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ABSTRACT
This paper demonstrates how the neoconservative programme, as articulated primarily by Irving Kristol, offered a conservative viewpoint distinct from and theoretically opposed to neoliberalism. It does so by explaining the founding vision of Kristol and Daniel Bell’s influential neoconservative journal The Public Interest, and the former’s subsequent response to the social and political contestations of the late 1960s. The also paper provides an explanation of how Kristol’s strategy of moral and cultural insurgency – within institutions such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal – attempted to fill in the practical gaps of neoliberalism’s economistic understanding of the defense of American society. The concluding section will reflect on the extent to which this critical exchange between neoconservatism and neoliberalism during the period of both movements’ political maturation, from roughly 1965 to 1980, provides an answer to long-held questions about the possibility of a viable conservatism in America.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Kristol first openly claimed the “neoconservative” label in the late 1970s, but the term had already been circulating at the time of his MPS speech, mainly among neoconservatism’s left-wing critics. Cf. Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative.
2 Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 211.
3 The speech was published the following as Kristol, “Capitalism, Socialism, and Nihilism”.
4 Kristol, “Capitalism, Socialism, and Nihilism,” 12.
5 Concerning general reference works on the historical emergence of neoliberalism, we refer mainly to Burgin, The Great Persuasion and Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe. On neoconservatism, the most comprehensive history is Vaïsse, Neoconservatism.
6 Wendy Brown has described neoliberalism’s mode of “rationality” as one in which “All conduct is economic conduct; all spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics, even when those spheres are not directly monetized.” Brown, Undoing the Demos, 10.
7 Brown, “American Nightmare”; Cooper, Family Values.
8 Bell and Kristol, “What is the Public Interest?”.
9 Cf. Grémion, L’intelligence de l’anticommunisme. Kristol was for many years the co-editor of the CCF-affiliated journal Encounter.
10 The CCF’s foundation and early history in many ways paralleled that of Friedrich Hayek’s MPS. Though the former consisted mainly of center-left social democrats and the latter of free-market economists, both organizations sought to redefine the idea of “liberalism” and claim the label as their own.
11 Though he had been circulating the idea for some time in CCF circles and in the pages of CCF journals, Aron’s most famous articulation of this thesis occurs in the conclusion to his well-known polemic against the French intelligentsia L’Opium des intellectuels. Aron provided a more substantial sociological foundation for the notion of the end of ideology in his lectures given at the Sorbonne on industrial society in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as well as in Trois essais sur la société industrielle. For an extended look at Aron’s rise to prominence in the CCF, particularly his participation in the organization’s crucial 1955 gathering in Milan, see Grémion, Intelligence, ch. 4. Kristol and Aron organized the CCF’s famous 1955 conference in Milan on the subject of the end of ideology, which helped bring about Bell’s influential book bearing that title: Bell, The End of Ideology.
12 Justin Vaïsse notes that The Public Interest essentially took the “descriptive” thesis of the end of ideology and transformed it “into a normative theme, in some sense a manifesto in favor of technocratic rule”: Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 52.
13 Glazer, “Paradoxes of American Poverty”.
14 Glazer’s critique of the War on Poverty typified the family-centric approach to social welfare policy that Melinda Cooper attributes to a broad consensus across left and right whose collapse helped prompt the rise of both neoconservatism and neoliberalism; cf. Cooper, Family Values, ch. 2.
15 Glazer, The Limits of Social Policy.
16 Moynihan, “A Crisis of Confidence?”.
17 Moynihan, The Negro Family. See also Cooper, Family Values, 33–40; Coates, “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration”.
18 Quoted, with disapproval, in Kristol, “‘When Virtue Loses All Her Loveliness’”.
19 Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty.
20 Daniel Stedman Jones notes Kristol and Bell’s affinity with the spirit of Keynes, a faithful believer “in the capacity of the educated, enlightened expert.” Stedman Jones, Masters, 183.
21 Cooper, Family Values, ch. 2. For a defense of a basic income in The Public Interest, see Tobin, “The Case for an Income Guarantee”.
22 Cooper, Family Values, 47–8. Daniel Stedman Jones concurs with Cooper’s diagnosis of Friedman’s hardline turn beginning in the 1970s: Stedman Jones, Masters, 96–102. Friedman had in fact published in The Public Interest in the years prior to this turn. His contribution to a forum on higher education policy in 1968, however, was in the minority for its skepticism towards the principle of state funding for colleges and universities. Friedman, “The Higher Schooling in America”.
