Irving Kristol and the Public Interest Crowd
Bartley, Robert
LTERN t TI On the Public Interest Irving Kristol and the Public Interest Crowd Robert Bartley A S ESTABLISHMENT liberalism blurred into radicalism in the mlddle and late 1960s, the...
...The Public Interest crowd" is serviceable enough for some purposes, but the magazine carries many other writers as well, and others outside its immediate circle are coming to parallel conclusions...
...There is, of course, much truth in each of these conservative positions...
...Kristol after all came out of a similar background - - a Jewish neighborhood of New York, City College, the Troskyist youth, then he affiliated with the moderate Schachtamanite minority in the split of 1939, then he affiliated with the small group that split away again from the Schachtamanites, finding even its Marxism rather too nmch...
...It is the strength of the neo-conservatives, by contrast, that despite their small numbers they have occupied a number of strategic intersections in American life...
...Government regulation has an automatic tendency toward overextention...
...In his new book he says the two contemporary figures who have most influenced him are Lionel Trilling, the famous literary critic who first wrote of "the adversary culture," and Leo Strauss, the great Aristotelian scholar at the University of Chicago...
...Without his skill and verve even that much probably would not be clear outside of a few cloisters here and there...
...Kristol does not carry this as far as other members of the school might, though he says "the unanticipated consequences of social action are always more important, and usually less agreeable, than the intended consequences...
...He believes reforms are necessary, but not reforms intended to change the material conditions of life as to produce institutions that incorporate, stress and reinforce the values and traditions important to society...
...And in 1945 Irving Kristol began to write for it, and shortly thereafter joined it as an editor...
...Rosenfeld knew Yiddish, and this seemed some basis for hiring him...
...When Elliot E. Cohen became editor of the newly enlarged magazine, Commentary (Cohen too was a friend of the Partisan Review circle, but he differed from it in a number of important ways), he inherited Greenberg and me...
...Thus the problems of society may stem not from material conditions or its formal insitutions but directly from the more important informal variables...
...The neo-conservative themes speak so plainly to our day, indeed, that it is something of a mark against American conservatism that sounding them is left to a group laced with apostate liberals and radicals...
...at reality would lead back to the same questions, that a rigorous empiricism would prove that Aristotle was right...
...Clement Greenberg was left as acting editor of the magazine when Oko died suddenly...
...One wonders, though, if Mr...
...The best place to follow its development has been in the pages of that incomparable quarterly, The Public Interest...
...This article was adapted by the author from an article An that publication...
...They are occasionally found in the pages of The National Review, to be sure, but other and perhaps contradictory themes leave them muted and confused...
...It appears that Louis Oko, the editor of the Contemporary lewish Record, who it appears did represent the American Jewish Committee and its outlook, had hired Isaac Rosenfeld, the young Jewish novelist from Chicago, as his editor...
...Politically, for example, they are something of a swing group between the two major parties...
...It must have appeared to all concerned that the old succession of those who edited, wrote for, could have written for or hoped to write for Partisan Review was being maintained at the editorial offices of Commentary...
...And so, why not Commentary, home of radicals with such or similar careers...
...And the themes come straight from the pages not only of Aristotle but from Burke...
...and they may very well be the pressing issues of the vaunted postindustrial society...
...In fact, names like that," along with others like Irving Kristol, James Q. Wilson, Robert Nisbet and Nathan Glazer, represent a new intellectual school composed of a somewhat ironical alliance of empirical social scientists and classical philosophers attuned to an almost forgotten conservatism...
...The term rico-conservative is also useful in making another contrast...
...This view of society also suggests the immense difficulty of reform by rational prescription...
...First, Kristol was interested in religion, and even, -mrprisingly enough, Judaism...
...In the radical-liberal book reviews, the most hated book of recent times was not anything by a conventional conservative, but Edward C. Banfield's "The Unheavenly City...
...He calls for a "combination of the reforming spirit with the conservative ideal...
