The New York Times Book Review - Daniel McCarthy
Lilla…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…Lilla's chapters are as compact and elegant as they are erudite…[Lilla's] book is a spur to self-critique…By studying reactionary thought, the centrist or progressive—and the conservative as well—can learn something about his own failings, if not their remedy.
Publishers Weekly
05/23/2016
Lilla’s fascinating exploration of political conservatism shows how various so-called reactionaries have helped shape history. Adapted from Lilla’s essays in the New York Review of Books and the New Republic, this book profiles several prominent religious and political thinkers such as theologian Franz Rosenzweig, philosopher Eric Voegelin, and Leo Strauss, a favorite of the American right. Rosenzweig presents a particularly interesting case, partly because, as Lilla observes, his mystical magnum opus, The Star of Redemption, is little understood or examined today. Lilla also examines the intellectual history and evolution of Catholic philosophy, the way Saint Paul has been co-opted by critical theory scholars on the left, and how the Paris attacks of January 2015 affected the reception of popular novels by Michel Houellebecq and Eric Zemmour. Lilla frequently returns to the epoch-defining philosophy of Hegel and Heidegger as lodestars that define the terms of the debate. In revealing the mechanics of political reaction, Lilla approaches the subject through a unique religious lens. He is a fantastically gifted essayist, and this short volume collects the best of his recent work—not simply on political reaction or revolution, but on subjects including Judaism, Gnosticism, Islam, and Don Quixote. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
The most impressive and the most enjoyably stylish book I read this year … Lilla is a superb commentator on politics and society. A wise and cautionary volume." —John Banville, The Irish Times, "Our Favorite Books of the Year"
"The Shipwrecked Mind showcases Lilla’s gift for sketching out such long histories — and historical mythologies — with a few artful brushstrokes, covering centuries of thought and politics in a few pages. (His chapter titled ‘From Luther to Walmart,’ channeling academics such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Brad Gregory to describe the post-Reformation descent into today’s rapacious capitalism, is a minor classic all on its own.)" —Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post
"Mark Lilla’s graceful, elegant, and concise appraisals of a variety of reactionary figures could not be more timely." —Andrew Sullivan
"Mark Lilla is one of America's foremost intellectuals and he has written an essential book. He argues that we live in an age when revolutionary ideas have lost their allure but reactionary ideas—that protest and reject core elements of the modern world—are gaining strength. As you read these essays, you will be reminded that ideas matter. John Maynard Keynes once explained that 'madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.' To make sense of the madmen, you need first to understand the scribblers." —Fareed Zakaria
“Mark Lilla leads us on a fascinating tour of the modern reactionary mind, shining a fresh light on the ideas and beliefs of a wide range of thinkers, both famous and forgotten. Engagingly written and impressively erudite, this is intellectual biography at its finest.” —Robert Kagan
"Lilla has assembled this brief but far from lightweight volume from essays….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….as compact and elegant as they are erudite.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia, skillfully untangles the apocalyptic 'mytho-histories,' 'just-so narratives,' and 'political bedtime stories' favored by the modern right, in Europe and America…The best pages in The Shipwrecked Mind are elegant, concise portraits of refugees from Weimar Europe who fled to America after the Nazi takeover and brought with them 'some very large and very dark ideas about the crisis of the age.'” —Sam Tanenhaus, The New Yorker
“Critical theorists need not accept Lilla’s liberal solution…to find his analysis and many of his proposals compelling; his plea to adopt new analytical tools beyond the old-fashioned Left/Right dichotomy is even more relevant now, such a short time after the election, and he is right to show that the crisis of democracy cannot be solved by a division to identity groups and selective sets of interests.” —Nitzan Levbovic, Critical Inquiry
"Timely—and illuminating...Lilla’s book offers a fascinating framework for making sense of our contemporary political landscape." —Sean Illing, Vox
"At a time when the United States is dealing with radical populism and Europe is beset with a new far right, Mark Lilla’s The Shipwrecked Mind is the book to read for a more profound understanding of what ails us." —E.J. Dionne
“Mark Lilla is the model of an engaged intellectual. These essays brilliantly explore the unhappy present in the light of history and philosophy.” —George Packer
“Philosophically timely and politically urgent.” —Avishai Margalit
"Lilla’s fascinating exploration of political conservatism shows how various so-called reactionaries have helped shape history….In revealing the mechanics of political reaction, Lilla approaches the subject through a unique religious lens. He is a fantastically gifted essayist, and this short volume collects the best of his recent work—not simply on political reaction or revolution, but on subjects including Judaism, Gnosticism, Islam, and Don Quixote.” —Publishers Weekly
"Though the revolutionary impulse has been analyzed to the point of overkill, Lilla suggests that its opposite pole has been all but ignored….Lilla provides a welcome corrective in restoring analytical balance.” —Kirkus
“In trenchant prose, [Lilla's] work combines a shrewd assessment of French current events with an impressive command of French history and literature—a rare example of commentary that is at once journalistic and scholarly, and deeply informed.” —Overseas Press Club citation for Best Commentary on International News
From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY
"[Mark Lilla] is a fantastically gifted essayist, and this short volume collects the best of his recent work not simply on political reaction or revolution, but on subjects including Judaism, Gnosticism, Islam, and Don Quixote. —Publishers Weekly
Kirkus Reviews
2016-06-01
A short book drawn from a series of essays analyzes the contemporary relevance of the oft-maligned "reactionary," who isn't retreating into the past so much as reclaiming it.Though the revolutionary impulse has been analyzed to the point of overkill, Lilla (Humanities/Columbia Univ.; The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, 2007, etc.) suggests that its opposite pole has been all but ignored, that "we have no such theories about reaction, just the self-satisfied conviction that it is rooted in ignorance and intransigence, if not darker motives." The author proceeds to argue that the revolutionary spirit is all but spent, that its reactionary counterpart is on the ascent, and that liberal relativism has been exposed in the process. He says that this strain is not restricted to the right and that reactionary "tropes can also be found on the fringe left, where apocalyptic deep ecologists, antiglobalists, and anti-growth activists have joined the ranks of twenty-first-century reactionaries." Lilla opens with biographical essays on three intellectuals (Leo Strauss the best known among lay readers), grounding the book in the religious reaction of "theoconservatism," though the analysis provides context dating back to Socrates and Plato. The essay on Strauss underscores a "distinction between nature and convention," pitting the latter against the moral authority of the former. "It was only a matter of time before modern thought…descended into relativism and nihilism," he writes. The author's accounts of terrorism and the anti-Muslim backlash in France make the analysis vividly contemporary, showing how previously it was anathema in France to be "a reactionary with a theory of history that condemned what everyone else considered to be modern progress. Today it is permissible." Within this context, he claims that Michel Houellebecq's controversial Submission deserves to be compared with Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Most American critics weren't nearly that generous, but the author is less concerned with literary value than with ideas and arguments. Lilla provides a welcome corrective in restoring analytical balance but is less convincing when he veers toward polemics.
