Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind ** 1/2

The Shipwrecked Mind considers the political reactionary. As Lilla says in the introduction:

Reactionaries are not conservatives. ... They are, in their way, just as radical as revolutionaries and just as firmly in the grip of historical imaginings. Millennial expectations of a redemptive new social order and rejuvenated human beings inspire the revolutionary; apocalyptic fears of entering a new dark age haunt the reactionary. ...
His story begins with a happy, well-ordered state where people who know their place live in harmony and submit to tradition and their God. Then alien ideas promoted by intellectuals challenge this harmony and ... a false consciousness soon descends on the society as a whole as it willingly, even joyfully, heads for destruction.

The revolutionary imagines a mythical society of the future; the reactionary imagines a mythical society of the past. (A conservative, by contrast, imagines that we have not yet irreversibly abandoned the virtues of the golden age.)

I found the introduction quite stimulating in showing the deep affinities between revolutionaries and reactionaries. The rest of the book considers specific reactionary thinkers, mostly from the early 20th century. These men had different opinions about when things started to go wrong –– the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Socrates(!) –– and different prescriptions for getting back on track, but they all had a theory of history at least as compelling as Hegel's or Marx's.  (They were also all bad writers, if we can trust Lilla's assessment.) These chapters have their insights, but I wasn't really interested in the subjects themselves.

The author's biography identifies Mark Lilla as "a regular essayist for the New York Review of Books" and indeed the chapters of The Shipwrecked Mind all first appeared as standalone essays. The connection between the chapters is tenuous.