Irving Kristol’s Brute Reason
By PAUL BERMAN
NYT Book Review
THE NEOCONSERVATIVE PERSUASION
Selected Essays, 1942-2009
By Irving Kristol
Edited by Gertrude Himmelfarb. Foreword by William Kristol.
390 pp. Basic Books. $29.95.
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.
Himmelfarb has reprinted the essay. It is bristly with words like “hypostasizing” — a commentary by a wisp of a lad who is trying in vain to appear as solid and august as Lionel Trilling, the literary critic. Still, the essay makes good reading, and this is precisely because young Kristol, in his boyish impressionability, was alive to the intellectual tremors of his own moment, which were huge.
Teenage Trotskyism, back in the ’30s, had rested on a series of firm beliefs and alarming realities. The student rebels noticed that at home in America, capitalism had pretty much collapsed, which made free-market conservatism or any other kind of conservatism out of the question. Europe had absolutely collapsed. Communism and the Soviet Union advertised themselves as the answer to everything. The young Trotskyists knew too much about Stalin to believe any such thing. Trotskyism’s big idea was to hold out for a better sort of revolutionary left, under the leadership of Leon Trotsky himself. This did not seem altogether impossible, for a while. Then the Spanish Civil War turned out badly. The Spanish left went down to defeat. In 1940 Trotsky was assassinated. And revolutionary leftism retreated from the zones of plausibility to the zone of mere speculation.
(More here.)
NYT Book Review
THE NEOCONSERVATIVE PERSUASION
Selected Essays, 1942-2009
By Irving Kristol
Edited by Gertrude Himmelfarb. Foreword by William Kristol.
390 pp. Basic Books. $29.95.
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.
Himmelfarb has reprinted the essay. It is bristly with words like “hypostasizing” — a commentary by a wisp of a lad who is trying in vain to appear as solid and august as Lionel Trilling, the literary critic. Still, the essay makes good reading, and this is precisely because young Kristol, in his boyish impressionability, was alive to the intellectual tremors of his own moment, which were huge.
Teenage Trotskyism, back in the ’30s, had rested on a series of firm beliefs and alarming realities. The student rebels noticed that at home in America, capitalism had pretty much collapsed, which made free-market conservatism or any other kind of conservatism out of the question. Europe had absolutely collapsed. Communism and the Soviet Union advertised themselves as the answer to everything. The young Trotskyists knew too much about Stalin to believe any such thing. Trotskyism’s big idea was to hold out for a better sort of revolutionary left, under the leadership of Leon Trotsky himself. This did not seem altogether impossible, for a while. Then the Spanish Civil War turned out badly. The Spanish left went down to defeat. In 1940 Trotsky was assassinated. And revolutionary leftism retreated from the zones of plausibility to the zone of mere speculation.
(More here.)
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