...Now we even find that the New York Conservative Party has decided to oppose state senator John Marchi, its impeccably civilized standard-bearer against John Lindsay...
...Despite the heritage of pertinent themes, they are not the ones we normally associate with contemporary American conservatism...
...These are contemporary issues...
...LTERN t TI On the Public Interest Irving Kristol and the Public Interest Crowd Robert Bartley A S ESTABLISHMENT liberalism blurred into radicalism in the mlddle and late 1960s, the most telling opposition came not from those we usually call conservatives but from another distinct group of thinkers for which we need a new name, perhaps "neo-conservatives...
...They were supported by the American Jewish Committee, the most conservative of the American Jewish defense organizations - - and staffed by editors who thought of themselves as radical...
...These are truths we should not forget, but they do not really seem the truths central to our day...
...Bucidey...
...And through the essays run the ancient philosophical themes we so seldom see today: the nature of man and society, the question of virtue and the importance of underlying values...
...Kirk lost the war...
...Yet the words - - self-discipline, authority, legitimacy, values, virtue are profoundly conservative ones...
...Such is the perverse homage paid to critics who not merely sting but bite, to critics who are a real threat...
...Their political outlook is that of establishmefitarians looking for an establishment worthy of the name, and without taking any polls, one can guess that among them the most common Presidential preference would be, 1. Henry Jackson, 2. Richard Nixon...
...So often you find not skepticism about rationalist reformers, but the prescription of Laissez faire not merely as a marvelously efficient economic device but as a cure for the ills of society...
...The Nixon adviser most maligned in liberal circles was not a conventional rightwinger, but Daniel Patrick Moynihan...
...Finally, in terms of policy as opposed to politics, the neo-conservatives have been able to deal with the realities that confront a relatively disinterestedpolicy-maker...
...they are in fact what underlies "the social issue" of political note...
...One finds it the most cited single source when talking seriously about social policy with policy-oriented White House aides, or assistant secretaries of cabinet departments or assistant directors of the office of management and budget...
...Of the same people, the wife of an Ivy League department chairrtian remarks to a young dinner-guest job applicant, You don't mention names like that if you want to be hired in this department...
...The most obvious manifestation of this erosion is the spread of the adversary culture, the growth of traditional intellectual hostility to capitalist society into a powerful and self-perpetuating force that undermines the authority and legitimacy any society needs to operate...
...SO often you find not the thought that other nations must work out their own systems even if we know ours are better, but an apocalyptic anticommunism...
...One must give credit where it is due, of course, and anyone who values conservative ideas of any sort owes a deep debt to Mr...
...Irving Kristol is a key figure in the group, first of all as a central personality, but also in exemplifying the philosophical side of the alliance...
...Robert L. Bartley is associate editor in charge of day-to-day operations of the editorial page of the Wall street Journal...
...Even while dealing with Communist China, we should remember that its totalitarianism denies the values Western civilization holds dear...
...They represent an opportunity for the Republicans to break the Democratic strangle-hold on intellectual talent, and if the Republican Party ever figures out how to make use of any such thing it may, in fact, make itself into the sought-after establishment...
...The basic viewpoint of the group rests on its conception of society...
...How to designate this body of thought or thinkers is admittedly a difficulty...
...a fellow member is "a sensible person," or more likely "one of the few sensible persons around...
...Somehow there is the doctrinal rigidity one would expect of radicals, not the moderation one would expect of conservatives...
...The intellectual ambience of the Contemporary Jewish Record and Commentary are not easy to communicate now...
...Things are always so much more complex than they look...
...It never occurred to them, it seems, that a truly hardheaded look...
...You don't describe yourself that way, though, and various individuals are forced to formulations like "radical centrist" or "neo-Whig...
...Thus Herman Kahn, one of those outside The Public Interest crowd who sounds parallel themes, speaks of the emergence of "conservationists: trying to conserve old values, but not necessarily interested in the economic and political emphasis of 'Landon' or 'Goldwater.' " His term is overly contrived and a bit awkward...
