Now we’re ready for the second installment of the Balloon-Juice book club discussion of Corey Robin’s “The Reactionary Mind”. Corey should be by in five or ten to discuss things, so fire away. I’ll put up an update in a little bit with my thoughts on the second and third chapters.
Update. Chapter 2 focuses on Hobbes and the idea of conservative as counterrevolutionary. To whet your appetite if you don’t the book yet, it ends with the words “full Hayekian monty”. Chapter 3 is on Balloon-Juice favorite Ayn Rand.
Update. I *still* have a bit of hard time integrating Rand into Burke and the others. I’m not sure that Rand *is* about preserving power, I think she’s just about some kind of adolescent fantasy of being a bad-ass. What are all of your thoughts on this?
Update. A good question from commenter birthmaker about conservatives in general:
Well, I have only finished chapter one, but I’ll chime in. It’s a bit depressing! The institutions that these writers talk about, like slavery and the monarchy, have died away. The writers were proven wrong over time. So why do we still deal with these philosophies? Why are these people still held up as justification for the modern day conservative movement, which, at its core, historically, fails? How can one expect stagnation of institutions in the march of human history ever to be successful?
Angry DougJ
Hey, where is everybody?
Linda Featheringill
Hobbes:
I got the impression that he was more of an authoritarian than a monarchist, probably because of Leviathan. I guess the two could intersect.
But he seemed to preach that if someone is macho enough to keep you safe, you have a moral obligation to be submissive to him/her. Presumably, the said strong person could do whatever he/she wanted.
Anything but a republic, I guess.
Angry DougJ
@Linda Featheringill:
I don’t really understand Hobbes at all. I would have to read more about him and by him to get a good sense of where he was coming from.
Linda Featheringill
@Angry DougJ:
Maybe Corey can enlighten us. :-)
WereBear (itouch)
I lived the description of Hobbes’ career; hopscotching around and coming up with weird rationalizations, almost like hybridizing vegetables.
Batocchio
Okay, Doug, you asked for it!
I’ve enjoyed Corey Robin’s book immensely. I’ve long argued that conservatism has always had a significant reactionary strain. Even those who claim they’re only defending the status quo and that this is somehow noble are often kidding themselves or arguing in bad faith (it’s hardly a neutral stance). Buckley’s “standing athwart history yelling stop” is sold as prudence and sounds not so bad at first, but in actual practice it meant defending segregation and publishing some very racist pieces in National Review in the 50s and 60s. When progress is achieved despite them, conservatives merely move the goal posts. (And in the case of MLK, after his canonization they’ve tried to claim him as a conservative despite denouncing the actual man in his lifetime.) Conservatives always claim to be fighting for the natural order, whether that is the current (unfair) status quo, the status quo of some earlier era, or some mythical status quo that never existed (think of the theocrats who claim America was founded to be a Christian nation, among others).
Of course there are self-described conservatives (small “c,” also small “l” libertarians) who are reasonable, decent people working in the tradition of Enlightenment liberalism and who believe in the social contract. (Some call themselves “classical liberals,” although people use that term very differently.) However, this reasonable crowd has been hunted to near extinction when it comes to any position of power in the Republican Party and have no place in modern movement conservatism. I’d love it if they could take over the Republican Party, because America really needs two somewhat responsible parties and the GOP has gone so insane. However, I find myself debating how much such people have ever been part of “Conservatism” historically.
What I really appreciate about Robin’s book (besides his general “getting it”) is some of the details, particularly on Burke. Saying conservatism has a reactionary strain has some rhetorical value, because conservatives of the “it was once pure but then became sullied” crowd (Andrew Sullivan, Davids Brooks and Frum) react so angrily when they feel their movement is impugned. But as Robin shows, being reactionary is the very core of conservatism, and always has been since the oft-invoked, rarely-fully-read Burke. Because the world changes, conservatism can appear cosmetically different in different eras, but its reactionary nature (and hunger to do cultural warfare) does not. Then there’s the international angle, since many “conservatives” in Canada and Britain support universal health care. So how do we define “Liberalism” and “Conservatism”? Does Conservatism simply amount to different things (at least in terms of actual policy positions) in different countries and eras, even over relatively short periods of 20-30 years? Is it mostly just the defense of privilege while crying “freedom”? (In the United States, particularly with the Southern Strategy and Reaganomics, it has consisted of bigotry and plutocracy, and using the former to sell the latter.)
As to Ayn Rand (Chapter 3), it’s hard to think of a more reactionary person. Pretty much her entire ideology is a reaction to events in her life (communism most of all), and she merely flipped it, applying dogmatic black-and-white thinking to everything. Her real thrill was applying ferocious, unforgiving judgment on all those she who believed had wronged her or who she viewed as unworthy. Atlas Shrugged is really a thousand page wish-fulfillment exercise and ideological igged demo, or self fan fic with Mary Sues (author surrogates) galore. Rand was hardly a kind person in real life (and then there’s that serial killer she praised, and her personal hypocrisy on Social Security). She was an atrocious writer, and it’s amusing is that Atlas Shrugged reads as bad Soviet agitprop, except with the ideology flipped. (But then, Dostoevsky refuted her ideology in Crime and Punishment before she had ever written a word.)
Sorry, long comment! I believe there was a question or two in there somewhere…
realbtl
I have to confess I had to kind of fight my way through Hobbes but I agree Doug that I’d like to know more.
The Rand chapter just left me confused. I’m 63 but somehow escaped ever reading her stuff. Maybe it’s a low tolerance for poorly written fiction.
noodler
giants game ir intellectual persuits? Hmmm aw heck go giants been reading the book and even tho its halftime, im with my fam in nj so i cant participate suxthat im driving back to dc tonite too
will read the thread l8r.
Birthmarker
Well, I have only finished chapter one, but I’ll chime in. It’s a bit depressing! The institutions that these writers talk about, like slavery and the monarchy, have died away. The writers were proven wrong over time. So why do we still deal with these philosophies? Why are these people still held up as justification for the modern day conservative movement, which, at its core, historically, fails? How can one expect stagnation of institutions in the march of human history ever to be successful?
I am feeling a bit emo today-the thought of President Gingrich makes me ill.
Batocchio
Also, Doug, I think the problem is going up against the NFC Championship game. (I have it on in the background.)
WereBear (itouch)
One of Hobbes’ concepts he described as the people being “the audience who thinks they are onstage.” It is in connection with the rationale that the Monarch IS the Country and that is why the people should love him/her. That’s the Tea Party!
Rand now; a fascinating person trapped in the worst of adolescence. Thus, the appeal of her work to age groups that we hope will get over it. And the damage that is done when they do not.
Nicole
Sorry- palladia TV is running a thing on Simon & Garfunkel and I love them and forgot what time it was. I’m here now!
I’ve read a fair amount of Rand (stupid story why), and I think the observation about her being so very influenced by Hollywood is quite astute.
chrismealy
I want to know how Corey Robin can stand to read all those assholes. I loved his book but I got tired of them pretty quickly. Buckley is right, conservatism is boring. Seriously CR, what keeps you going?
