Unqualified Reservations: Volume 2

Between 2007 and 2013, a mysterious software engineer writing under the name Mencius Moldbug published a sprawling blog called Unqualified Reservations, a strange fusion of political philosophy, cultural critique, historiography, and right wing polemics never-before-seen in the contemporary American landscape. In what became the most intellectually explosive body of writing of the early internet age, these essays helped define what would later be called the “Neoreactionary” critique of modernity: a systematic dismantling of progressive orthodoxy and an audacious attempt to imagine the architecture of post-democratic order. 

Volume II brings together three of Moldbug’s most influential texts. A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations serves as the perfect initiation to Moldbug’s core themes, an elegant, wide-ranging labyrinth of reference and analysis that turns the language of liberal democracy inside out to reveal the Matrix-like operating system beneath. Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century builds on that critique by proposing a radical rethinking of sovereignty through the lens of technology, imagining a world divided into thousands of competing, privately governed jurisdictions, optimized for order and exit. Finally, Moldbug on Carlyle presents the Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle as the the first great opponent of egalitarian illusion and the sentimental moralism that sustains it. 

Collected here for the first time in print, these writings preserve one of the great intellectual detonations of the early blogosphere, whose incisive critiques and playful style still radiate outward from that first shockwave.