A HOLIDAY INN OF BOURGEOIS VIRTUE: IRVING KRISTOL AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM
Cohen, Mitchell
In a celebrated passage of "The Economic Ethic of World Religions," Max Weber remarked that often, "like switchmen," the "world images" created by ideas have "determined the tracks along which...
...I do not like it in sports, in the arts, or in economics...
...12 Ibid., pp...
...21 Irving Kristol, "Capitalism, Socialism, and Nihilism," in Two Cheers, p. 59...
...Is he the genius of their stupidity, or the Mr...
...17-18...
...Kristol's presentation of the French Enlightenment, despite a disclaimer, is a homogenized caricature...
...Then the social organism is having, not hunger pains, but an "existential spasm...
...His underlying agenda is to provide American capitalism with a moral incandescence he thinks it fails to generate, to its detriment...
...Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: Random House, 1967), p. xi...
...The result is then served a l'americaine...
...The philosophes wrote in prerevolutionary France while the AngloScots, by and large, wrote in the context of postrevolutionary Britain...
...True, both were pillars of established order...
...Had I the courage of my friend Heinrich Heine," Marx once wrote, "I should call Mr...
...39-40...
...Unlike romantic anticapitalists who pined for Gemeinschaft in the face of Gesellschaft, he wants them both at the same time...
...These intellectuals are filled with ressentiment toward an essentially unheroic society that is "prosaic, not only in form but in essence" and compels them, because of the market, to consider the tastes of the common man...
...In short, Kristol's adventures in intellectual history demonstrate a blithe, and shoddy, disregard of context...
...All this is seasoned heavily with James Madison and Adam Smith (and subtly, one suspects, with Lord Acton), stirred by a venture into intellectual history according to which the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment and its link to the American Revolution are Good Things while their French counterparts are Bad...
...Kristol's real concern is not the individual's existential confrontation with nothingness but rather the maintenance of order by giving the masses a good.dare we say it?.opiate, in the general form of neonostalgia...
...The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment refers to an array of 17th- and especially 18th-century thinkers including, among others, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Bernard de Mandeville, Adam Ferguson, and Francis Hutcheson...
...Hence inasmuch as neoconservatives intrinsically link, as they are wont to do, the Protestant ethic with a social culture of bourgeois meritocracy, they ignore the Augustinian foundation of Lutheranism and Calvinism in the notion of unmerited grace...
...That is, it is by God's hand, not by human deed, that the individual is saved...
...Hence, as the title of one of his collections proclaims, he gives but two cheers for capitalism, though they often ring louder than he pretends...
...Rather than work and discipline, acquisitiveness and appetite rule the day...
...But then the problem begins: "in our lifetime" the true liberal tradition self-destructed as it dissociated itself "from the Judeo-Christian tradition which was the source of those beliefs" about proper human behavior...
...205 i Kristol claims a "detached attachment" to bourgeois society, insisting that it provides the foundation for the best of possible worlds, with the emphasis decidedly on possible...
...the former mode of thinking helped engender the victories pursuant to '76 in America, while the latter abetted the disasters of '89 and after in France...
...More than this, his couplings...
...In very simplified form, the question is this: Is America primarily a product of a Lockean world view that emphasizes the natural rights of property and individualism, or can one legitimately point to a tradition of republicanism that stresses "civic virtue" and is rooted in a 208 Renaissance humanism that was mediated by English republican and dissenting traditions in the 17th and 18th centuries, en route to the New World...
...As Butterfield noted, Our assumptions do not matter if we are conscious that they are assumptions, but the most fallacious thing in the world is to organise our historical knowledge upon an assumption without realising what we are doing, and then to make inferences from that organisation and claim that these are the voice of history...
...alienated," and with "all the wit, verve, boldness of imagination, and blithe irresponsibility" often displayed by "such a class" of salon intellectuals...
...For Kristol the bourgeois ethic, via capitalism, achieves unprecedented political and economic success, only to have its world undermined from within by an adversary culture produced by intellectuals...
...abstinence is such a sign, not a capitalist virtue...
...A nation, he writes, "whose politics revolves around such issues as day-care centers or school lunches or the 'proper' cost of false teeth is a nation whose politics is squalid, mean-spirited, debasing...
...19 "The Spiritual Roots of Capitalism and Socialism," Novak, ed., Capitalism and Socialism, p. 14...
