Review of Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind (2nd edition)
The political Left today is
resurgent, led by a newly galvanized Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of
George Floyd’s death on Memorial Day.
Massive protests erupted across the country (perhaps because COVID-19
had canceled most people’s summer vacation plans), including Seattle, where
protestors faced down police and claimed the Capitol Hill section. Leaders at some of the country’s most prestigious
universities have fallen over themselves to issue statements condemning racism
and affirming that black lives matter (sometimes with capitalization). Princeton University announced that it would
rename the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs as well as
Wilson College (Wilson served as president of Princeton University from
1902-10), and the American Political Science Association is considering
renaming the award that bears his name (Wilson served as president of APSA from
1909-10), due to Wilson’s “racist thinking and policies.” NASCAR has banned the flying of the
Confederate flag at its races. In a sign
of how drastically the political mood has shifted in just over a month, Mississippi
has removed the Confederate emblem from its state flag.
The changed mood can especially be
felt on social media. On May 28, three
days after Floyd’s death, David Shor, a political data analyst, tweeted a summary of a paper by Princeton professor Omar Wasow, which found that violent
protests in the aftermath of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination decreased
Democratic vote share in surrounding counties, whereas nonviolent protests
increased the Democratic vote share. For
this, he was accused of “anti-blackness” and “minimizing black grief and rage”
by Ari Trujillo Wesler, who proceeded to tag Shor’s boss, and instructed him,
“Come get your boy.” The next day, Shor
tweeted, “While I strongly admire [Omar Wasow’s] work, it’s clear that I have
not been, due to both my background and words, an effective messenger of his
findings about the power of non-violent protest. I regret starting this conversation and will
be much more careful moving forward.” It
was not enough. He was fired shortly
thereafter. This was but one of the
first instances in what is now an identifiable trend.
On my own feed, I have read that
anyone who criticized the riots without talking about what led to them, or who
made it a point to publicly support police, or who is doubling down on their
support of Trump and/or Republicans, or who is unwilling to “do the work” to be
an “ally,” is a racist or, at minimum, is acquiescing to racism. Since most of the people guilty of the
aforementioned sins are politically conservative, the criticism amounts to accusing
many conservatives of being racist or culpably passive in the face of racism.
The idea that there is a link or
affinity between conservatives/conservatism and racism is not new. In the preface to the second edition of The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin[1] speaks of “the
characteristics we have come to associate with contemporary
conservatism—racism, populism, violence, and a pervasive contempt for custom,
convention, law, institutions, and established elites” (xi) as a matter of
established consensus, at least among his first person plural. The book’s central claim, that conservatism
is “a meditation on—and theoretical rendition of—the felt experience of having
power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back” (4), is the sort of
argument one frequently hears from those leftists who reduce all social
relationships to power struggles. I find
them one-dimensional and tiresome. Nevertheless,
these arguments seem to be increasingly influential, and therefore should be addressed.
Let me say straightaway that The Reactionary Mind puts Robin’s wit
and intelligence on full display. The
book is organized in three parts: the first part sets forth what Robin sees as
the defining features of conservatism, and the next two parts consist of case
studies of European and American conservatives, ending with Trump. The third part, where Robin discusses the
American scene, is the strongest. Let me
begin at the end, with the chapter on Trump.
While many on the left have decried Trump as authoritarian or fascist
(it would appear most of them use the two terms indiscriminately), and someone
who endangers the United States by recklessly escalating tensions with other
countries, Robin notes that “[f]or all the apparent violence and statism of
[Trump’s] rhetoric, what’s remarkable about Trump’s political vision is how
economistic it can be” (260). Robin
quotes from Trump’s book: “China is our enemy,” and “the military threat from
China is gigantic.” Therefore, the
answer must be to proportionally beef up our own military, right? No.
“We need a president who will slap the Chinese with a 25 percent tax on
all their products entering America if they don’t stop undervaluing the
yuan.” The closest Trump gets to
violence is threatening to “slap” China where it hurts: its pocketbook.
