VIEWPOINT I1

On Being Reactionary
Rein Staal

CONTEMPORARY
CONSERVATISM stands in
danger of being the conservatism of
nothing. Too much conservative energy pours into negotiations over the
pace and method of what are presented a s social changes and t h e
policies designed to address them.
Many on the Right appear content to
represent the voice of prudence in a
liberal world. When it falls victim to
this mood, conservative thought fails
to focus on the true nature of our
cultural and political predicament.
We must recognize that we face a
great contest. At stake is the understanding of personal identity that
supplies moorings for the conservative virtues and lies at the root of any
distinctively Western tradition. That
understanding is being crushed in
the tentacular grasp of the technobureaucratic order, its idioms, and
its methods. Such a predicament calls
for the conservatism of conservatism,
a recourse to first principles. N o political disposition, no set of policies,
will suffice. Our situation calls for a
frankly reactionary posture. We must
return to t h e metaphysical foundations of Western culture, even and
especially if these are denied or distorted in the prevailing matrices of
power.
At the heart of that return lies a

renewed appreciation of the personal

nature of our world and of ultimate
reality. The drama of society mirrors
the drama of the soul. Our world and
its history, indeed all our stories, derive their meaning from personal initiatives. I want to suggest that our
most pressing political dilemmas raise
the question whether God, man, and
world are ultimately personal or impersonal realities. The Western tradition rests at its core on the experience
of personal identity. It rests also on
the appreciation of ontological heterogeneity, of the plural and manyleveled character of ultimate reality.
Most criticism of the tradition reflects
an antipathy to distinct and irreducible personal existence. That antipathy comes from viewing multiple centers of agency and responsibility as
an illusion and as an affront to the
constitution of being. The tragic story
of the Left, obscured by its egalitarian
formula, amounts to the generation of
tyranny out of monism.
I propose to sketch the fundamentals of a principled reactionary stance
through the development of several
converging themes. An initial contrast between the personal and the
impersonal suggests the twin themes
of political thinking and political language. We face the rapid spread of
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theories and idioms that, t o the extent we take them seriously, reduce
human beings to the pliable material
of irresponsible power. The question
of personality in turn suggests our
responsibility to transform the given
elements of life. These transformations include that of time into duration, the lived, human time that one
can remember and relate as a story,
and that of space into location, the
place for fellowship and loyalty. (Reactionaries tend t o b e storytellers
and localists rather t h a n theoreticians and cosmopolitans.) The discussion of reactionary principles will
conclude by considering authority,
the crux of the mystery of personal
existence. One of the reactionarys
first obligations is to illuminate the
significance of authority as a bulwark
against social engineering and as a
foundation of humane living.
Todays political controversies revolve around the embattled ideals of
personal loyalty and personal responsibility. Put another way, those controversies imply t h e alternative of
personal dependence o r impersonal
dependence. Progressive political
thought has attacked the former and
a b e t t e d t h e l a t t e r , reflecting
Rousseaus insistence that dependence on things is less corrupting
and degrading than dependence on
persons. Human associations constituted by mutual personal loyalties-notably
family, friendship, and
locality-confront a n intensifying
theoretical as well a s practical onslaught. Other spheres of human activity, such as school and workplace,
likewise feature the rise of bureaucracy and regimentation a t t h e expense of spontaneity and personal
loyalty. From t h e rationalists perspective, the relationships of family
members, friends, and neighbors arise
by chance and carry unfathomable

and unwanted dangers. Therefore, we

are told, we need plans and programs,
staffed by credentialed experts, t o
undo the damage wrought by us, the
amateurs of life, hapless sleepwalkers whose first need is to be disabused
of the illusion of free agency.
Depending on t h e rhetorical circumstance, our progressive savants
remark the growth of the impersonal
sphere either with the cool detachment of t h e impartial spectator o r
with the enthusiasm of a co-conspirator in t h e historical process. T h e
reactionarys scandalous vocation
consists in the refusal t o abet such
historical forces o r t o accept their
inevitability. The inner meaning of
reaction is captured in Paul Elmer
Mores elegant phrase: to oppose to
the welter of circumstance the force of
discrimination and selection. This
determination must contend with a
canard that should be exposed right
away, namely the invocation of social
change. It is in t h e name of this
slogan that our pundits invoke t h e
famed clock that cannot be turned
back, the quintessential technocratic
golem. T h e change in question is
clearly not pure change, change as
such. Change as such brings to mind
the unpredictable, the novel, even the
arbitrary. Change a s s u c h has n o
predetermined content or direction.
Social change has been tamed and
mastered by t h e theoreticians of
progress; it is change that has been
filled, mapped out, predicted and predestined, a change to end all change.
Progressive politics figures as the instrument through which time submits to theory.
Since h e knows that history has
many other avenues besides the crude
dichotomy of backwards and forwards, the reactionary poses indelicate questions about the content and
direction of change. (Not When will

