And remember, this reasoning probably occured in a language other than English, where reaction may have a different connotation than it does in modern English.

For example. In modern English, “bureaucrat” has a negative, perjorative connotation: a dull, hidebound, unimaginative government paper shuffle–at best.

OTOH, “executive” has a very positive connotation; dynamic, decisive, active leadership, usually in a business environment.

But in Spanish, the two words are used interchangeably, and neither has a positve or negative connotation associated with it.

Words are defined, sometimes arbitrarily, even as slang, and the definition sticks, and then may change through time. When I worked as a postal clerk in high school “swing” meant “taking a break”, and “swing room” was the worker’s lounge where you could relax with a coffee or have a smoke. There is no real significance, language is all about usage.

French and Spanish both have semi-official Academies, a language police which decides what is good usage and what isn’t. They have been very unsuccessful at preventing slang, linguistic drift, regional dialects, borrowing from other languages, etc. Languages evolve, like living things. Dictionaries and schools can slow the process, but not forever.

Or so it seems to me…yes, no?

And, this is a total hijacking of the original post but since I posted it I guess it is permissable

I’ve always understood it to mean someone who “wants to go back to the way things used to be”, presumably, in the good old days. Of course, they are the ones who decide when the good old days were, and why they were so good. It is always used perjoratively, and only by their opponents. Reactionaries usually call themselves traditionalists–or patriots.

Political definitions are fluid and tell you more about the people who coin them than the people they describe. For example, “the bourgeosie” is a French word meaning “the townfolk”, in Spanish, “la burgesia” means small businessmen, bureaucrats, government employees, minor professionals, schoolteachers, and managers, etc. It has no particular political connotation or significance. Among Marxists it refers to the property-owning class that controls capital and the means of production. You can’t look up these things in Webster’s and pin them down precisely, and anyone who tells you you can is trying to define the terms of debate in his favor. Don’t let them get away with it.

Incidentally, Americans have this thing about dictionaries. They look something up and they think they understand what it means. Language is a living thing, it is defined by common usage, not by scholarship. A good dictionary does not define what a word is supposed to mean, it tells you how it is used in conversation and literature, both contemporarily, and historically. Look at how the meaning of “Liberal” has changed since the 18th century. This is not a perversion of the language, it is a perfectly normal linguistic drift. In Shakespeare, many words have different meanings than they do today.

I was originally taught the political spectrum, from R to L, was Reactionary–Conservative–Moderate–Liberal–Radical. But there is no such thing as a “correct” definition, there are only terms of convenience.

It would seem that a Reactionary is someone who reacts. This is something we all do and reacting is neither bad or good and has nothing to do with what we have vs what we had.

It seems that reactionary, unlike revolutionary or visionary perhaps was coined with no regard for it’s root. I know this is unlikely but none of the definitions I have seen tie the word to react.

2: Would you like inexpensive gasoline and a healthy economy, or
Would you like to pay high taxes to buy expensive gas for the Cadillacs
driven by welfare queens and kings?

3: Would you like a strong military defending your rights, freedoms and
democracy, or
Would you like the United States defenseless against rogue nations and their
weapons of mass destruction, including but not limited to crop dusters
launched from ships spreading anthrax and small pox over our schools and
neighborhoods?

4: Would you rather have a God-fearing, tithing Christian who would bring
traditional values, support families, ban degeneracy, and make the
military safe for our brave boys and girls as President, or
Would you rather have a demon-worshiping foreigner wholly without values
who turns the armed forces into a homosexual, gerbil ridden, haven for
disease practicing behavior condemned by God (and we don’t mean killing)?

I remember once saying something along those lines here myself. I remarked that the old (dare I say, reactionary?) world view was finally demolished by Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and Isaac Newton. All for pretty much the same reasons. They replaced a world created and planned by god with one which could be understood by scientific principles. Of course, scientific principles are not fixed, they can be updated, revised, even replaced, but they do not rely on mysticism. They posit that the world can be understood as the manifestation of relations which arise naturally, you don’t need a puppet master pulling the strings. It was the final triumph of the pre-Socratic philosophers of Ionia: there is a real world out there independent of man and the gods, and it can be observed and understood by reason.

Newton showed us that the physical universe was not run by the diety, but was based on simple rules derivable by mathematics from observation. Physics has progressed greatly since then, with Maxwell, Einstein and the quantum, but Newton was the breakthrough. Mechanics is not magic, its math.

In Economics, Marx showed that the observations of Adam Smith could be explained, not just accepted as received wisdom, and that they could be related, to sociology, politics and history, in fact, were inseparable from them. Again, there were reasons why things happened, it wasn’t the will of god manifesting itself. Trying to apply these observations into a political program led to disaster, but you can’t really understand economics without his insights. Without Marx, economics becomes a blatant justification to protect the wealth and political influence of those who have already accumulated it.

Much the same can be said for Freudian psychology. Today it has been pretty much discredited as a means of clinical treatment, or even as a model for the human personality, but it was the first attempt to place human psychology on a scientific basis, to divorce it from the concept of the spirit and the soul and replace that with a model, albeit a 19th century hydraulic one. We have other models, today, but Freud was the first. Prior to him it was all mumbo-jumbo.

And finally, Darwinism. Living creatures were exquisitely adapted to their environment not by the design of a creator, but by a stochastic mechanism, natural selection, one that has to work, it is inevitable. Evolution was not the whole story, Darwin had no knowledge of Mendelian genetics, and could not conceive of molecular biology and DNA, but he was still able to see their result and effect by simple observation. It was a triumph of the human mind.

Reactionaries have always attacked Marx, Freud and Darwin. Not because they were mistaken, or needed correction, but because the very idea that there was an external reality capable of being understood by reason was anathema to them.

On the other hand, Newtonian mechanics recieved very little opposition when it was introduced in the 18th century. Perhaps it was because physics was perceived as a field which could not threaten the existing political, economic, or religious power structure. Or perhaps because it provided such immediately verifiable proofs, a characterestic absent from philosophical speculations in economics, psychology and biology.

Or perhaps it was because Newtonian mechanics arose in an age when the ability to understand and predict its consequences was limited to an educated elite. Or perhaps because it was the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment. Marx, Freud and Darwin are products of the 19th century, the Age of Romanticism and revolution…the age of reaction and nostalgia for a pastoral, simpler age, for a past that never really was.