Graham Ashurst, Emily Hull, and Sophie Joscelyne
Edited by Thomas Cryer
INTRODUCTION
This roundtable examines the multifaceted phenomenon of neoconservatism through the intellectual trajectories of three key figures: the historian of education Diane Ravitch (1938–), the journalist, editor, and “godfather of neoconservatism” Irving Kristol (1920–2009), and the diplomat and Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick (1926–2006). Emerging in the 1960s as a critique of the perceived leftward drift in liberal politics, neoconservatism—while broadly characterized by anti-communism, cultural conservatism, and commitment to liberal democracy—exhibited significant internal variations and shifts in focus. By examining these individual careers and their engagement with neoconservative ideas, scholars Graham Ashurst, Emily Hull, and Sophie Joscelyne aim to provide a nuanced understanding of this significant and often debated current in modern political thought.
Neoconservatives quickly became an important component of the conservative revolution that swept Ronald Reagan to the Presidency in 1980. There is a large body of scholarship on neoconservatism (see, for example, work by Steinfels, Ehrman, and Vaïsse), yet historians have struggled to define exactly what neoconservatism was, tending to focus either on foreign policy or domestic politics. This roundtable brings together scholars of neoconservative foreign and domestic policy to consider the understudied connections between these—and other—facets of neoconservatism. In it, Ashurst, Hull, and Joscelyne grapple with central debates surrounding neoconservatism: Did neoconservatism constitute a political movement? When, and why, did neoconservatism emerge? Who was a neoconservative? How and why was neoconservatism absorbed into the wider conservative movement? And what is the relationship between neoconservatism and neoliberalism? The roundtable sheds light on the perplexing nature of neoconservatism, revealing commonalities and connections between neoconservatives—especially the influence of the Cold War and reaction against the 1960s—while recovering the variety contained within a movement animated by a disparate set of political ideas.
GRAHAM ASHURST: NEOCONSERVATISM AND DIANE RAVITCH
In my contribution, I’ll briefly consider the meaning of neoconservatism and its relationship with the American right generally, focusing on neoconservative ideas about school education, and the career of my research subject, the education writer and adviser Diane Ravitch (born 1938).
Neoconservatism emerged in the 1960s in response to the leftward shift in liberal politics and the rise of the New Left. Neoconservatives were anti-communist, but they also had a major domestic policy focus. They were culturally conservative and pro-liberal democracy. Initially, however, they were not set firmly against New Deal-era ideas. Ravitch’s attachment to neoconservatism was forged during the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville dispute in New York City when New Left supporters of Black community control of schools challenged the New Deal emphasis on government spending and support for unions. Amid this dispute, Ravitch joined other neoconservatives in backing the United Federation of Teachers in its battle with the community control activists.
As neoconservatism developed from this early period, it retained an enduring commitment to cultural conservatism and liberal democracy. While many neoconservatives came to focus on foreign policy, others (including Ravitch) largely ignored it. By the 1980s, most neoconservatives had followed Irving Kristol in moving from New Deal-era principles to pro-private enterprise views, but some did not (such as Daniel Bell, though he rejected the neoconservative label) whilst others like Ravitch were slow to do so. Though a key neoconservative figure in the movement for educational ‘excellence,’ she resisted until the mid-1990s the pressure for business-related ideas like ‘choice’ and teacher accountability advanced by her neoconservative colleagues, William Bennett and Chester Finn.
Even when espousing pro-business principles popular with neoliberals, neoconservatives put a distinct twist on right-of-center policies. Kristol argued that a healthy society meant more than a strong free-market economy (35–37). Though Bennett and Finn accepted that there was a role in school education for market-based principles such as choice and accountability, they (like Ravitch) argued that improving education also required the incorporation of culturally conservative ideas, based around a structured classroom environment and strong curriculum content.
Debates about federal education policy from the 1990s illustrate the relationship between neoconservatism and neoliberalism. Neoconservatives advocated government intervention to raise school standards, whilst ‘neoliberals’ stated that this ‘ideal’ meant the dismantling of the existing public education system. In practice, however, as Philip Mirowski has argued, neoliberals were prepared to use government power to create opportunities for business. Moreover, since neoconservatives increasingly accepted market-related principles to achieve their aims, there were synergies between neoconservatism and neoliberalism, giving rise to agreed policies (18–19, 80). This occurred (as Melinda Cooper has identified) in the 1996 welfare legislation, and also in school education, where the 2001 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) measure provided a central role for the federal government in improving schools but did so by holding teachers and schools to account and creating private sector opportunities, such as charter schools.
By 2010 however, Ravitch rejected the education ‘reform agenda’ in the shape of NCLB because (she said) she was too “conservative” to accept the market-based neoliberal ideas which largely underpinned it (14). Her ‘conservatism’ was partly cultural—NCLB focused on the testing of basic skills at the expense of the liberal arts, which she had championed. But her status as a self-described conservative also reflected her residual belief in New Deal-era ideas like well-funded public institutions and support for unions. Ravitch became a neoconservative because her principles were challenged by the radical New Left. She parted company with her neoconservative allies because she perceived that the greatest threat to those principles came from the radical policies of the right. Ravitch’s relationship with these two manifestations of radicalism underlines the fact that neoconservatism—particularly in relation to domestic politics—originated as a set of principles which could genuinely be described as conservative, and which rejected radical ideas.