As Robin observes, Trump’s favored
instruments of state power are those familiar to him as a businessman: leaving
the bargaining table and filing a lawsuit (262-63). “Indeed, for all the fear that Trump poses a
threat to the independence of the judiciary or the rule of law, his primary
mode of opposing court rulings has been … to appeal those rulings” (263). He has worked within the constraints of the
American system of checks-and-balances without seriously challenging that
system. Crucially, he has not
consolidated state power to clear the political field of opposition and dissent
(cf. 265).[2] Tweeting a storm at your political opponents
is not exactly the mark of a political strongman. Commendably, Robin does not allow his disgust
of Trump to drive his analysis of Trump.
What Makes a
Conservative?
As the chapter on Trump shows,
Robin can be perceptive. But it is one
thing to produce perceptive case studies; it is another to offer a
comprehensive, unifying account of conservatism. The former could fall within the purview of
political journalism; the latter falls squarely within the province of
political theory. Robin, being a
self-described political theorist “whose method is close reading and historical
analysis” (xiv), endeavors to offer just such an account in the first three
chapters of his book. On his telling,
the divisions within conservatism, “so often emphasized by scholars and
pundits” (29), are but improvisations on a single theme (32).
According to Robin, conservatism is
“the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should
not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be
allowed to govern themselves or the polity.
Submission is their first duty” (7-8).
The hoi polloi have their
place, should know their place, and should stay in their place. Moreover, because “the real subject” of
political deliberations is “the private life of power” (10), “[t]he priority of
conservative political argument has been the maintenance of private regimes of
power” (15). The political is
personal. Indeed, the “animating
purpose” of conservatism is its “opposition to the liberation of men and women
from the fetters of their superiors, particularly in the private sphere”
(16). Robin admits, “Such a view might
seem miles away from the libertarian defense of the free market” (16). “But,” he proclaims, “it is not” (16). Because “[w]hen the libertarian looks out
upon society, he does not see isolated individuals; he sees private, often
hierarchical, groups, where a father governs his family and an owner his
employees” (16).
If conservatism is “the most
consistent and profound argument” against power sharing, then that means it is
not the only such argument. The
conservative argument is distinguished, above all, from the traditionalist
defense of inherited power and privilege.
The distinction consists in the fact that conservatism “invariably arises in response to a
threat to the old regime or after the old regime has been destroyed” (44,
emphasis added); it is inherently reactionary and its ideas “are a mode of
counterrevolutionary practice” (17).[3] Robin points out a “surprising and
seldom-noticed” element of conservatism: an “antipathy, bordering on contempt,
for the old regime they claim as their cause” (41), for the revolution itself
is proof of “the weakness and incompetence” of the traditionalists (18). This means that, unlike traditionalism,
the
reactionary imperative presses conservatism in two rather different directions:
first, to a critique and reconfiguration of the old regime; and second, to an
absorption of the ideas and tactics of the very revolution or reform it
opposes. What conservatism seeks to
accomplish through that reconfiguration of the old and absorption of the new is
to make privilege popular, to transform a tottering old regime into a dynamic,
ideologically coherent movement of the masses.[4]
The conservative’s defense of power
and privilege, then, is directed against both
the revolutionaries and the
pre-revolutionary old guard,[5] which frequently causes
the traditionalist to “mistake the counterrevolutionary for the opposition”
(93). Conservatism is the counter-resistance,
adopting the tools and techniques of the resistance against the resistance,
including above all (reactionary) populism and, closely connected to that, the
politics of grievance (50-57).
The “wildness and extravagance”
(41) of conservatism as a counterrevolutionary practice points to a deep
affinity between conservatism and violence, shown superficially in the support
among self-identified conservatives for the death penalty, torture, and war,
and on a deeper level in the arguments of writers like Burke, especially in
their descriptions of the rejuvenating effects of violence (ch. 3, esp. 72-77).
