WHAT IS REACTION?
Consult any decent university library and you will find hundreds of books in all the world's major languages on the idea of revolution. On the idea of reaction you will be hard put to find a dozen. We have theories about why revolution happens, what makes in succeed, and why, eventually, it consumes its young.
We have no such theories about reaction, just the self-satisfied conviction that it is rooted in ignorance and intransigence, if not darker motives. This is bewildering. The revolutionary spirit that inspired political movements across the world for two centuries may have died out, but the spirit of reaction that rose to meet it has survived and is proving just as potent a historical force, from the Middle East to Middle America.
This irony should pique our curiosity. Instead it arouses a kind of smug outrage that then gives way to despair. The reactionary is the last remaining "other" consigned to the margins of respectable intellectual inquiry.
We do not know him.
[ ... ]
All previous history took on meaning as a preparation for this event, and all future action could now be oriented toward history’s predetermined end, which was human emancipation. What would political life then look like? Hegel thought it would mean the establishment of modern bureaucratic nation-states; Marx imagined a communist nonstate populated by freemen who would fish in the morning, raise cattle in the afternoon, and criticize after dinner. These differences were less important, though, than their confidence in the inevitability of arrival. The river of time flows in one direction only, they thought; reversing upstream is impossible. During the Jacobin period anyone who resisted the river’s flow or displayed insufficient enthusiasm about reaching the destination was labeled a “reactionary.” The term acquired the negative moral connotation it still retains today.
[ ... more]
http://ift.tt/2gwJgy4
Consult any decent university library and you will find hundreds of books in all the world's major languages on the idea of revolution. On the idea of reaction you will be hard put to find a dozen. We have theories about why revolution happens, what makes in succeed, and why, eventually, it consumes its young.
We have no such theories about reaction, just the self-satisfied conviction that it is rooted in ignorance and intransigence, if not darker motives. This is bewildering. The revolutionary spirit that inspired political movements across the world for two centuries may have died out, but the spirit of reaction that rose to meet it has survived and is proving just as potent a historical force, from the Middle East to Middle America.
This irony should pique our curiosity. Instead it arouses a kind of smug outrage that then gives way to despair. The reactionary is the last remaining "other" consigned to the margins of respectable intellectual inquiry.
We do not know him.
[ ... ]
All previous history took on meaning as a preparation for this event, and all future action could now be oriented toward history’s predetermined end, which was human emancipation. What would political life then look like? Hegel thought it would mean the establishment of modern bureaucratic nation-states; Marx imagined a communist nonstate populated by freemen who would fish in the morning, raise cattle in the afternoon, and criticize after dinner. These differences were less important, though, than their confidence in the inevitability of arrival. The river of time flows in one direction only, they thought; reversing upstream is impossible. During the Jacobin period anyone who resisted the river’s flow or displayed insufficient enthusiasm about reaching the destination was labeled a “reactionary.” The term acquired the negative moral connotation it still retains today.
[ ... more]
http://ift.tt/2gwJgy4
The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction by Mark Lilla snowflake. Introduction.
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