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we get there ? but Where are we

going ?) A s the pathbreaking reactionary G.K. Chesterton put it, whats
wrong with t h e world is t h a t not
enough people in it ask whats right.
The unwillingness to pose that question explains the veiled, subversive
character of t h e moral orientation
behind relativistic and deterministic
modes of thought.
The key challenge facing our thinking about politics is whether we ought
t o resist the spiraling augmentation
of the impersonal at the expense of
the personal. (To pose the question in
terms of whether that development is
capable of being arrested or reversed
is t o substitute an insoluble pseudoproblem for a fundamental question
of spiritual orientation.) The nature of
our predicament has been expressed
with consummate clarity by Romano
Guardini as the divorce of power from
person. This condition leaves power
increasingly autonomous and intangible, while persons come increasingly t o see themselves as the paralyzed playthings of forces outside their
control. Thus divorced, both power
and person are, strictly speaking, irresponsible. The new world order has
a s its foundations two pillars, t h e
impersonal constitution of power and
the decomposition, one is tempted to
say the deconstruction, of the person
and of his experience of moral responsibility. The recognition that technocrats and intellectuals, despite their
professed disdain for each other, actually operate hand in hand, supplies
the key impetus to reactionary thinking.
Not for the first time, intellectuals
have succumbed t o t h e lyricism of
power. Today, popular social science
and the machinery of opinion formation have infused that murky passion
deep into the public mind. Art, morality, love, and learning, all the forms of

judgment and affection, have been

recast as matters of power relations.
In a way, there is nothing new here.
Since the first parents raised the first
infant, human beings have known
that relations of power figure in the
most tender of human experiences.
What is destructive in t h e current
teaching is the identification of power
with ultimate reality. Todays devotees of power eagerly embrace t h e
Nietzschean view that t h e world of
quality is a rhetorical gloss on t h e
world of quantity; t h e r e is neither
good nor bad, only more and less
(power). In this view, all discrimination between can be nothing other
than discrimination against. Lacking
the poetic integrity of Nietzsches tyrannical vision, our power-worshipping contemporaries seek shelter behind a patina of egalitarian politics.
That retreat does not a t all detract
from the lasting legacy of this intellectual movement, namely the metaphysics of tyranny. According to this view,
ultimate reality consists of units of
force acting on each other in relations
of domination and subjection. On the
existential plane, m o r e a n d m o r e
people accept the claim that misery,
despair, and lethargy can only be cured
by empowerment. Empower men t
commonly turns out t o mean recruitment into the offices and doctrines of
the techno-bureaucratic order. (One
thinks of the sinister evolution of the
once honorable word workshop.)
Against the metaphysics of tyranny,
the reactionary upholds a religious
view of ultimate reality. (In this context religion is meant in an etymological sense distinct from its application to specific institutions o r t o the
specific content of Revelation. My discussion draws on the treatment of
personal fidelity and disposability
by Gabriel Marcel a n d t h a t of
religation by Xavier Zubiri.) AccordWinter 1996

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ing to this view, reality owes its coherence and its articulation t o obligation; o r binding, between persons.
Human beings are bound both vertically, to the source of their existence,
and horizontally, to each other. These
relationships occur in specifically
personal forms such as love or loyalty,
or, for that matter, other personal
forms such a s hate o r resentment.
This holds with respect both t o the
Somebody to Whom we owe our existence and with respect t o the others
with whom we share the given world.
Our understanding of other human
beings mirrors the image we have of
the source of our existence. Even those
who see God and man as things, or as
nothings, are themselves bound a s
persons to an ultimate reality and to
other human beings. Either their views
are merely speculative and they nevertheless live according t o a religion of
personal fidelity, or they learn to practice the religion of their philosophy
and enact the story of personal extinction. To be a person means to be
open to the different forms of personal
relation, and to find oneself in a field
of obligations and loyalties. We can
attempt t o alter t h e particulars, or
modify the scope, but obligation itself
is inescapable, The idiot, the closed
soul, lives on t h e spiritual capital
accumulated by others.
Our world receives its articulation
from the light cast by personal engagements and loyalties. This is a s
true of the fields of, for instance, economic and scientific experience, as it
is of the personal o r religious
spheres as understood in the stunted
sense current in social criticism. Truth
of any sort builds on the fundamental
sense of personal faithfulness. When
mutual obligations weaken and persons begin to live like closed, impermeable units, the world grows dim. As
Guardini and others have noted, Franz

Kafka stands as the premier storyteller of a world succumbing to impersonality and bureaucracy. Reaction,
if you will, is the self-conscious awareness of t h e fundamental reality of
personal obligation, or binding. This
awareness accompanies a spiritual
orientation that sees historical developments toward impersonality as the
shadow, not t h e substance, of our
lives. Disregarding t h e cynicism of
those who regard history as the theater of necessity, the reactionary bases
his outlook on the personal engagement of hope.
At the level of political thinking, the
distinction between the impersonal
and the personal recalls a major argument put forward by opponents of the
French Revolution and of its legacy.
That argument centered on a penetrating critique of what was seen as
the spirit of philosophy. For t h e
statesmen and thinkers of the party of
order, the Enlightenment rationalism
that claimed the mantle of philosophy
stripped all customs and traditional
institutions of their authority in order
to substitute for them the illegitimate
power of the revolutionary State. Joseph de Maistre lamented that philosophy having corroded the cement
binding man t o man, there are no
longer any moral ties. The endangered alternative was understood as
the spirit of religion. In a powerful
formulation, Juan Donoso CortCs contrasted the internal control supplied
by religion with the external control
supplied by politics, warning that
when the religious barometer falls,
the political barometer, that is political control and tyranny, rises. Nor
ought we t o forget Edmund Burkes
eloquent portrayals of the theoreticians who proposed t o strangle Europe in the grip of abstract schemes
that would replace the contingency of
tradition with social arrangements

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flowing from logical necessity.