...Thus, by Kristol's account, assorted evil forces.unleashed by capitalism's very triumphs...
...21 "The Adversary Culture of Intellectuals," p. 38...
...In defending "common" culture against the scourge of modernist elitists, Kristol is directing us toward some broader points he would make...
...He was chased from the bourgeois Temple by its owners, the money changers, the believers in the Hidden Hand...
...And, more important, it is the specter of him for whom pain and pleasure are humanity's "sovereign masters," the calculable determinants of what is called happiness...
...Since Kristol claims that neoconservatism aims to infuse "American bourgeois orthodoxy with a new self-conscious intellectual vigor," it is only proper that his edifice be examined for its intellectual rigor...
...In speaking of the Anglo-Scots with eyes turned to the New World, he skews the reference points of their thought...
...20 -, "Reforming the Welfare State," in Two Cheers, pp...
...There is no cultural document that is not at the same time a record of barbarism...
...from Max Weber comes an emphasis, taking somewhat un-Weberian forms, on the relation between religion and capitalism...
...rather, it is less regulation of business and a good dose of that old-time religion (mostly, it would seem, for others...
...Kristol wants to "turn the clock back" and, as Peter Steinfels has suggested, create a Bourgeois Reformation, since in his view America's alternatives are either Reformed Bourgeois Capitalism or nihilism...
...An idea of self-government, if it is to be viable, must encompass both the private and the public sectors...
...The sociopolitical logic employed in Kristol's exploitation of religion is, in fact, the reverse of that in his discussion of revolution...
...Therefore, he concludes, give 'em the consolations of religion because they'll never consume philosophy...
...One is that these elitists can contemplate the "higher things in life" owing to the affluence that capitalism creates...
...This is something of a semantic game in which the rebelliousness of revolution is denuded in order to redefine it as an exercise in conserving...
...Ibid., p. 150...
...It is noteworthy that, in making his various assertions, Kristol never confronts the actual arguments made by the critics of religion's social and political roles in the last two centuries...
...In his depiction of bourgeois life, religion is an indispensable bond of human harmony, a bond that classical liberalism, with its emphasis on rational access to truth, tears apart...
...It surely must share center stage with politics in the public sphere...
...Was it really modernism, even if spread wider through mass education, that became the source of legitimation and delegitimation in the West, undermining order, tradition, religion, and authority...
...But Kristol hardly notices the toils of the many, and why should he, since the type of existence they lead creates those social explosions he disdains as mere "existential spasms...
...I, for one, am unclear as to what exactly "Judeo-Christian" virtues are, especially since Kristol goes so far as to assert that the principles underlying the Protestant ethic are not only equally Jewish, but perhaps Confucian, too...
...Indeed, who will have to be stoic...
...It is common, and hardly culpable, for political combatants to harness potent symbols in a nation's political culture for their partisan goals...
...Hence (again) the need for a Reformation since, as he puts it, bourgeois society has lived for a century and a half on the moral capital traditional religion and morality had 211 supplied...
...This is one reason why, in his view, one's response to the French and American revolutions, respectively, indicates the true nature of one's politics...
...who declared in the mid-1960s that, having "made it," he realized that money, fame, and power are Good Things, for it is "better to be rich than poor . . . better to give orders than take them . . . better to be recognized than to be anonymous...
...But then, what if the assumptions are recognized...
...but when poverty or inequality, in short, "the social question," makes its revolutionary intrusion, then woe to political virtue...
...And which reality is to be preserved...
...From Leo Strauss comes a concern with "character" and the premodern...
...Religion and capitalism, according to Kristol, are linked in the person of the bourgeois who, far from being a mere hedonist or social Darwinist, upholds values that are in fact "the Judeo-Christian virtues assimilated into capitalist society...
...While on principle he finds the system's operative precepts more than satisfactory, he knows that any socioeconomic order requires a self-justifying luster, transcendent props in the form of ideology and/or religion, if it is to survive...
...This entire account rests on a historical sleight of hand...
...from Lionel Trilling comes the notion that an "adversary culture" promoted, or perpetrated, by a new class will accomplish Schumpeter's prognosis...
...The attitude Kristol describes, one imagines, was at least partly exemplified by a young member of the New Class.Norman Podhoretz...
...Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) emphasized Locke's bequeathal...