On the basis of the foregoing
account of conservatism, it is not surprising that Robin views Trump as
“entirely legible as both a conservative and a Republican” (xi). However, a not insignificant number of
conservatives, including the Never-Trumpers, do not consider Trump a
conservative.[6] More broadly, few conservatives would
recognize the doctrine[7] they espouse in Robin’s
characterization. Robin’s burden, then, is
to demonstrate that he, a non-conservative, has understood conservatism better
than conservatives themselves have understood it.
That difficult task is made
unnecessarily more difficult by a muddle at the heart of his argument. Conservatism, like all political doctrines,
has both a theoretical dimension (the idea or ideal of conservatism) and a
practical dimension (conservatism in action).
Robin admits that the theoretical and practical dimensions of
conservatism do not always cohere; at one point, he refers to “the failure of
the conservative politician to follow the lead of the conservative theorist”
(63).[8] He nevertheless proposes to “treat the right
as a unity, as a coherent body of theory and practice” (28-29), and to “read
the theory in light of the practice (and the practice in light of the theory)”
(29, footnote).
Why does Robin insist on treating
conservatism as a coherent body of theory and practice even as he points to a
rupture? I believe it is because he is
caught between two realizations which he does not quite know how to harmonize. He realizes that he cannot simply collapse
the theoretical and practical dimensions into one another, but also, those two
dimensions are dimensions of
conservatism. Something makes
conservatism cognizable as such. That
“something” is what renders our everyday political discourse intelligible (see
34-35, footnote). Robin has a particular
conception of that “something.” It seems
to him “a necessary condition of intelligent discussion that we agree that
there is something called the right and
that it has some set of common features that make it right. That, at any rate, is the assumption of this
book” (36, footnote, italics added).
I think Robin’s assumption that
there must be “some set of common features” that conservatives share, that
there is a single theme unifying all of conservatism, is mistaken. The search for a definitive set of features
(or beliefs) common to all conservatives will tend to exclude some people who
are generally recognized as conservative, include some people who are generally
not recognized as conservative, or both.
And this is precisely the type of problem we encounter in Robin.
For example, libertarians do not
fit his characterization; no libertarian baldly avows that “the lower orders
should not be allowed to exercise their independent will.”[9] Robin is aware of this issue. I quoted him above as saying, “When the
libertarian looks out upon society, he does not see isolated individuals; he
sees private, often hierarchical, groups, where a father governs his family and
an owner his employees” (16). That
sentence is accompanied by a footnote, which quotes Milton Friedman and Richard
Epstein, and cites (but does not quote) additional sources.[10] Neither quotation, however, supports Robin’s argument,
because neither concerns who ought to rule and who ought to obey. “[H]ierarchical groups, where a father governs
his family and an owner his employees,” is what Robin sees, not what Friedman or Epstein see. But even if Friedman and Epstein see the same
thing as Robin when they look out upon society, Robin does not offer any
evidence that Friedman or Epstein support those things any more than Robin
does. He adduces no compelling evidence
that libertarians share the beliefs that, according to him, make a
conservative.
To take another example, Robin
criticized a well-known twentieth-century conservative theorist by saying,
“Oakeshott’s view of the conservative … is not an insight; it is a conceit”
(44).[11] Well, that is a convenient way to brush aside
any conservative thinker who does not fit his schema, which Oakeshott does not. It certainly is not clear why Robin’s view of
the conservative is any less of a conceit.
A better approach than trying to
identify a set of common features (and then force-reading those features into
authors one is inclined to treat as conservative) would be to employ the idea
of family resemblance made famous by Wittgenstein. On this approach, conservatives share no one
thing or set of features in common, but they are related to one another via a
complicated network of overlapping and criss-crossing similarities.[12] This has the virtue of allowing the
theoretical and practical dimensions to diverge significantly without seeking to
impose a spurious unity. It has the
additional virtue of being more faithful to natural language, because we use
“conservative” in both casual and technical/analytical senses, and while those
senses are related, they are far from identical. A satisfactory account of conservatism must
simultaneously make it possible for us to understand why Hayek is frequently
labeled a conservative as well as why Hayek himself declined the label. A Wittgensteinian approach allows this;
Robin’s does not.[13]
Moreover, this Wittgensteinian
approach is compatible with Robin’s use of the “theme and variations” imagery
(xvi), if he does not insist on there being a single, unifying theme to
conservatism. It is also compatible with
his saying that “there is an underlying affinity that draws these differences
[on the right] together” (32) and his invocation of “metaphysical pathos” (29,
footnote), so long as these things are understood in the right way. Instead of saying, “These are the definitive features of conservatism,”
Robin could have said, “These are some recurring themes within conservatism
that conservatives don’t like to talk about.”
