The Rhetoric of Reaction

Abstract

It is symptomatic that Companhia das Letras republished Albert Hirschman's classic, The Rhetoric of Reaction, in 2019. In an attempt to understand the wave of reactionary nationalism that has spread across the planet in the last decade, it is remarkable how much a work originally published in the 1990s remains suitable for explaining, albeit partially, contemporary phenomena. Among many successes and some misfires, Hirschman proposes, limited by the scope of less than 200 pages, to analyse over 200 years of reactionary rhetoric, its main reconstructions and its strategies.In short, as the title itself shows, Hirschman divides reactionary politics into three broad rhetorical groups, each occupying a chapter: the thesis of perversity, the thesis of futility and the thesis of jeopardy. To accomplish this, the author leans more on the discursive aspects than the reactionary practice itself, although both are naturally related, dividing them into three large historical groups: the reaction to the French Revolution, to universal suffrage and to the welfare state. In short, the perversity thesis assumes that any major social change will have the opposite effect of what was intended. To this thesis, Joseph de Maistre's Considerations on France is one of the strongest examples, in which the author sadistically interprets that the rationalist drive would eventually self-destruct by pulling men away from God. Following next, Hirschman presents what he labels as the futility thesis, a position that argues that attempts at substantial changes in the social order are doomed to failure. To this thesis, one can think of an example such of the theory of elites, of authors like Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, which empties the desire for change as irrelevant because human societies are formed by natural elites (Hirschman 2019: 63). And, lastly, the jeopardy thesis, a rhetorical manoeuvre similar to the perversity thesis. The main difference, however, is put in its broadest aspect: while perversity criticizes what it sees as the danger of a backslash, jeopardy argues that further changes will jeopardize previous achievements. For example, according to Hirschman (2019: 105), the