...Jeremy Bentham a genius in the way of bourgeois stupidity...
...The question for Marx was whether the religious response to such "soulless conditions" was valid...
...one hardly has to be a Marxist to see this is a subject that Kristol never addresses...
...hence the yearning for a narcotic that, at the same time, happens to be a useful means of social control...
...Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment/American Revolution and French Enlightenment/ French Revolution.are a "prefabricated interpretation," a Kristolized example of what Herbert Butterfield once criticized as the "Whig Interpretation of History...
...The details of the scholarly debate need not preoccupy us here," but what is essential is that Kristol would divest the tradition of political republicanism of any legitimate radical impulse...
...Hence his fear of modernism, which threatens to fill our empty selves with adversary culture, as opposed to, and instead of, Truth and Faith...
...A socialism speaking American would undoubtedly cause neoconservative nightmares...
...Kristol's selectivity.not illegitimate in and of itself.becomes problematic because of the broader intellectual agenda to which it is tied...
...For "the deeper one explores into the self, without any transcendental frame of reference, the clearer it becomes that nothing is there...
...23-24...
...Again, one imagines that this Reformation actually began with the presidency of Ronald Reagan, underwhelming Luther, though he might be...
...This is where it takes him: Once upon a time, mostly, it seems, in the late 18th century, there was a liberal-capitalist America, suffused by a religiously tempered and provincial republican virtue, heir to the Spirit of '76 and the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment, yielding the ethos of a bourgeois civilization that was politically articulated in the Constitution and The Federalist...
...For neoconservatives, they represent a bourgeois world that has gone off on the wrong track...
...Classic Athens, for example, had twice as many slaves as citizens...
...from Joseph Schumpeter comes the claim that not economics but culture will be capitalism's undoing...
...He qualifies this, however, by claiming that this force originally, somehow, did not define the fundamentals of the civilization, by which he means "matters of belief about good conduct" (that is, moral and religious beliefs...
...0 Ibid., p. 146...
...In the end, Kristol's edifice rests on a consistent mangling of the relation between political ideas and history...
...Of course, if we follow this logic, the "shot heard 'round the world" at Concord was fired by a philosopher, not an embattled farmer, and Jefferson was not a revolutionary since he proclaimed inalienable rights.which are clearly preconceived ideals.in the Declaration of Independence...
...In terms that would please a Marxist, Kristol states that capitalism's distinguishing feature is that it makes commerce "the dynamic force which defines and shapes the civilization...
...The "sacred" did not shrink, as Bell once put it...
...Ah, if the Bourbons and their backers had but funded their own switchmen at a French Ancien Institute, the Enlightenment might have taken to other tracks...
...Apparently, when the track before bourgeois civilization forked, with one way leading to hedonism and the other to virtue, Jeremy or his like was at the switch...
...Urban Civilization and Its Discontents," in Democratic Idea, p. 11...
...excess was wrought entirely by the revolutionaries and their intellectual predeces207 sors, who were apparently all of a kind...
...Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), pp...
...Kristol, it seems, has an interest in ignoring this...
...Underpinning this is an ideological melange that draws on numerous sources but has its own peculiar consistency...
...and if there is a spiritual force that succeeded religious sensibility, it is the sanctified myth of that collective ego known as the nation...
...The contemporary debate is at least three decades old...
...Kristol has written that The results of the political process and of the exercise of individual freedom.the distribution of power, privilege, and property.must also be seen as in some profound sense expressive of the values that govern the lives of individuals...
...232-33...
...xii-xiii, see note...
...may be signs of salvation, but in themselves merit nothing...
...Hence the real question: Who has the correct interpretation of Jeremy Bentham's relation to "the bourgeois idea" and the spirit of capitalism...
...This is the source of his obsession with the "adversary culture...
...Even if one grants Max Weber's renowned thesis that the Protestant (or the ProtestantJewish-Confucian) ethic was a catalyst of capitalism, Kristol's claims are untenable...
...Kristol's writings since the 1960s form an ideological whole, resting on an edifice of claims about the fate of the bourgeois world...
...q 214...
...Such an expropriation of the American founding for neoconservatism is precisely Kristol's purpose...
...which in its classical form celebrated public life and man as zoon politikon (a political animal...
