Corey Robin

After discussing the forgotten lunacies of the conservative movement during its heyday of the 1950s and 1960s—including one Fred Schwarz, right-wing crackpot and author of You Can Trust the Communists: To be Communists—Rick Perlstein, who knows more about the American right than just about anyone, writes this: The notion that conservatism has taken a new, and nuttier, turn has influential adherents whose distortions derail our ability to understand and contain it. In a recent New York Review of Books review of Corey Robin’s ground-breaking book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, which traces continuities in right-wing thought all the back to the seventeenth century, the distinguished political theorist Mark Lilla pronounced that “most of the turmoil […]

I wrote a letter in response to Mark Lilla’s review of my book. The New York Review of Books has now published it, along with a reply from Lilla. There’s not much to say about Lilla’s reply: it’s long on attitude, short on argument. But readers can judge for themselves.

I’ll be speaking at the following venues this semester. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by and say hello. Friday, February 24, 5 pm “The Death of American Conservatism.” University of Hawaii, Saunders Hall 624 Friday, March 3, noon “Public Intellectuals: Bringing a Public Into Being.” In conversation with Jedediah Purdy. Duke University, Old Chemistry Building 011 Tuesday, March 28, 5:30 pm “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump.” Manhattan College, room TBA Wednesday, March 29, 7 pm Harper’s Forum on Trump. With Masha Gessen, Lawrence Jackson, and Sarah Schulman. McNally Jackson Books, 52 Prince Street, New York Friday, April 14/Saturday, April 15 Keynote Address, Princeton Graduate Political Theory Conference Princeton University, room and time TBA In addition to […]

My post on neoliberalism is getting a fair amount of attention on social media. Jonathan Chait, whose original tweet prompted the post, responded to it with a series of four tweets: The four tweets are even odder than the original tweet. First, Chait claims I confuse two different things: Charles Peters-style neoliberalism and “the Marxist epithet for open capitalist economies.” Well, no, I don’t confuse those things at all. I quite clearly state at the outset of my post that neoliberalism has a great many meanings—one of which is the epithet that leftists hurl against people like Chait—but that there was a moment in American history when a group of political and intellectual actors, under the aegis of Peters, took on […]

Greg Grandin takes to Gawker to report on a clusterfuck of corruption at the New York Times Book Review: This Sunday, the New York Times Book Review will publish a review of the first volume of Niall Ferguson’s authorized biography of Henry Kissinger, Kissinger: The Idealist. The reviewer is Andrew Roberts. Roberts brings an unusual level of familiarity to the subject: It was Roberts whom Kissinger first asked, before turning to Ferguson, to write his authorized biography. In other words, the New York Times is having Kissinger’s preferred authorized biographer review Kissinger’s authorized biography. … Oh, and Roberts isn’t just close to the subject of the book he is reviewing. He has also been, for a quarter-century, a friend of the book’s author. … The Times, too, normally checks those things. When I’m approached about […]

  Over at The American Conservative, political theorist Sam Goldman offers a thoughtful response to The Reactionary Mind. Among its many virtues, Goldman’s post manages to get my argument right. As we’ve seen, that can be something of a challenge for some reviewers. Goldman also agrees with me on some fundamentals. Conservatism, he says, is a reactionary ideology. It is a defense of hierarchy against emancipatory movements from below. It’s not a disposition or an attitude; it’s not a philosophy of liberty or even of limited government.  (It supports the idea of limited government, Goldman says, but that’s a consequence, not a premise, of the theory.)  It is first and foremost a coherent set of ideas about inequality that gets […]

It’s been a long while since our last roundup of news of the book.  So here goes…. Firedoglake held a salon about The Reactionary Mind today. Rick Perlstein hosted the discussion, lots of people chimed in. Thom Hartmann conducted an interview with me for his show Conversations with Great Minds. I certainly don’t have a great mind, but it was, thanks to Thom, a great conversation. Here’s Part I; here’s Part II. Paul Heideman has a really thoughtful review of the book here, one of the best I’ve read. Though Heideman has some criticisms, he gives a thorough account of the book’s argument. Jeffrey Goldfarb wrote an interesting blog post about the book, which sparked some more interesting discussion. Daniel […]

So The Reactionary Mind has made it into the New York Times for a third time. Writing in The Stone, the online section of the Times dealing with issues in contemporary philosophy, Gary Gutting, a philosopher at Notre Dame, weighs in on the debate the book has spawned: Corey Robin’s new book presents conservatives as fundamentally committed to stopping “subordinate classes” from taking power from the ruling elite.  Conservatism, Robin says, holds that “the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, to govern themselves or the polity.”  Mark Lilla, however, has argued that Robin misrepresents the tradition of conservative thought. … Robin cites Edmund Burke: “The real object” of the French Revolution is “to break all […]

The blog has won another award!  Cliopatra, the history blog at the History News Network, has awarded me its “Best Writer” award.  Here’s what the judges said: Corey Robin’s new blog, CoreyRobin.com, has rapidly become a *tour de force*. Robin joins battle with contemporary issues by way of a deep engagement with the history of political thought. Although he is a passionate partisan of the left, he takes conservative thinkers seriously. Several of them have returned the favor, including Andrew Sullivan, who regularly uses Robin’s provocative posts as a launching pad for his own blogging, and Bruce Bartlett, who recently debated Robin at CoreyRobin.com. All that, and Robin’s words sparkle with a crafty combination of intelligence and wit. He is […]

Jumping off from Mark Lilla’s negative review of my book in the New York Review of Books—about which more later, though if you’re looking for a hard-hitting response, check out Alex Gourevitch’s demolition at Jacobin—Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a helpful corrective to Lilla’s claim that “political apocalypticism” is a recent development on the right. It’s interesting that Lilla raises Buckley here. People often bring him up as foil to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, as an example of a time when conservatism was sane. But that Buckley joke has always struck me (a college dropout) as batshit crazy. I constantly hear about the sober-minded Buckley, but it’s tough for me to square that with the man who posited that the bombing […]