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Soc (2012) 49:104108DOI 10.1007/s12115-011-9508-6
BOOK REVIEW
Irving Kristol, The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 19422009.
New York: Basic Books, 2011. 390 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-465-02223-6
David Lewis Schaefer
Published online: 29 November 2011# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
Irving Kristol (19202009) was one of the most important and influential American social thinkers for more than a half century. He was the first person to be assigned the label neoconservative (with pejorative intent, by the socialist Michael Harrington), a title he readily accepted. (At the time the term referred mainly to matters of domestic policy; it had not yet taken on the foreign-policy implications sometimes rightly or wrongly associated with it more recently.) Kristol set forth his developing views on politics, economics, religion, and culture through hundreds of essays and reviews he published in such periodicals as Encounter, The Public Interest (for both of which he served as founding co-editor), Commentary, The Reporter, The New York Times Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal (for which he composed a monthly column for over 28 years). Four collections of his essays were published during his lifetime. In 2002 he was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush.
The present volume consists of some 50 essays and reviews, all but one of them previously uncollected, selected by his widow, the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. It also includes a memorial foreword by his son William Kristol, an introduction by Dr. Himmelfarb, and a bibliography of Kristols writings. The essays are divided into seven sections: In the Beginning (five essays and reviews from Enquiry, an independent radical magazine that Kristol published with former college friends for two years in the early 1940s); Ancients and Moderns (three essays dealing with Machiavelli, Tacitus, and Leo Strauss); Democracy in America; The Culture and
Counterculture, Capitalism, Conservatism, and Neoconservatism, Foreign Policy and Ideology, Judaism and Christianity, and Memoirs.
Having grown up in a traditionally Orthodox but not particularly pious Jewish household, Kristol recounts in his autobiographical memoir his induction into the world of radical politics during his undergraduate years at City College of New York through joining a Trotskyist group, which appeared the most interesting among such organizations and least tarred with the sins of Stalinism. The most remarkable manifestation of that early political background included in the present volume is a 1943 essay taking his teacher Sidney Hook to task for calling on members of the political Left to unite behind Americas cause in the Second World War, given the fact that the defeat of Hitler was the precondition for the achievement of any sort of democratic socialism: Kristol laments Hooks failure to appreciate how the war in Asia clarifies brutally the activating war aims of the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands as far as the vital questions of empire and freedom are concerned and terms it a completely reactionary crusade. (Shortly thereafter, Kristol found himself serving as an infantryman in the European theater, an experience that he reports dispelled any anti-authority sentiments he may have had.) By contrast, an appreciation from the same period of a piece by the Columbia literary critic Lionel Trilling (whom Kristol elsewhere terms one of the two major influences on his later intellectual development) reflects a more sensible political judgment, identifying Marxian disgust with humanity as it is and perfect faith in humanity as it is to be as a posture that forgives in advance inhumanity disguised as humanistic zeal.
By 1952, following several years of work as an editor at Commentary, Kristols thought had clearly undergone a considerable evolution. The review from that year that
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introduces the next section of The Neoconservative Persuasion is concerned with the book Persecution and the Art of Writing, by the great and controversial political philosophy scholar Leo Strauss, the other chief influence on the development of Kristols mature thinking. At a time when Strausss name was practically unknown outside a narrow academic circle, Kristol demonstrated an unusual appreciation of the magnitude of the scholars achievement, notably his rediscovery of the practice of esoteric writing by the leading classical, medieval, and early modern political philosophers. And he offered an acute speculation as to the reason why Strauss avoided writing on Christian thinkers. Kristol already foresaw that Strausss work promised to bring about a revolution in intellectual history that would require a thoughtful audience to re-study the wisdom of the past that we thought we knew.
