multiplying and taking on a democratic cast.

Charles I exercised his arbitrary authority to try to impose ritual conformity and episcopacy on Scotland long after the lowlands had become thoroughly Presbyterian. Jenny Geddes threw her stool, and the fight was on.

(Hobbes never seems to consider the sheer stupidity of Charles I to be problematic for the case of absolutism. How does an impoverished monarch manage to make himself responsible for funding both armies in a war against each other? The incompetence and bad luck of the Stuarts was the most telling argument against their governing absolutely.)

After Cromwell sorted out the character of those recruited for the New Model Army, it was not long before Lilburne’s Agitators had the private soldiers debating and writing constitutions. The Levelers were famously egalitarian and their ideology is pretty much a straight shot to the American Revolution and the Chartists and the Parliament Act of 1911.

I do not find much affection among the lower orders for manor courts and the like. If Cromwell had a selling point, it was that his judiciary was scrupulously fair, even in Ireland after his conquest (making allowance for the claims of conquest which are always manifestly unfair).

The appeal out-of-doors for political support for and against the Stuart monarchy and its Catholic ambitions oddly enough began in earnest pretty late in the chaotic political evolutions of the 17th century. And, well after the calamities of 1666-7 brought the legitimacy of the dynasty to a very low ebb. Then (on what became the Tory side) it was accompanied and accomplished in part by Charles II revoking ancient municipal charters wholesale. That was the process that finally reduced the chaotic efflorescence of opinion mid-century to make every Englishman a Tory or a Whig, and made governing from Parliament possible — ironically, without much in the way of subsequent popular participation.

I guess what I am struggling to articulate is that the public-private distinction that we often take for granted was a political solution to excessive political conflict over issues that people came to see did not need to be decided by the central state. It is not that anyone wanted it, at least not until exhausted. Religious toleration, for example, was not a popular cause, though figures like Harry Vane advocated for it, and figures as disparate as Cromwell and Charles II tried to make limited forms of religious toleration a political solution, before the settlement on the accession of William and Mary embodied a grudging degree of toleration, made somewhat less punitive with the Whig Ascendancy under the Hanovers. But, if you were to puzzle over the meaning of public good and public purpose, you have to wonder why, say, Harry Vane lost his head after the Restoration; he was no regicide — what infuriated the Cavaliers against him?

This comment has meandered enough that I won’t repeat a review of the French case, but I don’t think the Great Fear showed much latent affection among the peasants for their aristocratic betters.

@177 Agreed. As I noted earlier, I do not see how the political can be separated from the religious when considering the genesis of formal conservative thought, whether we are talking about Luther and the German conservative reformers, or those they preceded and followed. The two are inextricably linked. The cycle of political and religious discourse from 1520 to 1700, and on to the abolition movement, advanced a great many important ideas, which you identify, but lamentably do not expand upon. The response of the puritan press in Cromwell’s England took a very dim view of the Ranters, Levellers, and Children of Light, and the few woodcuts we still possess demonizing these dissenting groups provide vital, if fragmentary, evidence of a what was very likely a very wide-ranging political and religious debate. John Milton, of course, published a number of essential political pamphlets which should still be read today.

I remain unconvinced that we can obtain a clear understanding of our interactions by deploying labels to behaviors which are in many cases responses to change, as much as they are doctrinaire, or driven by some set of ‘principles,’ except in the most rudimentary sense. You rightly point out that both Cromwell and Charles II advanced the rights of religious minorities. Yet, the Acts of Uniformity of the late 17th century provoked much the same response as they did in the middle of the 16th. The very conservative views of 18th century evangelicals did more to end slavery than any philosophical tract by Voltaire, or Rousseau. Liberty-loving revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic had very little interest in extending even voting rights to women, much less people of color. As famous as Susan B. Anthony is, she has much more in common with Henry Ford and Emmeline Pankhurst than she did with any left-wing activist.

The history of the Chartists is one long history of the oppression of politically active women by ‘liberals’ advocating greater equality and rights for men, while openly embracing the notion that women were physically and mentally unprepared for any challenge outside the bedroom and the kitchen.

How much has changes is open to question. Terms of reference matter. We accept that we hold a great many beliefs. I’d go further and say that these beliefs manifest themselves as theologies, and that part of the current discourse is closer to catechism than conversation.