...True, they were a differentiated lot and Kristol, as noted, insists on separating what Mandeville's world view and the egotistical atomized man of Thomas Hobbes represent from Smith, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson, for whom self-interest has "natural and self-correcting limits...
...In an argument clearly intended to imply a moral for our day, Kristol makes much of what distinguishes the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment from that of the French...
...Ibid., p. 85...
...have undermined bourgeois virtue and its traditionalist props...
...We owe culture, as Walter Benjamin once noted, not only to writers and artists, but to "the anonymous drudgery of their contemporaries...
...a classless Holiday Inn of bourgeois virtue...
...22 "The Disaffection from Capitalism," p. 25...
...He is especially concerned to counterpose the attitudes of the two Enlightenments toward religion, but he says nothing about the relations of Anglicanism and the First Estate to their respective societies...
...Kristol's catechism is familiar by now...
...J. G. A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment (1975) argued that the revival of republicanism during the Florentine Renaissance (and thus the revival of notions of civic virtue rooted in the conceptions of man as a political animal, in contrast to the Christian whose kingdom is not of this world) eventually traveled to America, via 17th- and 18th-century English republicanism...
...These categories are, of course, by no means logically or historically exclusive of each other but rather reflect different emphases...
...The English 17th century, designated as important but then passed over by Kristol, was full of bloody civil war, upheaval of tradition, and regicide, those things he abhors when they occur across the channel in the following century...
...Madison and friends "intended this nation to be capitalist and regarded it as the only set of economic arrangements consistent with the liberal democracy they had established...
...29 Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978), pp...
...The animating principles of the American republic combine The Federalist, classical liberalism, the market, and religion...
...However, in utilizing Arendt's distinction between political and social questions, Kristol banishes from his own account her emphasis on the "pathos of novelty" in revolutions, that is, their character as an engagement with freedom, and a participatory, almost joyous, entry into the public sphere...
...But this civilization is now subverted, perhaps by impulses within it, and the democratic republic is far adrift from its original animating principles...
...Postscript A SPECTER stalks the neoconservatives, and they have summoned their powers to exorcise it...
...The Disaffection from Capitalism," p. 16...
...Kristol's former coeditor Daniel Bell has bemoaned that "to its own detriment" capitalism adopted a Benthamite self-justification grounded on individual self-interest and utilitarian calculation...
...It is the ethos of capitalism that is in gross disrepair," writes Kristol, "not the economics of capitalism...
...Notes ' Irving Kristol, "Preface" to On the Democratic Idea in America.hereafter Democratic Idea (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. vii...
...But salvation through this grace alone will not suffice.' 26 Kristol's use of the religious motif is particularly revealing...
...Unlike Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, and company, Bell does notice that the democratic left has not been running America of late...
...In the first place, that ethic's premises remain those of a theology, not of an ideology of capitalism...
...Following, very selectively, Hannah Arendt's On Revolution, Kristol proclaims the American Revolution a success and the French a failure because the former was strictly political while the latter engaged with "the social question...
...250-51...
...Kristol wants to harness the republican notion of virtue...
...25-26...
...The fevers are many...
...It was reinvented as the dollar, the nation, and scientific rationality...
...The logic employed is reminiscent of that of the father, in Sholom Asch's play God 209 of Vengeance, who runs a brothel on his first floor, while seeking to retain his daughter's chastity on the second...
...The American Revolution as a Successful Revolution," in Reflections of a Neoconservativehereafter Reflections (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p. 84...
...But needn't one ask, what order...
...an edifice constructed primarily while he was en route from supporting Hubert Humphrey to serving as a Reagan advocate and, in David T. Bazelon's words, the "brigadier general in the Intellectual Supply Corps of the business class...
...2 "Corporate Capitalism in America," in Two Cheers for Capitalism.hereafter Two Cheers (New York: Mentor, 1978), p. 3. "The Disaffection from Capitalism," in Michael Novak, ed., Capitalism and Socialism: A Theological Inquiry (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1979), pp...
...25 "The Adversary Culture of Intellectuals," pp...
...For the author of Capital, Bentham's moral vision and the values accompanying a world of fetishized commodities and consumerism.in which buying and selling and the conversion of ends, including human beings, into means.are the essence of the bourgeois world view...
...It is ultimately from a Benthamite raison d'etre that Kristol would shield capitalism...
...For instance, the point of Marx's famous "opium of the people" comment was that religion does try to grapple with existential questions...
