In the substantial introduction to his collection, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (Free Press, 493 pages, $30), Irving Kristol ticks off ambient felicities. He ends by remarking happily the political faith of those who surround him. “My son and daughter, and son-in-law and daughter-in-law, along with dozens of young ‘interns’ who have worked at The Public Interest over the past thirty years, are now all conservatives without adjectival modification.”
That is a tremendous statement in political taxonomy, on the order of the excommunication of Trotsky from the communist movement, as presided over by Moscow; except of course that Mr. Kristol moves in the opposite, ecumenical direction — toward amalgamation, away from schism. Neos are now just plain cons. There are men and women on the right who will frown on this self-designation by the godfather of neoconservatism, perhaps even accusing him of cooptation of the conservative cause. But one wonders exactly what arguments they will advance. Is there an Albigensian heresy in Irving’s credo?
Irving Kristol is not stylistically inclined to declamation (he would not have done well as amanuensis on Mt. Sinai). He can write, “What, exactly, is neoconservatism anyway?” and answer, “I would say it is more a descriptive term than a prescriptive one. It describes the erosion of liberal faith among a relatively small but talented and articulate group of scholars and intellectuals.” Yes, but an erosion of faith doesn’t midwife any complementary view. An attenuation of Marxist faith, even to the breaking point, does not describe what it is that the sometime Marxist now embraces, let alone particular articles of his new faith. And yet in the 500 pages of this book, questions of every kind are pondered — questions philosophical, cultural, and political. Meditation is done and what passes for conclusions are reached, or adumbrated. And the reader is as satisfied as if he had read through a catechism. It is, so to speak, all there — in its own way.
We are reminded of the 5-year-old girl sitting down to draw. “Mother, what does God look like?” “Nobody knows, dear.” “Well, they will now.”
Early in any discussion of work by Irving Kristol, mention needs to be made of the way in which he writes. In the 20-page introductory section, he gives us much of the narrative of his “idea.” There are notes on his childhood; he takes us through his marriage to his celebrated wife, rather absentmindedly touching on their platonic affair with Trotskyism. We learn that he served in the infantry during the war, went then with his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb (“Bea”) to Oxford where both did graduate work, then back to New York, on the junior staff of Commentary magazine. From there to Encounter in London, then to the Reporter in New York. After that, The Public Interest and The National Interest in New York and Washington.
Through it all he wrote what would seem incessantly, but not at length. “I was not a book writer,” he notes. “I did not have the patience and I lacked the necessary intellectual rigor to bring my ideas into some kind of consistent thesis.” This self-effacement doesn’t work — the reader of Neoconservatism will find a dozen essays that might have been expanded into books, and they serve to remind us how many books could profitably have been shrunk into long essays, Kristol-length.
To celebrate Kristol’s 75th birthday, a Festschrift was done, The Neoconservative Imagination (AEI Press, 249 pages, $ 12.95). It is edited by Christopher DeMuth and Kristol’s son, William (the editor and publisher of this magazine). The volume gives 42 pages of bibliography. In sequence, Books, Essays, Newspaper Articles, Reviews, Interviews, Symposiums, and Letters. While in London as a young scholar and journalist, he read John Crowe Ransom’s God Without Thunder. “The style was lucid, straightforward, unpretentious, but brightened with flashes of irony and wit,” Kristol writes, exactly describing his own style.
In his engaging introduction, Kristol takes us back to the early postwar years. Communism was (geopolitically) triumphant. Great Britain was in the hands of socialists, and when Churchill resumed office he did not resume power. The emaciation of bourgeois England was all but complete: the empire gone, the Soviet empire unchallenged, the socialized industries untouchable, taxation confiscatory. It was a period of great loneliness for restive dissenters from left/liberal orthodoxy.
In 1944 Albert Jay Nock’s Memoirs of a Superfluous Man had appeared and a few months after that, Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Not very long after, Irving Kristol began his criticisms of an “empty liberal-socialist faith.” DeMuth muses, “I am sure that, in 1944, the founder of the neoconservative wing of modern conservatism would have found a thing or two to disagree with in those books by the founders of the libertarian wing. But they were all working on the same set of problems, and their answers would converge over time.”
It took a while before the convergence could be thought of as fullblooded. It was with the founding of The Public Interest that the need was felt to come up with a term that would distinguish Kristol and his associates from other movers, other movements, some of them contentious (the left), some harmonious (the right). In the early days of neoconservatism, there was little room for the adamant anti-statist. And indeed in these essays Kristol happily records that both Reagan and Gingrich have publicly acclaimed Franklin Delano Roosevelt. More specifically, he cites the Social Security program (“and its subsequent corollary, Medicare”) as the “outstanding social reform of the century.”
His criteria for so designating it are worth noting: It is comprehensive in its coverage; of greater use to the poor than the rich; it contributed to political and social stability “by encouraging Americans to have a better opinion of their society — a ‘good’ which the economist is at a loss to measure and which the ideologically oriented sociologist, interested in ‘social change,’ is likely to scorn”; and it is overwhelmingly popular. Well, non-neoconservatives are not calling for the repeal of Social Security, but many of them (of us) would happily see organic reform in the Act, and need go no further than Chile for a better model.
