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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
reactionary
I.adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
forces
▪ First, he argued, there had been post-revolutionary disillusionment which had allowed reactionary forces to become influential.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
Reactionary politicians voted against the proposal.
▪ Cultural attitudes to women were more reactionary than in most of Western Europe.
▪ He is known for his reactionary views on immigration and the reintroduction of the death penalty.
▪ The seventy year old president has been condemned as reactionary by his radical opponents.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ And the main reason was that reactionary and factious opposition led the Government to seek and obtain an immediate dissolution of Parliament.
▪ But the reactionary left rejected change, to the present detriment of those it claims to represent.
▪ Elated by their first opportunity to serve as Guardians of Truth and Traditional Wisdom, they weighed in with equally reactionary vigor.
▪ In a reactionary decade there are many who will not be hesitant to use such state-ments to confirm their former views.
▪ This appears reactionary because Freud states it in such general, ahistorical terms.
▪ We realise today that this reactionary generation grew up to be the most materialistic the world has ever known.
II.noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ That Ptolemy was a conservative, even a reactionary in certain respects, is undeniable.
▪ The damage was two-fold, for within months of Kiselev's departure a reactionary took his place.
▪ The fact is that Berlioz, who invented the modern orchestra, was a fervent reactionary throughout his life.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Reactionary

Reactionary \Re*ac"tion*a*ry\ (-[asl]*r[y^]), a. Being, causing, or favoring reaction; as, reactionary movements.

Reactionary

Reactionary \Re*ac"tion*a*ry\, n.; pl. Reactionaries (-r[i^]z). One who favors reaction, or seeks to undo political progress or revolution.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
reactionary

1831, on model of French réactionnaire (19c.), from réaction (see reaction). In Marxist use, "tending toward reversing existing tendencies," opposed to revolutionary and used opprobriously in reference to opponents of communism, by 1858. As a noun, "person considered reactionary," especially in politics, one who seeks to check or undo political action, by 1855.

Wiktionary
reactionary

a. Politically favoring a return to a supposed golden age of the past. n. 1 One who is opposed to change. 2 One who is very conservative.

WordNet
reactionary
  1. adj. extremely conservative [syn: reactionist, far-right]

  2. n. an extreme conservative; an opponent of progress or liberalism [syn: ultraconservative, extreme right-winger]

Wikipedia
Reactionary

A reactionary is a person who holds political views that favor a return to the status quo ante, the previous political state of society, which they believe possessed characteristics ( discipline, respect for authority, etc.) 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 at the right-wing of a political spectrum; yet, reactionary ideologies can be radical, in the sense of political extremism, in service to re-establishing the status quo ante. In political discourse, being considered a reactionary is generally regarded as negative; yet the descriptor "political reactionary" has been adopted by the likes of the Austrian monarchist Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, the Scottish journalist Gerald Warner of Craigenmaddie, the Colombian political theologist Nicolás Gómez Dávila, and the Hungarian historian John Lukacs.

Reactionary (album)

Reactionary is an album by the band Face to Face, released in 2000 (see 2000 in music). This was their last release with second guitarist Chad Yaro, who left the band in 2001 but would rejoin seven years later.

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.