Whether Dissent really named the neocons
Ross, Benjamin
WHO NAMED THE neoconservatives? You are looking at the perpetrator, or so it is believed. Dissent and its circle, in the early 1970s, invented the term to denigrate the right-moving...
...And the editorial preference for "new" over "neo" is instructive in itself...
...He wrote "George Bush's Philosophers" in the Summer 2005 issue...
...I found it used in 1883, in a periodical that featured excerpts from Karl Marx's new book Capital...
...He is at once the new conservatism's leading journalist-publicist and its prime exemplar...
...The conservative writer B. BruceBriggs demurred in the Spring 1976 issue: one must quibble with his use of the term "neoconservatives" to label the ex-Marxists who went over to the right before 1950...
...The name first appeared in print here, in a Fall 1973 article by Michael Harrington entitled "The Welfare State and Its Neoconservative Critics...
...Consider this passage by Joseph Epstein from Spring 1973: Other intellectuals show one or another aspect of the new conservatism in high relief...
...In contemporary usage, "neoconservative" labels those liberals who would not accept the "New Politics" shift during the mid1960s...
...Rereading these essays, it seems clear enough that "new" had been substituted for "neo...
...In this case, fluttering on the West Side of Manhattan is connected to a hurricane three decades later in Iraq...
...It seems to be in the early seventies that neoconservative became a regular part of the Dissenters' vocabulary...
...The neocons, it is said, resisted the designation at first and began to use it only after it had gained wide acceptance...
...For the butterfly that has thus flown into history, scrupulous care in taxonomic nomenclature is indeed demanded...
...It was in the latter sense that the word made its first appearance in the New York Times, in a May 26, 1968, book review by Columbia University historian Richard Morris...
...In 1973, Dissent ran a series of polemics against what the magazine called—everywhere but in Harrington's piece—"new conservatives...
...the best-annotated version is in S. M. Lipset's 1996 book American Exceptionalism...
...in Irving Kristol the full and finished edifice is on display...
...Academic jargon would rank much higher than political invective on any list of editor Irving Howe's dislikes...
...The Rosetta Stone that unlocks this linguistic puzzle is the next appearance of neoconservative in Dissent...
...his diligent avoidance of neoconservative in this period suggests he understood the word as jargon...
...they are careful to keep their distance from the premature antiliberals of Buckley and company...
...An annotated version of this piece will be available at www.dissentmagazine.org or from the Dissent office...
...A neoconservative, for the Dissenters of the early 1970s, was either someone with a new variant of conservatism or a former leftist who had moved right...
...But did the Dissenters mean neoDISSENT / Summer 2007 n 77 NOTEBOOK conservative as a derogatory name for a specific group or was it still a general descriptive term...
...By this time, the term had developed two specific meanings for historians alongside its more general usage...
...But its meaning was not limited to them...
...It described—of all people—Staughton Lynd, in some of whose work Morris found "an updated and perceptive brand of neoconservatism...
...Dissent and its circle, in the early 1970s, invented the term to denigrate the right-moving intellectuals who wrote in Commentary and the Public Interest...
...Scientists know that the flapping of a butterfly's wings can sometimes trigger a hurricane on the other side of the earth...
...It was elsewhere that neoconservatism became a name rather than a description...
...It was in Fall 1975, just as Daniel P. Moynihan's appointment as ambassador to the United Nations began to propel the word into prominence...
...On first examination the texts support the former view, but read carefully they do not rule out the latter...
...The red pencil may have been stayed this once to avoid ambiguity: "The Welfare State and Its New Conservative Critics" could have been misinterpreted to refer to new critics offering the same old conservatism...
...The word neoconservative has (Internet search tools now reveal) a long prehistory of use in academic and quasi-academic writing to describe any new variant of conservatism...
...78 n DISSENT / Summer 2007...
...Harrington later recalled that the word "was in common use among Dissent editors and other associates of mine...
...But—you're reading Dissent, after all—the story really is more complicated...
...Six months after Epstein's, Harrington's article appeared with neoconservative in the title...
...It designated either the integral nationalists of Weimar Germany, such as Arthur Willer van den Bruck, or the American historians who reacted against Charles Beard, Carl Becker, and their liberal interpretation of the Revolutionary era...
...In the late 1960s, it seems, neoconservatism began its transformation from academic neologism to part of the language...
...On the right, as the left, sectarianism demands scrupulous care in nomenclature...
...A lexical shift was under way: along with continued use in reference to revised conservatisms, neoconservative gained the new meaning of a former liberal or leftist who had moved right...
...BENJAMIN Ross contributes frequently to Dissent...
...This history can be found in dozens of books, articles, and Web postings...
...On September 30, 1973, a few weeks before the Harrington article reached subscribers, Dissent contributor Martin Kitson had this in the New York Times Magazine letters column: "On the quota issue—and others, too—the American Jewish Committee and Commentary ought to come out of the neoconservative closet...
...The term was applied to the group that evolved into today's neocons, simply because they were the new conservatives of immediate concern...
...In any case, this was not the first use of the word in print by the Dissent circle...
...It recurred annually in the Times thereafter...
...An article by John P. Diggins used it to describe William F. Buckley's early collaborators Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, Will Herberg, and James Burnham...
Vol. 54 • July 2007 • No. 3
