The Ideology of Political Reactionaries

Richard Shorten

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000518412
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Ideology of Political Reactionaries offers a new perspective on the beliefs reactionaries share, presenting a theory of reactionary ideology in the process. Rather than taking self-contradictions in the reactionary imagination as a reason for diminishment, complexity is taken as a challenge.

The book argues that the features that unite reactionaries lie in rhetoric. Reactionaries make three persuasive appeals: to decadence, conspiracy, and indignation. They also display some recurrent styles. The book's rhetorical approach entails a critique of the alternative approaches to reactionary politics (dubbed as 'dispositional', 'sociological', and 'conceptual'). At the heart of the book is the textual analysis of the writings of a range of figures who are chosen in deliberate diversity and who have interacted with political audiences in different eras and settings: Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Adolf Hitler, Éric Zemmour, Joe McCarthy, Anders Breivik, and Nigel Farage. Analysis of their writings helps the book to reckon with some particular puzzles of ideologies and rhetoric. These puzzles include the proximity of reactionaries to conservatism, the ambiguity of their nostalgia, the myth of their essential charisma, and the apparent fetishisation of facts.

The Ideology of Political Reactionaries ought to interest anyone concerned about current ideological trends and, in particular, students and scholars of politics and history.

Part IIndignationThe Pathos of Reaction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003224891-2

1Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre

DOI: 10.4324/9781003224891-3

Part I of the book’s main body is dedicated to exploring the pathos in reactionary ideology. Part I itself divides into two sections. The present chapter is given over to two figures from the intellectual world of the European counter-Enlightenment: Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre. The next chapter looks at writings of two figures from the politics of the contemporary United States: Sarah Palin and Donald Trump. In each chapter, the expositions of the primary texts are intended to show the presence of all three of the reactionary themes being postulated (decadence, conspiracy, and indignation), but with an extended rendition of the theme identified as imparting the pathos, indignation, around which there is some additional commentary.

Regarding the choice of the historical examples, why Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre? Apart from these two authors sharing the same principal subject – the fate of revolutions – the choice reflects the opportunity to execute one of this book’s main theses, by means of challenging one influential account of how these two counter-Enlightenment thinkers compare. In a well-known essay, the British historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin offers a vivid contrast. The ‘violent preoccupation with blood and death’ to be found in the ideas of Maistre, suggests Isaiah Berlin, ‘belongs to a world different from the rich and tranquil England of Burke’s imagination’ (1991: 112). Berlin’s thesis sharpens up into a more general view. Specifically, this view says that a very clear divide exists between, on the one hand, a conservatism which is ‘moderate’ (and indebted to Burke as a founding figure) and, on the other, the mainstream Right’s more extreme counterpart, which allegedly has roots that are ‘continental’ (and is represented by Maistre) (see O’Sullivan, 1974). Yet this contrast is false – and certainly so in respect of the confidence with which the line of demarcation is drawn. This issue of blurred lines provides the subject for the interpretive argument pursued at the very end of the chapter, which is informed by the textual reconstructions preceding it. Whilst an argument of this book in general is that reactionary ideology is fairly continuous over time, a particular suggestion of this chapter is that it can also be expansionist across political space. In moments, Burke could be just as dark as Maistre, and although it may be comforting for conservatives to suppose otherwise, the boundaries that separate conservatism and reactionism (whilst they indeed exist) are very far from being firm and crisp. There is, however, a special benefit of rereading Burke and Maistre on the rhetorical perspective. That is exposing the ways in which slippage between conservatism and reaction may be the result of their internal patterning. By inbuilt tendency, the expansionist incursions of reaction into conservatism may only be temporary.

Reflections on the Revolution in France

Edmund Burke was born in Dublin in 1729. His political writings, however, very much express an affinity with England. In November 1790, Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Structurally, Reflections is a work which has often confused commentators; a feature which basically arises out of the fact that the text is some 250 pages in length yet ordered by no chapter divisions. Re-interpreted as an exercise in rhetoric along classical lines, Reflections does, though, gain some shape. It starts to look comprehensible as follows (see Reid, 2012). First, an exordium – lasting over 30 pages – constructs a distinct audience (Burke, 2014: 3–36). Second, a narration – over six pages – distils Burke’s case concerning what (instead of embarking on revolution) the French should have done (ibid.: 36–41). Third, a proof for this case lasts the whole remainder of the book and, as is expectable in the performance of deliberation by diatribe, is significantly extended (ibid.: 41–247). Fourth, the epilogue forms three pages and is notable for doing an extraordinary thing with the central emotion having been summoned up (ibid.: 247–250). Indignation, which is the main emotion Reflections showcases, finally relents. Superficially, this could be seen as softening the political message into one of forgiveness, but a less demanding interpretation is that by the point of the conclusion, strong reactionary emotion has simply become exhausted in author and reader alike.

