Irving Kristol, who died on Friday at the age of 89, was often called the godfather of neoconservatism. And so he was, along with Norman Podhoretz, who has actually done far more to set the (foreign-policy focused) agenda and (insistently combative) tone of recent neocon thinking and writing. Kristol's impact was felt earlier, as he led a group of moderately liberal academics and intellectuals on a rightward migration across the political spectrum during the 1970 and '80s. It's an important story that's been told countless times. What's less often recognized is that while Kristol was growing more conservative he was also undergoing a different sort of transformation--from a dispassionate analyst of American politics and culture to a fully engaged advocate for a comprehensive political ideology. Lamentably, it is this change more than Kristol's gradual drift to the right that may have done more to shape the contemporary conservative mind.
When Kristol and Daniel Bell co-founded The Public Interest in 1965, they did so as liberals. But their liberalism differed in one important respect from the outlook that motivated Lyndon Johnson's vision of a Great Society. While the early contributors to the journal shared the goals of their fellow liberals, they were skeptical of Great Society liberalism because it was an ideology. In the editorial announcing the first issue of The Public Interest (which can be read here), Bell and Kristol voiced concern about the tendency of ideologues to "insistently propose prefabricated interpretations of existing social realities--interpretations that bitterly resist all sensible revision." The Public Interest, they declared, would be "animated by a bias against all such prefabrications."
And it was, in issue after issue, as social scientists, political theorists, and experts in public policy crunched the numbers and analyzed the outcomes of Great Society liberalism in an effort to determine what worked, what didn't, and what might work better. The tone was consistently sober, pragmatic, moderate, urbane, ironic--in a word, dispassionate. The magazine's editors and authors were obviously motivated in large part by public spiritedness. But they believed that the most responsible way to contribute to the good of the nation was to restrain the urge to promulgate an ideology, which though it nearly always "seems to go deeper, point further, [and] aspire higher" in fact frequently inspires thinking that is marked by a "bland disregard for opposing fact" and a "smug self-assurance."
The measured tone persisted even as Kristol and his colleagues turned their critical attention to the impassioned radicalism of the New Left. In their early writings on the subject they avoided polemical denunciations of the illiberalism and anti-intellectualism they detected among some elements of the counterculture. Instead, they attempted to reflect carefully and cautiously on what was happening around them. In one of their most influential theories, they argued that when modern societies reach what Daniel Bell called a "post-industrial" level of development they tend to become increasingly dependent on a "new class" of highly skilled intellectuals, including scientists, teachers, journalists, lawyers, psychologists, social workers, and other professionals. Since all societies are dominated by some elite, the rise of this new class was unremarkable aside from one troubling fact: intellectual elites differ from others in their tendency to adopt an adversarial, even subversive, relation to their own societies. As literary critic Lionel Trilling noted in an important essay of the mid-'60s that significantly shaped the political imagination of Kristol and the other early neocons, the modern intellectual stakes out and occupies "a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn . . . the culture that produced him." Using these concepts to analyze America in the early '70s, Kristol and his colleagues concluded that the tumult and turmoil of the time could be traced to the influence of a decadent and subversive elite.
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COMMENTS (5)
I wonder how much of this journey was influenced by the Trotskyism of his youth.
It sounds like his life journey consisted of a journey from an authoritarianism of the left to one of the right.
I wonder how much of this journey was influenced by the Trotskyism of his youth.
It sounds like his life journey consisted of a journey from an authoritarianism of the left to one of the right.
Behind the godfather of the neoconservative persuasion looms the specter of Alcove No. 2 in the CCNY cafetaria during the 1930s. Alcove No. 2 was the spot where Irving Kristal (recruited by Irving Howe), Seymore Martin Lipset, Irving Howe and Daniel Bell, among other budding ideological notables, eat their brown bag lunches and plotted the theory and practice of anti-Stalinist leftwing ideology, sometimes referred to as Trotskyism, Shachtmanism or just plain old-style intellectual anti-communist Socialism.
Alcove No. 2 was the site where aspiring dentists, doctors, accountants, physicists became disillusioned with their immigrant parent's dreams and became "social scientists." The ideological ... view full comment
Behind the godfather of the neoconservative persuasion looms the specter of Alcove No. 2 in the CCNY cafetaria during the 1930s. Alcove No. 2 was the spot where Irving Kristal (recruited by Irving Howe), Seymore Martin Lipset, Irving Howe and Daniel Bell, among other budding ideological notables, eat their brown bag lunches and plotted the theory and practice of anti-Stalinist leftwing ideology, sometimes referred to as Trotskyism, Shachtmanism or just plain old-style intellectual anti-communist Socialism.