In our day, the spirit of philosophy and the reactionary resistance
contend over what is discussed in
fashionable quarters as the equation
of the personal and the political. From
such quarters issues the demand that
the lives of individuals and families be
analyzed in terms of power politics.
Even more ominous is t h e almost
inevitable corollary that those lives
succumb to the same techniques that
the State and allied power syndicates
have perfected on a larger scale. (As
but one example, note the technofeminist reduction of human beings
to human resources valued according to their economic function, a development foreseen by Chesterton.)
The reactionary stands the fashionable equation of the personal and the
political on its head. lnstead of furthering the spread of politicization,
reactionary political thinking encourages personalization, the reconstitution of power on the basis of personal
responsibility. This emphasis replaces
the bureaucratic formula of administrative consolidation and spiritual
fragmentation with the combination
of spiritual integration and administrative decentralization.
Cries of irrationalism and antiintellectualism hardly explain traditional opposition to rationalist political experiments. Such charges sidestep the central question of whether
political thinking is participant o r
abstract. Conservatives spurn rationalism because they sense that new
meanings are best built up through
organic growth within a tradition. At
the living heart of tradition lies the
experience of participation, of being a
part of an order that endows words
and deeds with meaning. The occasion for being reactionary in turn
arises when one becomes conscious
o f that experience and that order,

characteristically when they are endangered; reactionary hope emerges

out of conservative despair. Reactionary thinking rests on the experience of self-consciousness and t h e
aspiration to participation. Drawing
on ways of thinking deeply embedded
in t h e Western tradition, t h e reactionary strives to order the social and
political world in the light of the personal and participant character of
ultimate reality. (My understanding
of participation draws especially on
the treatment of that theme by Marcel
and by Michael Polanyi, as well as on
the work of Owen Barfield and John
Lukacs. In his recent autobiography,
Lukacs explains how he has come to
think of himself as a reactionary; in
one of his many masterful insights,
he notes that reactionaries are made,
not born. An insistence on the centrality of participation also lies at the
root of Allen Tates essays setting out
his reactionary ideas on literature
and culture.)
Participation is meant here in an
ontological s e n s e that goes much
d e e p e r than t h e immediate, often
political, sense in which the word is
generally used. Participation characterizes all human existence, thinking, and utterance. To live, think, and
talk as a human being means to be a
part of the order of being and to be
linked to the other parts of that order.
Any purposive action, like any attempt at being understood, affirms
that participation. Although we might
seek t o flee from it, whether frivolously or painstakingly, t h e experience of personal self-consciousness
belies those philosophies and political theories that insist on the impersonal or objective character of our
human predicaments and their solutions. Being as such is irreducibly
personal and irreducibly diverse.
Abstraction is a fugitive occupation;
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one always returns t o the experience

of being a person with obligations. No
argument from mechanical causation
or logical necessity can explain either
the experience or the obligations. It
can only explain them away.
The experience of participation reflects what Marcel calls the ontological mystery, which h e in turn explains in terms of embodiment, or
incarnate being, a theme that affirms
the profoundest symbols of the Western philosophical and religious tradition. Our personal identity consists
in a mysterious reciprocal relation
between our selves and our bodies;
we are irreducible to our bodies, yet
inexplicable without them. It would
be inaccurate to say either that we are
our bodies or that we have them as
possessions. We cannot step outside
that relation, in order for instance to
see if its exact workings function along
either of the lines suggested above,
without abstracting through our inquiries t h e very personal identity
whose nature we a r e trying t o observe. (Lukacs has illustrated how the
realizations of modern science, of
physics in particular, confirm this
facet of participant thinking.) In this
sense personal identity is a mystery
that we live within, rather than a
problem we can stand outside of in
order to solve. The same abstract reason that yields such ample dividends
in the solution of logical or technical
problems, figures in personal life either as an irrelevance or as a fountain
of distortions and simplifications. The
usage of mystery as a synonym for
meaninglessness or unintelligibility
presumes that the only form of reason
is the impersonal one that approaches
its objects in the spirit of abstraction.
Reactionary thinking aims instead to
salvage and redeem the meaning won
through personal, participant reason.
It seeks out hard-won glimpses of