23 See issue number 13 of The Public Interest (Fall 1968), as well as Bell and Kristol, eds. Confrontation: The Student Rebellion.
24 Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.
25 Kristol, “The Adversary Culture of Intellectuals”, reprinted in Kristol, Reflections, 27–42. Norman Podhoretz published an almost identical critique of the “new class” in “The Adversary Culture and the New Class,” in B. Bruce-Briggs, ed., The New Class? Bell pushed back strongly against Kristol and Podhoretz’s use of the term “new class. See Daniel Bell, “The New Class, a Muddled Concept,” in the same 1979 collection. Kristol and Podhoretz borrowed the term “adversary culture” from Podhoretz’s mentor Lionel Trilling. See Trilling’s introduction to Beyond Culture, reprinted in Trilling, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, 552.
26 Many European members and participants of the defunct Congress for Cultural freedom exhibited a similar neoconservative turn due to the student protest movements and rise of the New Left. See in particular: Aron, La Révolution introuvable; Löwenthal, Der romantische Rückfall.
27 “Introduction,” in Kristol, Reflections, xiv–xv.
28 Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 1–20.
29 Ibid., 50–109.
30 At the height of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Bell denounced in no uncertain terms his former colleague Kristol’s flirtation with cultural populism as a betrayal of the technocratic project they had embarked on together two decades earlier. See Bell, “The Revolt Against Modernity”.
31 Cooper, Family Values, 46.
32 For the role of the neoconservatives in the broader American “culture wars” beginning in the 1970s, see Hartman, A War for the Soul of America, ch. 2.
33 Ibid., 7–23.
34 Cooper, Family Values, 60–3.
35 Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 203–14; Stedman Jones, Masters, 152–73. The term “counter-establishment” itself was popularized by the journalist Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment.
36 Stedman Jones, Masters, 134–78.
37 Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands.
38 Kristol’s most important Wall Street Journal articles from 1970 to 1978 appear in Two Cheers for Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978).
39 Powell, “Confidential Memorandum”.
40 Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 204. Cf. Kristol, “Business and the New Class” (1975), in Two Cheers, 27–31.
41 Kristol, “Introduction,” in Two Cheers, xi–xii.
42 Irving Kristol, “Some Doubts About Deregulation” (1975), in Kristol, Two Cheers, 111.
43 Irving Kristol, “Horatio Alger and Profits” (1974), in Two Cheers, 84–9.
44 Ibid., 84.
45 Kristol, “When Virtue Loses All Her Loveliness,” 9–11.
46 Kristol, “Horatio Alger and Profits,” op. cit.
47 Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment,
48 Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 203.
49 Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, See also Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind, 102–3.
50 An example of this sort of thinking was Novak’s, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, an AEI-sponsored book that attempted to demonstrate between the society created by the convergence of capitalism and democracy with the values of Christianity.
51 An excellent primary source-based overview of the New Right can be found in Klatch, Women of the New Right.
52 Irving Kristol, “Taxes, Poverty, and Equality,” The Public Interest (Fall 1974); Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 203.
53 Cf. Irving Kristol, “The Republican Future” (1976), in Kristol Two Cheers, 124–9. Kristol found himself having to argue the same point as late as 1993, in Kristol, “A Conservative Welfare State”. Even Milton Friedman complained of his colleagues’ counterproductive fixation on budget deficits in “The Limits of Tax Limitation,” Heritage Foundation Policy Review (Summer 1978), cited in Stedman Jones, Masters, 172.
54 Dorien, The Neoconservative Mind, 311.
55 Cf. Stedman Jones, Masters, chs. 6–7, Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 207.
56 Daniel Bell, “The Revolt Against Modernity,” 60.
57 See Bell, et al., The New American Right.
58 Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America.
59 Buckley’s collaborator at the National Review Frank Meyer, often considered the primary theorist of “fusionism,” actually rejected this concept, and sought to demonstrate—decades before Michael Novak—that Christian tradition and liberal individualism were fundamentally compatible. See Meyer, In Defense of Freedom.
60 Cooper, Family Values, 57.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jacob Hamburger
Jacob Hamburger is a graduate student in philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. In addition to his scholarship on the history of neoconservatism, he writes frequently as a journalist in both English and French. He has also translated into English authors including Michel Foucault and Marcel Gauchet.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins is a lecturer in the religion department and in the directed studies program at Yale University. He is writing a book for Columbia University Press titled, The Other Intellectuals: Raymond Aron and the United States.