Kristol reports that the other piece from the same year included in this volume, Civil Liberties, 1952, was the most controversial essay of his career. In that essay, wading into the controversy over McCarthyism, Kristol chided liberals (a class with which he then identified himself) for thinking that because a vulgar demagogue lashes out at both Communism and liberalism as identical, it is necessary to protect Communism in order to defend liberalism. Kristol even suggested that the American people had some justification for doubting whether liberals were as unequivocally anti-Communist as Senator McCarthy, given the tortured apologetics that prominent liberal thinkers like Henry Steele Commager offered on behalf of American Communist spokesmen. Kristol identified as the crucial error of those liberals the notion of Communism as left and therefore at an opposite pole from fascism, which is right, meaning that liberals, also being on the left, had some affinity with the former (both aiming, in the words of First Amendment scholar Zechariah Chafee, to bring about change). (52) Distinguishing between the legal rights that all American citizens enjoy and the supposed rights to social acceptance or specific employment, Kristol denied that those who might be deprived of employment as academics or Hollywood writers as a consequence of their membership in Communist organizations therefore deserved sympathy as persecuted dissenters. Considering the liberal political orientation of Commentarys core audience at the time as well as its sponsor, the American Jewish Committee, it is no wonder that Kristols well-reasoned piece caused a storm.
All but one of the remaining pieces in the section on Democracy in America stem from a later period in Kristols career (19742000), in which the reader finds several distinctively neoconservative themes introduced. The chief one is the necessity that government take account of the effects of its policies on the peoples moral character. In Republican Virtue versus Servile Institutions, Kristol
laments the decline of a public concern with inculcating republican virtue, the decisive change occurring when it came widely to be believed that it was both natural and right for our republican institutions to adapt themselves to the American people, rather than vice versa. The Founders, Kristol observes, were concerned for the continued encouragement of public-spiritedness and self-discipline among the citizenry, and would have been shocked, for instance, by the widespread practice of buying consumer goods on credit. Prior to the Civil War, he adds, it was thought to be dishonorable for a businessman to go bankrupt and thus cheat his creditors. This bourgeois ethos was far more supportive of republican institutions than the contemporary emphasis on self-expression. Another example Kristol cites is the decline of the old-fashioned view that regarded with suspicion those candidates who campaigned too energetically for public office. As of 1974, Kristol was attributing the peoples declining trust in most of their countrys chief institutionsgovernment, business, schoolsto those institutions failure to make sufficient moral demands on citizens, rather than simply being responsive to the people as they are. According to polls, this decline of trust continues today.
The remaining essays in this part of The Neoconservative Persuasion take policymakers, including private foundations as well as government agencies, to task for neglecting to weigh the effects of their policies on peoples behavior and motivation, and their failure more generally to think realistically about human nature. Because of their Rousseauean faith in the innate goodness of human nature indeed, their un-Rousseauean belief that it is incorruptible liberal reformers assume that social improvement simply requires adaptations in the human environment, such as higher welfare payments to alleviate poverty, or ineffectual programs for the rehabilitation of habitual criminals. Their belief in human incorruptibility similarly underlies their tolerance of pornography. (Presumably, the realistic thinking Kristol advocates is different from taking the people as they are, criticized in the previous essay, in that it includes in its realism an awareness of the likely means of human improvement, given our nature.)
Kristol then faults the pride of private foundation executives who undertake sweeping programs of social reform that typically backfire, in place of less ambitious schemes that could actually work, such as addressing the problem of youth unemployment in poor neighborhoods by improving the quality of vocational education, or starting a new school rather than aiming to reform the whole public education system (as in the disastrous school decentralization program that the Ford Foundation promoted in New York City in the 1960s.) It is this sort of empirical public-policy analysis that distinguished The Public Interest during its 40 years of publication.
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In the next essay, published during the year in which Americans celebrated the bicentennial of the Constitution, Kristol reminds readers of the popular attitudes derived from Protestantism that helped to sanctify the Constitution in the peoples eyeseven if the American governments structure derives from the work of secular political philosophers. His practical point is that continued reverence for the Constitution requires that it be thought to have a moral, rather than merely utilitarian, justificationa civil religion that is nourished by the Americas religious roots. He speculates, as others have done, that there might be some connection between the American peoples greater religiosity as compared with their Western European counterparts and their patriotic spirit, along with their countrys greater prosperity and political stability.
A concern with morality also runs through Part IVof The Neoconservative Persuasion, The Culture and Counterculture, beginning with a 1960 piece from Encounter on the relation between popular culture and popular government. While the nineteenth century distinguished culture, understood largely as erudition, from popular printed entertainments (which no one thought to call culture), the latter constituted no threat to the former, or to the polity as a whole, since they accepted the conventional standards, as established by high culture, of good and evil, of success and failure. (Elsewhere, Kristol has written of the highly moral character of the Horatio Alger self-help novels.) By contrast, the very survival of culture in any meaningful sense is threatened by the rise, thanks largely to the electronic media, of mass culture, which gives popular taste a historically unparalleled coercive power. In this context Kristol laments the tendency, within all the Western democracies, for education, even higher education, to divorce itself from the task of forming character, habits, and tastes. The danger is that the erosion of popular characterincluding that of the supposed elitesby pandering media may weaken the peoples very capacity for self-government (in both its individual and collective forms).
