Irving Kristol: life, ideas and books

Life

Irving Kristol was born in New York City in 1920 and raised in Brooklyn. He wrote for Commentary from 1947 to 1952, co-founded the magazine Encounter in London with Stephen Spender, edited The Reporter, and in the 1960s worked at Basic Books. He co-founded The Public Interest in 1965 and co-edited it until 2002, and in 1985 he founded The National Interest.

He held the Henry Luce chair in urban values at New York University from 1969 to 1987, wrote a monthly column for the Wall Street Journal from 1972 to 1997, served on the National Council on the Humanities, and was a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002 and died in 2009.

Ideas

Kristol described neoconservatism as a persuasion rather than a movement or a fixed ideology: practical, anti-utopian and attentive to the unintended consequences of social programmes. The term was coined as a pejorative in 1973 by Michael Harrington, and Kristol adopted it. He accepted the New Deal-era welfare state but opposed most Great Society programmes.

In Two Cheers for Capitalism (1978) he held that capitalism deserved two cheers, for raising living standards and protecting liberty, but not a third, because markets do not generate the moral and religious character a free society needs. He thus favoured economic growth, including supply-side policy, while insisting that economics be joined with moral and religious thought. In foreign policy he was a firm anticommunist who supported an active American role in the world.

Major works

• On the Democratic Idea in America (1972).
• Two Cheers for Capitalism (1978).
• Reflections of a Neo-conservative (1983).
• Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (1995).
• The Neo-conservative Persuasion (2011, collected essays).

Why conservatives read him

Kristol's greatest influence was institutional: he gave a generation of former liberals and social scientists journals, foundations and an audience, and so helped move a group of New York intellectuals into the Republican coalition. Readers still go to him for the shortest account of why a conservative can be reconciled to the modern welfare state yet remain skeptical of its ambitions.

Critics on the left saw neoconservatism as a betrayal of liberalism; critics on the right, including paleoconservatives, accused it of importing a liberal temperament into the movement. Both arguments are part of the story. His work belongs beside that of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman as a case for markets, though with more concern than they showed for the moral life of the middle class, and it fed directly into the policy debates of the Ronald Reagan years. Obituaries described him as perhaps the most consequential public intellectual of the latter half of the twentieth century, a judgment his admirers share and his critics dispute, which is itself a sign of how much the argument still matters.