inner realities rather than command

of external, manipulable realities.
An awareness of participation has
clear consequences for political thinking. Relativist and reductionist formulas traduce the conditions of personal existence and ultimately impugn the grounds for their own validity. The widespread propagation of
such formulas compounds their inherent deficiencies. Reductionism, for
example, has traversed the path from
scientific detachment spoken in the
third person (Social forces cause ...),
t o disdainful invective spoken in the
second person (Youre only saying
that because ...), t o the proud assertion of irresponsibility spoken in the
first person (I, too, am a victim ...).
Increasingly, official thought invites
us to become the spectators and theorists of our own conduct. Yet in the
conduct of life, as Burke explained in
his critique of revolutionary rhetoric,
it is disingenuous to argue from necessity. Necessity needs no help, indeed brooks no help. What is more
important, any argument itself testifies to the presence of personal intelligence t h a t t r a n s c e n d s t h e mute
workings of necessity. Participant
political thinking affirms the centrality of persuasion and deliberation
among rational, responsible beings; it
is teleological, not causal, because
our actions derive their deepest meaning from their ends; and it admits that
political explanation carries a spiritual valence that helps t o shape the
world it describes, a n d therefore
shares in responsibility for that world.
Consider the notorious oxymoron
at the heart of deterministic thought.
Whatever factors may figure as terms
of explanation, any theory with a pretense of meaningfulness exempts itself from the scope of the reduction it
imposes on the world at large. This is,
if anything, most poignantly true of

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those theories, recurringly popular

among the intelligentsia, that would
deflect criticism by denying the reality of reason and of reasonable discourse. Abstraction from the field of
rational meaning operates much like
abstraction from the field of personal
obligation. The operation can be performed, but only s o long as those
involved nourish themselves on the
spiritual resources of a wider world
constituted by precisely those two
fields. (In a striking analogy, Miguel
de Unamuno compared gnostic intellectualswho deny the reality of personal identity t o intestinal parasites
who might take it upon themselves to
deny the reality of sight o r hearing.)
Our political language suffers from
a similar corruption effected by the
spirit of abstraction. Consider t h e
prevalence of the type of expression
described by C.S. Lewis as the methodological idiom. Language of this
sort plays on the transference of meaning between phenomena and the study
or treatment of those phenomena. Liable to occur in any established trade,
it is particularly overweening in the
language of academics. (One could
easily, for example, hear someone referred to as an important figure in
German history only to realize that
the speaker is referring, not t o Bismarck or Adenauer, but to a professor
at an American university.) Methodological idiom supplies the pathway
through which a host of noxious neologisms have invaded our political
discourse and, within t h e space of
remarkably few years, begun to crowd
out traditional moral and spiritual
categories. Foremost among these
invaders are expressions and formulas such as social problems and
social forces. Through such expressions the mindset of mechanical explanation has come t o color our understanding of ourselves as a commu-

nity. In a development that comes as

no surprise t o a reactionary, the social engineers who set out to harness
those forces and solve those problems
come back repeatedly asking for more
time a n d more money, more programs. The iatrogenic character of
our social problems has become increasingly apparent t o sensible observers. The interior, spiritual dimension of personal existence exacts its
revenge upon attempts t o manage
human affairs as if people were closed
units or carriers of impersonal forces.
Undeterred, our managers have the
temerity t o identify the resultant anger and despair, not as the spiritual
distresses they are, but as yet more
problems requiring additional programs.
The connection between methodology and bureaucracy is far from
accidental. Over half a century ago
Zubiri diagnosed the bureaucratization of the intellect, the reduction of
the republic of letters t o an amalgam
of self-referential disciplines with a
gentlemans agreement not to intrude
on each others turf as each refined its
terminology and amplified its techniques. The expansion of bureaucratic
power requires a constant replenishing of the technical vocabulary presumed to explain our social and political life. The findings of social science likewise figure among the arcana
of the techno-bureaucratic order. The
impersonal they receives its paradigmatic use in the expression they
did a study, which characteristically
introduces t h e conclusion of some
eager researchers that yet another
facet of everyday life should be reorganized in order to benefit from professional expertise. Sophists are the rainmakers of tyranny.
Trend-setting theoreticians have
pursued the bureaucratization of the
intellect t o its finale, suggesting that
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discourse may not be capable of referring to anything but itself. Leaving

aside the oxymoron, note that this
approach elevates academic opportunism to a theory of knowledge. When
Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote that love
is a text, he meant that it is a dramatic
and creative engagement through
which we enact our lives. When todays
scholar argues that love is a text, he is
likely to mean that its significance lies
in being a subject for journal articles.
Consider the effects of propagating
such methodolatry. The danger is not
so much that language will cease to
be a medium for the transmission of
meaning; not even the new theoreticians seriously envision such a future. The danger lies more in the weakening of our capacity t o hold t h e
wielders of power accountable through
intelligent public discourse. Someone who has lost faith in the ability of
language t o illuminate reality is ready
prey for any tyrannical design.
The spread of methodological language calls for a redoubled insistence
on the use of participant, ontological
language. Reliance on such language
is a n important a s p e c t of t h e
reactionarys scandalous vocation.
Ontological language r e s t s o n t h e
awareness that meaningful thought
and speech imply our openness to,
and our participation in, realities other
and larger t h a n ourselves. Having
passed through the crucible of personal self-consciousness, such language, instead of implying a notional
return to the participant language of
those ensconced in an unproblematic
tradition, represents a subsequent
victory over the spirit of abstraction.
(Barfield describes this victory as final participation, a s distinguished
from the original participation enjoyed before the rise of science and
self-conscious theory.) In the case of
moral and political language, such a

