It has long seemed self-evident to many scholars and critics that conservative thought should be divided into two parts. The first would be its stable core of ideas—including, perhaps, a skeptical attitude toward reason, or a politics of prudence, or a sober view of human nature. Then there would be its multitudinous array of contingent, sometimes eccentric, and occasionally even regrettable expressions. Such an approach provides a convenient way of explaining any illiberal, authoritarian, or atavistic arguments by conservatives. According to this approach, these types of arguments can be assigned to the broad category of the accidental and ephemeral.

This particular kind of taxonomy would seem to be doing rather strenuous explanatory work at this moment, in which the memory is still fresh of the functional leader of the conservative movement in America praising the “very fine people” among a march of white supremacists and neo-Nazis, some of whom had been chanting anti-Semitic slogans and one of whom had murdered a counter-demonstrator.

It is the signal contribution of the original edition of Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind (2011) that it offered a compelling alternative to the standard classificatory approach: a new vision that was at once striking and (for many) provoking but also consistent with what many conservatives have always said about themselves. And it provided this alternative, one that could account for Donald Trump, well before anyone took him seriously.

Robin’s argument is that it is not primarily any core of ideas that explains conservatism but instead a continually renewed, yet protean purpose. Since the eighteenth century, he observes—in both the 2011 edition and the thoroughly revised 2018 version—a great many movements have attempted to make good on the modern promises of freedom and equality, extending those ideals to those who have been previously denied them. Conservatism, Robin contends, is best thought of as all the varied responses to these varied movements. It is “the theoretical voice,” he writes, of “animus” against them (p. 7). And so “all conservatives,” Robin argues “are, in one way or another, counterrevolutionary” or reactionary (p. 29).

This orientation toward meeting democratic challenges, according to Robin, predisposes conservatives toward arguments and affinities that seem surprising from the perspective of the standard ideal-typical depiction of the ideology. It inclines them to be activist rather than prudent, to admire the rhetoric and dynamism of revolutionaries (pp. 45–50), and, by contrast, to be impatient with old regimes and their inability to mount effective self-defenses against democratizing movements (pp. 41–45). It predisposes them to try to reach far beyond the ranks of traditional elites to recruit supporters—and so to create new coalitions and structures of inequality (pp. 50–54). And this, in turn, makes conservatism attractive to at least some self-defined outsiders and inclines it to portray itself as an outsider’s voice of dispossession.

Robin’s identification of the continual reactionary impulse and these related tendencies does not mean that he discerns no variety in conservatism, as a number of his critics claimed seven or eight years ago. In fact, he portrays conservatism as diverse and, by need, perennially innovative. This portrayal is perhaps even clearer in the new edition of the book. Robin has revised extensively, omitted several chapters, and added a few others—including one on Trump—and reorganized the whole into one part introducing the main arguments and two more parts with essays on various conservative thinkers. Robin describes the book as consisting of themes and variations, and the variations include interpretive essays that are often, by turns, elegant and surprising. There is a compact essay on Thomas Hobbes, showing how he responded to the challenges of “democraticals” by innovations that traditional monarchists found frightening (pp. 91–103). Another chapter explores the surprising affinity between Nietzsche and neoliberal economists and their ancestors, from Stanley Jevons to Friedrich Hayek (pp. 133–64). Hayek and others, Robin argues in this essay, valorize “a conception of political life as the embodiment of ancient ideals of aristocratic action, aesthetic notions of artistic creation, and a rarefied vision of the warrior,” but they locate that vision “not in high affairs of state but in the operations and personnel of a capitalist economy” (p. 133). He argues in another essay (pp. 201–20) that late-twentieth-century neoconservatives like Irving Kristol, by contrast with Hayek, found themselves dismayed by the ascendancy of market values in late-twentieth-century America, and longed for the return of a nation that would claim an “imperial role” (p. 202).

Robin’s capstone essay on Trump (pp. 239–72) depicts him as illustrating many of the themes developed in the rest of the book, such as recurrent conservative efforts to create “a new-old regime that, in one way or another, makes privilege popular” (p. 243). In Trump’s obsession with besting others in combat, similarly, Robin finds the resurfacing of an atavistic, agonistic vein of conservativism.

