The Ideology of Political Reactionaries

Abstract

life” (136). To compensate for the meaninglessness of a life alienated from fellow citizens, “commercialized fantasy and pornography” are readily available (137). Yannaras attacks Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order but seems to misunderstand the centrality of Magna Carta, namely, that rights are privileges of a feudal aristocracy that become generalized in the course of history. For example, Magna Carta included the baronial demand that noblemen be judged by their peers, not by a magistrate appointed by the Crown. The recognition of this aristocratic demand became the Common Law right to trial by jury. He insists that Byzantine society was not feudal (132), since the elected monarch “functions in reality as a symbol and leader of the unity of the popular body, a servant of the communion of relations” (100), and since the large landowners were not barbarous, violent and selfcentered feudal lords but put the interests of the imperial state before their own (132). The tensions between Crown and aristocracy that characterized the feudalism of Western Europe and Japan did not exist in Byzantium according to Yannaras’s account. He and Huntington agree that East and West have different political traditions but Yannaras, like Patriarch Kirill and Alexander Dugin, does not think western notions of human rights, its individualism and legalism, its pluralism and multiculturalism, should be imposed on nations with different traditions (139). Perhaps reciprocity might demand that Russian Orthodoxy not impose its own political culture on Orthodox countries like Ukraine which strive to become closer to western liberal democracies. Yet according to Yannaras western political scientists “regard Orthodox popular piety as prone to tendencies of nationalism, religious chauvinism and fundamentalism” (75). I am a western political scientist.