That would have made his point, and been more defensible.
Misreading Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France
Classification issues aside, my
biggest issues with Robin are textual/interpretive. He consistently plays on ambiguities, omits
qualifications, and subtly distorts texts to make the text support positions
that are not the author’s. Let me take
an early passage in The Reactionary Mind
where he quotes from Burke’s Reflections
on the Revolution in France:
What
the conservative sees and dislikes in equality … is not a threat to freedom but
its extension [to the lower orders] … Such was the threat Edmund Burke saw in
the French Revolution: not merely an expropriation of property or explosion of
violence but an inversion of the obligations of deference and command. “The levellers,” he claimed, “only change and
pervert the natural order of things.”
The
occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a
matter of honour to any person—to say nothing of a number of other more servile
employments. Such descriptions of men
ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers
oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted
to rule.
By
virtue of membership in a polity, Burke allowed, men had a great many rights—to
the fruits of their labor, their inheritance, education, and more. But the one right he refused to concede to
all men was that “share of power, authority, and direction” they might think
they ought to have “in the management of the state.”[14]
First, some context. The sentence about the levellers changing and
perverting the natural order of things is preceded by this sentence: “In all
societies, consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description
must be uppermost.”[15] A little later on occurs the passage from
which Robin pulls his block quote:
The
chancellor of France at the opening of the states, said, in a tone of oratorial
flourish, that all occupations were honourable.
If he meant only, that no honest employment was disgraceful, he would
not have gone beyond the truth. But in
asserting, that any thing is honourable, we imply some distinction in its
favour. The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler,
cannot be a matter of honour to any person—to say nothing of a number of other
more servile employments. Such
descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the
state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively,
are permitted to rule. In this you
think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with nature.[16]
At this point, Burke drops an
important footnote, where he cites four verses from Ecclesiastes, all of which
make the point that political engagement requires leisure. It is the lack of leisure which makes the
working class unfit for politics, and not any sort of intrinsic unfitness. This is certainly an elitist conception of
politics, but such a conception is hardly confined to conservatives. Moreover, Burke’s elitism is qualified in a way
Robin chooses to ignore. Immediately
after the passage just quoted, Burke says:
I
do not, my dear Sir, conceive you to be of that sophistical captious spirit, or
of that uncandid dulness, as to require, for every general observation or
sentiment, an explicit detail of all the correctives and exceptions, which
reason will presume to be included in all the general propositions which come
from reasonable men. You do not imagine,
that I wish to confine power, authority, and distinction to blood, names, and
titles. No, Sir. There is no qualification for government, but
virtue and wisdom, actual or presumptive.
Wherever they are actually found, they have, in whatever state,
condition, profession or trade, the passport of Heaven to human place and
honour. Woe to that country which would
madly and impiously reject the service of the talents and virtues, civil,
military, or religious, that are given to grace and to serve it … Woe to that
country too, that passing into the opposite extreme, considers a low education,
a mean contracted view of things, a sordid mercenary occupation, as a
preferable title to command. Every thing
ought to be open; but not indifferently to every man.[17]
In other words, Burke is open to
hairdresser commanders—something a reader of Robin might never guess—but they
will be the exception, rather than the norm.
The basis of his elitism is the conviction that the social environment of
what we today call “the disadvantaged” limits opportunities for learning and
achievement—something that every leftist and liberal should find agreeable
(even if Burke’s conclusions are not)—including developing an aptitude to rule. The hierarchy in the “natural order of
things” is established by accident, not by intrinsic merit.