recognition is especially pressing. In

this sphere, we would do well to rely
on a n insight t h a t goes back t o
Socratess critique of sophistry. The
debunking of a term such as justice
would make no s e n s e unless that
term described a real quality that can
be traduced or denied within political
life. The reduction of moral and political language to symbols referring only
to the relations of power among their
users confuses t h e corruption with
the substance. However much we may
subvert its purposes, language remains the medium of our link with
reality and with each other.
Here reactionary thinking draws
close to the spirit evoked by Thomas i
Kempis when he warned against the
temptation of being an inquisitive
philosopher who, considering the constellations of heaven, willfully forgets
himself, and told his readers that he
would rather feel compunction in his
heart for his sins than know the definition of compunction. True knowledge is personal knowledge, characterized by the inward appropriation of
ideas. Opposing this insight stands
t h e regnant emphasis on how our
language reveals our position on
things. This emphasis rewards t h e
repetition of approved formulas (what
Lukacs calls the substitution of vocabulary for thought). This emphasis finds its existential form in those
ideologists convinced that their intellectual baggage enjoys diplomatic
immunity. Consider the humanitarians who hold actual flesh-and-blood
people in contempt, or the egalitarians
who devote their own lives t o craven
status-mongering. Under the influence of
this spiritual pathology, the avarice of
ideas, virtue and distinction lie in the
accumulation of fashionable opinions.
When the reactionary challenges those
opinions he does so not so much for the
undeniable amusement it brings as for

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the sake of rehabilitating our public discourse, crippled as it is by slogans generated and disseminated through the bureaucracy of ideas.
The methodological cast of bureaucratic language reflects a rejection of
metaphor in favor of the infinite regress of neologism. In the hands of
skilled practitioners, neologism serves
as a technology of ideas, the equivalent of techniques of advertising and
planned obsolescence. In large part,
the phenomena discussed under the
label political correctness indicate
attempts by bureaucrats and intellectuals t o keep abreast of the stream of
neologisms. For those susceptible to
such techniques, proper moral and
political terminology changes at a pace
akin on the one hand to that of developments in mass consumption, and
akin on t h e other hand to that of
methodological innovation in an academic discipline. As in those other
areas of endeavor, status rests on
being at the cutting edge. One would
not dare be seen sporting yesterdays
paradigms. Each new accession of an
issue leads to the demand that we
demonstrate our commitment. Not
coincidentally, the desired commitment invariably involves swelling the
bureaucratic class and its power over
our lives.
The spirit of neologism is perhaps
best illustrated when it fastens on a
word in common use. Note the recent
career of the word diversity. This
term d e n o t e s a key conservative
theme. As is pointed out by Erik von
Kuehnelt-Leddihn in writings including his classic Leflism (1974), a devotion t o diversity arguably distinguishes the Right from the Left. The
elements of this devotion are many;
consider, for example, respect for regional traditions, the insistence that
human beings are not interchangeable, the tendency t o think in terms of

distinct persons rather than large

classes of people, support for various
institutions that shield individuals
from the State, as well as the related
belief in decentralization. We are now
expected t o restrict the term t o one
explicit, technical meaning, one that
refers to a specific demographic distribution. Not surprisingly, t h e new
usage is explained and enforced by a
phalanx of experts. Note also that, in
a characteristic tour d e force, the term
is now compatible, not only with intellectual conformism, but also with
the pursuit of economic and political
integration on a global scale.
T h e spirit of neologism also accounts for t h e notorious opacity of
methodological language. Technical
terms carry literal, stipulated meanings anchored in the presuppositions
of the science or ideology that makes
use of them. The opacity of technical
terms lies not in their difficulty, but in
the fact that one cannot, as it were,
see through such terms to call on the
kind of associations and implications
that characterize t h e vernacular language. Steeped as they are in idiomatic tradition, populists and traditionalists are often perplexed by the
strident insistence of issue activists
that t h e population undergo education as the answer to social problems, even when it does not seem
t h a t formal instruction could a d d
much t o common s e n s e about/ t h e
matter in question. We must remember that such programs of education
are designed, not primarily a s additions to our stock of knowledge, but
as initiations into the premises and
terminology of social engineering. (As
one listens to the way in which activists intone the word education, it
becomes apparent that this once noble
word has itself undergone a contraction even more egregious than the one
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tified schooling.) Taken seriously

enough, such new idioms entirely cut
off their users from inherited wisdom
and reflection.
Spurning neologism, participant
language relies instead on metaphor.
Metaphor requires initiation, not into
a method, but into a culture and into
a sense of idiomatic tradition. The ebb
and flow of metaphors reflect the shaping force of what Barfield has discussed as speakers meaning, which
builds on but alters the literal, stipulated meaning of words. Speakers
meaning is the source of nuance, of
poetry, and of wit. Tradition allows
and encourages a degree of personal
inflection unacceptable t o the technocrats of ideas, who yearn for interchangeable people holding interchangeable opinions. For that reason, technocrats strive to replace traditional usages with a vocabulary presumed to express an unmediated apprehension of social reality. In this
fashion, moral and political phenomena are redefined as technical problems in fields ranging from medicine
t o fiscal policy. Yet attempts t o d o
without metaphor mask their own
poetic diction. Anyone who believes
that a term such as codependency
has a hard, literal meaning missing
from a phrase like no man is a n
island, is truly lost in the mists of
theory.
The acceptance of technical terms
as merely literal reflections of reality
forecloses any consideration of t h e
metaphysical postulates and political
designs that have gone into the making of such terms. Consider the increasingly prevalent treatment of
the concept equality as a literalism
referring to an aggregate, demographically proportioned distribution of political power and of economic roles
and rewards. (Here, the mathematical
reduction seems to be a danger built

