Mark Lilla reviews Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind. He objects as I did to Corey’s lumping together of many diverse political strains, but when he turns to discussion of reactionaries Lilla gets a couple things wrong:

There have always been two kinds of reactionaries, though, with different attitudes toward historical change. One type dreams of a return to some real or imaginary state of perfection that existed before a revolution. This can be any sort of revolution—political, religious, economic, or even aesthetic. French aristocrats who hoped to restore the Bourbon dynasty, Russian Old Believers who wanted to recover early Orthodox Christian rites [bold mine-DL], Pre-Raphaelite painters who rejected the conventions of Mannerism, Morrisites and Ruskinites who raged against the machine, all these were what you might call restorative reactionaries.

A second type—call them redemptive reactionaries—take for granted that the revolution is a fait accompli and that there is no going back. But they are not historical pessimists, or not entirely. They believe that the only sane response to an apocalypse is to provoke another, in hopes of starting over. Ever since the French Revolution reactionaries have seen themselves working toward counterrevolutions that would destroy the present state of affairs and transport the nation, or the faith, or the entire human race to some new Golden Age that would redeem aspects of the past without returning there.

If there is one thing that unites “restorative reactionaries” and “redemptive reactionaries,” it is their refusal to believe that it is possible to create a Golden Age. There is much less difference between the two types than Lilla suggests. All counter-revolutionaries desire restoration, and all reactionaries perceive usurpation as a perversion of the right order of things that requires redeeming what was lost.

The example of the Old Believers is a questionable one. They didn’t believe in provoking an apocalypse, but they did share a belief that they were living through apocalyptic tribulations. For the most part, their response was quietism and tending their own gardens. The Nikonian reforms weren’t really a “revolution.” In fact, the liturgical changes were relatively modest in comparison with the changes in religious practice in western Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. In most respects, the early Old Believers were very much customary religious conservatives objecting to alterations in their liturgical practices for fear that they were repudiating Orthodox tradition and the practices of their ancestors. They weren’t trying to recover “early” rites that they had never known, but were simply interested in preserving the rites that they and centuries of Russian Orthodox before them had practiced.

As for supposed contemporary Republican apocalypticism, Lilla needs to do better than to dust off the controversy over that First Things symposium. What Lilla fails to mention is that the editorial’s suggestion that it might be time stop giving “moral assent to the existing regime” resulted in a horrified backlash from many of the journal’s neoconservative friends, including Gertrude Himmelfarb, at which point First Things immediately abandoned this line of argument. As usual, the radicalism of so-called theoconservatives has been grossly exaggerated.