The Reactionary Mind
Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump
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Narrated by:
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Mike Chamberlain
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By:
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Corey Robin
About this listen
In The Reactionary Mind, Robin traces conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution. He argues that the right was inspired, and is still united, by its hostility to emancipating the lower orders. Some conservatives endorse the free market; others oppose it. Some criticize the state; others celebrate it. Underlying these differences is the impulse to defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality - while simultaneously making populist appeals to the masses. Despite their opposition to these movements, conservatives favor a dynamic conception of politics and society - one that involves self-transformation, violence, and war. They are also highly adaptive to new challenges and circumstances. This partiality to violence and capacity for reinvention have been critical to their success.
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The hour is critical. The American republic is suffering its gravest crisis since the Civil War. Conflicts, hostility, and incivility now threaten to tear the country apart. Competing visions have led to a dangerous moment of cultural self-destruction. This is no longer politics as usual, but an era of political warfare where our enemies are not foreign adversaries, but our fellow citizens. Yet the roots of the crisis are deeper than many realize. Os Guinness argues that we face a fundamental crisis of freedom, as America's genius for freedom has become her Achilles' heel.
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Thought Provoking Work On Liberty In America
- By Ezekiel on 05-28-19
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Capitalism
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The foundations of capitalism are being battered by a flood of altruism, which is the cause of the modern world's collapse. This was the view of Ayn Rand, a view so radically opposed to prevailing attitudes that it constituted a major philosophic revolution. In this series of essays, she presented her stand on the persecution of big business, the causes of war, the default of conservatism, and the evils of altruism.
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Ashame this is not taught in our
- By Karen on 08-18-07
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The End of History and the Last Man
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Ever since its first publication in 1992, The End of History and the Last Man has provoked controversy and debate. Francis Fukuyama's prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is as essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists as it was for the end of the Cold War. Now updated with a new afterword, The End of History and the Last Man is a modern classic.
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An important discussion expertly narrated
- By Kevin Teeple on 06-27-19
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The Voice of Reason
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In the years between her first public lecture in 1961 and her last in 1981, Ayn Rand spoke and wrote about topics as different as education, medicine, Vietnam, and the death of Marilyn Monroe. In The Voice of Reason, these pieces are gathered together in book form for the first time. Written in the last decades of Rand's life, they reflect a life lived on principle, a probing mind, and a passionate intensity. With them are five essays by Leonard Peikoff, Rand's longtime associate and literary executor.
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Explains Everything Of Today
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The Lost History of Liberalism challenges our most basic assumptions about a political creed that has become a rallying cry - and a term of derision - in today's increasingly divided public square. Taking listeners from ancient Rome to today, Helena Rosenblatt traces the evolution of the words "liberal" and "liberalism", revealing the heated debates that have taken place over their meaning. In this timely and provocative book, Rosenblatt debunks the popular myth of liberalism as a uniquely Anglo-American tradition centered on individual rights.
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Educative and informative
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America
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Is America a source of pride, as Americans have long held, or shame, as Progressives allege? Beneath an innocent exterior, are our lives complicit in a national project of theft, expropriation, oppression, and murder? Or is America still the hope of the world? New York Times best-selling author Dinesh D'Souza says these questions are no mere academic exercise.
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We can think for ourselves
- By score bags on 06-21-14
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A Thousand Small Sanities
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A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, Adam Gopnik argues that liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights. It is something far more ambitious: the search for radical change by humane measures. Gopnik shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history.
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Erudite and entertaining!
- By D. A. Vail on 05-20-19
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On Anarchism
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On Anarchism provides the reasoning behind Noam Chomsky's fearless lifelong questioning of the legitimacy of entrenched power. In these essays, Chomsky redeems one of the most maligned ideologies, anarchism, and places it at the foundation of his political thinking. Chomsky's anarchism is distinctly optimistic and egalitarian. Moreover, it is a living, evolving tradition that is situated in a historical lineage; Chomsky's anarchism emphasizes the power of collective, rather than individualist, action.
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Hit and Miss
- By Jacob King on 06-18-14
By: Noam Chomsky, and others
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Cursory, unoriginal, class-blind
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What listeners say about The Reactionary Mind
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- Brandon
- 09-19-24
the historical linage of the right
amazing well organized timeline of the right's history. an important thing to understand the world we live in.
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- Timothy L. Swabb
- 12-16-23
Very instructive.
Cory Robin examines a broad range of conservative thought and finds the thread running through each apparently new and shifting ethos. Each time, Robin says, conservatives learn from the left, adapt, and recast their belief in hierarchy in the terms used by the left.
Conservatism is counter-revolutionary, but it is not an attempt to turn back the clock. If anything, conservative counter-revolutionaries have contempt for the old regime that grew soft and allowed itself to be overthrown, But conservatism again and again invents new ways to sell hierarchy to a new age.
If the divine right of kings is abandoned, they portray monarchy as the most rationale system. If freedom is what people want, they complain about the tyranny of the poor and dispossessed, who are taking away the freedoms of the silent majority.