...It is by the yardstick of this god.in whose ethos the neoconservatives believe.not modernism and experimental poetry that morality, loyalty, and thus individual virtue came to be judged...
...which is, indeed, its saving grace...
...An "amiable philistinism" was, in Kristol's view, "inherent in bourgeois society," and this inevitably upsets artists and writers.' Thus a kind of elitism, restive and often bohemian, is engendered, which is hostile to bourgeois life, counterposes itself to the popular (apparently wholesome, traditional, republican) majoritarian culture, and is especially represented in the Antichrist of capitalism, cultural modernism...
...His argument, not surprisingly, ignores who, historically, had access to what culture and in which conditions...
...Perhaps it was Bell, characterized once by Kristol as the theoretician of neoconservatism's "social democratic wing," who best captured this in Partisan Review when he called it "a strange hybrid of 'bourgeois populism,' a mixed metaphor of Aristotelian measure within the burgher's suit of clothes, which by prudence, reflection, and moderation would dissolve the fevers and black humors of political choler...
...Bernard Bai213 lyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) argued that American colonists saw "a comprehensive conspiracy against liberty throughout the English-speaking world" and were especially influenced by a "distinctive ideological strain" of "left" opposition to Walpole in London, an opposition that was heir to 17th-century English republicanism...
...In their stead, a "self-centered hedonism" becomes the standard of happiness...
...After all, the author of Candide, for much of his career, advocated France's transformation through an alliance of the monarchy and the bourgeoisie, was enraptured by the London Stock Exchange (as his Lettres philosophiques attest), and raised the banner of tolerance, free speech, and the rule of law in ancien-regime France...
...151-52...
...9 In the end, however, what Kristol wishes to impress on us is that "When one speaks of the `spirit of capitalism,' one is bound to have in mind the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment, rather than the French.' Kristol's point here is really this: when the French revolutionaries ran amok, murdering royalty and storming the barricades of tradition, they traversed grounds made fertile for turmoil by Enlightenment rationalists naive enough to seek universal regeneration...
...But, simultaneously, he wants to give it a bourgeois guise, thereby countering the claim that the politics and political implications of self-interest were foremost in the minds of the Founding Fathers.and, by extension, are in those of Irving Kristol and his friends...
...Kristol, here playing the populist while going into one of his characteristic lapses in regard to history, tells us that this sort of situation is virtually unprecedented in the annals of humankind...
...He does so by touching themes long debated by scholars about the formative influences of American political culture...
...In a world of human suffering, of poverty and meaningless toil, religion was "the soul of soul-less conditions...
...Since the '60s Kristol has been obsessed with the delegitimation of American institutions, discerning decadence everywhere.although presumably Ronald Reagan's Era of Patriotic Good Feelings has stemmed the tide...
...Among other things, Diggins's book seeks to undermine Pocock's thesis and also various claims about the influence of Scottish ideas in the work of Gary Wills.Inventing America (1978) and Explaining America (1981...
...I just don't like it in the world...
...hence the need to carefully consider the tracks before us...
...One wonders whether Voltaire, perhaps its most representative if not most renowned figure, exemplifies "blithe irresponsibility" according to Kristol...
...We know that Kristol, lump in throat, admits that perhaps something intrinsic to capitalism created this situation...
...Bell, whose essays parallel Kristol's in some crucial regards, criticized him in the 50th Anniversary issue of Partisan Review for retreating "from the idea of a 'prudential politics.' " Bell went so far as to brand contemporary conservatism as incoherent and to chastise neoconservatives for taking the posture of selfrighteous ideologues who not only need enemies but frequently sound like "a hunted band . . . huddled together against the 'cultural hegemony' of the liberals and the left...
...Rather, his aim is to champion "the man who succeeded by diligence, enterprise, sobriety, and all those other virtues Benjamin Franklin catalogued for us, and which we loosely call 'the Protestant ethic.' '" The world view of the Founding Fathers, Kristol says, was antiurban...
...Both left and right do so, though this may lead, obviously, to popular myths and historical misrepresentation...
...Kristol wants the morals of capitalism, a system defined by buying and selling, to be those of a Cotton Mather preaching The Federalist, and then finds himself slapped by the back of the Invisible Hand when pious Publius turns out to be homo ceconomicus...