into t h e concept itself, a s von

Kuehnelt-Leddihn and Marcel have
argued and as Tocqueville warned so
eloquently.) Again we confront a key
term defined so as to foreclose consideration of the manner and quality of
power and of economic roles. Taken
seriously, technocratic politics conjures up the Kafkaesque experience of
the world as a place of outsides with
no inside to them (Barfields description of the mechanical worldview).
Yet, to cite one of Chestertons classic paradoxes, t h e inside is larger
than the outside. Few propositions
come closer to expressing the core of
reactionary thinking. The spiritual
dimension of life holds more significance, and ultimately more power,
than those facets of life described
from the outside in objective or mechanical language. Hence t h e reactionary holds what one could call a
sacramental attitude toward the given
elements of life, which he sees as
occasions for testifying t o the obligations of human agency. Foremost
among those obligations are the redemption of time through tradition
and the transformation of space into
place, or location. Both constitute
per enn i a1 hum an engage men t s designed to cast the world in the form of
an ethical community rather than that
of a field for the workings of necessity.
Deracination, the attempt to live outside tradition and outside location,
draws its inspiration from the desire
t o replace obligations with choices,
yet it issues in submission t o impersonal forces.
Tradition anchors our experience
of time in memory, and projects it into
t h e future through hope. Its inner
logic is dramatic rather than dialectical, something explicated through
narration rather than through demonstration or analysis. The principle
of tradition seems backward and irra-

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tional only from the imagined perspective of impersonal, disembodied

reason. The dramatic structure of history, its character as a tableau of
stories, reflects our existence as embodied spirits. We are unavoidably
immersed in the succession of events
yet also capable of, and given to, abstracting our self-consciousness, our
thoughts, and our hopes, from that
stream. Human beings experience
neither t h e immersion nor t h e abstraction to the exclusion of the other,
which is why they experience life as a
drama; personal life is self-conscious
but not self-sufficient. Traditional is
scarcely an appropriate term for static
societies that have a diminished sense
of time and of personal existence. As
an active engagement, a sense suggested by its etymology, tradition implies a participant understanding of
personal identity. The field of obligation and the field of meaning extend
into the past and into the future. The
transmission of culture sustains our
awareness of those relations.
The propaganda of social change
builds instead on an impersonal conception of time as mere succession.
Such a conception reflects the deterministic errors so aptly pointed out by
Henri Bergson. Progressivist time is
dead; it consists of discrete moments
that cannot react upon each other
and instead run a necessary course
visible to observers. This view in effect
reduces time to space, and then explains all movement (change) in
terms of mechanical causation. In a
world envisioned in this way, there is
no room, for instance, for memory or
hope, the human activities that allow
past, present, and future t o s h a p e
and enrich each other. Tocqueville
pointed out the political implications
of this mechanical conception of time
through his discussion of democratic
historianship, a discussion amplified

a n d updated in Lukacss writings.

Once the doctrine of necessity takes
hold of the public mind, the Frenchman warned, free citizens would be
enervated into submission. Historians of general causes teach men t o
obey. Aggregate movements are presented as impersonal processes, only
t o wind up as idols, as hollow abstractions presumed t o govern our lives. In
our day, we see a blatant manifestation of this spirit in administrative
boosterism, whose slogans a r e forever masking the march of bureaucracy in florid asseverations of t h e
need t o adapt t o exciting new historical trends.
Against the lure of historical necessity, t h e reactionary looks t o duration, to lived, human time. From this
perspective, progress is a spiritual
p h e n o m e n o n , in t h e s e n s e t h a t
Bunyan wrote of progress. Human
time takes the form of a journey, a
pilgrimage. T h e journey is s h o t
through with contingency; t h e pilgrim may get lost, be misguided or
delayed o r ambushed, may even go
backwards (at times because, having
strayed o r having neglected something, h e ought to). We participate in
our destiny through the media of hope
and despair. Life has a plot that continuously calls on u s to assume responsibility for our actions and for
the spiritual orientation that supplies
the shaping power of what we want to
believe. The refusal t o acknowledge
human beings a s pilgrims explains
the hierarchical cast of most contemporary egalitarian movements a n d
ideologies. These generally embrace a
historicized version of the rationalist
distinction between the few and the
vulgar. In this view, t h e many a r e
weighted down by ostensibly temporary forms of false consciousness. For
the time being, the division persists
between the few who recognize t h e
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workings of necessity and the many

