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Now updated to include Trump's election and the rise of global populism, Corey Robin's 'The Reactionary Mind' traces conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution.
America Needs Reactionaries! Never have the American people been lonelier, unhappier, or more in need of a swift reactionary kick in the pants. There is a better way to live—a way tested by history, a way that fulfills the deepest needs of the human spirit, and a way that promotes the pursuit of true happiness. That way is the reactionary way. In this irrepressibly provocative book, Michael Warren Davis shows you how to unleash your inner reactionary and enjoy life as God intended it. In The Reactionary Mind, you’ll learn: Why medieval serfs were probably happier than you are Why we should look back fondly on the Inquisition Why all “news” is fake news How “conservatives” become “adagio progressives” You also get bonus lists of Reactionary Drinks, Reactionary Books—even Reactionary Dogs. If you want to be happy, you need to be a reactionary, and this book is your guide. It belongs on the bookshelf of everyone in America. (And, incidentally, a reactionary would build his own darn bookshelf, not buy one from IKEA!)
The Ideology of Political Reactionaries offers a new perspective on the beliefs reactionaries share, presenting a theory of reactionary ideology in the process. Rather than taking self-contradictions in the reactionary imagination as a reason for diminishment, complexity is taken as a challenge. The book argues that the features that unite reactionaries lie in rhetoric. Reactionaries make three persuasive appeals: to decadence, conspiracy, and indignation. They also display some recurrent styles. The book’s rhetorical approach entails a critique of the alternative approaches to reactionary politics (dubbed as ‘dispositional’, ‘sociological’, and ‘conceptual’). At the heart of the book is the textual analysis of the writings of a range of figures who are chosen in deliberate diversity and who have interacted with political audiences in different eras and settings: Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Adolf Hitler, Éric Zemmour, Joe McCarthy, Anders Breivik, and Nigel Farage. Analysis of their writings helps the book to reckon with some particular puzzles of ideologies and rhetoric. These puzzles include the proximity of reactionaries to conservatism, the ambiguity of their nostalgia, the myth of their essential charisma, and the apparent fetishisation of facts. The Ideology of Political Reactionaries ought to interest anyone concerned about current ideological trends and, in particular, students and scholars of politics and history.
This book offers an original interpretation of the achievement of Leo Strauss, stressing how his ideas and followers reshaped the American conservative movement. The conservative movement that reached out to Strauss and his legacy was extremely fluid and lacked a self-confident leadership. Conservative activists and journalists felt a desperate need for academic acceptability, which they thought Strauss and his disciples would furnish. They also became deeply concerned with the problem of 'value relativism', which self-described conservatives thought Strauss had effectively addressed. But until recently, neither Strauss nor his disciples have considered themselves to be 'conservatives'. Contrary to another misconception, Straussians have never wished to convert Americans to ancient political ideals and practices, except in a very selective rhetorical fashion. Strauss and his disciples have been avid champions of American modernity, and 'timeless' values as interpreted by Strauss and his followers often look starkly contemporary.
"Paleoconservatism" as a concept came into circulation during the 1980s as a rejoinder to the rise of neoconservatism. It signifies a brand of conservatism that rose up in opposition to the New Deal, setting itself against the centralizing trends that define modern politics to champion the republican virtues of self-governance and celebrate the nation's varied and colorful regional cultures. This volume brings together key writings of the major representatives of "Old Right" thought, past and present. The essays included here define a coherent intellectual tradition linking New York libertarians to unreconstructed Southern traditionalists to Midwestern agrarians. Part I is devoted to the founding fathers of the modern conservative movement. Essays by Frank Chodorov, Murray Rothbard, and James Burnham attack economic aspects of the New Deal, big government in general, and high taxes. Russell Kirk introduces the cultural paleoconservatism, with its preference for social classes and distinctions of age and sex, while Richard Weaver explains why culture is more important to a civilization's survival than mere material conditions. The second part covers the contemporary resurgence of the Old Right. Chilton Williamson, Jr. sets out the argument against large-scale immigration on cultural and economic grounds. The divisive issue of trade is covered. William Hawkins outlines a mercantilist trade policy at odds with the free trade libertarianism of Chodorov and Rothbard. On education, Allan Carlson goes further than the Beltway Right in his advocacy of home schooling. M.E. Bradford shows how the doctrine of equality of opportunity inevitably leads to greater and more tyrannical state action. The contemporary culture wars are the focus of Thomas Fleming, Paul Gottfried, Clyde Wilson, and Samuel Francis, who search for the roots of American nationalism, the lessons to be drawn from the past, and how they may be applied in the future.
It is a truism to suggest that celebrity pervades all areas of life today. The growth and expansion of celebrity culture in recent years has been accompanied by an explosion of studies of the social function of celebrity and investigations into the fascination of specific celebrities. And yet fundamental questions about what the system of celebrity means for our society have yet to be resolved: Is celebrity a democratization of fame or a powerful hierarchy built on exclusion? Is celebrity created through public demand or is it manufactured? Is the growth of celebrity a harmful dumbing down of culture or an expansion of the public sphere? Why has celebrity come to have such prominence in today’s expanding media? Milly Williamson unpacks these questions for students and researchers alike, re-examining some of the accepted explanations for celebrity culture. The book questions assumptions about the inevitability of the growth of celebrity culture, instead explaining how environments were created in which celebrity output flourished. It provides a compelling new history of the development of celebrity (both long-term and recent) which highlights the relationship between the economic function of celebrity in various media and entertainment industries and its changing social meanings and patterns of consumption.
This collection of recent scholarship on the thought of Michael Oakeshott includes essays by both distinguished and established authors as well as a fresh crop of younger talent. Together, they address the meanings of Oakeshott's conservatism through the lenses of his ideas on religion, history, and tradition, and explore his relationships to philosophers ranging from Hume to Ryle, Cavell, and others. The collection assigns no single or final meaning to Oakeshott's conservatism, but finds in him a number of possibilities for thinking fruitfully about what conservatism might mean, when it is no longer considered as a doctrine, but as a habit or a turn of mind.
As the recent hausse in pragmatic studies shows, linguistic attention is increasingly focussing on aspects of language use. Making use of recent insights developed within speech act theory, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistics, this book deals with the various expressions that were used in Latin to per-form so-called directive speech acts, i.e. orders, requests, advice, proposals, sug-gestions, etc. On the basis of a large corpus of comedy, correspondence, and instruction texts the expressions concerned (imperatives, subjunctives, future indicatives, as well as modal expressions and vari-ous other lexical expressions of directivity) are investigated against the background of the verbal interactions in which they typically occur. As regards its contribution to Latin linguistics, the present study adds a number of re-finements to our knowledge of this well-documented lan-guage, for instance with respect to the reference of the subjects of the so-called impera-tive II ending in -to, the conventionalized speech act functions of interrogative quid and quin directives, and the diachronic process of conventionalization of velim requests.