More on the Corey Robin Book

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Published: January 18, 2012

For Corey Robin the author it’s been a bruising few months. Shortly after his essay collection “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin” appeared last fall, The New York Times Book Review published a review by Sheri Berman dismissing the book as “a diatribe that preaches to the converted,” “so filled with exaggeration and invective that the reader’s eyes roll.” Then in late December, The New York Review of Books ran a withering assessment by Mark Lilla, who dismissed the book as “history as W.P.A. mural, ” if not the left-wing scholarly equivalent of Glenn Beck’s blackboard scribblings.

)For Corey Robin the blogger, however, the past few months have been quite excellent. Since starting CoreyRobin.com in June, Mr. Robin, an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College, has established himself as a lively and combative online presence. He has racked up links from prominent bloggers and this month won the 2011 “best writer” award from Cliopatra, the blog of the History News Network, which called him “the quintessential public intellectual for the digital age.”

So when Mr. Lilla’s review hit the newsstands, Mr. Robin’s online admirers were ready to pounce, setting off a cycle of learned (and often lengthy) commentary and counterreviews that trickled up from smaller blogs like U.S. Intellectual History to big ones like Crooked Timber.

As one commenter on U.S. Intellectual History wrote, “Bashing Lilla’s review of Robin’s book seems to be the newest Internet meme.”

If Mr. Robin seems to be enjoying the online tumult, filing regular updates on his blog, he professes to remain puzzled by the hostile reviews that touched it all off.

“I don’t know what is driving the critics,” Mr. Robin, 44, said in a recent interview at his apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn. “The argument itself just bothers them, and I don’t know why.”

“The Reactionary Mind” certainly cuts hard against the common view that the radical populist conservatism epitomized by Sarah Palin represents a sharp break with the cautious, reasonable, moderate, pragmatic conservatism inaugurated by the 18th-century British statesman Edmund Burke. For Mr. Robin even Burke, that great critic of the French Revolution, wasn’t a Burkean moderate, but a reactionary who celebrated the sublimity of violence and denounced the inability of flabby traditional elites to defend the existing order.

This counterrevolutionary spirit, Mr. Robin argues, animates every conservative, from the Southern slaveholders to Ayn Rand to Antonin Scalia, to name just a few of the figures he pulls into his often slashing analysis. Commitment to a limited government, devotion to the free market, or a wariness of change, Mr. Robin writes, are not the essence of conservatism but mere “byproducts” of one essential idea — “that some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others.”

These are fighting words, and to some of Mr. Robin’s readers they serve a useful purpose.

“By the standards of intellectual history it may be found wanting,” the political scientist Alan Wolfe, who gave “The Reactionary Mind” an appreciative if mixed review on The New Republic’s Web site, said in an interview. “But the argument is valuable at this moment because Robin’s analysis helps explain why there is so much fury and resentment in our politics.”

But to Mr. Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia, what he sees as the incoherent Manicheanism of Mr. Robin’s vision is more a symptom of our polarized politics than an explanation of it.

“He is interested in an anthropological, or maybe entomological, way of looking at how these little bugs are behaving or changing,” Mr. Lilla said. “But he can’t take conservative ideas seriously as ideas. Everything is just positioning.”

Mr. Robin counters that his own arguments are the ones that aren’t being taken seriously — or even really being read. The true subject of “The Reactionary Mind,” he said, isn’t the eternal sameness of conservatism but the way it transforms itself in response to threats to existing hierarchies, often by borrowing from the very movements it seeks to oppose.

“We see the left initiating a politics, whether it’s the French Revolution or abolition,” he said. “What’s fascinating to me is how the right reacts to that, how it learns from the left a whole capacity for political agency.”

Mr. Robin, who was the lead organizer for the graduate student union campaign at Yale while getting his doctorate there in the 1990s, dates his fascination with the right to 2000, when he got a magazine assignment to write about former free-marketeers who had become sharp critics of capitalism.

That assignment yielded some juicy sound bites, as when William F. Buckley (who was not one of the apostates) told Mr. Robin that conservative fixation on the market was as boring and repetitious as sex. But it also opened his eyes to what he calls “the agonies and ecstasies of the conservative mind,” a deep political romanticism that colleagues on the left often fail to appreciate.

Take, for example, the war in Iraq, which Mr. Robin argues was less about oil than the neoconservative longing for a project of national greatness more noble than simply making money.

“When I said that the neocon project was not about defending oil, that it was much more a Kulturkampf that goes to the heart of conservatism’s deep ambivalence about the free market, people on the left didn’t buy it,” he said. “To them it’s all just the pursuit of economic interest.”

As for his argument with Mr. Lilla, the two do find at least one point of agreement: There are few if any true Burkean political actors in American history, and certainly none anywhere near the Republican presidential primaries.

Mr. Lilla does see real Burkeans in Europe. But to Mr. Robin there is no actually existing Burkeanism anywhere, making those who cite the ideal of a reasonable, pragmatic, nonreactionary conservatism guilty of the kind of utopianism the left is more commonly faulted for.

“Their whole claim to credibility is, as William F. Buckley put it, ‘We are the politics of reality,’ ” Mr. Robin said. “But if you can only find two examples across two centuries, it’s not a political theory anymore.”