May 23, 2016
Lilla’s fascinating exploration of political conservatism shows how various so-called reactionaries have helped shape history. Adapted from Lilla’s essays in the New York Review of Books and the New Republic, this book profiles several prominent religious and political thinkers such as theologian Franz Rosenzweig, philosopher Eric Voegelin, and Leo Strauss, a favorite of the American right. Rosenzweig presents a particularly interesting case, partly because, as Lilla observes, his mystical magnum opus, The Star of Redemption, is little understood or examined today. Lilla also examines the intellectual history and evolution of Catholic philosophy, the way Saint Paul has been co-opted by critical theory scholars on the left, and how the Paris attacks of January 2015 affected the reception of popular novels by Michel Houellebecq and Eric Zemmour. Lilla frequently returns to the epoch-defining philosophy of Hegel and Heidegger as lodestars that define the terms of the debate. In revealing the mechanics of political reaction, Lilla approaches the subject through a unique religious lens. He is a fantastically gifted essayist, and this short volume collects the best of his recent work—not simply
on political reaction or
revolution,
but on subjects including Judaism, Gnosticism, Islam, and Don Quixote.
June 15, 2016
A short book drawn from a series of essays analyzes the contemporary relevance of the oft-maligned "reactionary," who isn't retreating into the past so much as reclaiming it.Though the revolutionary impulse has been analyzed to the point of overkill, Lilla (Humanities/Columbia Univ.; The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, 2007, etc.) suggests that its opposite pole has been all but ignored, that "we have no such theories about reaction, just the self-satisfied conviction that it is rooted in ignorance and intransigence, if not darker motives." The author proceeds to argue that the revolutionary spirit is all but spent, that its reactionary counterpart is on the ascent, and that liberal relativism has been exposed in the process. He says that this strain is not restricted to the right and that reactionary "tropes can also be found on the fringe left, where apocalyptic deep ecologists, antiglobalists, and anti-growth activists have joined the ranks of twenty-first-century reactionaries." Lilla opens with biographical essays on three intellectuals (Leo Strauss the best known among lay readers), grounding the book in the religious reaction of "theoconservatism," though the analysis provides context dating back to Socrates and Plato. The essay on Strauss underscores a "distinction between nature and convention," pitting the latter against the moral authority of the former. "It was only a matter of time before modern thought...descended into relativism and nihilism," he writes. The author's accounts of terrorism and the anti-Muslim backlash in France make the analysis vividly contemporary, showing how previously it was anathema in France to be "a reactionary with a theory of history that condemned what everyone else considered to be modern progress. Today it is permissible." Within this context, he claims that Michel Houellebecq's controversial Submission deserves to be compared with Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Most American critics weren't nearly that generous, but the author is less concerned with literary value than with ideas and arguments. Lilla provides a welcome corrective in restoring analytical balance but is less convincing when he veers toward polemics.
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