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The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction by Mark Lilla

The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction by Mark Lilla Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction (New York: New York Review of Books, 2016), 168 pp. Lilla has long been an unsparing critic of la trahison des clercs. In The Reckless Mind (2001), he developed an account of the “philotyrannical intellectual” — thinkers as various as Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida are types — who failed to dis- cern any potential asymmetry between the order of the mind and, in Plato’s lan - guage, “ ‘the right ordering of cities and households. ” I ’ n The Shipwrecked Mind, Lilla turns from politically reckless intellectuals, whose visions are apocalyptic or eschatological, to “reactionary” ones, whose visions are nostalgic or reviva- l ist. One wonders whether Lilla wrote this book to distinguish his own position from those of such reactionaries, for he tells us that the “betrayal of the elites is the lynchpin of every reactionary story,” and such betrayal was a lynchpin of his previous book. If this characterization seems inappropriately psychologizing, one must rec- ognize that Lilla is himself a moral psychologist for intellectuals; his perennial theme is the temptation to mistake the structure of ideas for the structure of life. Just as in his previous book http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Common Knowledge Duke University Press

The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction by Mark Lilla

Mutter, Matthew
Common Knowledge , Volume 24 (1) – Jan 1, 2018
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Copyright
Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press
ISSN
0961-754X
eISSN
1538-4578
DOI
10.1215/0961754X-4254168
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Abstract

Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction (New York: New York Review of Books, 2016), 168 pp. Lilla has long been an unsparing critic of la trahison des clercs. In The Reckless Mind (2001), he developed an account of the “philotyrannical intellectual” — thinkers as various as Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida are types — who failed to dis- cern any potential asymmetry between the order of the mind and, in Plato’s lan - guage, “ ‘the right ordering of cities and households. ” I ’ n The Shipwrecked Mind, Lilla turns from politically reckless intellectuals, whose visions are apocalyptic or eschatological, to “reactionary” ones, whose visions are nostalgic or reviva- l ist. One wonders whether Lilla wrote this book to distinguish his own position from those of such reactionaries, for he tells us that the “betrayal of the elites is the lynchpin of every reactionary story,” and such betrayal was a lynchpin of his previous book. If this characterization seems inappropriately psychologizing, one must rec- ognize that Lilla is himself a moral psychologist for intellectuals; his perennial theme is the temptation to mistake the structure of ideas for the structure of life. Just as in his previous book

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Common Knowledge – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2018

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