THE SHIPWRECKED MIND

On Political Reaction

By Mark Lilla

145 pp. New York Review Books. Paper, $15.95.

Revolutionaries imagine time as a stream flowing in the direction they desire. Reactionaries, Mark Lilla writes, “are, in their way, just as radical as revolutionaries and just as firmly in the grip of historical imaginings.” Yet they are shipwrecked, watching the currents of modernity sweep everything down a course they despise.

Lilla, a professor of humanities at ­Columbia University, has assembled this brief but far from lightweight volume from essays that first appeared in The New York Review of Books and The New Republic. Taken together they have new force, sketching a cast of mind that has shadowed European thought for a century, and one that may seem disturbingly familiar to students of American politics today.

This book’s first chapters consider in turn Franz Rosenzweig, Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss as exemplary reactionary scholars. Rosenzweig, who died in 1929, sought to explain the place of the Jewish people in history — or rather outside of history. “The Jews, as the sole people of revelation, lived in a timeless, face-to-face relationship with their God,” Lilla explains. This permits them to escape the secularizing forces of modernity, or so Rosenzweig had hoped.

Voegelin, a philosopher who fled Austria for the United States in 1938, also pondered the relationship of history to religion. He traced latter-day totalitarianism to the Christian heresy of Gnosticism, which broadly maintained that the world as it exists is corrupt, that a special form of knowledge could provide an intimate connection to God and that the earth must finally be purified in a violent apocalypse. Voegelin’s account found favor with American religiously minded conservatives during the Cold War, though Lilla notes, “Voegelin thought Christianity was partially to blame” for the revolutionary spirit.