who suffer delusions of free agency.
At some point in t h e future, after
sufficient education and reconstruction, the life of freedom and responsibility may commence. Meanwhile, we
a r e put u n d e r t h e tutelage of a
mandarinate licensed t o tell us whats
what. Reactionaries tend t o believe,
on t h e other hand, that t h e moral
journey is now, that we should not
wait for relief from our burdens. In
opposing the proffered postponement
of personal responsibility, reactionary thinking affirms one of the most
powerful populist sentiments. Moral
agency is not so much the goal as the
way; our obligations would cease to
have meaning if we could perform them
without hindrance or temptation.
Localism, cultural as well as political, complements the understanding
of time as a moral journey fraught
with significance and contingency.
Rationalist political thought and the
social engineering it inspires feed on a
hostility to what progressives see as
the accidental, arbitrary constituents
of a human life. Foremost among those
constituents are t h e identities and
loyalties generated by local attachments. Far more is at stake here than
the admittedly important debate over
federalism. Reactionary localism
points t o a first principle, the same
theme of embodiment that underlies
the dramatic structure of human history. No embodied existence, not even
that of the most abstracted theoretician, can dispense with the categories
of here and there. Even under t h e
most dire conditions of cultural decline and confusion, much of a
persons identity hinges on his location and on his ties to those he finds
there. Local patriotism works to transform location from more of an external, spatial factor to something e x p e
rienced as a source of meaning and

significance. Viewed as human situations, locations are no more interchangeable than are persons or their
biographies. The reactionary seeks to
redeem the looming indifference of
space through the building of homes
and communities that mirror the articulated, obligation-laden character
of ultimate reality.
From the techno-bureaucratic perspective, all t h e worlds places together comprise one undifferentiated
mass of space, flecked with recalcitrant spots pretending to distinct identities. The inhabitants of this universal space figure less as human beings
t h a n as human resources, interchangeable units of labor ever more
tightly girded in the mesh of national
and international markets. Much of
the sentiment derided as protectionism expresses a dissent from this
reduction of human nature, a dissent
not stilled by discussions of the shifts
and compensations effected by the
macroeconomic mechanism. The
managers of the mechanism do a delicate dance with their egalitarian partners, a s t h e demand for an equal
distribution of offices and rewards
rubs against the bottom line. Neither
wing of t h e new world order pays
much attention to those mossbacks
who would call into question their
enterprise as a whole by insisting on
the integrity of local communities and
on the priority of personal ties over
functional roles.
Local loyalties run afoul of centralizing technocrats and leveling radicals for the same underlying reason.
Both groups regard the various human associations that arise organically a s impediments t o the comprehensive reconstitution of our lives. As
students of tyranny have long recognized, such associations, when intact, endow persons with qualities
that make them resistant t o the or-

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chestration of their lives. Confirming

Richard Weavers apprehension, even
the enjoyment of friendship has come
under attack as arbitrary. We are increasingly encouraged to rely for sustenance o n support groups and
mentoring conducted under professional auspices. Reactionaries insist
that such arrangements be debated
on their merits, not on the basis of the
social changes presumed t o necessitate them. As t o policies and institutions, the reactionary posture incorporates suspicion, what the founding
fathers would have called republican
j ea1o u sy . Reaction a r ie s a r e t h oroughly skeptical of the bureaucratic
claim that we have no alternative to
centralization and regimentation. On
the level of the spirit, t h e reactionary
posture incorporates a scandalous
hope. Perhaps we can turn back the
clock; perhaps uprooting can be undone; p e r h a p s families, neighborhoods, friendships-the persons and
places that matter-can rise from the
ashes of dislocation and mistrust.
As an alternative to the consolidation of impersonal power, the reactionary returns t o t h e principle of
authority. Authority humanizes power
and makes it personally meaningful
and personally accountable. Much as
tradition redeems time and location
redeems space, authority redeems
power. Power without authority works
as a mechanical force. As Guardini
argued, we who live at t h e end of
modernity face the decisive challenge
of curbing autonomous power and
recasting it in the light of personal
responsibility. Authority and responsibility intertwine inextricably; authority resides in persons or bodies of
persons who can answer for their actions. Power wielded in and by the
techno-bureaucratic order functions
precisely through its lack of authority. Its impersonality at once protects it

from its subjects and justifies it in the

eyes of its adherents. Tocqueville foresaw the proliferation ofthis kind of power
and, keenly aware of how its faceless and
efficient character distinguished it from
classical models of tyranny, termed it
democratic despotism; in the twentieth century, James Burnham and later
observers have charted,the course of
managerial power and its method of
handling persons as one might handle
trained animals or other resources.
Reactionaries tackle t h e crisis of
authority on three levels, t h e personal, the literary, and the political.
In e a c h case, bureaucratic institutions, private as well as public, d o
their best to shape a world in which
authority gives way t o impersonal
forces. At the same time, each case
feeds on theories and idioms emerging from the bureaucracy of ideas. A
review of the three levels of the crisis
will shed some light on the reactionary enterprise of reinvigorating authority.
Every man is the author of his own
actions. In that sense, each of us
exercises what we could call personal
authority. Personal responsibility
hinges on personal authority; t h e
former makes no sense without the
latter. The current attack on the principle of authority is not directed at the
overlords generally identified with
authoritarianism. The attack begins
closer to home, as more and more
persons, inspired by the propaganda
of determinism and sustained by the
engines of therapy and pharmacology, disavow authorship of their own
actions. Our culture displays an increasingly clear split between those
who would extend the scope of personal responsibility and those who
would diminish it. The reactionary
stands firm with those who would
uphold the principleof personal responsibility. Reactionary thinking does not
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deny the reality of impersonal forces