I now turn to the final part of
Robin’s explication of Burke, already quoted above:
By
virtue of membership in a polity, Burke allowed, men had a great many rights—to
the fruits of their labor, their inheritance, education, and more. But the one right he refused to concede to
all men was that “share of power, authority, and direction” they might think
they ought to have “in the management of the state.”[18]
Here, Robin has completely missed
Burke’s meaning. What Burke actually
says is, “But as to the share of power, authority, and direction which each
individual ought to have in the management of the state, that I must deny to be
amongst the direct original rights of man in civil society … It is a thing to
be settled by convention.”[19] Burke’s point here is that the issue of who
gets to participate in government is not a matter of right at all, because (so
he argues) men give up their right to self-governance when they enter civil
society.[20] In other words, Burke argues that no man has a right to participate in government.
Instead of speaking of “the one right [Burke] refused to concede to all
men” (as if Burke had conceded that right to some men), Robin should have
spoken instead of “the one right [Burke] refused to concede to any man.” By selectively quoting this passage
immediately after the passage regarding hair-dressers, Robin gives the
impression that Burke reserves the privilege of participating in government to
a certain class of men. Such subtle
distortions are typical of Robin’s hermeneutical style.[21]
Misreading Hayek: The Constitution of Liberty
In chapter 6, Robin makes an
arresting and intriguing argument: that the Austrian marginalists, including
above all Hayek, were bolder, far bolder, than the outspoken Nietzsche in
imagining how to recreate a world hospitable to greatness, for it was they who
founded “Nietzschean economics,” where the market is “the proving ground of
aristocratic action” and “the very expression of morality” (164, 157, 149). The question with which Nietzsche and the
Austrians wrestled concerned the nature, origin, and creation of value in a
disenchanted world. Robin argues that
Hayek, like Nietzsche, believed that the legislation of values is a prerogative
reserved for the greatest among us. “In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek
developed … a full-blown theory of the wealthy and the well-born as an
avant-garde of taste, as makers of new horizons of value” (157).
Robin introduces his exposition of
Hayek with the following passage, which also serves nicely as a précis of his argument:
The
distinction Hayek draws between mass and elite has not received much attention
from his critics or his defenders, bewildered or beguiled as they are by his
repeated invocations of liberty. Yet a
careful reading of Hayek’s argument reveals that liberty for him is neither the
highest good nor an intrinsic good. It
is a contingent and instrumental good (a consequence of our ignorance and the
condition of our progress), the purpose of which is to make possible the
emergence of a heroic legislator of value.[22]
Hayek does indeed distinguish between
the mass and the elite. It is also fair,
within limits that Robin does not always observe, to claim that “[d]eep inside
Hayek’s understanding of freedom, then, is the notion that the freedom of some
is worth more than the freedom of others” (159). Finally, it is true that “Hayek’s argument
for freedom rests less on what we know or want to know than on what we don’t
know, less on what we are morally entitled to as individuals than on the
beneficial consequences of individual freedom to society as a whole”
(159). Yet, despite all that Robin gets
right or mostly right about Hayek, his argument remains fundamentally flawed.
Robin’s failures are twofold: first,
his account of the value of liberty for Hayek is misleading, and, second, he
misunderstands the role of the avant-garde.