It’s Peirce (pronounced “purse”), not Pierce.

He was, indeed, strongly influenced by German Idealism, as were most (provincial) philosophers of the late C19. The influence was not sufficiently profound to prevent him going on to be a founder of American Pragmatism and analytic philosophy (wrt the latter: in principle, at least).

OK, my bad. I wasn’t familiar with the English Civil War book. Guy had a thing for big things. Over- compensation of some kind or other, perhaps.

Peter T@184 Again, a good analysis, I think.

I would conclude that Robin’s version of reactionaries* do draw a public/private distinction which they did not in reality, a distinct error in the analysis. I would further add that a lot of this analysis highlights the sense in which Robin’s argument could be more correctly rephrased as, reactionaries oppose change when their ox is gored. Except that in the real world there are many, many reactionaries supporting the barbecuing of their “ox.”

*I’ve lost track of the extent to which a focus on a reactionary mind allows a surreptitious assumption that clean and decent conservatives, as opposed to those nasty reactionaries, exist, and need not be criticized. Sort of a political theory version of the cozy mystery’s “ordinary decent criminal?”

@s.t. johnson
I’ve lost track of the extent to which a focus on a reactionary mind allows a surreptitious assumption that clean and decent conservatives, as opposed to those nasty reactionaries, exist, and need not be criticized

The extent to which this exists in CR’s work is pretty much zero. Whatever you think of his argument, and I’ve offered some criticism of it above in this thread, you shd at least state the basic outline of it accurately: he doesn’t (iirc) use words like nasty, clean, or decent; rather assumes that there are some features unifying the outlook of conservatives and that those features can be identified (partly or mostly via a reading of certain authors). ‘Conservative’ and ‘reactionary’ are words used basically interchangeably by him, hence a split of the kind you suggest doesn’t show up in the bk.

@Stephen 188

“But I would suggest that eugenics is not the opposite of natural selection, it’s trying to achieve the results that would be obtained by truly natural selection in a society where the unfit weren’t kept going by unnatural means.”
The whole difference between “nature” and “society” doesn’t make sense from a darwinian standpoint, though.

“I am trying to remember the source arguing that, in mediaeval times, the surviving descendants of the relatively rich outnumbered those of the poor.”

I did read some articles that argued the opposite, but I doubt anyone can seriously check this for a long historical period. The argument for “the poor reproduce more” is that at some point household choose to limit births in order not to divide the patrimony, but this happened only to proprietors (most farmers were sharecroppers or serfs).

“Re Malthus: I’m not sure you realise he lived in a state that was, by historic standards, liberal towards the poor: consider the Poor Laws which in England largely kept the poor alive.”
Many cities and countries in the second part of the middle ages had some sort of poor law, the catholic church had hospitals for the poor, much of the money that came from the indulgence went to the poor etc. (this is in my opinion the reason Luther was against the idea of “good deeads”, because it justified what he saw as “simony”). In earlier times there weresn’t such things but there wasn’t a lumpenproletariat in the same sense either. I have no reason to think that the poor laws were particularly generous by historical standards.

“The rich preventing the poor from rallying together and killing all the rich: surely the rich being able to stop that happening is an example of their Darwinian superiority?”
Only if their offspring outnumbers my offspring. Thanks for reminding me, now I’ll go reproduce as a rabbit.
[…]
More seriously, I don’t think that darwinian superiority has any sense, as I hope is clear from my previous comments.

“Should not the rich believe it is a good idea to get somebody to kill you?”
Eh, if the masters kill all the slaves, they are not masters anymore though – it’s catch 22.

I think I should hardly have to point out that a) killing people is wrong and b) most people on this website are rich in their own country, let alone globally. Anyone here advocating killing rich people is talking up their own demise.

Peter T: I would argue that medieval and early modern thinkers were well aware of the public/private distinction.

You think a world in which the lord of the manor was both the owner and the state had public and private as platonic ideas fully formed but unattached? No. They had ideas of the divine attached to a universal religion and an institutional church with its own language.

@B. Wilder

In late-medieval France (late 13th c., early 14th), the ‘kingdom of France’ (regnum Francie) emerges as something distinct — in language and to some extent on the ground — from the king’s personally held lands.

What about throwing them in jail?