Linda Featheringill
@realbtl:
I read Atlas Shrugged [mumble, mumble] years ago when I was 18 and a freshman in college.
She is a bad writer. But more than that, her characters lead such dull, colorless lives. Very little fun, very little love, very little friendship. Lots of paranoia and poor-little-me.
Anyway, I thought she was boring and I went off to explore other topics.
Roger Moore
I’m not sure how well the section on Hobbes fits in. It seems to me that he supported any strong authority, to the point he was willing to come back and support Cromwell. That seems very difference from the reactionary views that characterize other conservatives.
Batocchio
@WereBear (itouch):
On monarchy, I know some people who favor the British system of a division between the Head of State and Head of Government. The reasoning is that plenty of people really do like their pomp and glitz, whether because of an authoritarian streak and/or the entertainment/wish fulfillment value. In theory, this allows the same people to more soberly “hire” someone to actually run things. I’m not sold on all that, but that theory seems correct on the appeal of royalty.
chrismealy
CR, what do you have against Rachmaninoff? He’s not Mantovani.
Linda Featheringill
I can see why Hobbes would get into trouble for Leviathan. Monarchy, the divine right of kings, is based on authority by blood, inheritance, genetics. He seemed to support that authority but also rule based on ability to protect the state. The entire European nobility was determined by blood, of course, and they didn’t want to hear about authority based on merit. I can imagine they wanted to kill the messenger, Hobbes in this case.
WereBear (itouch)
That is the most fascinating part of the book thus far: it is explained.
I thought conservatives were about clinging to the past. But they are not. It is about using the opportunity, the fluidity, of social change to brung in their own, counter-utopia. One based on the past, but correcting what they perceive as its vulnerabilities. Which is what led to it being attacked and dismantled.
Nicole
@Roger Moore: Advocating subjugation of “lessers” to a “better,” whether king or government or slave owner, etc., is one of the things CR cites as a defining aspect of the conservative line of thought (unless I’m misinterpreting, which I often do). Conservative thinking isn’t necessarily consistent on WHO does the subjugating, which is a bit like Hobbes- monarch or dictator, it’s still more “freedom” in his mind, than subjects who ostensibly govern themselves. It ties in with the conservative belief in a strong security state. Which stinkin’ liberals call a police state.
Villago Delenda Est
Hobbes, in a nutshell, says that everyone gives up their liberty to a class that will take care of them in exchange.
The problem is, the class does not. One need look no further than Dick Cheney to see what a fallacy this is.
Hobbes assumed men of honor would rule. Bad assumption.
WereBear (itouch)
It does seem to work that way for the British. I certainly see how splitting the head of state into glittery figurehead and actual management is better than just rolling the genetic dice.
Linda Featheringill
@WereBear (itouch):
The new, improved past?
Nicole
@Batocchio: i.e., the British may not like their Prime Minister, but they still love their Queen.
Villago Delenda Est
@Linda Featheringill:
Yeah, Hobbes somehow managed to piss off BOTH sides in the English Civil War.
Nicole
@Villago Delenda Est:
Rand had exactly the same problem with her world view- in her view, the movers and shakers were all honorable men and women, who created the things they did because they loved the work for itself; that money was just the physical manifestation of the value of the work, not the entire value (in Atlas Shrugged, one of the characters speaks derisively of the hereditary wealthy who don’t do anything productive). Of course, the real world works nothing like that, ergo why her novels really should be filed under “fantasy.”
WereBear (itouch)
@Linda Featheringill: Exactly. Then, it’s not vulnerable. Then, it will endure forever! And a very insecure personality feels soothed.
Linda Featheringill
@Villago Delenda Est:
One of the tenets of soshullysm is that war is the result of arguments between the ruling class of one country and the similar ruling class of another country. Started by the upper crust and actually fought by the underlings. They say that getting rid of the upper crust will make war fade away.
Now, whether this is reflected in reality is another question. But it is an answer to Hobbes’ argument. If we were to get rid of the people who start wars and invasions, we wouldn’t need to tolerate rule by warlords.
Batocchio
@Villago Delenda Est:
According to David Broder, Hobbes must have been a brilliant, wise centrist.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Occupy DougJ @top I agree that Rand’s “works” are essentially poorly written fiction about being an adolescent bad ass. Battochio has a point that they also full of wish fulfillment, and clearly as reactionary as it gets, as s/he also notes. I suspect most of us can agree that the fiction is rank and as such defiles the very paper on which it is printed.
But I also suspect that to the extent Rand believed she was observing and writing about the free market, her work is about preserving that power in extreme. I haven’t fully developed that thought as yet, no doubt the result of getting bringing home a go cup of Margarita from dinner, which turned out to contain more like a pitcher, but birthdays only happen annually, so…
MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson
I suggest that when conservatives talk about preserving specific institutions, what they really mean is the power structure which underlies those institutions. If something else can be fashioned which preserves that power structure more or less intact, specific institutions can be discarded in the name of “reform”.
Lavandula
I’m having technical difficulties so I may miss this — arrgh! I’ve never read Ayn Rand — I read Lord of the Rings when I was 14 instead — so take this fwiw, but I liked the description of her work as kitsch Hollywood-style Romanticism. I jokingly refer to my conservative Christian friends as free market warriors because it seems to me they have opened up the culture war on a new front — moochers and slackers are the new “powers and principalities of the air,” adversaries as wily and fearsome as the purveyors of the “gay agenda.” hating on poor people hasn’t been a hallmark of Christianity, even of the folks I knew growing up, but my people have really taken to it. Even though they wouldn’t own up to being Randians of any sort, I wonder if her romanticism has given this kind of economic warfare a heroic sheen and made it easier for culture and religious warriors to join the fray.
Linnaeus
@Villago Delenda Est:
Same with James Madison. He thought that there should be a bulwark in the U.S. government that would protect the interests of “the minority of the opulent”, which was the Senate, but he also thought that 1) the House would balance this and 2) that Senators would be enlightened enough to look past their own personal gain.
Angry DougJ
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
Happy birthday!
Corey Robin
Some quick notes. The major point re Hobbes has less to do with the specifics of his arguments than with the task he set himself and how he performed it: opposing a revolution was the task, and how he did it — which forms the model for the subsequent figures I look at — was to take the revolutionaries’ categories (consent, representation, and so on) and turn it against them. Hobbes senses that the monarchy’s arguments are either extremely weak — or have provided the revolutionaries with justification for their rebellion. So he wants to find a different way to justify authority. That’s the main point.
Chris: Rachmaninoff? Pretty sappy and syrupy. Melodramatic, pompous and bombastic at times, way too lush. The kind of thing someone like Rand love — and not just love but value above Mozart and other composers (can’t remember who she ranked Rachmaninoff above right now but it was kind of ridiculous.)
Why do I read these guys? I think they’re pretty interesting. And I think the task they set themselves — defending privilege when it’s under siege — is not an easy task. It’s the way they try to reinvent feudalism and feudal categories in a non-feudal age. Also, some of them — Burke, Nietzsche — are fantastic writers.
