Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Encyclopedia of New Populism and Responses in the 21st Century |
Editors | Joseph Chacko Chennattuserry, Madhumati Deshpande, Paul Hong |
Place of Publication | Singapore |
Publisher | Springer Nature |
Edition | 1 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9789811698590 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Accepted/In press - 2023 |
Abstract
Reactionism is a twenty-first century mode of politics with long provenance. Lately, it tends to have four main articulations: national populism, the alt-right, neo-fascism, and antimodernism. Inhabiting a right-wing space beyond conservatism (but only uncomfortably distinguished from it), reactionism has been a puzzle, variously, for political analysis, historical explanation, and moral criticism. This essay describes an overlapping commonality in commitments to inequality, but meanwhile finds fault with Marxian approaches and those indebted foremost to philosophy or psychology. What may better serve sense-making exercises across politics, history and ethics is an approach prioritizing rhetoric. As such, reactionism is found constituted in three interrelated pillars (‘decadence’, ‘indignation’, and ‘conspiracy’). What may take future study forward is greater attention to the detail of reactionary expression in nonconventional forms and settings.