Subsequent pieces in this section include a column on the student movement of the 1960s that attributes it in part to the stultifying character of the contemporary welfare state, which leaves so little room for personal idealism, and one from 1973 which properly laments the rise (still in its nascent stage then) of legalized gambling, a means by which government swindle[s] its citizens so as to raise money to finance programs that will supposedly improve their livesat the cost of weakening their belief in the work ethic and in frugal habits as a condition of pride and self-sufficiency. Equally indicative of contemporary governments disregard of the problem of character were the assorted programs of pornographic art financed, and therefore given legitimacy, by the National Endowment for
the Arts during the 1980s, as Kristol observes in a 1990 column.
In a brief 1976 column in Part V on What Is a Neoconservative?, probably his first published response to the label, Kristol summarizes the tenets of this position as (1) acceptance of the welfare stateincluding some form of national health insurancealbeit with a minimum of bureaucratic intrusion in the individuals affairs;(2) respect for the power of the market to respond efficiently to economic realities while preserving individual freedom, so that where interference with the market is necessary for social purposes, it should be done indirectly (through, for instance, housing vouchers instead of public housing); (3) respect for traditional values and institutions including religion, the family, and the Wests high culture; (4) supporting the traditional American idea of equality of rights as well as the encouragement of equality of opportunity, but not equality of conditions as a goal for government; (5) in foreign policy, a rejection of isolationismbut otherwise a considerable diversity of views (as, for instance, on the Vietnam war).
Kristol played an important role in publicizing the doctrine of supply-side economics, which he describes in a 1981 essay as a return to the humanistic (as opposed to mathematical) economics of Adam Smith. However, he emphasizes that Smith was not an advocate of pure laissez-faire, but recognized the need to provide certain kinds of assistance to the poor. Indeed, in contrast to free-market apologists who want to applaud the profit motive, Smith favored a society that exemplified such Judaeo-Christian virtues as compassion and public spirit, not one that was chiefly dedicated to promoting acquisitiveness.
The last three essays in Part V address the meaning of what Kristol now prefers to call the neoconservative persuasion (2003), its role in the postwar history of American conservatism (as of 1995), and its relation to British conservatism (1996). Kristol settled on the term persuasion (borrowed from the historian Marvin Meyerss Jacksonian persuasion) to signify that neoconservatism was one of those intellectual undercurrents that surface only intermittently, rather than a distinct movement. Despite the original Democratic affiliation of most of its adherents, Kristol now judges that neoconservatisms historical task had been to convert the Republican party and American conservatism generally into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy. He views it as the first variant of American conservatism to fit the American grain, in that it is hopeful and forward-looking rather than grim or nostalgic. He describes its twentieth-century heroes as including TR and FDR along with Ronald Reagan. (There is surely some room for debate here. While scholars still argue the merits of FDRs domestic policies, his class-based rhetoric, partly anticipated
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by his cousin, hardly seems to fit well with neoconservative principles such as reverence for the Constitution. And does Calvin Coolidge, surely an exemplar of republican character, deserve to be placed in the category Kristol assigns him of those politely overlooked by neoconspresumably on account of his lack of Rooseveltian bonhomie or plans for governments expansion?)
Despite the fact that most Republican politicians know nothing and could not care less about neoconservatism, Kristol maintains that it is the neoconservative public policies, notably cutting tax rates in order to stimulate steady economic growth, even at the risk of what are hoped to be temporary budget deficits, that result in popular Republican presidencies. In his history of postwar conservatism, he identifies three stages: first the revival of traditional conservatism centered around William F. Buckleys National Review, which culminated in Barry Goldwaters 1964 Presidential nomination, but had the long-term effect of expanding conservative influence within the Republican party; second, the neoconservative impulse, which gradually transferred from the Democrats to Republicans in the 1970s; and finally the rise of religion-based conservatism, which was provoked into activism by the militant secularism now associated with liberalism. Kristol observes that it is easier for Christian conservatives to get along with the neoconservatives than with traditional economic conservatives, since the neocons were more concerned than the latter with questions of character and less concerned with criticizing statism as such.