...Exactly so...
...And one should then notice the implications for policy issues.such as affirmative action...
...But that is just it...
...Indeed, "If nothingness is the ultimate reality, those somethings called books, or poems, or paintings, or music are mere evasions of truth rather than expressions of it...
...Kristol's nostrum is not, heaven forbid, the transformation of capitalism...
...16 Ibid, p. 23...
...It is striking that in two of Kristol's essays preoccupied with the American political heritage and published at the time of the American bicentennial...
...If we'd only let America be America, if we'd only reject the insidious antibourgeois "adversary culture" promoted in the media by the "new class," the nation could reemerge as something like what was intended by the Founding Fathers...
...In the past decade and a half, the somewhat nebulous group known as the neoconservatives seems to have sought just this role.that of switchmen of the American mind, seeking to change the signals and hence the track for both intellectuals and the country at large...
...25 What Kristol does not and cannot consider is that those books, poems, and paintings.and the expressions of angst and dislocation in them.may be human efforts to struggle with the nothingness of a social system that deifies commerce and profit, and whose god permeates all aspects of contemporary life.so that authentic human meaning can best be found in revolt against it...
...Indeed, the American Revolution seems to have been just about the only true revolution, because revolution is "a practical exercise in political philosophy, not an existential spasm of the social organism.'" Ironically, Kristol insists simultaneously on the singularity of the American Revolution as a revolution and on its conservative character in creating a correspondence between political institutions and the preexisting American "way of life...
...Clearly, Kristol pines for a Horatio Alger world in which the businessman is hero and his vocation "profitable because honorable and not vice versa.'" Whether profit can economically, sociologically, or logically be derived from honor need not concern us.it certainly doesn't concern Kristol...
...The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment did not "merely" overthrow an ancien regime "but created a new and viable one," for it was composed of cautious men, skeptical, concerned with individual liberty, always cognizant of the role of self-interest in human affairs...
...It is the distinctive specter of Jeremy Bentham, the father of 19th-century English utilitarian philosophy, who insisted that something is good if it augments the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people...
...Hence the malaise of modern times...
...He has strongly implied that the very concept of class is misplaced in the United States...
...But, instead, the philosophes saw progress as the total undermining of the old order, in contrast to the Anglo-Scottish "revolutionaries," who looked at their world and saw that it was good, as evidenced by "the rise of commerce, the gradual 'refinement' of manners and morals, the increase in knowledge...
...Indeed, there has long been a tradition of socialism that sees in economic democracy the obvious fulfillment and concretization of a democratic republicanism that, in its bourgeois form, is viewed as incomplete owing to its reliance on formal rights and abstract individualism...
...the famous 212 Hidden God, Deus Absconditus, did not abscond in the face of modernism...
...23 See "Business and the 'New Class,' " p. 25, and "Corporate Capitalism in America," pp...
...8 Now, one does not know where the Russian revolutionaries of February 1917 might fit into this, or if the converse proposition is true, that unsuccessful revolutions are the product of people who do want and/or are compelled to make them...
...22 This example of sociological innuendo, in which the irrelevance of class is demonstrated by a singularly peculiar representative sample of the American people, has not kept Kristol from elsewhere locating a "vaguely" describable but decidedly powerhungry new "indispensable class for our society...
...Where the New Deal fits into this historical schema, one just doesn't know...
...Kristol is preoccupied with "the tendency of democratic republics to depart from . . . their original, animating principles .. ."' He often seems to find this process somewhat mysterious, emphasizing the unintended results of human acts (unless, of course, Adam Smith's Invisible Hand works things out...
...At times Kristol appears to be battling for the soul of this "class".the 1984 Yuppy vote for Reagan may demonstrate a certain neoconservative success on this score .while at other times he seems to imagine this New Class as something of a left-liberal modernist Golem, arisen and marching, dominant in the media, advocating equalitarianism, undermining the meritocracy that made America great, and influencing liberal politicians so that the country may become an all-encompassing welfare state, demanding and needing the New Class's services...
...In any event, Kristol seeks to link the heritage and the future of republicanism to specifically bourgeois virtues, his fear being of a democratic republicanism that might extend beyond the political realm...
...All this unhinged bourgeois society from its moorings and brought forth what Kristol calls a "not easily defined" class that carries aloft an equalitarian, antibourgeois banner...
