About this site

This site is designed as a permanent home for Unqualified Reservations by Mencius Moldbug. It includes ebooks prepared from the original UR source material, as well as a complete chronological archive. Although Moldbug himself has retired from UR, this site and the various ebooks have been prepared with his permission, and he receives all royalties from sales.

UPDATE: Support Moldbug’s latest work here: Gray Mirror of the Nihilist Prince.

Mencius Moldbug is widely credited with founding neoreaction (NRx), a political philosophy and intellectual movement dedicated to providing secure, responsible, and effective government. A central thesis of neoreaction is that accomplishing this goal requires a critical re-evaluation of “democracy” from the perspective of political engineering and informed by a study of the great political thinkers of the past. As Moldbug puts it in A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations :

The essence of any 21st-century reaction is the unity of these two forces: the modern engineering mentality, and the great historical legacy of antique, classical and Victorian pre-democratic thought. The adept, to achieve reactionary enlightenment, observes that both yield the same result. What can it be, but the truth for which all good men seek? Armed with this sure and fearless faith, the Reaction conquers all.

Although there are some who slander neoreaction, the reader is invited to evaluate UR for himself and make up his own mind. Be careful not to take everything Moldbug writes literally, though—as Moldbug himself notes when discussing arch-reactionary Daniel Defoe, author of The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters and Robinson Crusoe :

Defoe was a tricky fellow after my own heart. He too expects you to add your own salt.

Failing to add such salt when reading UR is guaranteed to cause confusion.

Notes: The original UR blog comments have been removed from the current archive, but there are plans to restore them (filtered for quality) at a later date.

The hypertext links in posts other than the ebooks are mostly unchanged from the original site, which means that many have no doubt broken since the posts were first written. A systematic effort to catch and fix such links is planned, but in the meantime you can report individual broken links (or any other issues) to the UR email address. (Moldbug himself does not monitor that account; unfortunately, there is at this time no publicly available way to reach him.)

Finally, all footnotes in the UR posts are by the site editor unless otherwise indicated.

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