Jeane Kirkpatrick: life, ideas and books

Life

Jeane Kirkpatrick was born Jeane Duane Jordan in Duncan, Oklahoma, in 1926. She studied at Stephens College and Columbia University, where she earned a bachelor's degree, a master's and a doctorate in political science. She joined the Georgetown University faculty in 1967 and became a full professor of government in 1973. Her party registration changed over the decades: she was a Socialist in the 1940s, then a Democrat, and she became a Republican in 1985.

An essay she published in Commentary in November 1979 brought her to the attention of Ronald Reagan, who made her a foreign policy adviser in his 1980 campaign. From February 1981 to April 1985 she was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, the first woman to hold the post, and she sat on the National Security Council. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985 and died in 2006.

Ideas

"Dictatorships and Double Standards" criticised the Carter administration for pressing allies such as Iran and Nicaragua toward reform while tolerating Soviet-aligned regimes. Kirkpatrick distinguished traditional authoritarian governments, which leave much of society's life alone and can evolve, from revolutionary totalitarian ones, which she held to be harder to reform. The argument was labelled the Kirkpatrick Doctrine and was used to justify American support for anticommunist governments in the region.

She was sceptical that democracy could be installed quickly in societies lacking the habits and institutions for it, and she was a critic of the United Nations' effectiveness. She co-founded the Committee on the Present Danger in 1972 and, later, Empower America.

Major works

• "Dictatorships and Double Standards", Commentary (1979).
• Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics (1982).
• The Reagan Doctrine and U.S. Foreign Policy (1985).
• Legitimacy and Force (1987).
• The Withering Away of the Totalitarian State... and Other Surprises (1992).

Why conservatives read him

Kirkpatrick is read as a clear statement of Cold War realism on the right and as a case study in how a Democratic scholar became a Republican foreign-policy figure through disagreement with her old party over the Soviet Union. Her distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes became a standard reference in debates over alliances, and her record at the UN shaped how Ronald Reagan's administration treated that body.

The doctrine remains disputed. Critics argue that it excused abuses by American allies, and supporters point out that the Soviet bloc fell while several authoritarian allies later moved toward democracy. Her contemporaries in the neoconservative circle, Irving Kristol among them, valued her intellectual rigor, and her essays are still assigned in courses on American foreign policy. Her later writing, including the 1992 book on the end of the Soviet system, argued that totalitarian states can collapse in ways that theorists had not expected.