...The Adversary Culture of Intellectuals," in Reflections, p. 37...
...Ibid., p. 42...
...One suspects that, given his cavalier attitude toward social suffering.and all who did not make it from 1930s City College socialism to the Wall Street Journal.what truly summarizes Kristol's politics is to be found in his statement that "In every society, the overwhelming majority of people lead lives of considerable frustration, and if society is to endure it needs to be able to rely on a goodly measure of stoical resignation...
...Irving Kristol, "Adam Smith and the Spirit of Capitalism," in Reflections, p. 155...
...He would do for those in power what he accuses that "culture" of doing for those he thinks are aspiring to (or are out of) power.that is, supply the intellectual means and confidence to face all challengers...
...II What exactly has gone awry...
...The ancien regime was culpable for nothing, by his account...
...rather than in either a libertarian version of capitalism or one that espouses the claim famously articulated in Bernard de Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees (1714) that the selfish pursuit of private vices yields public benefits...
...Hyde of their Dr...
...3 This is a somewhat bizarre claim...
...But alas, their provincial America, "which at least paid lip service to, if it did not live by, the traditional republican morality...
...In other words, Kristol assumes that the force defining a civilization can somehow be disconnected from the civilization's fundamental beliefs about good and bad conduct...
...Consequently he much bemoans a "Great Inversion" of the postwar era whereby the assumption that "liberal" governments ought to intervene in morality.but not in economics.was reversed...
...This, he says, and undoubtedly Kristol concurs, was a "weak moral argument...
...Jekyll...
...It seems, however, that all this is beyond the purview of the America Irving Kristol inhabits.or would like to inhabit...
...Kristol can't be faulted for his dismay at the hedonism and consumerism rife in contemporary culture, only for his acrobatics in explaining them and his attempt to mystify their sources...
...that America which, whether on the farm or in the suburb or small town, thought it important to preserve the appearance of a life lived according to the prescriptions of an older agrar206 ian virtue and piety".has been ingested into urban civilization with all its malcontents and discontents.' Capitalism and the bourgeois ethos, argues Kristol, sought a better life for all, but these aspirations were always tempered by a recognition of human limits...
...Scientific discovery, not surrealism, assaulted the pretenses of religion to universally valid knowledge...
...Indeed, all this is consistent with his advocacy of a "conservative welfare state," which he favors in order to remove certain issues from political debate...
...But then the "merely social" does matter, doesn't it...
...As a group, they constituted an "intellectual agent" of and a response to the birth of "bourgeois capitalist Britain...
...Such a maneuver is at least debatable in its American and is manifestly false in the European context...
...a goodly proportion of those college educated people whose skills and vocations proliferate in a 'post-industrial society.' " 23 The emergence of such a nonpropertied, educated, and vital stratum.its ranks range from scientists and city planners to educators and public-health doctors.has been discussed and probed exhaustively by writers on the left and the right to discern its political and sociological significance...
...Still, his goal has been to distinguish himself from both the old and the new right, and to do so he has reiterated his support for a "conservative welfare state...
...This effort, which began with a pretense of being "nonideological," has at its center the most publicly selfproclaimed neoconservative, Irving Kristol...
...And as long as poverty and scarcity are regarded as "merely" social, and not high-minded political, issues...
...Kristol, as Michael Walzer once put it, "stands with one foot firmly planted in the market while with the other he salutes the fading values of an organic society...
...While the joint introduction he wrote with Daniel Bell for the first issue of the Public Interest in 1965 denounced "ideologists" for their "prefabricated interpretations of existing social realities," the introduction to Kristol's recent Reflections of a Neoconservative (1983) proclaims, by contrast, that "in the modern world, a nonideological politics is a politics disarmed...
...This posture.presented by a man who once urged comprehending utopianism so as to preserve "the integrity of reality" and who now poses as a bourgeois populist.discloses an enormous cynicism behind his pretenses, especially his religious ones...
...This virtuous observation is undoubtedly true . . . as long as you can afford the dentist and your children aren't offered ketchup as a vegetable...
...And since he has defined revolution to be an exercise in political philosophy, Kristol has no problem characterizing the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment as a "revolutionary movement" that "like all successful revolutions . . . did not try to impose a set of preconceived ideals on a recalcitrant reality...