EMILY HULL: NEOCONSERVATISM AND IRVING KRISTOL
In 1973, the democratic socialist Michael Harrington pejoratively termed former left-leaning intellectuals turned critics of liberalism ‘neoconservatives.’ Earlier uses of the term exist, but it was in the 1970s that it entered widespread political vernacular. As a result of these origins, many figures associated with neoconservatism refused the label, making defining which figures made up the neoconservative milieu problematic. Significantly, the mid-twentieth-century public intellectual and journalist Irving Kristol (1920–2009) was the only neoconservative to openly embrace the term neoconservative. In 1979, he published an ironically entitled article “Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed—Perhaps the Only—‘Neoconservative.’” Here, he wrote, “perhaps because, having been named Irving, I am relatively indifferent to baptismal caprice. But I may be the only living self-confessed neoconservative, at large or in captivity” (Kristol, 12). This identification makes Kristol aptly placed as a figure through which we can interrogate the meaning of neoconservatism more thoroughly.
Kristol was born in New York City in 1920. In 1936, he enrolled at City College New York (CCNY), joined the Young People’s Socialist League (Fourth International), and became involved in the anti-Stalinist politics in CCNY’s infamous lunchroom’s Alcove No.1, where Communists and Trotskyists went head-to-head in between lectures. Kristol became disillusioned with socialism after serving in the United States Army, and in 1947, he began work for Commentary magazine, drawing him into the New York Intellectuals group. In 1953, he moved to London, where he co-founded and edited Encounter magazine with Stephen Spender for the Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF). Then, in 1965, along with his Alcove No.1 classmate, the sociologist Daniel Bell, he co-founded the public policy journal The Public Interest, which became a mouthpiece for neoconservatism. By 1979, he openly embraced the term neoconservatism. Kristol completed his political journey to the right in the 1980s, founding a foreign policy journal, The National Interest and joining the right-wing think tank, the American Enterprise Institute.
Kristol famously defined a neoconservative as a liberal who had been “mugged by reality” (Kristol, ix). Given his position as the only self-confessed neoconservative, should we then use Kristol’s definition of neoconservative to help us understand who else was a neoconservative? In many ways, this description fits several of the intellectual crowd associated with The Public Interest, who were traditionally affiliated with liberal politics yet were increasingly angered by the Great Society programmes of the Lyndon Johnson administration (Kristol, The Neoconservative Persuasion, 351). However, Kristol’s definition is too simplistic to be a useful determiner of whether a figure was a neoconservative or not. A study of Kristol’s published works between 1960 and 1980 shows that his own views were more complex, and better conceptualized as promoting a limited welfare state and low taxation rates at home, whilst advocating for an aggressively anti-communist foreign policy abroad.
Alternatively, do we take the association with neoconservative journals as proof of adherence to neoconservatism? Here, The Public Interest as the mouthpiece of neoconservatism is most useful to consider. Yet, this too presents problems. For example, the editor and co-founder of The Public Interest, Daniel Bell, famously declared himself to be a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture and rejected the neoconservative label (Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, xi-xii). Indeed, Bell resigned from his editorial duties for The Public Interest in 1973, claiming that the distinction between neoconservatism and conservatism was disappearing. Meanwhile, the sociologist Nathan Glazer, who took over Bell’s editorship, fundamentally disagreed with Kristol’s support of supply-side economics in the journal. These disputes therefore demonstrate the varied viewpoints held by those typically associated with neoconservatism.
Both the definition of the only self-confessed neoconservative, “a liberal mugged by reality,” and an association with The Public Interest—the central organ of neoconservatism—are useful measures of whether a figure was a neoconservative. However, these categories alone are insufficient as a litmus test for neoconservatism. Instead, careful study of an individual’s work is needed to determine whether they were a neoconservative and this judgement remains highly subjective. This insufficiency reflects the fact that neoconservatism was not a movement but rather, as Kristol called it, a persuasion (Kristol, xi). Ultimately, thick descriptions of intellectual trajectories of figures such as Kristol associated with neoconservatism offer crucial insights into the nature of a politics which remains undefined some seventy years after its inception, and also highlights the criticality of institutional vehicles and publications associated with this important -ism.
SOPHIE JOSCELYNE: NEOCONSERVATISM AND JEANE KIRKPATRICK
In my contribution to this roundtable, I’ll consider neoconservative foreign policy through the lens of Jeane Kirkpatrick’s international thought. Unlike the two other intellectuals spotlighted here—Diane Ravitch and Irving Kristol—Kirkpatrick was primarily a foreign policy-focused intellectual, and her contribution to neoconservative thought was (almost) exclusively in the realm of international thought.