Linnaeus
@Linda Featheringill:
I suspect, though, that Hobbes would say that you would still need a sovereign, though, even if you got rid of the old one. The problem of a potential breakdown in order wouldn’t go away.
WereBear (itouch)
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): Happy Birthday!
Rand is actually an interesting study in someone trying very hard to impose their will upon Reality. It turns into Massive Rationalization instead, but it’s both sick and sad how determined she was to not acknowledge it didn’t work. As long as she didn’t admit it wasn’t, she could continue doing as she pleased.
Batocchio
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
Happy birthday! All discussion of Ayn Rand’s godawful writing should probably require drinking.
@Lavandula:
Roger Moore
@Batocchio:
There’s also something to be said for having a reserve government figure who has little role in day to day affairs but can step in when things break down (e.g. the election doesn’t give a clear majority, there’s a vote of no confidence, etc.). There’s a reason even many non-monarchies go with a separate head of state and head of government.
realbtl
@WereBear (itouch):
“…impose their will upon reality.” Hmmm, that sounds familiar.
Linda Featheringill
@Corey Robin:
Like Carl Rove? Sorta?
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore:
For example, a lot of European republics have a head of state in a separate person from the head of government, which except for all the royal trappings, is pretty much the British system, with modifications.
The US system was rather copied from the British system at the time, with a head of state who also served very much as a head of government, and still had a role in day to day affairs, although much was delegated to the cabinet. The Brits moved away from that, gradually, because their constitution isn’t written down like ours is, and thus ours is a tad ossified in that respect.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Thanks for all the birthday wishes! The advantages of such a generous go cup is double the days of drinking, of which I’ve taken full advantage.
handsmile
As delicious as Robin’s defenestration of Rand in Chapter 3, “neither [a philosopher or a novelist}, but she thought she was both,” I felt he failed to answer its concluding and essential question: “How could such a mediocrity, not just a second-hander but a second-rater, exert such a continuing influence on the culture at large?”
His response: “Far from needing explanation, her success explains itself. Rand worked in that quintessential American proving ground…where garbage achieves gravitas and bullshit gets blessed.” Aside from admiring the alliteration, this statement seems to me insubstantial. What mechanisms of the culture industry transmute the garbage, who does the anointing? If Rand herself is not a the con man in this transaction, who and to what end are the hustlers perpetrating the fraud?
Linda Featheringill
BTW, I like Rachmaninoff. Yeah, he’s over the top, very Russian.
Now, a steady diet of nothing but Rachmaninoff? No thank you.
Roger Moore
@Nicole:
Too bad more of her readers don’t get that part and wind up treating the hereditary wealthy as “job creators”.
Nicole
@WereBear (itouch):
Especially when you read the biographies about her, it’s really clear she spent her life rationalizing. In her case, she believed in the rights of the individual above all, which makes for a simple, attractive soundbite, but doesn’t quite fit where the rubber meets the road (for example, she was actually in favor of trade unions, but very much opposed to any sort of “coercive” collective bargaining- forced membership, unions bargaining on behalf of non-union members who did not wish to join, government laws regarding unions, etc. Which doesn’t take into account the sheer amount of power business has over workers, and how the rigid adherence to this ideal of the individual would limit the power of unions.
smintheus
@Angry DougJ: Both Hobbes and Burke were concerned with stability and law/order. They saw contemporary (ideologically driven) social/political revolutions as inherently destabilizing and dangerous. Burke preferred to think that traditional institutions, having grown up organically, had a natural value by both providing stability and by limiting dangerous revolutionary reforms. He was of course reacting against what he saw as the excesses of the French Revolution. Hobbes was clearly obsessed with the horrors of the English Revolution and the era of political grandstanding that preceded it. But he also seems to have been influenced in his younger years by his reading of Thucydides, who had made so much out of the horror of civil unrest and revolution during the Peloponnesian War. The idea that political change was inherently dangerous and led to mayhem was actually pretty common among conservative Greeks (e.g. Aristotle). Hobbes thought what was needed to prevent political change (and thus civil war) was strong leadership (say on the model of Pericles in Athens, or in his day a divinely inspired kingship).
I see relatively little of either Hobbes or Burke in most modern conservatives in the US. Instead, they are reactionaries who agitate for vast changes and seek to create rather than tamp down social divisions.
MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson
@Linda Featheringill:
I think it rather depends on which pieces by Rachmaninov one chooses. Sure, there are some awfully slushy bits, but he’s clearly much better than elevator muzak. There are some pretty dull pieces by Mozart as well – just no-one ever goes through the whole catalog. Likewise with Beethoven, Brahms etc. Rachmaninov wrote relatively little, so his flaws are more apparent and his virtues get shorter shrift. In all honesty, pick the right selections for just about any composer and you can make him look like a cautionary tale for aspiring youngsters.
Chris
@Batocchio:
IMO yes. Conservatism does mean defense of privilege while crying something more noble-sounding (in this case “freedom”) – or, as someone once said, “a superior moral justification for selfishness.” Since the privileged class is different in every country, so’s the ideology. But the underlying principle is usually some variation of the “if the king doesn’t work the peasants will starve” reversal of reality that justifies the power of the elites (whoever they are).
Nicole
@Roger Moore:
Yeah, and the flip side of that same speech on money, was that the character said of the idle rich, basically, “eh, don’t worry about them; just trust that they are secretly miserable.” Which is all well and good, but doesn’t really take into account the amount of misery their easy access to power can bring on the rest of the population. She was great at absolutes in an ideal fantasy world, not so great at how it actually plays out in the real world.
Roger Moore
@Villago Delenda Est:
There’s also a big chunk of unwritten rules in our system. Within the Constitution as written, you could have a system that was much more like a European cabinet. If the parties had gotten more control early on, the president could have become just the most important figure within the party, with “his” cabinet and Supree Court appointments reflecting a consensus decision within the party rather than being primarily his.
Batocchio
@handsmile:
I think it’s simply that Rand had/has an built-in audience. John Kenneth Galbraith said, “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy, that is, the superior justification for selfishness.” Rand tells the ruling class (and those who aspire to join them or serve them) what they want to hear. Similarly, many conservative think tanks, which only have a passing acquaintance with truth, pay very well. I do know some people react positively to Rand’s fierce individualism and reject all the other crap, but her hardcore followers feel validated to be, well, assholes. It’s worth noting that some of her contemporary conservatives didn’t care for her, but she seems to have grown in popularity since on the right.
Corey Robin
@handsmile: Very fair point. I myself get asked this question all the time and I still don’t have a good answer, at least not one that I feel satisfied with. I don’t think I really can explain Rand’s success, in the end. But I’ll say this: the more important explanation is not in that bit of alliteration but in the graf that precedes it. The left historically had a project that was premised upon identifying the huge gap between liberalism as an ideal and liberalism as a reality. Out of that gap grew socialism and all manner of progressive movements. The idea of those movements was to try and bring the ideal and the real into alignment, not necessarily by accepting the ideal as an idea (Marxism sought to transcend it), but by transforming reality. Rand works in that same playground only she does it by having people live merely in the ideal, to pretend as if reality is as romantic as she assumes romance is. It’s a cheap version of the nineteenth century radicalism that motivated men and women to transform their societies. So it preys upon that tradition without asking people to make the kinds of political sacrifice that would be necessary to realize — to make real — the ideals of those traditions. Something like that.