The first failure results from not giving Hayek’s views on necessity and
contingency their due. Whereas Robin
speaks of the “happenstance of our ignorance” (159), Hayek speaks of the
“fundamental fact of man’s unavoidable ignorance,” “the inevitable ignorance of
all of us,” and our “necessary ignorance.”[23] Our ignorance is not a “happenstance” for
Hayek any more than our mortality is. Because
our ignorance is irremediable, the value of liberty is not contingent upon “the
condition of our progress;” we will never progress to a condition where liberty
is dispensable. Indeed, much more than
liberty itself is at stake, for “liberty is not merely one particular value but
… the source and condition of most moral values.”[24] Liberty may not be the “highest” good (presumably
happiness or satisfaction is[25]) but it is the sine qua non for most moral goods; it
may be an instrumental good, but for Hayek all moral values “are instrumental
in the sense that they assist mainly in the achievement of other human values.”[26] Liberty is valuable to the extent it enables
us to achieve “our ends and welfare;” “the case for individual liberty rests
chiefly” upon how well it allows us to achieve those ends.[27]
For Hayek, it is crucial that there
be a class of the privileged few with large fortunes so that they can explore
and promote new and better ways for us to achieve our ends, as well as innovate
new ends.[28] Robin sees that clearly. But he goes too far in saying that the
purpose of liberty is to “to make possible the emergence of a heroic legislator
of value.” That is like saying that the
purpose of courage is so that we can produce generals. Furthermore, the avant-garde are not “heroic
legislators of value.” I realize this is
a rhetorical turn of phrase, but it is a telling one. It pushes Robin’s worldview of a powerful
group dominating and commanding a powerless group. The model of legislation does not give the
masses a choice; they are the passive recipients of the law, to which they
simply owe obedience.
Regardless of whether that view is
accurate or not, it is not Hayek’s view.
For Hayek, the avant-garde are pioneers of leisure and new ways of life.[29] They function more like scouts than like
legislators; we are free not to follow where they go, without threat of
punishment. Indeed, he explicitly says a
member of the avant-garde “must not arrogate to himself the position of a
‘leader’ who determines what people ought to think.”[30] The avant-garde are what Malcom Gladwell and
others call “innovators” or “early adopters.”
Gladwell shows that all kinds of innovations fail because they don’t
capture the imagination of a critical mass of the public.[31] Far from legislating
to the masses, the avant-garde caters
to the masses by translating new ideas into something that captures the popular
imagination.
Confronting Conservatism
While Robin did not ultimately
persuade me of his thesis, he did persuade me that the image of conservatism
popularly expounded and defended by conservatives is a distortion. Conservatives would like to ignore White House
chief of staff H.R. Haldeman noting that Nixon “emphasized that you have to face
the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognized
this while not appearing to” (48, internal quotation marks omitted). They want to downplay Republican strategist Lee
Atwater saying, “By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires.
So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff….
all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a
by-product of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites” (48, internal quotation
marks omitted). Conservatives, like
everyone else, suffer from self-delusion or self-ignorance. It is good and right that they be forced to
confront their own hypocrisy or willful ignorance. Unfortunately, Robin’s image of conservatism merely
mirrors the self-distortion by conservatives.
Right now, the Left is ascendant. Many conservatives see in this current moment the
fall of the Republic. They may well be correct. But the fall of the Republic may be a
reckoning long in coming, induced by the Right.
It may be true, in a sense quite other than Haldeman’s or Nixon’s, that “the
whole problem is really the blacks.”
[1]
After I finished reading The Reactionary
Mind two years ago, I emailed Professor Robin, asking him for a list of
what he considered the best reviews of his book, along with any responses he
made. He generously took the time to
respond to my query. For that, I am
thankful. I hope he does not think I
repay him poorly with this review.
[2] In
the summer of 2016, while arguing against people labeling Trump a fascist, I
said that even if Trump wants to further expand executive overreach in
unconstitutional and undesirable ways, that does not make him a fascist. At that point he had made no statement (and
to this point, he has taken no steps) to suspend or abrogate the forms of
democratic republican governance. He did
not threaten to disband Congress. He did
not threaten to fundamentally alter the Supreme Court. The question, now as then, is whether one
thinks, when faced with legislative or other opposition to his policies, Trump
will undertake to destroy those institutional loci of resistance. In the final leg of his current term, it is
clear that he has no stomach for that whatsoever, even with COVID-19 providing
him the perfect cover to do so. In Alex Gourevitch’s words, Trump “relates to power as a way of acquiring and
concentrating attention on him, not as a means of imposing his will on the
world and taking responsibility for that imposition.” Trump is vain, not power hungry—or, rather,
he seeks power only to satisfy his vanity.