Steven if you’re a professor you’re rich,in your own country and globally. A professor in the UK is probably in the top 2-5% of the income distribution,am associate prof in the 5-8. Thats putting aside the common trait of academics to come from wealthy families with inherited money. Globally you’re in an even more privileged position. It’s fantartically misleading to think you can talk about killing the rich on a website run by profs and associate profs and not be talking about your hosts. It’s also a fantastically historically ignorant position to think that a revolution that leads to the deaths of rich people will leave you or yours out of the killing – especially a global revolution, but even a local one. If Aussie proles rise up do you think they’ll mistake John quiggin for one of theirs? It’s immoral and stupid to talk about this shit, and a sign that the commenters haven’t grown out of their 20s radicalism if they still think they’re on the same class divide as the poor. Even more so for those reading here who are baby boomers or thereabouts, beneficiaries of a great economic awakening followed by a massive inter generational theft.

This is an academic blog not a blog for zero hours contractors. Some readers would do well to remember that when they make jokes about killing their hosts.

faustusnotes avers that killing people is wrong. steven t johnson responds by pointing to evidence that people don’t really believe that killing people is wrong. This is to confound two separate issues. Even if there were incontrovertible proof that people don’t believe that killing people is wrong, that would be insufficient to establish that killing people is wrong. The statements ‘killing people is wrong’ and ‘people believe that killing people is wrong’ are not synonymous; for example, if I ask steven t johnson ‘Do you, steven t johnson, believe that killing people is wrong?’, I don’t mean ‘Do you, steven t johnson, believe that people believe that killing people is wrong?’ It’s very easy to believe that something is wrong and at the same time to believe that most people don’t believe it’s wrong.

steven t johnson: “But speaking seriously, the notion that income is a sufficient measure of wealth is preposterous.”

This from the person who, only yesterday, wrote “The rule of thumb for rich is a million a year in after tax income, isn’t it?”

@steven t johnson

If two or three people argue about Robin’s second edition (or first, if they’re too cheap to buy the new one,)

I’m planning to buy the new one, prob. today (sometimes prefer brick-and-mortar bk stores to online). Just hadn’t bought it yet — that’s why I made ref. to the first ed. in this thread. You seem to have read neither edition, which didn’t stop you from making (inaccurate) comments about C. Robin’s positions.

While I would be concerned to distance myself from Ze’s politics it does strike me that many of his positions have become a lot more mainstream since his glory days of dominating every other CT thread. Also wonder where he went (hope he’s alright)

engels

… Also wonder where he went …

The Twisted World, presumably, if the example of the canonical original is a guide.

Yes, and killing hundreds of thousands is even more morally wrong

One of the distinctive features of libertarian, quote, thought, unquote is that a strict distinction is made between action and inaction: in particular, a person carries no moral responsibility for their “failure to act” only for their “positive actions”.

Efforts to put this distinction on a stable analytical framework have… not been successful, as you’d probably know.

And yes I do think some people on here were vaguely serious about killing the rich.

I just want to take (some of? all of?) their stuff, certainly with enough allies to make it plausible. Am I responsible if they resist, counter-revolt, or subvert? I think I am, and so I choose to take responsibility for the consequences of my desire, which includes its misapplication by my allies. My alliance will never be 100%, and rarely more than a significant plurality, but to be effective and/or more determined it must be larger than theirs. So taxers are 30%, plutocrats 10%, with 60% apathetic or contented enough to just want peace and order. Therefore action on the part of both active factions will be partly undemocratic and extra-legal, hopefully gaining majority support over time.

I will not preemptively unilaterally disarm, and I will defend myself and my allies, with both preventative, preemptive, and proactive measures. History and power analysis tells me it will be necessary, and observing ongoing and possible damage to ourselves and noncombatants, aesthetically justifiable until empathy and disgust overwhelm. Morality is for those who want to outsource and evade responsibility.

Praxis will come into play somewhere between impossible and inevitable.

Omelettes, tumbrels, guillotines.

@faustusnotes
I’ll agree to stop ‘quibbling’. (btw, I don’t have an academic job, of any kind. There is no way to be sure of the sources and levels of income and wealth of the commenters here, but I’d venture to guess that, despite this blog’s ‘academic’ identity, the assumption that all or even most of the commenters are academics is prob. unwarranted. And of those who are, some are no doubt retired/emeritus.)

steven t johnson @ 196

I realize that I am not confident I understand how Corey Robin uses a public / private power distinction to support his concept of the perennial character of reactionary conservative thought. I will be reading the second edition with new curiosity about this.

