Summary of Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

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#1 A political party may find that it has had a history, before it is fully aware of or agrees on its permanent tenets. Its fundamental beliefs will be found only by careful examination of its behavior throughout its history and by examining what its more thoughtful and philosophical minds have said on its behalf.

#2 Modern politics is the story of the march of democracy, in which men and women have fought for their rights and freedoms. But behind that march, there has always been a counter march, led by conservative ideas.

#3 Occasionally, the subordinates of a world protest their conditions and make demands. They cease to be servants or supplicants and become agents, speaking and acting on their own behalf. This infuriates their superiors.

#4 American labor history is filled with similar complaints from the employing classes and their allies in government: not that unionized workers are violent or unprofitable, but that they are independent and self-organizing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Apr 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669380504

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Insights on Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

A political party may find that it has had a history, before it is fully aware of or agrees on its permanent tenets. Its fundamental beliefs will be found only by careful examination of its behavior throughout its history and by examining what its more thoughtful and philosophical minds have said on its behalf.

#2

Modern politics is the story of the march of democracy, in which men and women have fought for their rights and freedoms. But behind that march, there has always been a counter march, led by conservative ideas.

#3

Occasionally, the subordinates of a world protest their conditions and make demands. They cease to be servants or supplicants and become agents, speaking and acting on their own behalf. This infuriates their superiors.

#4

American labor history is filled with similar complaints from the employing classes and their allies in government: not that unionized workers are violent or unprofitable, but that they are independent and self-organizing.

#5

Right and left often argue about whether or not they stand for equality or freedom, but this is an incorrect assumption. The conservative stands for liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders.

#6

The conservative views the threat of the left in these terms. Every great political blast is set off by a private fuse: the contest for rights and standing in the family, the factory, and the field.

#7

The American slavery precedent offers an example of how the southern cabala functions. While masters knew their slaves’ names, tracked their births, marriages, and deaths, and held parties to honor these dates, they did not know their slaves’ sexual habits.

#8

Because the master put so little distance between himself and his mastery, he would go to great lengths to keep his possessions. Outside the South, the end of slavery was the liquidation of an investment. In the South, it was the death