[3] Conservatism
“is about power besieged and power protected.
It is an activist doctrine for an activist time” (33). It is the “deliberate, conscious effort to
preserve [better: rejuvenate] or recall ‘those forms of experience which can no
longer be had in an authentic way’” (23, internal quotation from Karl
Mannheim).
[4] The Reactionary Mind (2nd ed.), p.40.
[5]
“Unlike the feudal past, where power was presumed and privilege inherited, the
conservative future envisions a world where power is demonstrated and privilege
earned” (34). “To the conservative,
power in repose is power in decline” (33-34).
[6] As
Robin notes, Trump is not the first to have his conservative credentials
questioned. “Over the last two decades,
various writers and journalists have claimed that conservatism went into
decline when Trump, or Palin, or Bush, or Reagan, or Goldwater, or Buckley, or
someone took it off the rails” (40).
[7]
Both Robin and I recognize that there are people who take the position that
conservatism is not so much a doctrine as an attitude. That distinction can be overlooked for my
current purposes.
[8]
Earlier, when discussing Left politics or what he calls “the politics of
emancipation” (while I find Robin’s conception of “the politics of
emancipation” problematic and self-serving, I think contrasting the politics of
emancipation against the politics of hierarchy can be a useful heuristic;
wherever there have been people trying to dismantle hierarchy and privilege,
they have been opposed by the defenders of hierarchy and privilege), he
similarly raised the issue of “[w]hether the politics conforms to the
postulate” (9). See also pages 60 (where
he says that he is primarily interested in conservatism as a theoretical
tradition rather than as a political practice) and 65 (“Whatever the
relationship between theory and practice in the conservative tradition …”).
[9]
This is true even of those libertarians who are deeply elitist, such as Ludwig
von Mises, who did baldly distinguish between superior and inferior men.
[10]
Robin’s footnote begins thus: “‘The ultimate operative unit in our society is
the family, not the individual.’ Milton
Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962, 1982, 2002), 32 [should be 33];
also see 13. ‘It would be a mistake of
major proportions to assume that legal rules are a dominant force in shaping
individual character; family, school, and church are much more likely to be
powerful influences. The people who run
these institutions will use their influence to advance whatever conception of
the good they hold, no matter what the state of the law.’ Richard A. Epstein, ‘Libertarianism and
Character,’ in Varieties of Conservatism
in America, ed. Peter Berkowitz (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution
Press, 2004), 76.”
[11]
Oakeshott is treated rather unfairly by Robin.
Robin says, “Oakeshott argued that conservatism ‘is not a creed or a
doctrine, but a disposition’” (44). But
Oakeshott makes no such argument. In
fact, Oakeshott begins his essay on conservatism by saying that he disagrees
with those people who believe that it is either impossible or unpromising to
derive explanatory general principles from conservative conduct. He says merely that such an analysis “is not
the enterprise I propose to engage in here.
My theme is not a creed or a doctrine, but a disposition…. And my design
here is to construe this disposition as it appears in contemporary character,
rather than to transpose it into the idiom of general principles.” Essentially, Oakeshott says, “I’m only going
to be considering conservatism as a disposition,” and then Robin comes along
and says, “Oakeshott argues that conservatism is only a disposition!”
[12]
See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations, paragraphs 65-66.
Wittgenstein uses the example of games, and concludes that there is
nothing common to them all, but instead “similarities, relationships, and a
whole series of them at that.”
[14] The Reactionary Mind (2nd ed.), p.8, footnotes
omitted.
[15]
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the
Revolution in France (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p.205.
[16] Id. at 205-06 (italicized text is the
text quoted by Robin).
[17] Id. at 206.
[18] The Reactionary Mind (2nd ed.), p.8, footnotes
omitted.
[19]
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the
Revolution in France (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p.218.
