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Irving Kristol (89) "Godfather of Neoconservatism" Passes Away

Fiddytree

Fiddytree

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RIP: Irving Kristol (89) "Godfather of Neoconservatism" Passes Away

Irving Kristol, 1920-2009

Irving Kristol, writer, editor, and social philosopher, has died in Washington at the age of 89. His wisdom, wit, good humor, and generosity of spirit made him a friend and mentor to several generations of thinkers and public servants.
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The Weekly Standard
 
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I didn't realize that conservatives needed a "new conservative", did anyone check with the originals?
 
While I am still awaiting an article from at least Fox News (where I personally first heard the news), did I break protocol with The Weekly Standard?
 
You definitely better put RIP in that thread title!


RIP Mr. Kristol ....
 
I suppose it is to avoid heated arguments?

Personally, I could deal with it, but good suggestion!

I suppose I would be among one of the few here who doesn't view these guys with some level of distaste, so I see your point. :mrgreen:
 
Personally, I first found Irving Kristol while I was in my last years of high school. Back then the Iraq war was about ready to happen, and conversation was lively both for and against the war. At that time I had not read his essay for his son's (Bill Kristol) journal The Weekly Standard where he declared that he was wrong in declaring Neoconservatism a dead success. I was exposed to him by someone expressing the support of the ideology, and I was mostly curious about it. I wanted to know just what was with this seemingly small group of people and why so much controversy surrounded them (including the 9/11 conspiracy theory involving them). Eventually I got around to reading his essays, and even though there were several moments where I just could not agree with him no matter how hard I tried, reading each additional essay was a treat, a delight at any hour, including in the middle of a sleepless night.

The man was a clever writer with a capacity of great wit and humor. He could not begin to address a (at the time of the essay) contemporary political, economic, theological, or social issue without first digging back far into the past and working his way forward. Even if when you pull back a bit and find his essays regarding the intellectual class of America or Europe as too self-congratulatory, you could not help but almost join him in the celebration of the pursuit of ideas and their power.

To me, it is difficult to find writers that can pull you in to the pursuit of knowledge with such finesse like Irving Kristol. There are certainly still some souls out there who can make the written word as beautiful, inspiring, and as intelligent as they should be, but it seems as though we lost another wonderful contributor to political discourse, even if some of it was quite polemical.
 
From the transcript of The Power of Nightmares.

It describes the conditions which led to the creation of the neoconservatives and quotes Irving Kristol.

[ TITLE: 11pm, JULY 25th 1967 ]

PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON: Law and order have broken down in Detroit, Michigan. Pillage, looting, murder…

VO: Only a few years before, President Johnson had promised policies that would create a new and a better world in America. He had called it “the Great Society.”

[ TITLE: President LYNDON JOHNSON, 1964 ]

JOHNSON: The Great Society is in place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind. It is a place where the City of Man…

VO: But now, in the wake of some of the worst riots ever seen in America, that dream seemed to have ended in violence and hatred. One prominent liberal journalist called Irving Kristol began to question whether it might actually be the policies themselves that were causing social breakdown.

IRVING KRISTOL: If you had asked any liberal in 1960, we are going to pass these laws, these laws, these laws, and these laws, mentioning all the laws that in fact were passed in the 1960s and ‘70s, would you say crime will go up, drug addiction will go up, illegitimacy will go up, or will they get down? Obviously, everyone would have said, they will get down. And everyone would have been wrong. Now, that’s not something that the liberals have been able to face up to. They’ve had their reforms, and they have led to consequences that they did not expect and they don’t know what to do about.

VO: In the early ‘70s, Irving Kristol became the focus of a group of disaffected intellectuals in Washington. They were determined to understand why the optimistic liberal policies had failed. And they found the answer in the theories of Leo Strauss. Strauss explained that it was the very basis of the liberal idea—the belief in individual freedom—that was causing the chaos, because it undermined the shared moral framework that held society together. Individuals pursued their own selfish interests, and this inevitably led to conflict. As the movement grew, many young students who had studied Strauss’ ideas came to Washington to join this group. Some, like Paul Wolfowitz, had been taught Strauss’ ideas at the University of Chicago, as had Francis Fukuyama. And others, like Irving Kristol’s son William, had studied Strauss’ theories at Harvard. This group became known as the neoconservatives.
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Transcript - The Power of Nightmares - Part 1


R.I.P. Mr. Kristol.
 
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You can bet the devil's lubin' up tonight. Gonna be a party and a half on someone's ass!
 
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Jackboot said:
I didn't realize that conservatives needed a "new conservative", did anyone check with the originals?
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The interesting fact is that Irving Kristol was a Marxist / Trotskyite before he became enchanted with Neoconservatism and became 'born-again' . One needs to wonder if anyone who "palled around " with Trotsky o Marx can be trusted.
 