Villago Delenda Est
@smintheus:
Creating divisions gives you an opening for ruling. Playing off one faction against the other, and collecting the spoils of doing so.
A stable society is not their goal; a chaotic one they can exploit is. They figure with their gated enclaves and hired goons, they’ll be safe enough from the chaos outside the gates.
smintheus
@Nicole: That has been a pillar of aristocratic philosophy since antiquity (cp. e.g. Plato’s philosopher king).
MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson
@handsmile:
It’s a bit reminiscent of the endless debate over Stephen King’s work. I think one can dislike Rand’s ideas intensely and still grant her a measure of talent at telling a story. It’s too easy for the Left to assume that bad ideas = bad writing. Plato’s Theory of Forms has been pretty heavily criticized from Aristotle down to today – but he wrote some of the finest prose the world has ever seen. We shouldn’t fall into the trap of assuming that “degraded popular taste” is a sufficient explanation for Rand’s success, and a sufficient refutation of her. If we hold our noses at Rand and refuse to engage with an “unworthy” adversary, we achieve nothing more than ceding the battlefield without a fight. No-one was ever won over by the argument that their hero/heroine has a bad prose style and is thus wrong on the merits.
Chris
@Roger Moore:
If the hereditary wealthy don’t deserve their wealth, that means America isn’t a meritocracy.
If America isn’t a meritocracy, then what they believe is bullshit.
There are some thoughts that are just too terrible ever to face. Better to keep pretending that Mitt Romney earned every cent he got.
Nicole
While I’m no fan of Rand it always gives me a sad that this particular quote of hers (from one of her newsletters) doesn’t get more attention, because the right-wing ‘splosions would be droll:
“Now I want to give you a brief indication of the kinds of issues that are coming up, on which you might want to know my views.
1. The Presidential election of 1976. I urge you, as emphatically as I can, not to support the candidacy of Ronald Reagan. I urge you not to work for or advocate his nomination, and not to vote for him. My reasons are as follows: Mr. Reagan is not a champion of capitalism, but a conservative in the worst sense of that word—i.e., an advocate of a mixed economy with government controls slanted in favor of business rather than labor (which, philosophically, is as untenable a position as one could choose—see Fred Kinnan in Atlas Shrugged, pp. 541-2). This description applies in various degrees to most Republican politicians, but most of them preserve some respect for the rights of the individual. Mr. Reagan does not: he opposes the right to abortion.”
MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson
@Nicole:
Now that is pure gold. Double chapeau, madame.
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore:
I imagine it was more like that early on, but events in the 20th Century cemented the Imperial Presidency in position, and that’s what we’ve got now. Congress surrendered a great deal of power in the aughts to the Executive, in the name of “National Security”, and frankly, it was just part of an ongoing trend that dates back to FDR.
WereBear (itouch)
Rand appeals powerfully to adolescents of any age.
Nicole
@MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson:
When I read The Fountainhead I found the supporting, “flawed” characters much more entertaining than her wooden protagonists. Gail Wynand was a pretty fun character, as was Toohey, and Peter Keating at least had some do-or-die decisions. I’m sure Rand would have taken that as clear indication that I am a second-hander, or whatever it was she called ladies who didn’t get moist at the thought of Howard Roark, but of course, in reality, it is that no one likes a Mary Sue (or Gary Stu); it’s the flaws that make a fictional character interesting. It’s, to me, the biggest problem with Atlas Shrugged; the characters go on no journey; they are all already perfect or eeeeeeevil (with the possible exception of Hank Reardon, the only even slightly fleshed out character) and so it’s a thousand pages of “Who cares?”
smintheus
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yep, that’s the Republican political operative’s guiding principle. Many of the GOP rubes believe that what they’re getting is a conservation/restoration of older norms, but that’s because they’re rubes.
handsmile
Corey Robin:
Thank you for agreeing once more to address our questions at this humble website. After all, now that you’ve been profiled in the New York Times and are engaged in intellectual combat with the meticulously groomed Mark Lilla.
A simple(minded) question or two on definition and philosophical lineage between Hobbes and Maistre.
To what degree is “Conservative” and “Counter-Revolutionary” synonymous in your description/explication of these writers, each with such strikingly different historical contexts.
Your chapter on Hobbes is entitled “The First Counter-Revolutionary.” At the same time, you write in the chapter “Conservatism and Counterrevolution” that “It is hardly provocative to say that conservatism arose in reaction to the French Revolution [110 years after Hobbes’ death]…[the] two emblematic voices of that reaction-Burke and Maistre.”
Maistre’s statement “Monarchy is without contradiction, the form of government that gives the most distinction to the greatest number of persons” seems approximate to your brilliant precis of Hobbes’ view of polity, “Subjugation is emancipation.”
To your knowledge, did Maistre read or comment upon Hobbes? Was his work even known to the court of Savoy?
Batocchio
@MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson:
I’m not sure anyone’s arguing that. Both her ideas and her writing are terrible. They are, however, related, because Rand’s outlook means she viewed most of humanity as lesser beings and saw everything in black and white. Similarly, she could not write convincing human characters with nuance, contradictions and subtext, which makes for really crappy storytelling. If agitprop’s your thing, okay, and if someone enjoys Rand’s writing and derives personal value from it, fine, but criticisms of Rand’s poor writing are, um, extremely well-founded. In contrast, King may be a pulpy writer, but he is faaaar more skilled.
Roger Moore
@smintheus:
I don’t think you have to go back to Classical Greece to know about the horrors of chaos and weak government. I would think the Wars of the Roses would provide plenty of evidence of the need for a government strong enough to prevent every would-be ruler from coming out of the woodwork to stake his claim.
b-psycho
@Nicole:
I knew there was a reason I saw even rhetorically “progressive” arguments for the allegedly-representative state as conservative…
If anyone is confused by that remark: “self-government” in the truest sense of the term implies small scale radically decentralized direct democracy, if not outright anarchy. If there is a 3rd party making decisions and claiming they are on your behalf, you are still a subject.
Batocchio
@Nicole:
Awesome, thanks! I think I’ve only seen part of that before (her dislike of Reagan at the time).
Birthmarker
@Linda Featheringill: They all- kings, tribal chiefs, the Pope, emperors, pharoahs- convinced subjects that they were divine-literally, or at least that they had a special “pipeline” to divinity.
It was used to keep the subjects servile. While the rulers exploited the society. Really no different than what we have today. Republicans today still imply that they are more in sync with the divine.
It has always been about money and power, down through history, and will always be about money and power.
I am afraid that Gingrich will successfully exploit the tea partiers to victory.
MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson
@Nicole:
I agree with you, but I also think we aren’t looking at Rand.. er.. objectively. We keep judging her by the standards of the traditional novel and concluding, rightly, that she sucks. Where we go wrong is in not seeing her as some sort of romance novel/utopian/business dream fusion. She appeals precisely to people who don’t care about artistically drawn characters, who want a fantasy about what life could be like if other people could be pushed out of the way of your aspiring genius. People don’t buy traditional serious novels much – but they do buy romance novels, they buy fantasy novels that tie in with RPG – and they do so to escape, dream, make themselves and their lives over for a while. In a way, they want the opposite of the Bildungsroman. Where the Randies go wrong is that they don’t come back to the real world after getting their fantasy high. The fault lies with the readers, rather than the novels. As escapist fiction, I think Rand actually works quite well. The question is whether we are prepared to grant that type of fiction any merit.
Birthmarker
@MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson: I read The Fountainhead first, probably at about 18 or 19, and thought it was moderately entertaining. I learned a bit about architecture and in general thought it was well plotted and didn’t consider it a total waste of time. Then I read Atlas Shrugged, which was much less interesting.
It amazes me that all these decades later these books are actually being advocated for shaping public policy. They even get mentions on Mad Men.
We’ve lost our collective minds.
MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson
@Batocchio:
You see, I think you are reading Rand from the wrong perspective. You keep looking at her from a more traditional great novel angle, and I think she belongs much more to the romance/fantasy novel category. What you say is true, from the angle of wannabe/wannaread Tolstoys, but not from the angle of those who much prefer Lord Hardon’s Passion or Arch-Elf in Exile Drizzt’s Revenge on the Evil Cave-slugs. Rand tells quite a good lowbrow fantasy story, whatever she may have thought she was doing in highbrow philosophical/aesthetic terms.
Villago Delenda Est
@handsmile:
The Revolution Hobbes was trying to counter was one that was based on the shifting of political power in England away from the Crown to Parliament. Even after Charles I lost his head, Cromwell wound up with many of the same complaints about Parliament that Charles had. He couldn’t get things done, even with his co-religionists, just as Charles did when he was a Catholic sympathizer fighting against a Puritan dominated Parliament.
One of my pet theories about revolution in England v. revolution in France is that the French version was much more violent and society shaking because the rising middle class in England at least had Parliament to exercise political power through, while the French middle class had next to nothing in the Estates General, even if the absolute monarch deigned to pay much attention to it. Society was changing and the government framework was much more resistant to change in France than England, and thus when the dam broke, the flood was much worse.
Corey Robin
@smintheus: You need to read my book. My argument is that pretty much everything you say about Burke here is wrong. I know I’m not the most impartial person on this topic, but I think that argument is right.
@handsmile: Not a simpleminded question at all. Very good one. My quick answer is this: not all counterrevolutionary thought and politics is conservative — there’s a long tradition going back to the early 19th century of liberal counterrevolutionaries (remember, lots of liberalism is quite hostile to revolutionary action, even though Locke himself was a great theoretician and defender of revolution) — but that all conservatism is counterrevolutionary. Now what form that counterrevolution will take will really vary. But it is counterrevolutionary. And the first real theoretician of that is Burke. Hobbes is not really a conservative, for many many reasons that I can’t get into here, but he is a prototype of a counterrevolutionary thinker.
Batocchio
@MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson:
I would word it differently, We are viewing Rand “objectively,” or at least with well-founded aesthetic standards, but her suckitude does not preclude readers from obtaining subjective value from her work. No disagreement there; that’s sorta what I argued above. I agree with you about her appeal as a reading experience for her fans, and that “Where the Randies go wrong is that they don’t come back to the real world after getting their fantasy high.”
Samnell
@Birthmarker: Arguably the Rand references in Mad Men are fairly period-accurate. Most of the office-dwelling conservatives aren’t fans. The one who is is the one everyone thinks is pretty weird and when he speaks about Rand it’s with a glow of cultist affection. At various points he mentions getting someone a copy of Atlas Shrugged or taking them to meet Rand, but I don’t recall anyone else expressing much interest.
Batocchio
@MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson:
Sorry, I missed this one. See, I would argue that Rand is not a very good pulp writer, either, since many pulps have much better plotting and characterizations, but I take your point that she is better viewed in this way. Everyone has their guilty pleasures and all. Additionally, as you allude to at the end, while Rand may be best viewed as pulp, she herself did not view her work this way. She thought she was the most brilliant thinker and artist who ever lived (apart from perhaps a few giants she admired, like Aristotle). So it’s important to note that the value that Rand’s work can have as pulp (a fair point) is typically not the value either her fans or the author ascribe to it.
MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson
@Batocchio:
That takes us into the weeds of who decides what is well-founded and what our standards should be. I tend to avoid those discussions now, partly because I got rather burned out on them at Yale (where I actually knew Corey at a great distance via Robin Brown and GESO), partly because they don’t provide much of an antidote to Rand and her acolytes. Although I must confess to having recently reduced one young lady to enraged spluttering by deploying the famous quote about Tolkien and Rand’s work and its effect on the impressionable adolescent mind.
Nicole
@MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson: I tend to figure there’s an audience for everything, and Rand’s writing appeals to lonely teens who feel isolated from the world, because her protagonists are loners isolated from the world, but they couldn’t care less (whereas I think the lonely teens reading her care very much, but wish they didn’t).
For all the righties flinging her name around, her actual ideas aren’t really anywhere in right wing objectives, anymore than Jesus Christ’s actual ideas are. Her ideas are simplistic and don’t work in a real-life world, yet they’re still misinterpreted. She says, money is the physical manifestation of a person’s joy in his work and the Right hears, “Greed is good!” Jesus says give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and the Right hears, “Taxes are too high!”
So I think she speaks to a certain brand of lonely, angry person, because she herself was a lonely, angry person. And because the characters are beat up on so much by life, and yet still triumph and everyone else gets theirs in the end, it also speaks to a certain kind of eternal victim. And CR and others have pointed out, eternal victimization is also a hallmark of conservatism.
Heaven knows, I also read a lot of bodice-rippers as a teen, and they don’t have anything resembling good writing either. But I figure there’s a place for them, too. Wouldn’t read ’em today, but then, that’s the joy of reading- I think your taste (hopefully) matures as you do. I couldn’t get through The Wings of the Dove in my 20s, but adored it in my 30’s.
Steeplejack
__
This raises the question for me of whether Rand’s influence is uniquely, or primarily, an American phenomenon. I don’t know, so I’m open to expert comment, but I suspect that Rand has little or no foothold in Britain, whereas Burke and Hobbes are thoroughly transatlantic in their influence.
And what exactly is Rand’s influence? I mean her substantive influence, other than just providing cover for assholes acting like assholes. What does Randian government look like? Is it just the smoking crater where government used to be?
ETA: Sorry if this has all been neatly wrapped up in the book. I didn’t complete my homework reading in time.
MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson
@Batocchio:
Well, that’s just how life goes, I think. People write and read for all sorts of reasons and manage to make over books to their purpose. Anyway, I think we should probably agree to leave the thread to those talking about Corey’s book. Sorry, Corey!
brad
I’m behind in the reading, as it were, but my own prejudices are also slowing me down, at least in one semi-major instance.