If it’s no longer acceptable to assert white male privilege, they recast racism and sexism as religious beliefs in private (white) schools and the right of women to stay at home and be cared for by men. If violence is no longer fashionable, they talk of business as a kind of war and entrepreneurs and CEOs as generals who must have obedient troops, and countries who have a patriotic duty to support businesses and business leaders.
Samuel Johnson once said Republicans want to level down so they are equal to the King, but they don’t want to level up so they are no better than their servants. So the key to making conservatism popular is to convince people that true enforced equality will hurt them by leveling up more than it helps them by leveling down.
Equality will hurt their freedoms more than it helps. It’s better to be a favored subject of benevolent rulers than to be reduced to the level of the lowest of the low. That’s the sales pitch, anyway. And it’s the reason millions of people who are not highly educated or affluent, the people Democrats think they are helping, are voting Republican.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Josh Hughes
- 10-25-19
Insightful and Timely
This book took me on a journey from the origins of right wing conservatism to the Trump era and left me with a new understanding of reactionary politics.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Lilheart17
- 12-06-23
Brilliant author, slowish text
I love political philosophy and this book is full of it, but it dwells for a long time on Burke and his conception of the sublime, which I found too poetic and abstract for my taste. I vastly preferred the more modern analyses in the final chapters, particularly covering the last 50 years, since I know the history better, and the philosophy was more tangible, I would love to see another book from Robins that focuses more on the parallel between modern conservatives and their counterparts from centuries past, rather than deep dives of the earlier thinkers whose history I’m not as familiar with (and would take a much longer book to put into context). I love Robins’ appearances to talk about this book on YouTube and podcasts, where he does an excellent job of distilling down its main points.
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- Just Curious
- 03-02-20
An Important Book, but a Sub-Optimal Reader...
Corey Robin makes a first-class contribution to political literature in this explanation of how and why "conservatives" think the way they do...Too bad the narrator wasn't up for this particular job...Listen to the sample and make your own decision...Thanks!
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- JMPGKC
- 08-10-24
Rich, accurate, predictive
This is an authoritative book that you will want to reread. Very concise, densely packed, yet easily readable and smartly designed.
It will expand your view of the reactionary/conservative ideology. Tough and serious conservatives should read this as well. If you are academic, I do not think you will disagree with many of his points, and may learn a great deal about where you’re coming from and going.
I think it is fair and realistic, though preferring a Liberal-Left orientation.
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- Todd P.
- 11-30-19
Interesting, a bit disorganized
This books responds to a need. What's been needed is a theoretical elaboration of political conservatism. There have been plenty of those but, for the most part, they have been provided by conservatives so they were partisan and they were attempting to redefine the movement.
What Corey Robin provides is a survey of conservative theory and some practice. In chronological order, Robin takes his survey through Hobbes, Burke, Nietzsche, Hayek and Austrian school, mid-century American reaction, Ayn Rand, Bush-era neocon warmongering, Scalia, and Trump. Robin posits a unifying definition of reaction throughout.
The biggest shortcoming is the episodic nature of the survey. As this plays out throughout the book, the chronology is not as clean as it should be and the consistency of the episodes changes throughout the survey. For instance, after moving on from Burke, Robin circles back to him in subsequent chapters for additional excursions. This time and space would have been better spent flushing out one of the main premises of the second half of the book, where Robin posits two strains of reactionary types, following in the lineage of Nietzsche and the militaristic type on the one hand and on the other hand the Austrian school and the captain of industry entrepreneur type.
Despite these shortcomings, it is still an enjoyable book. Robin was responding to a need and he contributed to the literature on conservatism and reaction by do so. While he didn't write the definitive guide to conservatism and reaction, he did provide an edifying and at times stimulating tome.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Terra Jones
- 02-07-24
great analysis but needs to better distinguish quotes
it might have helped if there was a separate reader for quotes. I've seen that in other books.
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- Will2Combat
- 04-10-19
This is a brilliant book.
In short if you want to understand Conservatism not in the terms it prefers but from the level of it's DNA I don't know if there is better than this. This book is insightful, direct, and deeply thought out. It isn't about looking for some mystical, morally lazy middle ground it's about defining what Conservatism wants and how it acts. Pair it with Bob Altemeyer's "The Authoritarians" and you'll have the essence of Conservatism in it's starkest relief. This is a research document not an editorial, I can't recommend it enough.
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- David Pearce
- 06-10-21
All that’s missing is a Marxian class critique in this context
Simply excellent, a great shortcut to much knowledge on all this violent Right-wing nonsense. This world is a world built by the conservativism & reactionaries. They want hierarchy, not justice. Rich overlords, not less people above them. Someone to call the n-word, not for the dispossessed to do better. Remember that conservativism will always adopt popular language to serve power. US Democratic Party liberalism is partner here, not opposed. Winning with violence maintains status quo, not arguments, virtue or “how things should be.” If you are of the True Left, a socialist, a communist or whatnot you should read this book especially if you are married to any notions of nonviolence, “ideological diversity is best” & technology as progress. Also, f*** the police.
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2 people found this helpful