Irving's Whodunit
Buckley, William F. Jr.
Books Irvings Whodunit By William F. Buckley, Jr. In the substantial introduction to his collection, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (Free Press, 493 pages, $30), Irving Kristol...
...In the substantial introduction to his collection, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (Free Press, 493 pages, $30), Irving Kristol ticks off ambient felicities...
...Kristol had deemed "National Review . . . too right-wing...
...DeMuth muses, "I am sure that, in 1944, the founder of the neoconser-vative wing of modern conservatism would have found a thing or two to disagree with in those books by the founders of the libertarian wing...
...Not very long after, Irving Kristol began his criticisms of an "empty liberal-socialist faith...
...He can write, "What, exactly, is neoconservatism anyway...
...but without the religious dimension, it is thin gruel...
...James Burnham concentrated mostly on cold war strategy, Frank Meyer kept the libertarian tablets...
...Nobody knows, dear...
...Communism was (geopolitically) triumphant...
...This self-effacement doesn't work-the reader of Neoconservatism will find a dozen essays that might have been expanded into books, and they serve to remind us how many books could profitably have been shrunk into long essays, Kristol-length...
...The Neoconservative movement was given its own name for two reasons...
...Through it all he wrote what would seem incessantly, but not at length...
...I was not a book writer," he notes...
...Nothing is so dismaying, given the perspectives of conservatism, as for instance a political program to "end" poverty...
...From there to Encounter in London, then to the Reporter in New York...
...In later essays, Kristol makes the godlike point that there isn't, in the end, any substitute for what religion does to the character of the mind...
...One-and this is several times brought up in Neoconservatism-was the persistent failure of so many liberals to express appropriate indignation over the consolidation of the Soviet empire and life and pain within that empire...
...He is often quoted as having said that he came aboard because he was "mugged by reality," yet water torture would more accurately describe the pressures he felt, and assimilated...
...It is the decline in religious belief over the past 50 years- together with the rise of mass higher education, which popularized the culture's animus to bourgeois capitalism-that has been of decisive importance...
...of greater use to the poor than the rich...
...And indeed in these essays Kristol happily records that both Reagan and Gingrich have publicly acclaimed Franklin Delano Roosevelt...
...It was a period of great loneliness for restive dissenters from left/liberal orthodoxy...
...It took a while before the convergence could be thought of as full-blooded...
...But they were all working on the same set of problems, and their answers would converge over time...
...It was written by Whittaker Chambers, who approved of the free market but was hardly absorbed by it...
...The movement of the Neos in the direction of the lodestar was influenced by concrete historical events...
...The French moved in on man as malleable matter, to be redirected toward virtue at the expense of liberty...
...The British tradition of Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson looked always for incremental improvements, material and other...
...Meditation is done and what passes for conclusions are reached, or adumbrated...
...Russell Kirk wrote in every issue...
...Irving Kristol is not stylistically inclined to declamation (he would not have done well as amanuensis on Mt...
...At the time Kristol founded The Public Interest, he felt a void in serious journalism...
...Pelerin Society...
...The conservative disposition is real enough...
...My son and daughter, and son-in-law and daughter-in-law, along with dozens of young 'interns' who have worked at The Public Interest over the past thirty years, are now all conservatives without adjectival modification...
...he takes us through his marriage to his celebrated wife, rather absent-mindedly touching on their platonic affair with Trotskyism...
...We learn that he served in the infantry during the war, went then with his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb ("Bea") to Oxford where both did graduate work, then back to New York, on the junior staff of Commentary magazine...
...After that, The Public Interest and The National Interest in New York and Washington...
...Hugh Kenner was poetry editor...
...But one wonders exactly what arguments they will advance...
...But even if it is so that the Neoconservative movement had to wait until the crises brought on by the Great Society, Vietnam, and Woodstock simply compelled a remobilization of liberal thought, it could be held that the personal enterprise and talents of Irving Kristol were indispensable to its success...
...By enlarging the conservative vision to include moral philosophy, political philosophy, and even religious thought, it helped make it more politically sensible as well as politically appealing...
...It is, so to speak, all there-in its own way...
...Kristol became, in the words of George Will, "a one-man critical mass for a political movement...
...In the early days of neoconservatism, there was little room for the adamant anti-statist...
...The emaciation of bourgeois England was all but complete: the empire gone, the Soviet empire unchallenged, the socialized industries untouchable, taxation confiscatory...
...And here, I think, is where what we call neoconservatism has made its major contribution in the past two decades...
...While in London as a young scholar and journalist, he read John Crowe Ransom's God Without Thunder...
...An attenuation of Marxist faith, even to the breaking point, does not describe what it is that the sometime Marxist now embraces, let alone particular articles of his new faith...
...It describes the erosion of liberal faith among a relatively small but talented and articulate group of scholars and intellectuals...
...We are reminded of the 5-year-old girl sitting down to draw...
...The style was lucid, straightforward, unpretentious, but brightened with flashes of irony and wit," Kristol writes, exactly describing his own style...
...The volume gives 42 pages of bibliography...
...Well, non-neoconservatives are not calling for the repeal of Social Security, but many of them (of us) would happily see organic reform in the Act, and need go no further than Chile for a better model...
...it contributed to political and social stability "by encouraging Americans to have a better opinion of their society-a 'good' which the economist is at a loss to measure and which the ideologically oriented sociologist, interested in 'social change,' is likely to scorn...
...I did not have the patience and I lacked the necessary intellectual rigor to bring my ideas into some kind of consistent thesis...
...It was with the founding of The Public Interest that the need was felt to come up with a term that would distinguish Kristol and his associates from other movers, other movements, some of them contentious (the left), some harmonious (the right...