At the time Kristol founded The Public Interest, he felt a void in serious journalism. DeMuth has written that the “project” began with “concrete objections to the unintended consequences of specific liberal policies and grew into a fundamental critique of liberalism itself as based on a mistaken conception of the nature of man.” Kristol had deemed “National Review. . . too right-wing.” “I was able to see close-up the basic political impotence of traditional conservatism which lived off Democratic errors but had no governing philosophy of its own.”
He found U.S. conservatism just, well, jejune and, in any event, politically unmarketable. “Just as erroneous economic actions by government can wreck a society and a polity, so erroneous moral and political beliefs can accomplish the same end, more indirectly but just as effectively. And here, I think, is where what we call neoconservatism has made its major contribution in the past two decades. By enlarging the conservative vision to include moral philosophy, political philosophy, and even religious thought, it helped make it more politically sensible as well as politically appealing. … Neoconservatism, for its part, had provided traditional conservatives with an intellectual dimension that goes beyond economics to reflections on the roots of social and cultural stability.”
I make a point here that would appear to be self-serving, which it is, but a point that serves also the interests of historical accuracy. Not two decades but three before Mr. Kristol wrote those lines, National Review published what was correctly interpreted as a repudiation of Ayn Rand. It was written by Whittaker Chambers, who approved of the free market but was hardly absorbed by it. I was asked why National Review had turned against Rand and gave the answer in an essay called, “Notes Toward an Empirical Definition of Conservatism,” published as a preface to a book of essays on conservatism (Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?).
I wrote that her “exclusion” from the conservative movement was necessary because of “her desiccated philosophy’s conclusive incompatibility with the conservative’s emphasis on transcendence, intellectual and moral.” When I wrote those words — 1963 — Will Herberg was appearing regularly as Religion Editor of National Review; Russell Kirk wrote in every issue; Hugh Kenner was poetry editor; Chambers, a founding editor, had died two years before, and Richard Weaver would die that year, Willmoore Kendall in 1967. James Burnham concentrated mostly on cold war strategy, Frank Meyer kept the libertarian tablets. Chambers, Kirk, Weaver, and Herberg were not primarily evangelists for the Mt. Pelerin Society.
The Neoconservative movement was given its own name for two reasons. One reason was that its leaders, Mr. Kristol preeminent among them, considered it a liability to effect a political liaison with the conservative movement (Goldwater was its preeminent public figure) that had sustained saturation bombing by liberal critics from the beginning (“Scrambled Eggheads On the Right” was the title of the long essay by Dwight Macdonald, disdaining the birth of National Review in 1955). Moreover, a movement some of whose luminaries, like Nock and Frank Chodorov, were correctly judged to be antistatist to the point of anarchy (“An Anarchist’s Progress” was the title of one of Nock’s essays).
And then too the Neoconservative movement wanted to proceed at its own gait, which it proceeded to do, as this volume confirms. Kristol is not epiphany-minded, however acute his empirical intelligence. He is often quoted as having said that he came aboard because he was “mugged by reality,” yet water torture would more accurately describe the pressures he felt, and assimilated. In conversation 30 years ago Kristol asked if I had noticed the New York Times story that a rebuilt apartment in the Bronx under the auspices of a federal housing agency cost $ 32,000 dollars. “You can buy a house in Levittown for $ 28,000.” He did not dilate on a point he considered obvious in what it told us.
The movement of the Neos in the direction of the lodestar was influenced by concrete historical events. One — and this is several times brought up in Neoconservatism — was the persistent failure of so many liberals to express appropriate indignation over the consolidation of the Soviet empire and life and pain within that empire. A second was the manifest failure of the civil rights movement to bring on the world promised by its bards. A third was the licentious thought and behavior of the student revolutionaries in the sixties, combined with the failure of the liberal establishment to find its voice repudiating and correcting them; and, pointedly, the anti-Semitism of many of the young blacks associated with that turbulent period.
But much of what threatened, most especially communism abroad and disorientation here, pointed to a moral dislocation. The salient event in the intellectual history of the modern world, Kristol tells us persuasively, is the triumph of the French environment over against the Anglo-Scottish. The French moved in on man as malleable matter, to be redirected toward virtue at the expense of liberty. The British tradition of Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson looked always for incremental improvements, material and other. Pursuant to that tradition, Kristol defines his movement as concerned with “realistic meliorism.” Nothing is so dismaying, given the perspectives of conservatism, as for instance a political program to “end” poverty.
Such impulses are “eschatological” rather than empirical, “meliorist” in vision. Reliable political visions need to spring from a proper understanding of man. And to have that, it helps to understand the spiritual dimension of man. “It is the decline in religious belief over the past 50 years-together with the rise of mass higher education, which popularized the culture’s animus to bourgeois capitalism — that has been of decisive importance.” “The conservative disposition is real enough; but without the religious dimension, it is thin gruel.” Only if conservatism can “give its own moral and intellectual substance to its idea of liberty” will true headway be made.
Spoken in 1975. In later essays, Kristol makes the godlike point that there isn’t, in the end, any substitute for what religion does to the character of the mind.
But even if it is so that the Neoconservative movement had to wait until the crises brought on by the Great Society, Vietnam, and Woodstock simply compelled a remobilization of liberal thought, it could be held that the personal enterprise and talents of Irving Kristol were indispensable to its success. Kristol became, in the words of George Will, “a one-man critical mass for a political movement.” The autobiography of his idea is missing only the identity of Whodunit, but the hints are everywhere, and readers will rejoice in this great exploration of cause and effect.
William F. Buckley is Editor at Large of National Review. His current novel is Brothers No More.
