Reactionary
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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In political science, a reactionary is a person who holds political views that favour a return to the status quo ante, the previous political state of society, which they believe possessed characteristics (most notably economic prosperity, justice, individual ownership, discipline, respect for authority) that are negatively absent from the contemporary status quo of a society. As an adjective, the word reactionary describes points of view and policies meant to restore the status quo ante.
Political reactionaries are found on the right-wing and left-wing. Reactionary ideologies can also be radical, in the sense of political extremism, in service to re-establishing the status quo ante. In political discourse, being a reactionary is generally regarded as negative; the descriptor "political reactionary" has been adopted by the likes of the Austrian monarchist Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, the Colombian political theologian Nicolás Gómez Dávila, and the American historian John Lukacs.
See also
- Age of Metternich
- Anti-modernism
- Fundamentalism
- Glossary of the French Revolution
- List of people associated with the French Revolution
- Political radicalism
- Romanticism
