![]() ![]() They had their own thinkers and their own dystopian historical narratives. ![]() Yet, throughout the nineteenth century, European nations were largely being governed by forces hostile to the revolutionary surge. Thereafter European history books adopted a romantic, heroic narrative that strung a thread through revolutionary events-1789, 1848, the Paris Commune, 1917-and treated the periods in between as fallow, or as merely preparing for the next advance. Anyone or anything that didn’t fit got stamped with this label from then on. During the French Revolution, though, it became a term of abuse applied to those who were deemed as standing in the way of the revolutionary project and the ultimate destiny of mankind. Just as actions lead to reactions in the physical world, so, Montesquieu suggested, a similar string of actions and reactions takes place in political life. The term “reaction” enters European political thought with Montesquieu, who borrowed it from Newton. Events were also being shaped by forces of resistance that intellectuals, given their assumptions about history, had trouble making sense of. Meanwhile, though, not only were there powerful minds who dissented from these views. That was the illusion of the twentieth century. Or they have believed that forces for good have seized control of history-the workers, the Third World wretched of the earth-and that, however dismal things may now appear, they will eventually triumph. They have believed that over the course of time things just naturally improve that was the illusion of the nineteenth century. LILLA: Because most Western intellectuals since the French Revolution have held some sort of progressive view of history. Why then, as you point out, have scholars neglected reaction and the reactionary, in favor of studying revolution and the revolutionary? HUMANITIES: The reactionary belief that something beautiful has been lost to us can be as compelling to the political imagination as its opposite, the revolutionary idea that we might be able to leap out of the present and into a better and more just future. And so they convince themselves that something radical must be done to either recover or redeem what has been lost. The present becomes unbearable, as does the prospect of the future. They find themselves on the shore, looking on as the debris of everything they valued is swept away by the current. They believe that some calamitous event has taken place in time, that history has gone off course, and that the kind of society they lived in (or imagined they lived in) has shattered. This, I think, is the picture of history that reactionaries have. It might flow into a channel full of shoals or rocks, where a ship can run aground or be shattered. Other people, though, have a catastrophic conception of history: The river flows but it may not be heading in the right direction. Think of cyclical theories of history or even cosmology: The world runs its course, is destroyed, and is then reborn to travel the cycle again. While thinking about this image, it occurred to me that some people believe that time carries us along and all we can do is passively experience the ride. MARK LILLA: One of the most common metaphors for history, and for time itself, is that of a river. HUMANITIES: What is the shipwrecked mind? Why is it shipwrecked? Recently, HUMANITIES emailed Lilla several questions and he emailed us back several answers. This fall New York Review Books reissued a prequel to the current volume called The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, which is about the dangerous relationship between politics and philosophy as evidenced in the lives of Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and others. His interest in continental philosophy and the modern era has also resulted in books on Giambattista Vico and the place of the religious imagination in contemporary politics. In 1992, Lilla received a grant from NEH to support translations of postwar political theory in France for a book he edited called New French Thought. In his new collection of essays, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction, he explores the lives and ideas of sundry reactionaries for whom the last revolution “marked the end of a glorious journey, not the beginning of one.” His gallery of backward-looking thinkers stretches from the German-Jewish thinker Franz Rosenzweig to the émigré philosophers Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, and all the way to the political Islamists who dream of restoring a caliphate. Mark Lilla is a professor of humanities at Columbia University and a contributor to the New York Review of Books. ![]()
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