To firmly, concretely, indisputably place Nietzsche in the conservative camp is, to me, a huge error. Granted, there are as many Nietzsches in the world as there are readers of him, and there are many particularly poor readers of him who have created a lineage in the reactionary sphere. But, to avoid writing a wall of text here, to put it simply, the difference between N and Ayn Rand can be summed in the value they find in suffering and opposition.
Nietzsche may have hated Socrates and Christianity for their errors, but he doesn’t deny their utility or the value of a worthy opponent. Ayn Rand and the conservative mind cannot abide there being an opposite to them, its very existence is anathema. Nietzsche celebrates it, and values the struggle. Rand and the conservatives I see are simply annoyed that anyone would deny their inherent superiority.
There are, to me, countless more differences reaching deeply into many topics, but it’s a minor point in this context discussing a text which otherwise is a highly rewarding read for me thus far.
Birthmarker
@Samnell: Since the show does try to be accurate to the time, I wondered if she was that widely read by executives in NYC in the early 60’s.
Corey–thanks for your participation. We do appreciate it.
Corey Robin
@Villago Delenda Est: The revolution in Britain was extraordinarily violent. It took the lives of something like 180,000 people — I can’t remember the exact figure, but I believe historians compare that, in per capita terms, to the death rate of the British in World War I. I’m not sure about the numbers from the French Revolution, within France (setting aside the international wars France engaged in) but I believe they were smaller. The Reign of Terror, for example, took at most 40,000 lives.
Nicole
@Villago Delenda Est:
It also shapes the nations today, and their version of conservatism, which are different from ours. In some ways, France will always look to the state to “fix” things, which is, I think, a remnant of being a nation under an absolute monarch. Plus, it gives them something to complain about, which, as my French teacher said, is the French’s national sport.
Corey Robin
@Brad: you also need to read my book. Your comment rests upon a lot of mistaken assumptions about the conservative tradition.
Corey Robin
@Brad: Sorry, just to add to that: what you say about Nietzsche actually applies quite a bit to the conservative tradition, including, at points, Rand herself. Though in a much shallower way, as I say.
Villago Delenda Est
@Corey Robin:
That was the Civil War, which was fought with the sort of ferocity that the English attributed to those barbarian Spaniards.
Contrast with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which was comparatively bloodless, and thus “Glorious”.
smintheus
@Roger Moore: My point is that much of early modern political philosophy, including Hobbes, took what they’d studied about ancient politics and political theorizing as their starting point. Much of what they thought they knew was historically inaccurate or biased, but that’s beside the point. Most of the surviving ancient literature condemned democracy and populist government and portrayed it in the most lurid terms…esp. as inherently unstable and prone to violence. These writers tend to laud more aristocratic governments (like the Roman Republic) in the opposite terms. So that tended to influence the preconceptions of people like Hobbes.
Nicole
@Steeplejack: Rand wrote a lot about the nature of government, a lot of it boring, but basically:
“The proper functions of a government fall into three broad categories, all of them involving the issues of physical force and the protection of men’s rights: the police, to protect men from criminals—the armed services, to protect men from foreign invaders—the law courts, to settle disputes among men according to objective laws.”
Linky:
http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=arc_ayn_rand_the_nature_of_government
smintheus
@Corey Robin: And why am I wrong? I’m describing the way I believe Burke saw and portrayed his views. I didn’t say I thought his philosophy of preserving a conservative never-never-land was without its share of sleight of hand, or that it could be squared with the realities of English politics in his era.
Villago Delenda Est
@Corey Robin:
Also, I’d point out that if you do consider the entire Civil War to be the Revolution, it took place from 1642 to 1649, when they finally dispatched King Chuck. More time in which to kill, and thus higher casualties, and more through conventional warfare than the French one, although there were plenty of counterrebellions to suppress from Paris, the Fronde and whatnot.
Still, point taken…a lot of blood spilled in the name of Cavaliers and Roundheads. Which is why the contrast to all that in 1688 was “glorious”.
brad
@Corey Robin: Fair enough, and as I said I’m behind in the reading and enjoying, and learning, otherwise.
But I’d have to answer that your use of Nietzsche also rests upon a great many mistaken assumptions. That conservatives such as Rand have made those errors doesn’t validate their claim of kinship with him anymore than Hitler’s. Nietzsche was careful to avoid politics in almost all cases, and to disavow applications of his ideas to that world.
But I don’t mean to distract from the real purpose of this chat, I’m simply a scholar of Nietzsche and having him lined up next to Rand is a pet peeve. Even at a simplistic level he’s about 50,000 times better a writer.
Toadvine
Corey, I’ve read your book and found it very compelling — when I’ve the time I intend to reread Burke, which I’ve not touched since college. I’m curious, though: some of the harsher critics (Lilla, Berman)of your book seem unable to digest your more expansive reading of Burke. Why is this? Why does the more conventional reading (i.e. that is Burke = organic society, stability, tradition, yadda, yadda) run so deep?
Are these reviewers simply unfamiliar with the Burke of “Letters on a Regicide Peace”? From interviews, it seems to me that more conservatives are willing to discuss the radicalism of Burke with you than liberals are.
MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson
@smintheus:
Not true for the canonical Attic orators or dramatists, for a start. The Greek historians are more ambivalent, but not really lurid or one-sided in their presentation of politics. They dislike stasis (civil war) much more obviously than democracy per se. Republican period Latin literature and early Imperial literature tends to have a rather amusing tendency to venerate the abstract Roman people, even though the aristocracy clearly made the big decisions. It’s true that from the post-Augustan Roman period onwards, democracy becomes increasingly a synonym for mob rule, and that by the time you get to Byzantium democracy is regarded with fear and loathing by all right-thinking men.
Villago Delenda Est
@Nicole:
There’s your opening for all the fucking regulation you can possibly imagine.
So sorry, Ayn. You opened the door right there.
Tehanu
@MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson:
Yes, that’s it exactly. Fantasy is powerful stuff, much more powerful and much more widespread than 19th- & 20th-century mainstream, “realistic” fiction. It’s just a quirk of history that “fantasy”, the genre, has a lower reputation among the intelligentsia, and that they can’t understand why people value Ayn Rand or Barbara Cartland (say) over John Updike or Louise Erdrich. But most people — and certainly not the 14-year-olds who get mesmerized by Atlas Shrugged — don’t care how well written the story is; they care how the story makes them feel.
Nicole
@Villago Delenda Est: There’s your opening for all the fucking regulation you can possibly imagine.
Villago Delenda Est
@Nicole:
Yeah, “objective” always seemed to, amazingly, coincide with her viewpoint. Funny, that.
Corey Robin
@Villago Delenda Est (#89): It seemed from your comment you were talking about the Civil War. The previous paragraph was all about the revolution Hobbes was opposing — that was the Civil War.
@smintheus 90: There was a very strong republican tradition in early modern Europe, based on ancient texts of Greece and Rome, that celebrated either republican rule or democracy. Hobbes was explicitly arguing against that tradition, which was very powerful in 17th century Britain. He wanted to break from it, not by reviving aristocratic traditions of Rome (in fact he saw those arguments as precisely the problem), but by drawing upon scientific arguments and a skeptical arguments of Grotius, Descartes, and others.
