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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...