> To go back to what bothered me in the first place.
>
> "The Reactionary Mind" is a non-entity. It's dreamed up by someone to
> justify maundering on for a while. Define it. Point to the evidence that THE
> reactionary mind exists. Is a Jungian archetype or something, collective
> unconscious. We really are in a never-never land where the absurd premise
> operates that if you can coin a phrase something in the world obviously
> corresponds to it and must be explained.
“From revolutions, conservatives also develop a taste and talent for the masses, mobilizing the street for spectacular displays of power while making certain power is never truly shared or redistributed. That is the task of right-wing populism: to appeal to the mass without disrupting the power of elites or, more precisely, to harness the energy of the mass in order to reinforce or restore the power of elites. Far from being a recent innovation of the Christian Right or the Tea Party movement, reactionary populism runs like a red thread throughout conservative discourse from the beginning.” p. 55. Corey Robin THE REACTIONARY MIND
“Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.” ― Edmund Burke
I think Robin is on to something which socialists early on the in 19th century were on to: hierarchical power and its effects on the mind and by extension, social relations. The reactionary wants power to remain in the hands of those who have already accumulated it even though the already rich may have become 'decadent', 'flabby' liberals democrats. Robin seems to me to be pointing to various reactionary rebels like Hitler who formed a party of sadistic thugs to save rich from the egalitarian 'scourge' of Bolshevism and anarchism.
"The liberty of each necessarily assumes the liberty of all and the liberty of all assumes the liberty of each." M. A. Bakunin
Carl Schmitt's solution to what he perceived as the decadence of the bourgeois democratic Weimar State was developed in his theory of political theology. Schmitt claimed that all moves away from a theoretically based State, such as those ruled by kings ('Dieu et mon droit') were steps in the direction of chaos, anarchy and the dissolution of civilisation. In the modern age, it seemed to Schmitt that the best cure for the decay of central, religiously sanctioned authority was fascism.
Fascism demands hierarchical, political obedience to the authority of the leader. What was demoralizingly decadent in the liberal democratic Weimar Republic was the lack of a 'Fuehrerprinzip' (leader principle). For Schmitt, the old feudal systems of kings invested by God had gradually been replaced by States based on the 'will of the people'. Thus, obedience to God's will, manifested through the sovereign king, had been replaced by a secular, democratic State of conflicting human wills and this was, in his view, the reason why Weimar was so culturally and politically decadent.
Hobbes' LEVIATHAN (1651) had profoundly influenced the young, reactionary Schmitt as had his authoritarian, Catholic upbringing. After all, the Pope was a kind of kingly servant of God who ruled his flock through divine authority and was infallible in terms of the orders he gave and actions he blessed. As for Hobbes, his philosophy argued that monarchy was the best form of government, the only one which could guarantee peace between human beings, who, if left to their own devices, would return to a state of Nature and a condition of constant war amongst themselves, for, as the BIBLE told him, humans were naturally sinners. Thus the need for authority, especially the divinely sanctioned authority of a monarch and Schmitt's own synthesis of Hobbesian philosophy and Catholic Church doctrine into 'political theology' was just the philosophy to fill that need. In fact Schmitt claimed that ALL political philosophy was at bottom based on theologically inspired
notions.
Schmitt's views represent the roots of socially conservative, right-wing thinking: human nature is evil and ordinary humans need to be controlled by authorities who are not godless. His views coincide with the social psychology which is engendered within class societies, a social psychology which results in the social formation of an authoritarian personality character structure. Socialist humanists like Eric Fromm have developed a dialectically opposite position from Schmitt and reactionary philosophers like Heidegger. As opposed to right-wing, conservative thinking, Fromm found that human nature was instinctually connected to an urge for freedom, an urge which had to be continually tampened down within the political power hierarchies of class, sex, race and so on, so that the power of rulers and their ideas could remain in charge of the majority, the wealth producers of society, the working class of the modern world.
“Industry, technology, and commerce can thrive only as long as an idealistic national community offers the necessary preconditions. And these do not lie in material egoism, but in a spirit of sacrifice and joyful renunciation.” ― Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas."
- Marx, German Ideology (1845)
"In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."
--Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848)
I'm attempting to get hold of Robin's book through my library system. Until then, I shall peruse his blog, as the ideas he is exploring seem quite relevant...well, at least to me they do.
Mike B) ***********************************************************************
Wobbly Times
http://wobblytimes.blogspot.com/