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F107HyperSabr said:
The interesting fact is that Irving Kristol was a Marxist / Trotskyite before he became enchanted with Neoconservatism and became 'born-again' . One needs to wonder if anyone who "palled around " with Trotsky o Marx can be trusted.
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Did you read my post? If so you will see how he came to conservatism.
 
bhkad said:
Did you read my post? If so you will see how he came to conservatism.
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No, I did not have to read your post because I already knew a lot about Irving Kristol and why/how he became a neocon.
 
bhkad said:
Did you read my post? If so you will see how he came to conservatism.
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Well, Adam Curtis borrowed far too much from Straussian critics like Shadia Drury to come to that conclusion. Irving had always stated that he never really felt comfortable belonging to one group or another throughout his youth and adulthood, hence the "neo" designations he famously joked about so often.

Strauss did have a profound impact upon him, but so did Lionel Trilling and many others (include fellow Partisan Review members, fellow Alcov 1 classmates, early supply side economics proponents, fellow Public Interest writers, etc). Irving Kristol was the product of many intellectuals, family members, Jewish culture, and his own natural intuitions. This is why he stresses that neoconservatism is not a doctrine, a dogma, but rather a impulse.

You really get a sense of that by reading his writing. That is why I have this real distaste towards Adam Curtis' documentary, no matter how many times I see it. He simply looks at the Straussian angle in the wrong way and presupposes that it essentially is neoconservatism rather than one wing of an incredibly complex label. I mean, if you think about it carefully, everything Curtis does with that documentary (besides grabbing content from copyrighted sources without really communicating enough with said copyright holders, thus making it difficult to ship his content through mainstream vendors) is to create this really nice and clean narrative about how to seemingly extreme characteristics of international relations are confusing the reality of the human existence, and that everything should be just fine if we simply accept that these leaders are shaping us towards a paranoid existence and we deny their premises. If you start to spend time examining one person in the theory, and expand outward, his whole documentary seemingly falls apart.

I spent my time focusing on the neoconservative front, and bit by bit, I discovered how Curtis really just put together a shoddy product of others' work and once I examined the originators of that interpretation, you could find countless amounts of holes. But, you know, it's on the internet, it's spread quickly, it's promoted by the BBC, it has fantastic music, impressive visuals (again, taken from other sources), and has a fantastic narrative, but it's a really poorly examined thesis when you get down to it.
 
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F107HyperSabr said:
The interesting fact is that Irving Kristol was a Marxist / Trotskyite before he became enchanted with Neoconservatism and became 'born-again' . One needs to wonder if anyone who "palled around " with Trotsky o Marx can be trusted.
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It's a complicated issue, but since I never really bought into the idea of "palled around" (as was said in the 2008 election) being the end all, be all of how one analyzes an intellectual's political identity, the whole Trotskyite thing could miss the point or complexity of someone.

Irving Kristol got exposed to the Marxist movement through his older sister, when he was a young person. Expanding outward, there was an extraordinary amount of emphasis on leftwing politics, particularly one school of socialism or another in the Jewish community at around the time of the Great Depression. When we think about that and the time at which he was growing up, it could be really easy to suppose how one would teeter towards that intellectual direction. But over time, Kristol thought to himself, after he got exposed to more average Americans and the end of World War II, that this whole socialism experiment seems to be a fantasy, both not possible, and an "organic" (I believe that is what he labeled it as) connection to Stalinism (which he never liked to begin with). The triumph of America in the war, the growing economy, it all seemed like a confirmation that one could be completely disillusioned with Marxism, Trotsky, the whole nine yards in at least most ways.

After that, I would agree that Trotsky or Marx helped impress upon Irving the power of ideas and how they can be spread, the nature of the intellectual class, a mode of thinking with how to view the measurement of society, etc, but there was something intrinsic in the man to quickly make Irving Howe basically think the man was a complete mistake in incorporating into his little group of Trotskyists believing in the power of socialism.
 
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I never knew the guy.
 
bhkad said:
Did you read my post? If so you will see how he came to conservatism.
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By deciding that the individual freedom should be quashed to serve the state?
How incredibly conservative. :roll:
ymmv
Also note that he favored big-government--another solid conservative value there.
Not worried about the growth of the welfare state--pretty much as conservative as it gets right there.

A proponent of big-govt who felt individual liberty should be strictly regulated by the govt. Yep that's as conservative and American as it gets. Yessiree, Bob.
:roll:
 
By deciding that the individual freedom should be quashed to serve the state?
How incredibly conservative.
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It is a conservative notion. It just is not classical American liberality. Also recall that Curtis is relying upon a predisposed interpretation of the philosopher Leo Strauss's writings, while in all actuality the exact nature of Strauss' political beliefs are not known, and political leanings of his students may also not be the same as the teacher.

