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THE RECENT HISTORIOGRAPHY OF AMERICAN NEOCONSERVATISM*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2009

BRANDON HIGH
BRANDON HIGH*
Affiliation:
King's CollegeLondon
*
Pantiles, Braughing Friars, Ware, Hertfordshire, SG11 2NS[email protected]
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Abstract

This article surveys the literature on American neoconservatism since 1979, emphasizing those monographs which include assessments of developments in neoconservatism since 1995. It analyses the origins of neoconservatism in the anti-Stalinist Left and in the ideological divisions of the Democratic party. It assesses the position of neoconservatism in the American conservative tradition and its influence on Republican party policy. It places neoconservatism within the broader context of American foreign and domestic policy. It examines the emergence of networks of support which have sustained neoconservatives as a group of policy intellectuals independent of universities. It concludes by asking whether neoconservatism can be productively viewed as an expression of American ethnic politics, in particular as a response to the varying guises which anti-Semitism has assumed in the United States. The article asserts that, although commentators on neoconservatism from varying ideological standpoints have avoided the question of the neoconservatives' ethnicity, it offers a plausible explanation for the protean nature and apparent inconsistency of neoconservatism over the last forty years.

Type
Historiographical Reviews
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , June 2009 , pp. 475 - 491
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Jonathan Steinberg for his invaluable advice and assistance at all stages of the writing of this article. I would also like to thank Eric Kaufmann, Simon Parker, David Styan, Hugh Wilford, and an anonymous reader for the Historical Journal for their comments on earlier drafts of this review.

References

1 Those works which are broadly favourable to neoconservatism include: J. David Hoeveler Jr, Watch on the Right: conservative intellectuals in the Reagan era (Madison, WI, 1991); John Ehrman, The rise of neoconservatism: intellectuals and foreign affairs, 1947–1994 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1995); Murray Friedman, The neoconservative revolution: Jewish intellectuals and the shaping of public policy (Cambridge, 2005); and Mark Gerson, The neoconservative vision (Lanham, MD, 1996). Those which adopt a liberal perspective, critical of neoconservatism, are: Peter Steinfels, The neoconservatives: the men who are changing America's politics (New York, NY, 1979); Sidney Blumenthal, The rise of the counterestablishment: from conservative ideology to political power (New York, NY, 1986); Gary Dorrien, The neoconservative mind: politics, culture and the war of ideology (Philadelphia, PA, 1993); idem, Imperial designs: neoconservatism and the new Pax Americana (New York, NY, 2004). Two books written from the perspective of ex-neoconservatives are: Michael Lind, Up from conservatism: why the Right is wrong for America (New York, NY, 1996); Francis Fukuyama, America at the crossroads: democracy, power and the neoconservative legacy (New Haven, CT, and London, 2006). Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America alone: the neoconservatives and the global order (Cambridge, 2004), is an analysis from the viewpoint of the ‘realist’ – Kissingerian and libertarian strands in Republican party thought. This article will focus on Friedman, Fukuyama, Dorrien, and Halper and Clarke, with reference, as appropriate, to the extensive scholarly and journalistic literature on the American Right in general and to the writings of neoconservatives themselves.

2 Irwin Stelzer, ed., The neocon reader (London, 2004). Stelzer's somewhat eccentric choice of contributors (the inclusion of Condoleezza Rice, John Bolton, and Tony Blair gives a seriously misleading impression of what neoconservatism is) makes it much less useful than Mark Gerson's The essential neoconservative reader (New York, NY, 1996).

3 The literature on the New York Intellectuals is extensive, and is essential background for the history of neoconservatism: John Patrick Diggins, The rise and fall of the American Left (New York, NY, 1992); Alexander Bloom, Prodigal sons: the New York Intellectuals and their world (Oxford, 1986); Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: the rise and decline of the anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987); Terry A. Cooney, The rise of the New York Intellectuals: ‘Partisan Review’ and its circle (Madison, WI, 1986); Neil Jumonville, Critical crossings: the New York Intellectuals in postwar America (Berkeley, CA, 1991); Hugh Wilford, The New York Intellectuals: from vanguard to institution (Manchester, 1995); Joseph Dorman, Arguing the world: the New York Intellectuals in their own words (New York, NY, 2001).

4 For an account of Commentary's intellectual formation and its complex relationship to Judaism, see Nathan Abrams, Commentary magazine, 1945–1959: ‘a journal of significant thought and opinion’ (London, Portland, OR, 2007).

5 For detailed accounts see Mary Sperling McAuliffe, Crisis on the Left: cold war politics and American liberals, 1947–1954 (Amherst, MA, 1978); Frances Stonor Saunders, Who paid the piper? The CIA and the cultural cold war (London, 1999); Peter Coleman, The liberal conspiracy: the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the struggle for the mind of postwar Europe (New York, NY, 1989); Hugh Wilford, The mighty wurlitzer: how the CIA played America (Cambridge, MA, 2008).

6 David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: an intellectual biography (Chicago, IL, 2006), pp. 71–120; Peter Novick, That noble dream: the ‘objectivity question’ and the American historical profession (Cambridge, 1988), p. 337; Daniel Bell, ed., The radical Right (New York, NY, 1963); Richard Hofstadter, The age of reform: from Bryan to FDR (New York, NY, 1955). For a modern assessment of The radical Right, see Michael Kazin, The populist persuasion: an American history (New York, NY, 1994), p. 190.

7 Kristol, Irving, ‘My cold war’, The National Interest, 31 (1993), p. 143Google Scholar; idem, Neoconservatism: the autobiography of an idea (New York, NY, 1995).