I will say that I am surprised to find Peter T of all people taking an ahistorical view of the public / private distinction in politics.

Peter T @ 200

Class relations and patron-client relations are not mutually exclusive. Generically, both are likely to be fruitful modes of analysis for any hierarchical society with significant concentration of critical resources in few hands. It is the particular details that matter.

If you think 17th century England was not a polity structured around and dominated by a social class resting for its economic basis on inherited land ownership, I am sure I cannot help you. The particulars of how the institutions of land ownership worked had evolved from the day when William the Conqueror abolished all alloidal title except his own. And, ideas of public and private emerged with that evolution, driven by political conflicts of interest. It was no accident that the Convention Parliament took time out from arranging the Restoration to reform feudal obligations to “socage” (property tax) and move all forms of real property toward fee simple.

No part of the concepts of “public” or “private” was untouched or undisputed in the course of that dynamic evolution. The common appreciation of the public interest in the national foreign policy evolved considerably from the dynastic ambitions of the monarch’s family thru religious affiliation to a mercantilism that protected and promoted commercial interests in a calculated way. The formation of policy moved from the intrigues at court to the deliberations of Parliament. The inviolability of personal conscience competed with a continuing culture of honor and rank.

Clientalism played a significant part in the politics of the 17th century in Britain. There were a lot of people cast into a precarious dependency by the importance of landed property and its concentration. And before 1670, the British economy was far from prospering. Hobbes was a client. But, if you or your family had the income of a manor or two or three, you had the means for education and political activity. You could stand aside, retire, or resist. One interesting thing about the English civil war is how large a proportion of the landed gentry remained neutral or drifted from one side to the other in response to the changing focus of wars in the three kingdoms. Figures like Holles or Cromwell had considerable resources. Denzil Holles had been a childhood friend of Charles I. Only a third son, though a favored one, he could manage prolonged imprisonment and occasional exiles and keep coming back to play prominent roles. If Charles I had had the resources or wit of a Walpole or a Duke of Devonshire, 17th century British politics might have been more like 18th, but he did not. And, he was up against many who had a portion of both.

Comforting to notice that some, maybe most CT contributors understand that a policy of killing the rich would be suicidal. Not certain, though, that those who seem more or less, even if only hypothetically, in favour of killing or at least threatening to kill those richer than themselves, have entirely understood the likely consequences of their threats.

Orwell puts this with his usual concision in his article on prophecies of fascism (http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/fascism/english/e_fasco). About Jack London’s “The Iron Heel”, he wrote:
“Where London did show special insight, however, was in realizing the transition to Socialism was not going to be automatic or even easy. The capitalist class was not going to ‘perish of its own contradictions’ like a flower dying at the end of the season. The capitalist class was quite clever enough to see what was happening, to sink its own differences and counter-attack against the workers … A ruling class has got to have a strict morality, a quasi-religious belief in itself, a mystique. London was aware of this, and though he describes the caste of plutocrats who rule the world for seven centuries as inhuman monsters, he does not describe them as idlers or sensualists. They can only maintain their position while they honestly believe that civilization depends on themselves alone, and therefore in a different way they are just as brave, able and devoted as the revolutionaries who oppose them.
In an intellectual way London accepted the conclusions of Marxism… but temperamentally he was very different from the majority of Marxists … This probably helped him to understand just how the possessing class would behave when once they were seriously menaced. It is just there that Marxian Socialists have usually fallen short. Their interpretation of history has been so mechanistic that they have failed to foresee dangers that were obvious to people who had never heard the name of Marx.”

In short: if you are really, seriously talking about killing the rich (as Communists were during and after the Revolution), then in states where Communists seemed in measurable distance of coming to power, the rich will try to find a way of killing you.

This is not meant as a threat against Steven T Johnson, or against Engels. They can write whatever they please, safe in the knowledge that in their countries the rich, however one defines them, will never take them seriously.

J-D@201 didn’t understand the objection was that not just people in general don’t disapprove of all killing, but that neither does Faustusnotes. This is not a hypocrisy unique to Faustusnotes. The acceptability of pacifist platitudes is due to their inevitable selectivity, which permits the speaker to strike a critical pose that means nothing, and can’t.