...In a celebrated passage of "The Economic Ethic of World Religions," Max Weber remarked that often, "like switchmen," the "world images" created by ideas have "determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest...
...The American Revolution as a Successful Revolution" [see Note 7] and "Adam Smith and the Spirit of Capitalism" [see Note 9].mention of a certain Thomas Jefferson appears but once and then only in passing...
...14-16, both in Two Cheers...
...Unlike neo-Marxists who see the consumerist culture of the West as inherently bourgeois.as the obvious oak to grow from the capitalist acorn.Kristol wishes to absolve capitalism of the consequences of what he himself calls its dynamic force...
...And not Baudelaire, Dada, or modernist sensibility in general (or even Yippies later on) were the source of disruption, but rather factors such as nationalism and science (not to mention capitalism itself...
...Irving Kristol, "Horatio Alger and Profits," in Two Cheers...
...When Virtue Loses All Her Loveliness,' " pp...
...In Kristol's writings, "classes" exist primarily when they are useful to him in making a point...
...1 Irving Kristol, " 'When Virtue Loses All Her Loveliness,' " in Two Cheers, p. 242...
...Corporate Capitalism in America," pp...
...Debs was at least as American as Jean Jaures, who saw his own socialist movement as the heir to the French revolutionary tradition, was French...
...It is fine to use a nonpolitical social force such as religion for conservative political purposes and bolstering a status quo...
...The precise nature of Anglo-Scottish influence on America's revolutionary epoch is debated by historians, but not the fact that such men as Smith and Hume came to their bearings in the post-1688 Britain of constitutional monarchy and parliamentary supremacy...
...For Eugene V. Debs.whom Kristol may choose to see as un-American.American socialism was the force that would rescue American republicanism, as Nick Salvatore stresses in his recent biography of him...
...bad if to the contrary...
...Indeed, "if we go to a Holiday Inn and look at the people.their clothes, the food they are eating, their cars.it is impossible to determine their social status, or their income, or 210 what jobs they have...
...after all, Greek tragedies were performed before the Athenian citizenry, Dante was read aloud in Venetian squares, and Shakespeare's audience included both the more and the less sophisticated.' This concern with the culture of the common person is extraordinary in someone who espouses strict meritocracy and once declared, "I do not like equality...
...The most recent rejoinder in the scholarly dispute, John P Diggins's The Lost Soul of American Politics (1984), ought to be of little comfort to Kristol, since Diggins forcefully criticizes the misconstruing of classical republican and Scottish ideas (particularly "virtue") in their American context and argues (just as forcefully) that the framers of the American republic by and large rejected the notion that their political creation could be founded on "virtue," as opposed to the realities of interest and power...
...In the end, there is something bizarre in the way Kristol and like-minded neoconservatives portray modernism as the Antichrist of bourgeois civilization...
...But now, it seems, the principal has dissolved, as legitimation has passed from the heavens to culture...
...The philosophes, it seems, composed the 18th century's "New Class...
...A successful revolution, Kristol tells us, is "best accomplished by a people who do not really want it at all, but find themselves reluctantly making it...
...Bell finds no little irony in this since he sees the neoconservatives as the victorious switchmen of the 1970s...
...2 Consequently, Kristol is at pains to explain that "the bourgeois idea" is embodied in a combination of individual liberty and the pursuit of self-interest tempered by civic virtue and "traditional institutions," especially religion...
...In consequence, Kristol informs us, it is hardly surprising that "French rationalism was so contemptuous of traditional French institutions, whereas Anglo-Scottish rationalism was so respectful of British institutions...
...III Kristol wants to believe that capitalism is no longer truly "bourgeois" insofar as it jettisons the theological temper he thinks helped engender it...
...Good acts, and behavior.diligence, sobriety...
...However, Kristol's real problem is one of human transcendental frames of reference...
...His query doesn't extend to comparing the worlds that the Anglo-Scots.apparently forebears of the neoconservatives.and the philosophes.ancestors of New Class liberals, leftists, and modernists.respectively held in esteem and contempt...
...However, the culturally "new" projected itself, he says, just as capitalism was undermining tradition, and as mass education, especially in the postWorld War II era, spread modernism's intellectual modes and legitimacy...
...The readers of Kristol's columns in the Wall Street Journal or the funders of the American Enterprise Institute...
Vol. 33 • April 1986 • No. 2