@smintheus 48: This is the claim that is wrong: “Both Hobbes and Burke were concerned with stability and law/order. They saw contemporary (ideologically driven) social/political revolutions as inherently destabilizing and dangerous. Burke preferred to think that traditional institutions, having grown up organically, had a natural value by both providing stability and by limiting dangerous revolutionary reforms.” Don’t have time to get into here, but my whole book is an argument against this very traditional account of Burke.
@Brad 94: Nietzsche doesn’t appear that much in my book, but he fits very much with my argument, not about Rand abut about conservatism: the centrality of suffering and struggle, etc. And as a scholar of Nietzsche, you of course know that it’s by no means uncontroversial to claim that he is an apolitical thinker. There’s a very serious vein of scholarship that contends otherwise. I belong in that camp.
@Toadvine: excellent question. I really don’t know the answer to that.
Nicole
@Villago Delenda Est: Just like that poster that says, “The Word Of Christ: Surprisingly indistinguishable from one’s personal opinion, actually.”
smintheus
@MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson: Obviously literature meant for public competition in the Athenian democracy is unlikely to have been flagrantly hostile to that form of government. But apart from that, most of the literature was written by people who had an investment in promoting/justifying the interests of the upper classes, and in minimizing the interests or positive qualities of their social inferiors (except as those could be used to buttress the upper class interests). In particular, virtually none of the political philosophizing that survives from Greece and Rome presents the case for popular rule. Quite the opposite, it presents a pretty bleak picture of democracy.
Roger Moore
@Nicole:
The thing about everybody having to accept things that are “objectively” true is a convenient excuse for cultlike, lockstep behavior in people who claim to be a bunch of fervent individualists.
Nicole
@Roger Moore:
Absolutely, and it certainly was true of Rand’s inner circle. All espousing a fervent belief in the individual, while they all dressed alike, smoked the same cigarettes, watched the same films and listened to the same music, which, of course, was whatever Rand claimed was “objectively” good.
brad
@Corey Robin:
I know very well, and that’s why I genuinely don’t mean to distract, it’s just a tic of mine that I have to chime in in what I consider a defense of him. It’s both a strength and weakness of him as a thinker and writer that he left room for placing him in almost any camp on any topic. I’ve read well written carefully argued pieces claiming he was actually a dedicated Christian.
By no means do I intend not to continue reading, I suppose my disagreement would rest on the idea that Nietzsche considers the struggle an essential means of self-development and growth whereas conservatism as I experience today seems to be about defending one’s “precious bodily fluids” from pollution, as it were. But your desire to distinguish the essence from the manifestation is one that, even if my Nietzsche is opposed to metaphysics and dialectics, I can see clear value in.
Chris
@Nicole:
“You’ll have to rely on your ‘winning personality’ to get laid! God help you.”
Nicole
@brad:
So do today’s conservatives…but only for poor people.
Villago Delenda Est
@Corey Robin:
Yeah, my bad, conflating there and due to my words.
As I said, point taken, although I think the Civil War had plenty of additional baggage thrown in, what with all the religious conflict as part of it, which turned up the violence knob a few notches.
handsmile
Many thanks to Batocchio, MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson, Villago Delenda Est, and of course, Corey Robin, for your replies to my comments.
A bit of trivial serendipity:
From the chapter “Garbage and Gravitas,” I learned that Rand worked as a Hollywood screenwriter. I’d known little really of Ayn’s biography; perhaps now I will seek out the biopic “The Passion of Ayn Rand,” starring Helen Mirren who was herself the subject of much commentary on an open thread here on Friday night.
Last night, as luck(?) would have it, TCM broadcast one of Rand’s screenplays, the film “Love Letters,” with Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones. It was certainly execrable, but for reasons not solely attributable to young Ms. Rand.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037885/
smintheus
@Corey Robin: The ‘strong republican tradition in early modern Europe’ is based upon literature praising mainly the Roman Republic, or otherwise the Greek aristocracies (dressed up as more inclusive than they were), or constitutional governments that were based on similarly limited franchises. There was and is little surviving literature praising democracy, and such as there was the early modern political theorists didn’t consult much. So it was primarily the anti-monarchists who were invested in ancient political theory. The myth of the Roman Republic tended to serve as their model of good government. So no surprise that Hobbes, looking for a new justification for monarchy, wound up arguing against ancient political theories that (when read critically) actually tended to favor ancient aristocracies.
I already knew you think that my characterization of Burke’s views is all wrong. You haven’t said why, though I suspect it’s merely because Burke’s real goals had more radical aspects that he couldn’t manage to rationalize within his better known justification of organic tradition.
Corey Robin
@smintheus: I say why in my book, which is what I thought we here to discuss.
Nicole
@handsmile:
Seen it; can’t recommend. It’s pretty dull, and since it’s based on the biography written by one of her former inner circle (Barbara Brandon) it really seems to be less about Rand and more about the Brandons.
I liked Heller’s book, because I think it really depicted how Rand just stomped all over the people in her life, and while Heller, I think, sees her as a better novelist than I do, I think she depicted her pretty fairly- I definitely didn’t think she was lionizing her.
MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson
@smintheus:
Sorry, but this is absolutely false. Attic oratory, which was the gold standard for the ancient world is full of praise of democracy. Attic drama likewise. You’d have a much harder time finding examples of out and out denunciation of democracy before the post-Augustan Roman period, and even then it’s really only in Byzantine thought that democracy becomes unthinkable.
AA+ Bonds
To me these are the limits of Robin’s book – he refuses to admit that conservatism is dead in the West and has been replaced with fascism-like systems of revolutionary thought
AA+ Bonds
If you’re looking for an interesting medieval perspective on democracy check the “Aquinas” commentary on Book III of Aristotle’s Politics, which was actually finished by Peter of Auvergne
Villago Delenda Est
Also, I think the French Revolution was a lot more about transforming society (and in that sense more violent) than the English ones were, even with impressive casualty lists. The French revolutionaries sought to totally upend the Ancien Régime whereas the English wanted to get a stubborn monarch out of the way of further reform. They weren’t going around radically transforming weights and measures, renaming the months. All because the changing economic and social conditions were not as held back in England as they were in France, by an entrench absolute monarchy. The English monarch was a lot less absolute than Charles I wanted to begin with. Also, not to downplay the human cost of all this, but the wake of the French Revolution was nearly a quarter century of nearly continuous war that was felt throughout Europe, and reverberated around the world.
AA+ Bonds
@AA+ Bonds:
Take Boehner’s pre-sponse to the State of the Union, using the Republican line since 2010: attacking Obama for “the same old ideas”
Rightists in America nowadays are driven pathologically by pursuit of the radically, even psychotically “new” and a paradoxical belief that this will restore the “old” – palingenetic nationalism, pure and simple
AA+ Bonds
Another good place to look is something like Curtis’s The Mayfair Set, which explores how Burkean conservatism was wiped out in the UK during the 20th century by capital
AA+ Bonds
It used to be that the fascists allied themselves with conservatives . . . but with conservatism dead and gone, the fascists have discovered they can call themselves conservatives and scholars follow decades behind in their wake, turning this strange object over and over and trying to figure out how it is “conservative”
AA+ Bonds
Answer: it isn’t – it’s a form of Bolshevism
AA+ Bonds
Something closer to an elitist “third way” movement of total societal reform through implementation of untested plans without consideration that they might not work . . . than to anything that could be considered “conservative”
Batocchio
Hmm, I believe we’re wrapping up.
