Leave No War Behind
By BARRY GEWEN
NYT Book Review
NEOCONSERVATISM: The Biography of a Movement
By Justin Vaïsse
Translated by Arthur Goldhammer.366 pp. The Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press. $35
Probably no group of intellectuals has had a greater impact on American politics over the last four decades than the neoconservatives. The Rolling Stones even sang a song about them. Yet who or what exactly is a neoconservative? Over the years the meaning of the word has changed. Initially it referred to a coterie of liberals and leftists, absorbed in domestic policy issues, who raised questions about the efficacy of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs in the mid-1960s. Today, neoconservatives seem restricted for the most part to the Republican Party and are advocates of a muscular foreign policy. Irving Kristol, who once described himself as a liberal “mugged by reality,” was one kind of neoconservative. His son, William, a lifelong Republican, is an entirely different kind.
This definitional question, and in particular neoconservatism’s extraordinary transformation, is the principal subject of “Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement,” by Justin Vaïsse, a French expert on American foreign policy who is currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. It is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the contours of our recent political past. Vaïsse is a historian of ideas. “Neoconservatism” demonstrates, among other things, that ideas really do make a difference in our lives.
Vaïsse defines neoconservatism by disassembling it. He sees three “ages” to the movement. The first began in the mid-1960s with intellectuals like Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer gathering around Kristol and Bell’s new magazine, The Public Interest, and also around Commentary, under its editor Norman Podhoretz. At the time, all of these writers were sympathetic in principle to an activist government, especially when it came to the economy, but questioned the expectations of Great Society planners of antipoverty and related social programs — or, in Saul Bellow’s phrase, the Good Intentions Paving Company. Challenging what they saw as liberal overreaching and wishful thinking with hard, often crushing, empirical facts, these early neoconservatives were, in a sense, the skeptical conscience of liberalism.
(More here.)
NYT Book Review
NEOCONSERVATISM: The Biography of a Movement
By Justin Vaïsse
Translated by Arthur Goldhammer.366 pp. The Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press. $35
Probably no group of intellectuals has had a greater impact on American politics over the last four decades than the neoconservatives. The Rolling Stones even sang a song about them. Yet who or what exactly is a neoconservative? Over the years the meaning of the word has changed. Initially it referred to a coterie of liberals and leftists, absorbed in domestic policy issues, who raised questions about the efficacy of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs in the mid-1960s. Today, neoconservatives seem restricted for the most part to the Republican Party and are advocates of a muscular foreign policy. Irving Kristol, who once described himself as a liberal “mugged by reality,” was one kind of neoconservative. His son, William, a lifelong Republican, is an entirely different kind.
This definitional question, and in particular neoconservatism’s extraordinary transformation, is the principal subject of “Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement,” by Justin Vaïsse, a French expert on American foreign policy who is currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. It is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the contours of our recent political past. Vaïsse is a historian of ideas. “Neoconservatism” demonstrates, among other things, that ideas really do make a difference in our lives.
Vaïsse defines neoconservatism by disassembling it. He sees three “ages” to the movement. The first began in the mid-1960s with intellectuals like Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer gathering around Kristol and Bell’s new magazine, The Public Interest, and also around Commentary, under its editor Norman Podhoretz. At the time, all of these writers were sympathetic in principle to an activist government, especially when it came to the economy, but questioned the expectations of Great Society planners of antipoverty and related social programs — or, in Saul Bellow’s phrase, the Good Intentions Paving Company. Challenging what they saw as liberal overreaching and wishful thinking with hard, often crushing, empirical facts, these early neoconservatives were, in a sense, the skeptical conscience of liberalism.
(More here.)
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