A review by gregbrown
The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, by Corey Robin

4.0

Pretty good! I think Corey Robin's thesis about conservatism is right: an ideology to preserve hierarchy, even to the extent of reinventing existing institutions on renewed grounds.

There's a parallel way to phrase this, as Frank Witlhoit stated a few years later on the Crooked Timber blog:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

As far as the rest of the book goes, it's pretty good—though Robin's mention of cutting several chapters on war and violence for the first edition kinda makes me wish they'd stayed. The book's origins as what a fiction author would call a "fix-up" do kinda shine through, with the middle sections of the book made of essays originally published elsewhere.