REFLECTIONS OF A NEOCONSERVATIVE: Looking Back, Looking Ahead

by Irving Kristol ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 4, 1983

It is the self-imposed assignment of neoconservatives to explain to the American people why they are right, and to the intellectuals why they are wrong,"" So we have it, up-front in the introduction--with characteristic effrontery and audacity, and more style than substance. Along with his fellow neoconservatives, Kristol too is an intellectual: the first two selections in this new, retrospective essay collection, ""Memoirs of a Trotskyist"" and ""Memoirs of a Cold Warrior,"" are chapters of intellectual autobiography. And it is equally captious, as well as inherently reductive, to speak of ""the American people"" as a single-minded monolith. But Kristol's fallings as a thinker and social critic--the inconsistencies, the sweeping, unsupported assertions--are his strengths as a polemicist and publicist. From the section titled ""The Culture of Democratic Capitalism,"" on two suceeding pages: ""the ways in which various strata of our citizenry--from the relatively poor to the relatively affluent--are beginning to behave like a bourgeois urban mob are familiar to anyone who reads his newspaper, and I do not propose to elaborate upon them here."" ""Why the very best of bourgeois society--the work of our most gifted poets, painters, novelists, and dramatists--should have. . .such animus against its own bourgeois world is a question one can only speculate on."" Learning what Kristol is against, section by section, leaves us with little idea of what he is for--beyond a certain, presumed past virtue. But he does tap or feed some prevalent suspicions: ""What, really, is the point of this keen interest among economists and sociologists in the issue of inequality?"" (""There is precious little evidence. . .that it corresponds to a widespread popular concern."") And he does sometimes go his own, curious ways--into the difference, for instance, between the attitudes of traditional Judaism and Christianity toward the poor. (It is today's ""conventional Christian wisdom. . .that the poor--what we call underprivileged people--need not be expected to behave virtuously until their material situation has been remedied."") Of some importance as an assemblage--but Kristol's provocations read better singly and in passing.

Pub Date: Oct. 4, 1983

ISBN: 0786100591

Page Count: -

Publisher: Basic Books

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1983

Categories: NONFICTION