In another essay, The Right Stuff, Kristol articulates the differences between American and British conservatism, most notably the fact that the former are issue-oriented rather than being a faction of just one political party. Other differences reflect that Americans, being a creedal nation, rejected Soviet Communism on account of its atheistic character, without having to be convinced of the dangers of statism; while the rise of neoconservatism moved American conservatives in the direction of opposition to contemporary liberalism, not socialism or statism in the abstract. That both Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich could praise FDR as a great President demonstrated that conservatives were no longer interested in destroying the welfare state, but intended rather to reconstruct it along more humane and economical lines. Despite the concern he had expressed three decades earlier over the morally debilitating effects of popular culture, as of 1996 Kristol saw the rise of populist conservatism (a phenomenon largely unknown in Britain) as a force for good, and possibly the last, best, hope of contemporary conservatism. (Of course, British conservatives appear as of 2011 to have made their peace with the welfare state as well.)
Part VI of The Neoconservative Persuasion, Foreign Policy and Ideology, contains four incisive shorter
columns and two longer essays, the unifying theme of which is the danger of liberal utopianism in foreign affairs. The most important of these is a 198687 article titled Human Rights: The Hidden Agenda. Here Kristol traces the contemporary era of bad faith in human rights to its origin in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which by blandly equating so-called social and economic rights (such as the right to medical care or paid vacations) with the sort of political rights characteristic of liberal democracies, effectively treated communist and self-styled socialist regimes (which could always make vague claims about promoting social and economic goods) as morally equivalent to genuinely free ones. Among other results, this made it impossible to identify an authoritarian or totalitarian regime as a tyranny, so long as it claimed that its suppression of freedom was a necessary step towards advancing social and economic rights, and encouraged one-sided denunciations of American policies (since the American government was far more likely to respond to human-rights criticisms than the Soviet Union or assorted Third World despotisms).
The longest section of The Neoconservative Persuasion is Part VII, Judaism and Christianity. This part has two chief themes: first, what Kristol called in 1984 The Political Dilemma of American Jews, and in 1999 The Political Stupidity of the Jews; second, the basis on which Jews and Christians can best coexist in a liberal society. A 1947 essay opens this section with a thoughtful analysis of the historical and theological roots of Christian anti-Semitism, an issue also touched on in the 1998 Note on Religious Tolerance. A 1948 review of Milton Steinbergs Basic Judaism brings us closer to the core of Kristols later religious concerns: the unfortunate attempt by prominent American rabbis and other leading members of the Jewish community to reduce the tenets of their religion to a program of liberal social reform (as in Rabbi Steinbergs claim that the Mishnah and Talmud guarantee the right to strike). Decades later, while explaining the historical sources of the attachment of European Jews and their American descendants to the political ideology of the French Revolution, with its emphasis on social equality, Kristol was warning his coreligionists that the political alliances on which American Jews had heretofore relied for defense of their interests were coming apartas signified by the rise of black nationalism, and the leftist turn of the union movement on foreign policy issues. He pointed out fundamental inconsistencies in American Jews political outlook: wanting to become more Jewish, but fearing any tendency for American Christians to become more Christian; counting on the U.S. for military support of Israel, yet voting for candidates who favored cutting the defense budget, and ardently supporting the U.N. despite its anti-Israel policies; strongly favoring abortion rights, even though Jewish women
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were far less likely than women in other ethnic groups to have abortions. He urged Jews to disassociate themselves from the dogmatic secularism promoted by the ACLU (in its campaign to remove any reference to religion in the public square), and to recognize their common interests with Christian evangelicals, most of whom are now strong supporters of Israel. Finally, he cited the need for liberal Jews to overcome the political utopianism that makes them unwilling to acknowledge that there is such a thing as a Jewish interest distinct from the interests of mankind as a whole.
This is a book of great wisdom. Jews and Christians, liberals and conservatives, Americans and Europeans (and others) all stand to learn much from it.
David Lewis Schaefer is Professor of Political Science at Holy Cross College, Worcester, MA. He is the author of The Political Philosophy of Montaigne (1990) and Illiberal Justice: John Rawls vs. the American Political Tradition (2007). He is currently editing a volume of essays on democratic decision-making.
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