Readers may be surprised that Robin argues that Trump has accomplished little and that the increasingly weak national electoral performances of Republicans show that their “fusion of elitism and populism has grown brittle” (p. 268). He casts Trump’s most incendiary bigotry and antidemocratic acts as signs of conservative desperation. But the book’s endnotes show that Robin completed revisions to The Reactionary Mind in the middle of 2017—around the time that Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement on climate change, but before he signed huge tax cuts into law, appointed a second Supreme Court justice, withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, saw a version of his ban on travel from Muslim-majority countries upheld by the Supreme Court, recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and separated thousands of migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Robin may well be correct that Trump is a culminating expression, rather than a dramatic shift in direction, for American conservatism. But it is not yet clear that this continuity with conservatism means Trump’s own detonative acts will have few long-lasting effects.

The diversity of Robin’s interventions should, in one sense, suffice to counter the criticism that he fails to see variety among conservatives. But those critiques missed their mark for a deeper reason. Mark Lilla’s charge that Robin was an “über-lumper” was based on the assumption that explaining conservatism was necessarily a taxonomic endeavor (“Republicans for Revolution,” New York Review of Books, January 12, 2012). Because Robin posited a common impulse behind all conservatisms, Lilla seems to have assumed that Robin was substituting a taxonomy with just one category for a taxonomy with many.

But I do not think Robin’s main thesis is taxonomic at all: he owes far more to Karl Mannheim than to Carl Linnaeus. Robin, admittedly, only mentions Mannheim a few times in his book, yet Mannheim’s approach to the “sociology of knowledge” perfectly captures what Robin is up to in The Reactionary Mind. Mannheim writes in Ideology and Utopia (1985) that “there are modes of thought which cannot be adequately understood as long as their social origins are obscured” (p. 2). This, he claims, is because people “act with and against one another in diversely organized groups, and while doing so they think with and against one another….Bound together in groups, [they] strive in accordance with the character and position of the groups to which they belong to change the surrounding world of nature and society or attempt to maintain it in a given condition” (p. 4). And so, Mannheim concludes, “It is the direction of this will to change or to maintain…which produces the guiding thread for the emergence of their problems, their concepts, and their forms of thought” (p. 4).

The “über-lumper” charge, then, fundamentally misunderstands where productive critique of work like Robin’s is properly directed. Many of the interesting questions about The Reactionary Mind have to do with the properly sociological part of his sociology of knowledge. That is, they have to do with the claims Robin relies on about what Mannheim calls the “character and position of the groups” to which thinkers and actors belong—and to his understanding of “the surrounding world of nature and society” (p. 4).

There is space for only two brief examples. Consistent with his view that contemporary relations of power still retain certain early modern and even premodern characteristics, Robin frequently uses terminology to describe potential challengers that has a decidedly eighteenth-century ring. The most striking example is his use of the term “lower orders.” Two aspects of Robin’s work demonstrate that he does not hold a homogenizing or static view of the people, groups, and movements in question. First is his explicit acknowledgment that such groups are characterized by “very real differences” (p. 4). And second is his recurrent exploration of the claim that conservative movements tend to consist of quite varied coalitions of elites and non-elites, which is Robin’s way of recognizing intersectionality. But the generic terminology itself—used instead of more specific terms for particular movements and groups— may make Robin’s approach susceptible to misunderstanding.

A more significant example is Robin’s argument that the intimate, private aspect of unequal relations of power is generally the most important. This is true, he says, from the standpoint of those subordinates who wish to challenge those relations democratically. Likewise, he claims, “When the conservative looks upon a democratic movement,” what he sees is “a terrible disturbance in the private life of power” (p. 13). Robin cites Edmund Burke’s fears about challenges to the “chain of subordination” intimately linking “servants” and “masters,” “children” and “parents” (p. 13). This insistence on the intimacy of power is crucial to how Robin links contemporary reaction to its eighteenth-century forerunners. It is also essential to how he understands the ability of conservatives to attract non-elite adherents: by encouraging them to feel that they have a stake in defending their own intimate forms of domination. But at least since the rise of both the modern state and of capitalism, it would seem that many forms of domination have been linked to structures and forces that are actually quite vast and impersonal. In these instances, even personal experiences of oppression are referable in part to large-scale, remote, sometimes alien powers. Gig economy workers for whom the “boss” is not a hated person but a relentless algorithm, maintained and updated at the distant headquarters of a technology company, represent only a new extension of this tendency. Democratizing movements are already considering how to calibrate their challenges to such impersonal structures and relations of power. Innovating conservatives will likely need to devise arguments and rhetorical strategies with the same tendencies in mind. And so their interpreters and critics may, in turn, also need a vision less tied to the idea of private and intimate domination. But although I am not convinced that the propinquity of unequal power relations is as crucial as Robin thinks to challengers and defenders alike, that does not detract from the accomplishment of his powerful reframing of conservatism’s life.