Layman@203 is confused at best, forgetting that a million a year income after taxes is income from property, not salary. The tacit assumption this can only refer to income before retirement is simple misreading.

faustusnotes@204 doubles down on intergenerational theft while apparently denying it was ever mentioned, which is quite impressive in a left-handed way. As for any Lupita-ism that imagines anyone posting comments on an academic group blog is part of the global elite? It must convenient for someone to not even have a term for billionaires in the global economy.

LFC@205 seems to be under the impression Robin has resolved the No True Scotsman defense of conservatism/reaction/counter-revolution by correctly defining True Scotsman, and that anyone who wasn’t convinced didn’t understand. This is wit far beyond me.

Bruce is misreading me, but I’ll let it go with the observation that patronage was the way one gained or kept landed property or the additional income essential to keeping the family afloat in economic downturns.

Can I recommend two books on the period that shed useful light on socio-political responses to environmental or economic adversity: Jack Goldstone’s Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (1991) and the even more pertinent Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis (2017). The latter looks in depth at how climatic stress interacted with politics to produce – mostly – truly horrid outcomes.

Peter T @169

One way of framing Corey’s contest is between those who would open up higher levels of authority to wider participation and those who resist this.

I think that is one way to frame the general political conflict in the 1750/1950 period (in the Western world) but I don’t think that this describes accurately Corey’s specific interests. I think Corey is studying one particular reaction (in the usual sense) to the changes – real or perceived – in interpersonal and immediate (in the etymological sense) relations this global and general conflict triggered. Moreover, he argues that this particular reaction was more often than not (probably systematically, in fact) violently destructive in form and passionate in temperament.

So for instance, it is not in itself enough to oppose the extension of suffrage in the Reform Act of 1867 to qualify as a reactionary in the sense of Corey; the opposition should be grounded on a sense that it would make working-class males feel entitled, promote their defiance of elites and general unruliness etc… and should take the form of a disruptive call to some “restoration” of some sort.

There are many levels of authority below the state, many spheres which it is content to – or forced to – leave to themselves.

Interestingly, I take a good deal of Corey’s thesis to be the observation that reactionary thinkers reject precisely that point (that’s also what John hammers on in the OP). They deny that change in the general political or social world or at the state level will or even may leave some spheres undisturbed, even (or in fact especially) the most private ones. So a reactionary according to Corey is someone who reacts to larger systemic changes, but whose virulence stems directly from his direct experience of changes in his personal sphere.

(One might incidentally ask: were they right? That is to say, is it true that the systemic political changes were revolutionizing private spheres? To a certain extent certainly – think abolition of slavery for an extreme example – but I believe they usually weren’t. I think they got the general causal direction wrong, and that it was changes in private modes of apprehension of the world which triggered the systemic social changes, not the other way round.)

FaustusNotes’ comments are like a kind of parody of how liberals use guilt about global poverty to try to shore up the status quo

steven t johnson: “…forgetting that a million a year income after taxes is income from property, not salary. The tacit assumption this can only refer to income before retirement is simple misreading.”

Well, if you can’t be clear in your contradictions, that’s hardly my fault.

faustusnotes: “yes I do think the rich should be worried that the poor will get sick of their grifting…”

Odd that you ignored the rest of my questions. What’s with that? Do you think they are worried? Can you propose anything other than fear of force, or actual force, that might change their behavior? Can you point to a time and place when something other than force managed to constrain the wealthy and powerful?

Mario: “The poor are voting for Trump, LePen, AfD, PiS, etc.”

How many times does this have to be debunked before people will stop saying it? Poor people voted overwhelmingly for Clinton.

http://www.businessinsider.com/exit-polls-who-voted-for-trump-clinton-2016-11/#the-racial-divide-between-democratic-and-republican-voters-was-clear-3

@Mario 228
“The poor are voting for Trump, LePen, AfD, PiS, etc. It’s interesting and unsettling to read the last few dozen posts of this thread in light of that fact.”

For Trump this isn’t true (although the story is quite mixed):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/05/its-time-to-bust-the-myth-most-trump-voters-were-not-working-class

I’m not going to check the other cases but I suspect they are similar.
A lot of the “working-classness” of the populist right is mostly self-image, I think.

