When Irving Kristol joined the new magazine Commentary, he distinguished himself from the other editors--Clement Greenberg, part-time then, Robert Warshow, and me. First, he had an interest in politics, real politics, electoral politics, and not just the politics of left-wing anti-Stalinists, mulling over what was living and what was dead in Marxism, the fate of socialism, the future of capitalism, communist influence in the intellectual world--no mean issues, but hardly ones to affect who won and who lost an election. So Irving discovered the wonderful political reporter and analyst Sam Lubell in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post, persuaded him to write for Commentary, and made me an enthusiast for his books, now hardly noted (although Sam Tanenhaus’s recently published The Death of Conservatism uses one of Lubell’s central theses as a guiding theme). None of the rest of us had ever read or noticed The Saturday Evening Post.

When Irving Kristol joined the new magazine Commentary, he distinguished himself from the other editors--Clement Greenberg, part-time then, Robert Warshow, and me. First, he had an interest in politics, real politics, electoral politics, and not just the politics of left-wing anti-Stalinists, mulling over what was living and what was dead in Marxism, the fate of socialism, the future of capitalism, communist influence in the intellectual world--no mean issues, but hardly ones to affect who won and who lost an election. So Irving discovered the wonderful political reporter and analyst Sam Lubell in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post, persuaded him to write for Commentary, and made me an enthusiast for his books, now hardly noted (although Sam Tanenhaus’s recently published The Death of Conservatism uses one of Lubell’s central theses as a guiding theme). None of the rest of us had ever read or noticed The Saturday Evening Post.

Already noted in this space was the glaring omission of Daniel Patrick Moynihan from Planetizen’s list of “Top 100 Urban Thinkers.”

It was 40 years ago in the fall of 1969 that his essay “Toward a National Urban Policy” appeared in the Public Interest (It later became the basis for a 1970 book). What’s notable, considering that Moynihan was writing from his perch in the Nixon White House following massive civil unrest in the nation’s cities, is the piece’s shelf life.

In it he lays out 10 “fundaments of urban policy” because, in typical waggish fashion, “with respect to codes of human behavior, eleven precepts are too many and nine too few.” Many of them could be written today with little need for updating. To wit:

“The federal government should constantly encourage and provide incentives for the reorganization of local government in response to the reality of metropolitan conditions.”

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.   

Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea

by Irving Kristol

(The Free Press, 493 pp., $25)