Alcove No. 2 was the site where aspiring dentists, doctors, accountants, physicists became disillusioned with their immigrant parent's dreams and became "social scientists." The ideological debates internal to this student political faction, sometimes known as the YPSLs, became a life long political and literary obsession. The "little magazine" or the "internal discussion bulletin"became the anvil or the tool upon which the avant-guard ideas and "positions" were forged. "What is the nature of the USSR?" Is it a "workers state" worthy of suppost or was it ruled by a "new class" of bureaucratic collectivists? What is the motor force of History? The "new class" theory was nothing new to these young Socialists.
Many of the members of the Alcove made the question "Why there is no socialism in the United States" a life long intellectual career. Using the sharp debating skills acquired during endless hours of discussion and the literary skills developed editing the"internal discussion bulletins" the members of the Alcove entered adult life ready to do battle with the " mushy headed liberals," the Stalinists, the Stalinoids and all comers.
To ignore this history is to misunderstand the evolution of the godfather's "persuasion" and the long journey of his "internal discussion."
Who was more prescient than Nietzsche when he suggested that, in going out into the world to slay monsters, be careful you don't become one yourself. And that's not only a reference to Israel in Gaza either.
Kristol the Elder has spawned Kristol the Juvenile Delinquent has spawned BeckWorld. And next time the Becksters come to Washington they're packing heat. Or so the Thomas Jeffereson Republicans in Congress who sanction it say.
"Oh boy, I'm a real John Bircher now, look out you commies!!"
Ideology is resisted all the way up to the point you start taking the other guy's ideology personally. Then you need one of your own for protection. And few things are quite so protective than words layed ... view full comment
Who was more prescient than Nietzsche when he suggested that, in going out into the world to slay monsters, be careful you don't become one yourself. And that's not only a reference to Israel in Gaza either.
Kristol the Elder has spawned Kristol the Juvenile Delinquent has spawned BeckWorld. And next time the Becksters come to Washington they're packing heat. Or so the Thomas Jeffereson Republicans in Congress who sanction it say.
"Oh boy, I'm a real John Bircher now, look out you commies!!"
Ideology is resisted all the way up to the point you start taking the other guy's ideology personally. Then you need one of your own for protection. And few things are quite so protective than words layed out in precisely the right [or left] order.
Especially once you are recognized by the right [or left] people as one of the "intellectual elites". Writng then becomes like ejaculating, for one thing. But ever so much more dignified than your progeny on Fox News or Talk Radio. Good Lord, YOU can't be held responsible for THEM!
Alas, when Kristol the Elder came to recognize that, like Ayn Rand, his pearls before the swines were largely ignored by the body politic he had to sharpen his attack by withdrawing ever more arrogantly into the language of reality itself. Reality basically becomes language for all intents and purposes. This language too, for example.
But the more insulated the epistemologists become the less willing they are to countenance any measure of irony. Even the most ironic relationship of all: the one with God. How many truly sharp minds are reduced to that? Call it, say, the Kant Syndrome.
Sooner or later their deontological agenda has to be rooted in the transcendental.
After all, another, grubbier intellectual once suggested that without God, all things are permitted. He wrote this note on the underground wall. But you and your ilk don't go down there very often, do you?
george walton
d/a
george...thanks for the brief (for you) and interesting post on this thread. Like many others have commented before me, I usually just pass over your commments 'cuz they're either way too long, way too weird or just off-topic. If you keep them all on topic and limited to 500 words or less, the rest of us might actually read them and find them a positive addition to our discussion. And please, continue to refrain from your past insufferable habit of talking to yourself. Just talk to US. Schizophrenia is a scary thing.
Nice job, keep up the good work.
Now to the topic........
"Instead of arising from irrational passions and resentments, the populism of the early '80s was "not at all extreme" ... view full comment
george...thanks for the brief (for you) and interesting post on this thread. Like many others have commented before me, I usually just pass over your commments 'cuz they're either way too long, way too weird or just off-topic. If you keep them all on topic and limited to 500 words or less, the rest of us might actually read them and find them a positive addition to our discussion. And please, continue to refrain from your past insufferable habit of talking to yourself. Just talk to US. Schizophrenia is a scary thing.
Nice job, keep up the good work.
Now to the topic........
"Instead of arising from irrational passions and resentments, the populism of the early '80s was "not at all extreme"; it was merely an expression of the "common sense" of the American people against the "un-wisdom of their governing elites--whether elected, appointed, or (as with the media) self-appointed."
Wow. How could somebody so smart be so wrong? The embrace of the religious right by the NeoCons created the Frankenstein Monster that finally ended up costing them the Congress and the WH. Thank God above. Too bad it didn't happen 15 years earlier. We might have avoided all this damage to the economy, the environment, foreign relations and the psyche of the nation.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/09/25/a_great_good_man_98...
Irving Kristol was a Tanenhaus conservative.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/09/25/a_great_good_man_98...
Irving Kristol was a Tanenhaus conservative.