On the idea of “the poor killing the rich”, that originated from a comment of mine, the problem is that a large part of the income of the “rich” comes from the exploitation of the poor (like: the income of the landlord comes from the share he takes from the sharecropper), but this exploitation is often indirect. For example, while I’m not directly exploiting workers in bangladeshi sweatshops, my real income is higer because I can buy stuff at a lower price because of their lower incomes; on the other hand even if I choose to “buy italian” this might in the end make the bagladeshi workers worse of.
So I think the correct approach is not to “take from the rich” directly, but rather to increase the income of the poor, which automatically cuts the income of the rich (like, if the sharecropper gets to take home a larger share of the crop, the landlord’s income necessariously falls); so for example increasing the income of bangladeshi worker will indirectly lower my income.
The “violent” part comes from the fact that, as Stephen @217 points out through Orwell, the rich (or at least a part of them) is not going to like this, hence “reaction”, and perhaps the necessity of a violent revolution.
As Bob Mcmanus points out shortly after though this is exactly the standard marxist belief, so I don’t understand why Stephen thinks this is news or goes against marxism.

@Faustusnotes: I assume you believe economic inequality is a problem. This is not going away by magic as it’s obvious that the natural dynamic of the world we are living in is that of the accentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands; this can be changed only by “taking from the rich” in a way or the other. Perhaps you prefer a social democratic government, democratically elected, that increases taxes to a revolution – I’m with you with this! – but this is still a form of violence, as any libertarian can tell you. Furthermore, if you read Picketty’s Capital in the 21st century, while P. himself is a social democrat he shows that this kind of policies never could reduce inequality, at best they stopped inequality to grow in the postwar years (falls in inequality only happened in the tumultuous interwar period or with the violent abolition of slavery in the USA). So even if you want a social democratic solution, it would be an extremely aggressive form of social democracy, that is almost certain to cause some sort of “reaction” (basically you have to tax rich people enough that their capital has to fall in time – you have to tax them more than their income minus their personal consumption).

If I can amend to my previous comment, the story about Trump voters isn’t really all that mixed:

To look at it another way, among white people without college degrees who voted for Trump, nearly 60 percent were in the top half of the income distribution. In fact, one in five white Trump voters without a college degree had a household income over $100,000.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/05/its-time-to-bust-the-myth-most-trump-voters-were-not-working-class

@s.t. johnson

LFC@205 seems to be under the impression Robin has resolved the No True Scotsman defense of conservatism/reaction/counter-revolution by correctly defining True Scotsman, and that anyone who wasn’t convinced didn’t understand. This is wit far beyond me.

One of C. Robin’s positions is that all conservatives are counter-revolutionaries. Is it possible to disagree with that view and argue that Robin has overgeneralized, or whatever? Yes, it is. But to say that Robin himself distinguishes between “nice” conservatives and “evil” reactionaries, as one of s.t. johnson’s earlier comments seemed to suggest, is to misread Robin’s position (where “misread” is a mild word for it).

Btw, s.t. johnson, I’ve now bought the second edition of the bk (and in a brick-and-mortar store so it’s actually in my possession, I’m not waiting for it to be shipped); so much for your suggestion that I was too “cheap” to buy it.

I intend this to be my last comment in this thread.

steven t. johnson: “But if you do insist on using income to measure wealth…”

No, that was you, right there at 192. Thank you John Holbo and good night.

MrMister,

To look at it another way, among white people without college degrees who voted for Trump, nearly 60 percent were in the top half of the income distribution. In fact, one in five white Trump voters without a college degree had a household income over $100,000.

these are high energy weasel words, and I’m surprised you don’t notice (actually, scratch that, I’m not surprised in the least). N.B: if you are the provider for a family of four and earn 60000$, you are hardly affluent. Of course you could be poorer, but still. I’m still shaking my head at “In fact, one in five…”.

In Gemany, the AfD was the strongest party among the working class – by a margin. It won big among unionized voters. The actual official left got most of its votes from the affluent. I don’t find any numbers but PiS and Le Pen could never have obtained the number of votes they got without at least a very solid footing in the lower classes.

No, the left does not give much of a damn about the poor, or rather, about the real existing human beings that make up the poor. You can see that in their priorities: trans rights first, women in company boards first, all sorts of things first, and then maybe we give a sh*t about the poor. But only once they have been reeducated because patriarchy. Oh yeah, for fucks sake, first take away their cars because climate change.