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 […]

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.