@handsmile:
@Nicole:
I thought the The Passion of Ayn Rand was a decent film, interesting enough to see at least once, although you’re right that it’s from the Brandons’ perspective. Mirren is always good, and Rand’s personal flaws and contradictions (which she denied) do make her an intriguing figure.
Thanks to (Angry) DougJ, MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson, Nicole, Roger Moore, handsmile and everyone else for some interesting discussion.
Thanks to Corey Robin for showing up. He can certainly speak for himself, but for those are still waiting for their copies of the book, I think these two pieces of his serve as a nice introduction (Doug linked one in an earlier post):
http://coreyrobin.com/2011/09/27/revolutionaries-of-the-right-the-deep-roots-of-conservative-radicalism/
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Conservative-Mind/130199/
I assume we’re discussing chapters 4 and 5 for next time, at a time and date tbd?
smintheus
@MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson: Nonsense. Neither the oratory nor the drama is political theorizing as such (aside from a few stray bits of a handful of funeral orations), so at most they advocate indirectly for democratic values. And as I’ve said multiple times, the early modern political theorists (who were less familiar with Greek than with Roman literature) were not scouring and trying to build a political philosophy based on the Attic orators and dramatists.
I’m talking about the surviving ancient political theorists, very few of whom have more than lukewarm praise for democracy and very many of which treated it as unstable or worse. If you can’t see the criticisms of democracy in Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, and Polybios then you’re missing a lot.
For the most part, early modern republican theory is based on their understanding of the Roman Republic, not of Athenian democracy (except incidentally and mostly as a negative model of the undesirability of ‘mob rule’).
smintheus
@Corey Robin: I replied to others’ comments about Hobbes and Burke, whom I have read. If you didn’t want to discuss your interpretation of Burke, then why did you reply to me?
smintheus
@MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson:
Seriously? To quote you yourself, “this is absolutely false”. Show me a single example of a Greek text (esp. one known in the west ca. 1600 CE) analyzing democracy in glowing terms that could stand as an equivalent counterweight to the well known denunciation of democracy by the “Old Oligarch” [pseudo Xenophon, dated to the Periclean age].
MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson
@smintheus:
The Old Oligarch explicitly says that although he doesn’t care for Athenian democracy, he concedes that they manage it well. Not much of a denunciation, really. In future, please, read these texts and think about them. I offered you numerous texts that are positive about democracy, you came up with ONE text that you proceeded to misinterpret.
smintheus
@MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson: The Old Oligarch is “not much of a denunciation”? That’s profound insight.
As I’ve said repeatedly, texts like dramas that are “positive about democracy” don’t necessarily provide much basis for developing one’s own political philosophy, and in any event did not serve that purpose for early modern thinkers.
I would normally drop everything to follow your instructions, but it happens I did read and think about them at length while I was doing a doctorate in ancient Greek history. But I’ll work harder on not misinterpreting these texts in the future, thanks so much.
Nutella
The same thing happened with the Iraq invasion. Those of us who said it was the wrong thing to do were ignored before and during the invasion. Now that the proponents of the invasion have been ‘proven wrong over time’, who are the respected authorities in the government and the press? The ones who were totally, completely, demonstrably wrong.
Paul in KY
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): She is rabidly anti Marxist/Communist.
Stemming from her families problems when the Bolsheviks came to power.
matryoshka
Just got the book last night and started reading it this morning, so I hope to participate in the next discussion.
One thing that strikes me right off about Robin’s thesis (that in the conservative view, there are beings whose natural superiority gives them rulership over others): If there is a fundamental assumption that people of color are “lesser” underlying all the intellectual dressing of conservatism, the ascendancy of President Obama really does turn the world upside down for them. There are hierarchies of all sorts deferred to and no tolerance for inclusive or holistic thinking. I can certainly see why conservatism and evangelical religion make such happy bed-buddies. If we damned liberals won’t respect the authoritah of the wealthy white men, we must be driven to respect for “God,” the archetype in whose image wealthy white men believe they are created.
Scott P.
@MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson:
And yet both Thucydides and Xenophon were pro-Sparta and either ambivalent or hostile to democracy, which had a much greater effect on early modern opinion than the orators.
smintheus
@Corey Robin: Having read your OUP blurb, I think we have no disagreement. I described how Burke preferred to present his case, without commenting on the context in which he was making it. Your argument appears to be that Burke’s case for tradition was disingenuous insofar as it was a pretext for shoring up elite power and privilege and blunting the impetus for advancing the interests of their social inferiors. Well, duh.
Since antiquity nearly all conservative political philosophizing, with its intellectual pirouettes, has arisen in the context of elite privilege that’s been undermined, repudiated, or threatened. The very first such literature, from archaic Greece, was emphatically directed against populist movements and populist tyrants, as often as not by aristocrats who’d been dumped from power and exiled. This is when conservatives first developed the argument that elite privilege is naturally to be based not only on birth but also because those of ‘good birth’ are good stewards of the state.
The same is true of political philosophizing from the classical period and beyond. Plato’s ridiculously convoluted case for elite rulership would not have been necessary except in the context of the Athenian democracy where aristocratic privilege had been almost entirely repudiated.
And so forth. That’s just to say the obvious, that conservative justifications of elite privilege are promulgated as needed to confront social/political/economic challenges to that privilege; that it’s about conserving power/privilege/status more than any narrow concern about tradition per se.
Merp
I just wanted to add agreement to brad: the treatment of Nietzsche is utterly bizarre and goes against the grain of the vast majority of scholarship I’m aware of.
What makes it more strange is that Robin could reverse his stance on the philosopher completely and it wouldn’t change his argument. The largest role Nietzsche plays in Robin’s book is through his influence on Ayn Rand, and Robin makes a convincing case that Rand’s understanding of Nietzsche played a substantial role in her work.
But that fact is independent of whether Rand’s understanding was correct. I don’t see what is accomplished by adding that Rand’s understanding of Nietzsche was right after saying she was influenced by him. Indeed, it puts him in good company, as Rand made a complete hash of Aristotle as well.
I like the book, and the intellectual project that he’s working on with it is worthwhile and necessary. As I was reading it, I would read for stretches and think that this book would become a classic – and then I would hit a sentence or paragraph lamenting Nietzsche for being a conservative/reactionary thinker and my reverie was dashed. It would be a much stronger work, at least for me, if the Nietzsche stuff were cleaned up.
Hob
@Birthmarker: The Mad Men thing is pretty far off topic, but since I’ve missed the book discussion anyway: the show doesn’t suggest that Rand was “widely read by executives in NYC”. There’s one single character who is into Rand, and no one else appears to know or care what he’s talking about. I fail to see how that’s a stretch.