Download The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction AudioBook Free
We don't understand the reactionary head. As a result, argues Draw Lilla in this timely booklet, the ideas and passions that form today's political dramas are unintelligible to us. The reactionary is anything but a conservative. He's as radical and modern a physique as the revolutionary, someone shipwrecked in the quickly changing present, and suffering from nostalgia for an idealized recent and an apocalyptic dread that history is rushing toward catastrophe. And like the revolutionary his political engagements are motivated by highly developed ideas. Lilla begins with three twentieth-century philosophers - Franz Rosenzweig, Eric Voegelin, and Leo Strauss - who attributed the problems of modern society to a rest in the annals of ideas and marketed a go back to earlier settings of thought. Then examines the long lasting electricity of grand historical narratives of betrayal to form political outlooks since the French Revolution, and shows how these narratives are used in the writings of Europe's right-wing ethnic pessimists and Maoist neocommunists, American theoconservatives fantasizing about the tranquility of middle ages Catholic population, and radical Islamists wanting to bring back a vanished Muslim caliphate. The revolutionary spirit that inspired political movements around the world for two centuries may have become extinct, but the spirit of reaction that increased to meet it includes survived and is also proving just as formidable a historical power. We stay in an time when the tragicomic nostalgia of Don Quixote for a lost golden time has been altered into a potent and sometimes lethal weapon. Draw Lilla helps us to comprehend why.