...I make a point here that would appear to be self-serving, which it is, but a point that serves also the interests of historical accuracy...
...When I wrote those words-1963-Will Herberg was appearing regularly as Religion Editor of National Review...
...He ends by remarking happily the political faith of those who surround him...
...Only if conservatism can "give its own moral and intellectual substance to its idea of liberty" will true headway be made...
...The salient event in the intellectual history of the modern world, Kristol tells us persuasively, is the triumph of the French environment over against the Anglo-Scottish...
...And the reader is as satisfied as if he had read through a catechism...
...I was able to see close-up the basic political impotence of traditional conservatism which lived off Democratic errors but had no governing philosophy of its own...
...He did not dilate on a point he considered obvious in what it told us...
...You can buy a house in Levittown for $28,000...
...In 1944 Albert Jay Nock's Memoirs of a Superfluous Man had appeared and a few months after that, Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom...
...Not two decades but three before Mr...
...Mother, what does God look like...
...The autobiography of his idea is missing only the identity of Whodunit, but the hints are everywhere, and readers will rejoice in this great exploration of cause and effect...
...DeMuth has written that the "project" began with "concrete objections to the unintended consequences of specific liberal policies and grew into a fundamental critique of liberalism itself as based on a mistaken conception of the nature of man...
...In sequence, Books, Essays, Newspaper Articles, Reviews, Interviews, Symposiums, and Letters...
...His current novel is Brothers No More...
...Well, they will now...
...and, pointedly, the anti-semitism of many of the young blacks associated with that turbulent period...
...In the 20-page introductory section, he gives us much of the narrative of his "idea...
...In conversation 30 years ago Kristol asked if I had noticed the New York Times story that a rebuilt apartment in the Bronx under the auspices of a federal housing agency cost $32,000 dollars...
...Chambers, a founding editor, had died two years before, and Richard Weaver would die that year, Will-moore Kendall in 1967...
...I wrote that her "exclusion" from the conservative movement was necessary because of "her desiccated philosophy's conclusive incompatibility with the conservative's emphasis on transcendence, intellectual and moral...
...Is there an Albigensian heresy in Irving's credo...
...except of course that Mr...
...Kristol wrote those lines, National Review published what was correctly interpreted as a repudiation of Ayn Rand...
...Reliable political visions need to spring from a proper understanding of man...
...Chambers, Kirk, Weaver, and Herberg were not primarily evangelists for the Mt...
...More specifically, he cites the Social Security program ("and its subsequent corollary, Medicare") as the "outstanding social reform of the century...
...Yes, but an erosion of faith doesn't midwife any complementary view...
...There are notes on his childhood...
...Such impulses are "eschatological" rather than empirical, "meliorist" in vision...
...and answer, "I would say it is more a descriptive term than a prescriptive one...
...To celebrate Kristol's 75th birthday, a Festschrift was done, The Neoconservative Imagination (AEI Press, 249 pages, $12.95...
...A third was the licentious thought and behavior of the student revolutionaries in the sixties, combined with the failure of the liberal establishment to find its voice repudiating and correcting them...
...Kristol is not epiphany-minded, however acute his empirical intelligence...
...Early in any discussion of work by Irving Kristol, mention needs to be made of the way in which he writes...
...In his engaging introduction, Kristol takes us back to the early postwar years...
...Moreover, a movement some of whose luminaries, like Nock and Frank Chodorov, were correctly judged to be antistatist to the point of anarchy ("An Anarchist's Progress" was the title of one of Nock's essays...
...And to have that, it helps to understand the spiritual dimension of man...
...Pursuant to that tradition, Kristol defines his movement as concerned with "realistic meliorism...
...There are men and women on the right who will frown on this self-designation by the godfather of neoconservatism, perhaps even accusing him of cooptation of the conservative cause...
...A second was the manifest failure of the civil rights movement to bring on the world promised by its bards...
...conservatism just, well, jejune and, in any event, politically unmarketable...
...Kristol preeminent among them, considered it a liability to effect a political liaison with the conservative movement (Gold-water was its preeminent public figure) that had sustained saturation bombing by liberal critics from the beginning ("Scrambled Eggheads On the Right" was the title of the long essay by Dwight Macdonald, disdaining the birth of National Review in 1955...
...and it is overwhelmingly popular...
...Great Britain was in the hands of socialists, and when Churchill resumed office he did not resume power...
...It is edited by Christopher DeMuth and Kristol's son, William (the editor and publisher of this magazine...
...And yet in the 500 pages of this book, questions of every kind are pondered-questions philosophical, cultural, and political...
...Sinai...
...Neos are now just plain cons...
...And then too the Neoconservative movement wanted to proceed at its own gait, which it proceeded to do, as this volume confirms...
...But much of what threatened, most especially communism abroad and disorientation here, pointed to a moral dislocation...
...One reason was that its leaders, Mr...
...Neoconservatism, for its part, had provided traditional conservatives with an intellectual dimension that goes beyond economics to reflections on the roots of social and cultural stability...
...is Editor at Large of National Review...
...His criteria for so designating it are worth noting: It is comprehensive in its coverage...
...I was asked why National Review had turned against Rand and gave the answer in an essay called, "Notes Toward an Empirical Definition of Conservatism," published as a preface to a book of essays on conservatism (Did You Ever See a Dream, Walking...
...He found U.S...
...That is a tremendous statement in political taxonomy, on the order of the excommunication of Trotsky from the communist movement, as presided over by Moscow...
...Spoken in 1975...
...Kristol moves in the opposite, ecumenical direction-toward amalgamation, away from schism...
...Just as erroneous economic actions by government can wreck a society and a polity, so erroneous moral and political beliefs can accomplish the same end, more indirectly but just as effectively...
Vol. 1 • October 1995 • No. 4
