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Irving Kristol, the “godfather” of neoconservatism and one of our most important public intellectuals, played an extraordinarily influential role in the development of American intellectual and political culture over the past half century. These essays, many hard to find and reprinted here for the first time since their initial appearance, are a penetrating survey of the intellectual development of one of the progenitors of neoconservatism.
Kristol wrote over the years on a remarkably broad range of topics–from W. H. Auden to Ronald Reagan, from the neoconservative movement’s roots in the 1940s at City College to American foreign policy, from religion to capitalism. Kristol’s writings provide us with a unique guide to the development of neoconservatism as one of the leading strains of thought–one of the leading “persuasions”–in recent American political and intellectual history.
About the Author
Irving Kristol, the founder and editor of the Public Interest, was also a regular contributor for three decades to the Wall Street Journal. He was the author of Two Cheers for Capitalism, On the Democratic Idea in America, Reflections of a Neoconservative, and Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea.
Irving Kristol’s Brute Reason
The New York Times Book Review – January 27, 2011 (Excerpt)
Irving Kristol, who died in 2009, is sometimes called the “godfather” or even “father” of neoconservatism, and the patriarchal honorific, like a well-worn hat, sits comfortably atop “The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 1942-2009.” The book is strictly a family enterprise. It has been lovingly edited by Kristol’s widow, the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, and carries a prefatory funeral eulogy by their sorrowful son, the Republican journalist William Kristol. Even the selection of essays reflects a uniquely familial degree of intimacy.
Himmelfarb recounts in her introduction that while “rummaging among old files” after her husband’s death, she discovered tattered copies of a short-lived and wholly forgotten little magazine called Enquiry: A Journal of Independent Radical Thought. Her husband and some of his young friends founded the magazine in 1942, the year of her marriage, and they kept it afloat for eight issues, until the young friends and Kristol himself disappeared into the Army. Himmelfarb has reproduced the cover of Vol. 1, No. 1 — austere, elegant, partly sans-serif in the 1940s style, 10 cents a copy — and the sight of the magazine does conjure an era.
Kristol in 1942 was just two years out of New York’s City College, working as a machinist in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and he still bore the marks of his student Trotskyism. Russian revolutionaries in the time of the czars used to adopt noms de guerre to outwit the police, and at City College in the 1930s, earnest young Trotskyists did the same. Irving Kristol renamed himself “William Ferry” (which, if I may add a detail, was an undergraduate in-joke aimed at one of American Trotskyism’s adult leaders, who, not being a college man himself, was unable to pronounce correctly the word “periphery”). And sure enough, at the foot of Enquiry’s inaugural cover, you can see the name “William Ferry” listed as the author of a piece on W. H. Auden. [Read the full article...]
