The Conservative Mind: Why Reactionaries from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin Have Fought Real Liberty

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Oxford University Press / By Corey Robin

Understanding the Conservative Mind: Why Reactionaries from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin Have Fought Real Liberty
Historically, conservatism has been driven by the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.

December 8, 2011 |


The following excerpt is reprinted from The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin with permission from Oxford University Press, Inc. Copyright © 2011 by Oxford University Press, Inc.


Since the modern era began, men and women in subordinate positions have marched against their superiors in the state, church, workplace, and other hierarchical institutions. They have gathered under different banners--the labor movement, feminism, abolition, socialism--and shouted different slogans: freedom, equality, rights, democracy, revolution. In virtually every instance, their superiors have resisted them, violently and nonviolently, legally and illegally, overtly and covertly. That march and demarche of democracy is the story of modern politics or at least one of its stories.

This book is about the second half of that story, the demarche, and the political ideas--variously called conservative, reactionary, revanchist, counterrevolutionary--that grow out of and give rise to it. These ideas, which occupy the right side of the political spectrum, are forged in battle. They always have been, at least since they first emerged as formal ideologies during the French Revolution, battles between social groups rather than nations; roughly speaking, between those with more power and those with less. To understand these ideas, we have to understand that story. For that is what conservatism is: a meditation on--and theoretical rendition of--the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.

Despite the very real differences between them, workers in a factory are like secretaries in an office, peasants on a manor, slaves on a plantation--even wives in a marriage--in that they live and labor in conditions of unequal power. They submit and obey, heeding the demands of their managers and masters, husbands and lords. They are disciplined and punished. They do much and receive little. Sometimes their lot is freely chosen--workers contract with their employers, wives with their husbands--but its entailments seldom are. What contract, after all, could ever itemize the ins and outs, the daily pains and ongoing sufferance, of a job or a marriage? Throughout American history, in fact, the contract often has served as a conduit to unforeseen coercion and constraint, particularly in institutions like the workplace and the family where men and women spend so much of their lives. Employment and marriage contracts have been interpreted by judges, themselves friendly to the interests of employers and husbands, to contain all sorts of unwritten and unwanted provisions of servitude to which wives and workers tacitly consent, even when they have no knowledge of such provisions or wish to stipulate otherwise. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/occupywallst/153378/understanding_the_conservative_mind%3A_why_reactionaries_from_edmund_burke_to_sarah_palin_have_fought_real_liberty/