...They felt this turn led away from the key question of values...
...In particular, the present distress of the United States and other western democracies arises from the erosion of values and traditions that have held them together...
...But the fact is, Kristol was very different from the rest of us, and I recall my perpetual surprise at how different lie was...
...They have evolved that way through cut-and-fit adaptation, and those who follow rational prescriptions do not understand with what they tinker...
...Admittedly, to be radical and antiStalinist in 1945 was a rather mild sort of thing...
...So often those who claim the word conservative are not followers of Burke but of Adam Smith...
...The place of an intellectual elite in a nation where, The Public Interest reminds us, only eleven percent of adults have completed four years of college...
...Indeed, the first successor to Rosenfeld, who left the job to write, was no less a figure than Clement Greenberg, one of the editors of Partisan Review, who included such awesome figures as Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Lionel Trilling and Dwight MacDonald...
...For its own purposes, the circle solves the problem well enough...
...The collapse of vlaues...
...A Memoir of the 1940s Kristol and the New York Intellectual Establishment Nathan Glazer I N 1945, I was an assistant editor at Commentary, which had started at the beginning of that year, a successor to the Contemporary Jewish Record...
...He appointed Robert Warshow, the young aspiring film critic, to the magazine...
...While some of the individuals involved may still object to the title conservative, this is a heritage that deserves to be emphasized and reclaimed...
...That is why conventional conservatives so often march off into what strikes even many would-be friends as political irrelevancy, with the Goldwater campaign, strident opposition to the China initiatives, the Ashbrook candidacy...
...A society, culture or civilization is held together not ultimately by its formal institutions but by informal things - - traditions, values, feelings and e x - pectations shared by its citizens and imposing on them certain disciplines...
...SO often we find conservatives stressing not the proection and preservation of The Alternative June--September 1972 5 the American mainstream, but opposition to it...
...Yet something like that seems to have happened to produce the melding of values and data that is represented by Kristol and his friends...
...The place of tradition in a time of change...
...Intellectually, the neo-conservative themes are the central issues of our time...
...The Public Interest has a circulation of only 10,000, but is perhaps the chief medium of common knowledge within the incredibly small circle where the public interest is weighed in a rigorous way...
...Many recent American trends wholly deserve opposition...
...To measure what criticism tells, look at the reactions of the criticized...
...He hired me - - at least I had been in student Zionist politics and knew something, if not enough, about that side of things...
...Writing in this journal, Henry Regnery tells how Russell Kirk won his battle to impose the word "conservative" during the founding of The National Review...
...That is why, when the intellectual history of the 1960s is ultimately written, we may find that the event of most lasting significance was not the advent of a new radicalism but the evolution of a new and newly relevant conservtism...
...I do not know who first used "neo-conservative" in this context, but it seems the one that best fits...
...Nevertheless, it was an odd concatenation, and I do not know all the reasons for it...
...There is something of an irony here, since the Straussians have been among the strongest critics of the recent empirical turn in the social sciences...
...The melding has produced an exceptionally strong and valuable outlook, one sensitive to both detail and the broad sweep, one relevant both to important political battlegrounds and to the diffuse hunger of our times, and above all one that resonates to reality...
...He began to study Hebrew - - from a grammer published by Oxford University Press, and of a level 6 The Alternative June--September 1972...
...The need not only for outward material progress but for the inner satisfaction of living in what seems to be a proper society...
...This developed a link between the Contemporary Jewish Record and the world of Greenwich Village, that is, of the readers of Partisan Review, and those who aspired to write for it...
...The policy relevance is not due to the philosophers of the movement as much as to its social scientists, those initially attuned not to values but to the data that moves policy-makers...
...His talent and enterprise have succeeded in making clear that another tradition does exist as an alternative to the dominant liberalism...
Vol. 5 • June 1972 • No. 9