The exceptional length of the proof part of the book poses an interpretive problem in itself. That is only compounded by the absence of any chapter headings. The consequence is that it becomes sensible to break the proof down internally, so that it forms a series of three argumentative moves, with each stage building upon the last. In summary form, these three separate arguments concern: the nature of French Revolutionary principles to date, the stark contrast which the Enlightenment philosophy represents with the era before, and why the correct basis of the social order is the ‘spirit of the gentleman’ supplemented by the ‘spirit of religion’. Unmistakeably, there is much within the text to explicitly evidence the various properties of the pamphlet-diatribe: the repetition is frequent; the digressions are not only manifest, but oftentimes directly acknowledged (e.g. ‘I shall beg leave, before I go any further, to take notice of …’) (ibid.: 27); and with roughly 80 pages to go, there appears a discernible break in flow which seems to indicate the author resuming his manuscript after a salient gap in time.¹ In fact, over a 40-page segment at halfway point, nothing significant whatsoever seems to happen – which even on rhetorical reading might be ignored without loss (ibid.: 123–167). But perhaps most strikingly of all, in one place there is a direct apology for revelling in wrongdoing, which, moreover, is likely genuine: ‘Excuse me, therefore, if I have dwelt too long on the atrocious spectacle …’ (ibid.: 82).

When it comes to the content of the ideology it expresses, Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France is quite transparent, too. All three reactionary themes are articulated, albeit disproportionately in different places. Decadence, true to the expectation that it should appear within reactionary discourse in conjunction with a quasi-logical background story being sketched, is most developed in the earlier stages of proof, when Burke is drawing a line of descent from the Enlightenment philosophy’s allegedly false principles to the Revolution’s embryonic violence. Conspiracy, which classical rhetoric braces us normally to expect to find in the introductory part of discourse (when a speaker is affirming her credentials), is delayed; it does not appear until the third stage of proof, when Burke is expounding the proper basis of the social order, but when it does appear, it is both focused and has a special source, namely Enlightenment philosophers. Indignation is the reactionary theme which Reflections epitomises most of all and, although featuring throughout, has a special showing in a set-piece digression (appearing at the end of the second stage of proof), while Burke is portraying the French King and Queen as the Revolution’s representative victims. This ode to doomed monarch is therefore the particular segment below which will receive expanded commentary, especially in regard to how previous commentators, such as Tom Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Christopher Hitchens, have chosen to interpret it.

Introducing France to Englishmen

In classical rhetoric, a twin function of the exordium was to arouse an audience’s sympathy and engender prejudice against any adversary (Aristotle, 2004: III.xvi.1417b). The first 30 pages of Reflections see to both of these tasks, but both audience and adversary need a certain amount of decoding. Curious straightaway is Burke’s use of the epistolary form (reckoned to be the longest example of such in the English language): Reflections is a letter which, among other consequences, goes some way towards exonerating the missing chapter breaks (Hampsher-Monk, 2005: 58). To whom is this letter addressed? This is the first clue to audience. Burke’s subtitle seems to make an addressee plain – ‘a letter intended to be sent to a gentleman in Paris’ – the real-life Frenchman being Burke’s earlier correspondent, Charles-Jean-François Dupont. This device is interesting in itself for approximating apostrophe: a figure understood to be rare even within early modern discourse, and which consists in detaching oneself from one’s subject in order to speak to a third party – an imaginary character in the discourse (Lanham, 1991: 20; Reid, 2012: 47). But the designated addressee misleads. The device affords Burke some advantages in masking the haste of his writing style – when Reflections does break off in flow, it is often by addressing the imagined gentleman that he is able to get back on track (‘… This, my dear Sir, was not the triumph of France’) (Burke, 2014: 68) – but previous commentators are right in refusing to be taken in by this nicety (e.g. Hampsher-Monk, 2005: 58). The intended audience is not French, whether collective or singular, rather it is English. And, it is worth noting, at this point in the text, it is not primarily along reactionary lines that Burke elicits the sympathy of this English readership, since there is only a single isolated claim to uncover conspiracy (a passing reference, by the rhetorical device of chiasmus, to ‘literary caballers’ and ‘intriguing philosophers’). In the main, and instead, Burke follows a stratagem both more conventional and muted; namely, the rhetorical tactic of self-abasement. That is exemplified in the following clause (which begins one the book’s better-known, stand-alone excerpts): ‘I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty …’ (Burke, 2014: 8, 12).