Also note that he favored big-government--another solid conservative value there.
Not worried about the growth of the welfare state--pretty much as conservative as it gets right there.
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He was not afraid of the use of government to improve the human condition. Rather, he was wary of falling into the notion that the state could improve the human condition to some idealistic end like that of Plato's republic or so forth. If he was not worried about the growth of the welfare state, why suppose you that he was so interested in curbing the expansion of the welfare state and exposing liberalism's ill-considered weaknesses?
 
Oops. Forgot to explain something about a great majority of the neoconservative foregone conclusion with the welfare state.

The creation of the welfare state by FDR was a welcome triumph of American politics. However, to Irving Kristol and others (disagreeing with each other about which program or mentality specifically was okay or needing to be stopped or curbed), what was being seen as the next big step of the New Deal (the Great Society) carried with it many problems or delusions. The motto of Kristol in this regard was essentially, "help people to the point at which they could be helped, but do no more.". That meant that the welfare state via FDR was the point where humanity for the most part could be helped, and the Great Society was a delusional practice that in some areas could have actually harmed the American public and its virtues. To which reason Reagan became a hero of neoconservatism (to whatever extent, because Reagan is like Tocqueville or the Bible, all sorts of people, conservative or neoconservative claim the man as one of their own, when in reality it is not so clean cut-which is where a lot of conservatives here would not appreciate what I just said) when he became the first Republican President, or conservative president for that matter, to stop fighting the fight against The New Deal and publicly hail the achievements of FDR.

By the time of the 1990s, neoconservatives to a certain extent felt like they were apart of the conservative mainstream and declared the 'neo' designation dead. Of course, Irving later said he was wrong to give it a funeral.
 
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I wonder what he thought about the most recent "neocons"?
 
Fiddytree said:
Well, Adam Curtis borrowed far too much from Straussian critics like Shadia Drury to come to that conclusion. Irving had always stated that he never really felt comfortable belonging to one group or another throughout his youth and adulthood, hence the "neo" designations he famously joked about so often.

Strauss did have a profound impact upon him, but so did Lionel Trilling and many others (include fellow Partisan Review members, fellow Alcov 1 classmates, early supply side economics proponents, fellow Public Interest writers, etc). Irving Kristol was the product of many intellectuals, family members, Jewish culture, and his own natural intuitions. This is why he stresses that neoconservatism is not a doctrine, a dogma, but rather a impulse.

You really get a sense of that by reading his writing. That is why I have this real distaste towards Adam Curtis' documentary, no matter how many times I see it. He simply looks at the Straussian angle in the wrong way and presupposes that it essentially is neoconservatism rather than one wing of an incredibly complex label. I mean, if you think about it carefully, everything Curtis does with that documentary (besides grabbing content from copyrighted sources without really communicating enough with said copyright holders, thus making it difficult to ship his content through mainstream vendors) is to create this really nice and clean narrative about how to seemingly extreme characteristics of international relations are confusing the reality of the human existence, and that everything should be just fine if we simply accept that these leaders are shaping us towards a paranoid existence and we deny their premises. If you start to spend time examining one person in the theory, and expand outward, his whole documentary seemingly falls apart.

I spent my time focusing on the neoconservative front, and bit by bit, I discovered how Curtis really just put together a shoddy product of others' work and once I examined the originators of that interpretation, you could find countless amounts of holes. But, you know, it's on the internet, it's spread quickly, it's promoted by the BBC, it has fantastic music, impressive visuals (again, taken from other sources), and has a fantastic narrative, but it's a really poorly examined thesis when you get down to it.
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I thank you.
 
The silenced majority said:
Neoconservatism is ideology & has very little to do with Conservatism.

RIP
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I think Dr.Johnson put it best when he said of David Hume "The fellow is a Tory by chance." and Russell Kirk applied this to to Hegel. I would paraphrase that and apply it to the neocons and Burkean conservatism. They are to me far more the disciples of the likes of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hume and Hegel than they are of the strictly Burkean, Christian conservative tradition. They intersect with us sometimes but they lack what Burke would have called veneration, imho, and often we come into conflict.
 
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Wessexman said:
I think Dr.Johnson put it best when he said of David Hume "The fellow is a Tory by chance." and Russell Kirk applied this to to Hegel. I would paraphrase that and apply it to the neocons and Burkean conservatism. They are to me far more the disciples of the likes of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hume and Hegel than they are of the strictly Burkean, Christian conservative tradition. They intersect with us sometimes but they lack what Burke would have called veneration, imho, and often we come into conflict.
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Don't forget the including the ancients as well.
 
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