[21]
Robin similarly misreads and distorts Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. Since that misreading is not as damaging to
the argument it is used to support, I will gloss over it in this footnote. I quote from Robin’s exposition on pp.61-62
in the following paragraph, with my comments interspersed in square brackets:
The
Sublime and the Beautiful begins on a high note, with a
discussion of curiosity, which Burke identifies as “the first and simplest
emotion.” … Curiosity “exhausts” itself.
[Burke says that it “soon exhausts the variety which is commonly to be
met with in nature” (The Sublime and Beautiful [hereafter SB], p.
79); he does not even hint that curiosity would exhaust the variety of
artificial contrivances.] Enthusiasm and
engagement give way to “loathing and weariness.” [Burke says they would give way to loathing and weariness if we were not affected by
other passions (SB 79).] Burke moves on
to pleasure and pain … Any kind of pleasure “quickly satisfies; and when it is
over, we relapse into indifference.”
[Robin omits the qualification, “or rather we fall into a soft
tranquility, which is tinged with the agreeable colour of the former sensation”
(SB 82).] Quieter enjoyments, less
intense than pleasure, are equally soporific.
They generate complacency; we “give ourselves over to indolence and
inaction.” [Burke says almost the opposite: nature has formed us in such manner
that we do not take any real pleasure in life or health, “lest satisfied with
that, we should give ourselves over to indolence and inaction” (SB 88).] Burke turns to imitation as yet another force
of outward propulsion…. But imitation contains its own narcotic. Imitate others too much and we cease to
better ourselves. [Imitation is one of
three “social” passions described by Burke; Robin omits sympathy and ambition;
the latter spurs us beyond merely imitating others.] … Curiosity leads to
weariness, pleasure to indifference, enjoyment to torpor, and imitation to
stagnation…. Suicide, it seems, is the inevitable fate awaiting anyone who
takes pleasure in the world as it is.
[Except the pleasures of society are such that “death itself is scarcely
an idea of more terror” than a life without such pleasures (SB 90). Also, “whilst we are creatures vehemently
desirous of novelty, we are as strongly attached to habit and custom” (SB
138). It is true that we are much more
affected by pain at the loss of these things than joy at their possession. However, this effect cuts both ways:
familiarity deadens not only pleasure but also pain (SB 138-39).]
Robin is
especially enthralled by Burke’s description of the sublime as a way to avoid
being wearied of life. For reasons known
only to himself, he chooses not to explore the many other avenues Burke
identifies to avoid this weariness.
Robin rightly observes, “it is clear from The Sublime and the Beautiful that if the self is to survive and
flourish it must be aroused by an experience more vital and bracing than
pleasure or enjoyment” (65). He spends
two pages describing how the sublime, according to Burke, provides that more
rousing experience. At the end of that
discussion, he abruptly says, “The question for us, which Burke neither poses
nor answers, is: What kind of political form entails this simultaneity of—or
oscillation between—self-aggrandizement and self-annihilation” (67)? Why exactly is this a question that needs to
be raised? Why would anyone think to
choose a form of government based upon the existential experiences of the self? I might go so far as to suggest that there is
a lesson for Robin to contemplate in Burke’s not posing that question. At a minimum he owes his reader an
explanation for why he singles out the experience of the sublime as a
touchstone somehow for conservative politics.
[22] The Reactionary Mind (2nd ed.), p.158.
[23]
Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of
Liberty (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp.22, 29.
[24] Id. at 6.
[25]
The distinction between happiness and satisfaction is drawn from Hegel. According to him, “world-historical
individuals” set themselves an arduous task or end, which they accomplish “only
by dint of arduous labors. They knew how
to obtain satisfaction and to accomplish their end … Thus it was not happiness
that they chose, but exertion, conflict, and labor in the service of their
end.” G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p.85. Nietzsche indicates the same difference when
he has Zarathustra say, “What does happiness matter! I have long ceased striving after happiness:
I am striving after my work.” Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part IV, chapter
1.
[26] Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1960), p.67; see also p.152.
[27] Id. at 29.
[28] Id. at 125-26, 35.
[29] Id. at 129.
[30] Id. at 114.
[31]
Malcom Gladwell, Blink, ch.6.
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