The English, then, are Burke’s true audience. Who are his adversaries? They are named without much delay – contemporary radical circles in London, including the ‘Constitution Society’ and the ‘Revolution Society’ – circles which are just as quickly channelled into a single opponent who is, therefore, made emblematic: the Dissenting minister ‘Doctor Richard Price’, author of a recent sermon celebrating the principles then being set down by the French National Assembly (ibid.: 5). Richard Price, duly, is defamed; albeit, it is notable that he is defamed by creeping degrees. The defamation starts out from muted praise. For example, Burke remarks that Price’s sermon contains ‘some good moral and religious sentiments, and not ill expressed’ (ibid.: 11). Only steadily does defamation trough in outright reproach (via an application of the device of gradatio, staged across three paragraphs): ‘No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity’ (Lanham, 1991: 12, 36). The reason for picking out these specific paragraphs on Price is that at the end of them, the reader perceives for the first time in the book the emotion of indignation, and as inflected the distinctive, Burkean voice. That voice, as further reading will reveal, is disposed to haughtiness, insult and sarcasm, and, in Conor Cruise O’Brien’s phrase, amounts to ‘furious irony’ (1986: 43). But this distinctive voice of fury has not yet been given full rein. Moreover, one salient complication later arising is that the furious voice needs careful disentangling from some other communicative modes which Burke deploys.

A first function of the exordium in classical rhetoric was to arouse sympathy and engender prejudice; a further function was to tell an audience, concretely, what an argument meant for them. The introductory to Reflections also attends to this further function of familiarising a message. Contesting what the French Revolution means for the English allows Burke, by the end of his first 30 pages, to have laid out what can be fairly regarded as Reflections’ central topic: allegiance to ‘the English constitution’. Contextualist historians of political thought have long observed that the meaning of Reflections can only truly be grasped by restoring it to Britain’s emerging ‘Revolution controversy’ (see Levin, 2013). As such, at the occasion of the centenary of England’s so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, the text is said to be involved in a twofold rebuttal, whereby England’s own precedent of political upheaval is neither consistent with French aims nor susceptible to further revision on the French example. There is truth in this existing contextualisation. Yet there is simplicity – too much so – in how it is detailed. Overlooked is Burke’s more clamorous voice – his indignation – and hence his participation in the distinctive and enduring political tradition of reaction, above and beyond any strategic ends he may, in one part, have entertained. If the only thing possessing Burke were the need to take the winds out the sails of the more radical sections of his own party (on his alleged assessment, too susceptible to Price), then a puzzle emerges: why should so many of the moves he makes, so many the images he deploys, appear so disproportionate?

To be sure, not all of what Burke has to say about the comparison of the French and English revolutions is disproportionate to achieving ‘strategic’ ends. It is when Burke is faced with the need to engage in some ‘forensic’ rhetoric in this connection – about past, not future, and in respect of really happened in 1688 – that Burke assumes, perhaps appropriately, what O’Brien (1986: 7) calls his high, ‘Whig’ style. One mark of the higher style is to appear stately (accordingly, in the text, there is much throat clearing, whereby humility seems on show) (Burke, 2014: 7). Another mark of the style is to appear business-like (attested to inasmuch as Burke lets Price speak for himself – by means of plentiful citation) (ibid.: 15, 17, 21). The main hallmark of the high style concerns rationality, which is displayed, foremost, in the manner of the actual argumentation. The arguments that Burke assesses and presents in respect of 1688 have a logical arrangement, whereby Burke repeatedly presents his opponent’s understandings, before then drawing his own and contrary case (Aristotle, 2004: II.xxiii/1397b). Furthermore, Price’s case is frequently knocked down by means of exposing logical fallacies. A good example of the logical arrangement of arguments is where Burke carefully sets down his opponent’s claim – that England established a right in 1688 to elect its own king – before demolishing it totally (Burke, 2014: 21). A good example of the exposure of a logical fallacy is Burke’s retort that general principles are not drawn from special cases, in order to confirm that the instalment of William of Orange on the English throne was all but an one-off deviation from the ‘regular hered...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Reactionaries from Dispositions to Rhetoric
• Part I Indignation: The Pathos of Reaction
• Part II Decadence: The Logos of Reaction
• Part III Conspiracy: The Ethos of Reaction
• Conclusion: Reactionaries from Appeals to Styles
• Index