Jeane Kirkpatrick (1926–2006) was the first woman to hold the position of US ambassador to the United Nations—a post she held between 1981 and 1985. During these years, Kirkpatrick exerted a profound influence over Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy. She is best known for the distinction she articulated in her widely-read 1979 Commentary magazine article, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” between right-wing authoritarian regimes and left-wing totalitarian ones. This article launched her career as a public intellectual and led to her position as an influential member of Reagan’s cabinet and ambassador to the United Nations. Shortly after its publication, Reagan wrote to Kirkpatrick to say that the article had had a “great impact” on his own thinking (Collier, 105).
Bringing together Kirkpatrick’s ideas with those of Kristol and Ravitch enables us to put different dimensions of neoconservatism into conversation and consider some key questions: What are the connections—if there are any—between neoconservative domestic and foreign policy? Did neoconservatism constitute a (coherent) political movement?
While several studies have isolated and treated the international and domestic politics of neoconservatism separately (see e.g., John Ehrman and Maria Ryan on foreign policy and Melinda Cooper and Antti Lepistö on the social and political dimensions), connections between the international and domestic are evident in Kirkpatrick’s thought. One way to illustrate this is by examining the factors that led her to abandon her deep commitment to the Democratic Party, first by voting for Nixon in 1972, and later by joining Reagan’s administration in 1981—in other words, what made her a neoconservative. Like Ravitch and Kristol, the revolutionary 1960s played a key role in shaping Kirkpatrick’s thought. She reacted strongly against the trenchant criticisms of the United States—especially its foreign policy—which characterized sixties movements, from the New Left and anti-war movements to identity-based movements for equal rights.
She wrote that the “cultural revolution that had swept through American cities, campuses, and news rooms … had as its principal target the morality of the American experience and the legitimacy of American national interests.” Here, we can see a connection between the domestic and international dimensions of neoconservative thought. For Kirkpatrick, one of the most significant and most damaging aspects of sixties radicalism was its impact on attitudes towards foreign policy. She argued that the New Left had dissociated morality and American power. For those who embraced New Left ideas, America was an inherently immoral nation, with an inherently immoral foreign policy. For Kirkpatrick, it was vital to reverse this trend in attitudes towards US foreign policy and to reassert the idea of the United States as a moral nation and US power as a force for good. This rejection of the influence of the 1960s on US politics, which caused her to move away from the Democratic Party, combined with the primacy of anti-communism in Kirkpatrick’s thought, made her an archetypal ‘second age’ neoconservative. In this respect, it is possible to see how the social and political thought of domestically oriented neoconservatives fits with Kirkpatrick’s foreign policy ideas as part of a broader movement with some coherence.
When viewed through the lens of Kirkpatrick’s thought, a more striking divergence comes between the ‘second-age’ neoconservatives of the 1970s–1990s and third-age ‘neocons’ of the George W. Bush administration. Compared to the hubristic idealism which characterized the policies of these later neocons, Kirkpatrick was a realist who emphasized the importance of restraint in foreign affairs. Her argument in “Dictatorships and Double Standards” had been primarily a warning against the dangers of indiscriminate US attempts to export democracy. Her approach was thus very different from that of later neo-cons who embraced the unrestrained use of American power “to shape a world safer for all” (Vaïsse, 12). As a second-age neoconservative intellectual focused on foreign affairs, Kirkpatrick thus illustrates the diversity of foreign policy approaches encapsulated within the label ‘neoconservatism.’
Rather than searching for a universalizing ‘essence’ of neoconservatism, our projects seek to understand the varieties of neoconservatism through attention to biography. By spotlighting the ideas and intellectual trajectories of these three important neoconservatives, this roundtable helps to capture the malleability and variety of a movement which is best viewed as a sum of its distinct parts.
Graham Ashurst graduated in Modern History and Economics at St John’s College, Oxford, in the 1970s. He then qualified as a lawyer, working mainly as a corporate counsel in building societies. Returning to history in 2014, he studied for an MA in American Studies and History at the University of Nottingham and has very recently completed a PhD thesis at Nottingham on the career of the American education writer and adviser Diane Ravitch.
Emily Hull completed her PhD at University College London (2023) where she was funded by a Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities. Emily’s thesis used the life of Irving Kristol, the ex-Trotskyist turned “godfather of neoconservatism,” to explore transformations in American intellectual and political life during the twentieth century. Her first article on Encounter magazine was published in the Journal of Transatlantic Studies in 2022, and her second article on biography and intellectual history appeared in Cambridge Quarterly in 2024. She is currently working on a monograph which will expand on her Ph.D. research on neoconservatism.
Sophie Joscelyne is a lecturer in the History of the United States and the World at the Institute of the Americas, UCL. Sheobtained her PhD in American History at the University of Sussex in 2020. She is currently working on her first monograph, which uncovers the importance of the concept of “totalitarianism” in US intellectual life after 1960. She is also developing a new project on neoconservative intellectual Jeane Kirkpatrick and her international thought in the late twentieth century. Her work on intellectuals and totalitarianism theory has appeared in the journal Modern Intellectual History.
Edited by Thomas Cryer
Featured image: “1981 US Cabinet,” February 4, 1981, via Wikimedia Commons. Jeanne Kirkpatrick stands at the centre of this photo of President Reagan’s 1981 Cabinet.
