An opponent of progress or liberalism

Usage examples of reactionary.

The woman at the door was young and very attractive in a reactionary way, being dressed in a bourgeois grey costume with a sort of nutria or coypu or something coat swinging open over it.

Certainly, it would be incorrect to attribute to the historicism of the Enlightenment the thesis that was really only developed later by the reactionary schools in the period after the French Revolution-the thesis, that is, that unites the theory of sovereignty with the theory of the nation and grounds both of them in a common historical humus.

Nevertheless, as the deep logic of actions ought always to be italicized by the historian, it is necessary here to call to mind and to repeat, even to satiety, that apart from the members of the Left, of whom a very small number were present, and whom we have mentioned by name, the three hundred Representatives who thus defiled before the eyes of the crowd, constituted the old Royalists and reactionary majority of the Assembly.

Sophia had worked for the liberal leader, Bishop Fan Noli, but Nubar had backed the cause of the reactionary Zog.

If, on the one hand, it found presently that its own Fellowship was not altogether as free as it had been at first from reactionary weaknesses and traditional sentiments, on the other it found that its leading ideas, by virtue of its material successfulness and of continual explicit statement, were spreading far beyond the limits of its nuclei and its organized teaching.

The most reactionary rightists, the wildest leftists, with their theories of conspiracy by megalomaniac bankers, have made this man a target for any fanatic with a weapon, and his family is targeted along with him.

Proudest and most reactionary of Bloods, she hated the lower Tiers and had it not been impolitic would have hated Glenin for being the reason the system was abolished and the lower orders enfranchised.

The Tsar himself was a firm friend of the Entente, but the same could not be said of the Tsaritsa nor of the reactionary and disreputable influences to which she extended her patronage.

In the land of its birth long-standing political rivalries, combined with a steady decline in the authority and influence exercised by the central government, are contributing to the reemergence of reactionary forces, represented by an as yet influential and fanatical priesthood, to a recrudescence of the persecution, and a multiplication of the disabilities, to which a still unemancipated Faith has been so cruelly subjected for more than a century.

Once again, the unifying power of the subaltern nation is a double-edged sword, at once progressive and reactionary.

In the latter part of April, 1919, the Executive Committee of the Socialist party of Italy resolved to sever its connection with the International Socialist Bureau and the Berne Conference, in which there were many reactionary Socialists, and to affiliate with the newly established Moscow International, consisting of the various National groups of Socialists giving whole-hearted support to Lenine and the Bolsheviki.

Had the Engineers, those perfervid reactionaries, taken offense at her dancing?

Only the most satyrish reactionaries would insist that a solitary person wear clothes to emphasize his or her sex.

Charlotte, they would be joined by such reactionaries as Hugh Challis or Tertius Tully, and instantly, ranging up beside Charlotte, Purvis would be heard announcing that in Russia all actors are cared for by the government like pet rabbits and that any peasant just off the seat of a tractor can act with more disciplined technique than Noel Coward and design scenery more artfully than Oenslager or Bel Geddes.

Meanwhile the young generation of anti-sesthetic radicals, provoked by the overtly uncivic character of his poetry and by his notoriously reactionary sympathies, started a systematic campaign against him.