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    The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump
    The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump
    The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump

    Written by Corey Robin

    Narrated by Mike Chamberlain

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateFeb 27, 2018
    ISBN9781977373281
    The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump
    Author

    Corey Robin

    Corey Robin is the author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin and Fear: The History of a Political Idea. He teaches political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Robin’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, the London Review of Books, and The Nation, among other publications, and has been translated into eleven languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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    Reviews for The Reactionary Mind

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      Fantastic. The Ayn Rand roast would be enough but there’s so much more!
    • 3/5
      Didn't like very much. One-sided one-track analysis. I did like chapter 9, about the use of "national security" to justify just about anything.
    • 3/5
      File this under "not what I was expecting," rather than being actively bad. I'd expected theory and deep history. Instead, I got journalism and zingers. The zingers are good (see page 173 on Ayn Rand), but the lumping together is very unconvincing: Hobbes and Burke are both meant to be conservatives of the same kind. Nietzsche's followers, too. They all love violence, which is 'proved' by a reading of Burke's essay on the sublime, written eight years before he took a political position as a whig, and decades before he wrote against the French revolution.

      The best pieces here are exploratory and theoretical (the first two), or about Robin's contemporaries (Scalia, Trump, maybe the Goldwater one). The pieces in between, on various thinkers, sag badly. It's all well written, and Robin is on the side of the angels, but I think I'd hyped this up to myself, and it just doesn't fullfil that hype.
    • 1/5
      I'm putting down a lot of books these days--only got about 40 pages in. Reductionist and unsatisfying.
    • 4/5
      A loose collection of essays describing the origins and future trajectories of current conservatism. Describes thinkers with worthy praise and demagogues with fiery condemnation. The part on Ayn Rand is especially critical.