that may work on our bodies and on our
minds. Instead, what is at stake is the
existence of a nucleus of personal identity and responsibility that is irreducible
to those forces. Nor does the reactionary
deny the crippling power of anger and
despair, spiritual themes prominent in
the stories of our lives. The line is drawn
elsewhere, at the elevation of personal
irresponsibility into a principle that one
seeks to justify. Reactionary criticism is
obliged to expose, and even lampoon,
the spiritual oxymoron of reductionism
voiced in the first person. Only those
who acknowledge authority over their
actions can work to curb irresponsible
power.
Note the controversy over literary
authorship. At t h e most advanced
fringes of academia the notion has got
about that authors, strictly speaking,
d o not exist; t h e y have been
deconstructed along with their texts.
Once again, we see bureaucrats profiteering in the void left by the eclipse of
authority. The death of personal authority builds the business of treatment industries; the death of the author builds the business of the critic,
now presented with unlimited opportunities for speculation. Books become matter for dissection, and for
the virtuosity of artful manipulation;
what suffers is their potential for transforming and enhancing the vision of
the reader. The bureaucracy of ideas,
here as elsewhere, repeats and inculcates formulas that corrode the sense
of personal identity and prepare the
way for a more general consolidation
of bureaucratic, managerial power.
Deconstruction of personal identity
effects the mining and sapping required in order to supply ready material for projects of social engineering.
The reactionary approach to political authority builds on the traditional
conservative view of political power, a

view simultaneously realistic a n d

hopeful. Consider Burkes observation: A certain quantum of power
must always exist in the community,
in some hands, and under some appellation. Wise men will apply their
remedies to vices, not to names; to the
causes of evil which are permanent,
not to the occasional organs by which
they act, and the transitory modes in
which they appear. Burke was well
aware that the history of governments
is a sad tale full of fraud and force. He
also saw, as have most conservatives,
that power is an enduring reality in
political society and an enduring temptation to those who wield it. From this
perspective, the government of men
defies reduction t o t h e administration of things. The challenge posed by
power is whether it can be experienced as authority and not as force,
whether, in other words, it can be
redeemed through personal obligation.
Progressive thought h a s succumbed to different variants of a m e
nistic view of power (reflecting what
More discussed as the Demon of the
Absolute). The revolutionary Left
rested in the belief that in the future
relations of power would be completely
transcended. The story of Marxist regimes has made this position increasingly untenable, though the power of
such nostrums to persist should never
be underestimated. The main current
of todays progressive thought proposes a cynicism as thoroughgoing in
its way as the discredited utopianism.
We are now asked to adjust ourselves
to a world whose ultimate reality is
inescapably constituted by relations
of power, a world in which the joys
and burdens of personal existence
are reduced to manifestations of those
relations. We are used to identifying
this view with those who invoke the
demonology of oppression, but it also

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informs the theory that sees the end of

history in a global technocratic regime. (Perhaps we could speak of Left
Nietzscheans and Right Nietzscheans.) Against both variants of the
metaphysics of power, the reactionary puts forward the principle of authority derived from the metaphysics of personal obligation. W e cannot
escape relations of power, but they
can a n d must b e transfigured by
mutual loyalties and personal accountability. Authority marks t h e
transmutation of necessity into obligation. To the extent that the reactionary can be distinguished from the
traditional conservative, the difference
may lie in the reactionary belief that
the unbought grace of life did not die
with the Old Regime, but instead represents a perennial human possibility. The counterrevolution cherishes
personal loyalty and insists on personal responsibility, though these
spiritual values may conflict with every known institutional imperative;
and it works t o replace unilateral,
bureaucratic power with power of a
personal scale and constitution, disregarding t h e cynicism of t h o s e
pawned to the techno-bureaucratic
order.
The distinction between power and
authority reflects the mystery of personal identity. The prevalence of impersonal power indicates that fundamental human realities have been
problematized so that they appear

t o us as phenomena whose impersonal

workings we can trace. The theoreticians and managers of impersonal forces
will reply that they are simply dealing
with observable realities that just happen to be so, regardless of our wishes.
Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari,
sed inteelligere. (Not to laugh, not to
weep, neither to denounce, but t o understand. Spinozas motto captures the
dominant mood of technocratic politics.)
Yet the reactionary knows that all human phenomena reflect the mysterious
quality at the heart of personal identity.
The inside is larger than the outside. The
reactionary also knows that those, small
or great, who claim to be merely the
pristine vessels of impersonal forces in
fact harbor the souls of tyrants. We must
recognize power exercised outside the
field of mutual personal obligations as
the usurpation that it is.
Being reactionary entails care for the
spiritual realities that integrate and illuminate our common world. The integrity
of language, the mutual obligation of
personal ties, the cultivation of place,
the insistence on personal responsibility for power: all testify to the fundamental reality of personal identity. The reactionary vocation lies in the reclamation
of these projects, even and especially if
the constitution of the social and political world threatens to make them obsolete. Though the faith in recovery may
s e e m a scandalous a n d quixotic
dream, the reactionary knows the work
is worth the effort.

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