8 For the transformative impact of neoconservatism on the diverse and conflicting strands of American conservatism, see George H. Nash, The conservative intellectual movement in America since 1945 (New York, NY, 1976); Godfrey Hodgson, The world turned Rightside up: a history of the conservative ascendancy in America (Boston, MA, 1996); John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The right nation: why America is different (London, 2004); Jerome Himmelstein, To the Right: the transformation of American conservatism (Berkeley, CA, 1990); and Blumenthal, The rise of the counterestablishment. For the early history of neoconservatism, see Halper and Clarke, America alone, pp. 40–74; Fukuyama, America at the crossroads, pp. 12–66; Friedman, The neoconservative revolution, pp. 116–37. These accounts tend to portray early neoconservatism as more ideologically coherent than it was, and not to discuss the differences between neoconservatives that were always present.

9 See James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, ‘Broken windows’, in Stelzer, ed., The neocon reader.

10 James Q. Wilson: Contribution to symposium, ‘Neoconservatism: pro and con’, Partisan Review, 48 (1980), p. 567. Wilson doubts the value of his contribution, because he was not present at the creation of neoconservatism: ‘I was not given the benefits of being raised in New York or in other places where one is a participant from early childhood in the struggles and factional quarrels of the left.’

11 For the growing antipathy of Moynihan and Bell after the 1970s to neoconservatism, see Godfrey Hodgson, The gentleman from New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan: a biography (Boston, MA, 2000), and Nathan Liebowitz, Daniel Bell and the agony of modern liberalism (Westport, CT, and London, 1985).

12 For the flavour of Podhoretz's rhetoric, see his Breaking ranks: a political memoir (London, 1979), and his My love affair with America: the cautionary tale of a cheerful conservative (New York, NY, 2004).

13 For Strauss's and the Straussians' inherent antipathy to liberalism and pragmatism, and the ways in which they have emphasized the American Constitution's links with classical republicanism rather than with liberalism, see Allan Bloom, The closing of the American mind (New York, NY, 1987), pp. 25–46; Thomas L. Pangle, Leo Strauss: an introduction to his thought and intellectual legacy (Baltimore, MD, 2006); Catherine Zuckert and Michael Zuckert, The truth about Leo Strauss: political philosophy and American democracy (Chicago, IL, 2006), inter alia. For Strauss's influence on Irving Kristol, see Shadia B. Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right (Basingstoke, 1997), and Robert Devigne, Recasting conservatism: Oakeshott, Strauss and the response to postmodernism (New Haven, CT, and London, 1994). Paul Wolfowitz (fictionalized in Saul Bellow's novel Ravelstein, the hero of which is based on Allan Bloom) is a former student of both Strauss and Bloom.

14 Irving Kristol, ‘A conservative welfare state’, in Gerson, ed., The essential neoconservative reader; Richard M. Abrams, America transformed: sixty years of revolutionary change, 1941–2001 (Cambridge, 2006), p. 299; Robert M. Collins, Transforming America: politics and culture in the Reagan years (New York, NY, 2007), pp. 79–81.

15 Abrams, America transformed, p. 211; Robert G. Kaufman, Henry M. Jackson: a life in politics (Seattle, WA, and London, 2000); Jay Winik, On the brink: the behind-the-scenes saga of the Reagan era and the men and women who won the Cold War (New York, NY, and London, 1996); Ehrman, The rise of neoconservatism, pp. 33–62.

16 Richard Pipes, U.S.–Soviet relations in the era of détente (Boulder, CO, 1981).

17 For Burnham's relationship to neoconservatism, see Dorrien, The neoconservative mind. For the distinctions between the Krauthammer (‘assertive nationalist’) and the Wattenberg/Robert Kagan (‘democratic imperialist’) views of American foreign policy, see idem, Imperial designs, pp. 75–180.

18 Greg Grandin, Empire's workshop: Latin America, the United States and the new imperialism (New York, NY, 2006), pp. 52–86; James Mann, Rise of the vulcans: the history of Bush's war cabinet (New York, NY, 2004), pp. 130–7.

19 Jeane M. Kirkpatrick, Dictatorships and double standards: rationalism and reason in politics (New York, NY, 1983).

20 Grandin, Empire's workshop; Mann, Rise of the vulcans. For Reagan's Iran policy see Robert Dreyfuss, Devil's game: how the United States helped unleash fundamentalist Islam (New York, NY, 2005), pp. 292–302.

21 Benjamin Ginsberg, The fatal embrace: Jews and the state (Chicago, IL, 1993), pp. 97–144.

22 Richard Gid Powers, Not without honor: the history of American anticommunism (New Haven, CT, and London, 1995), pp. 360–95; Jerry W. Sanders, Peddlers of crisis: the Committee on the Present Danger and the politics of containment (Boston, MA, 1983).

23 Abrams, America transformed, pp. 252–5; Hodgson, The world turned Rightside up, pp. 207–14.

24 Micklethwait and Wooldridge, The right nation, pp. 160–2; Halper and Clarke, America alone, pp. 40–74.

25 James Allen Smith, The idea brokers: think tanks and the rise of the new policy elite (New York, NY, 1991), gives details of the disparity in resources available to research institutes of different persuasions.

26 Halper and Clarke, America alone, pp. 74–122; Dorrien, Imperial designs, pp. 75–180; William Kristol and Robert Kagan, eds., Present dangers: crisis and opportunity in American foreign and defence policy (San Francisco, CA, 2000).

27 Andrew J. Bacevich, The new American militarism: how Americans are seduced by war (New York, NY, 2005).

28 Anne Hessing Cahn, Killing détente: the Right attacks the CIA (University Park, PA, 1998).

29 William Kristol, ed., ‘The Weekly Standard’: a reader (New York, NY, 2005); Halper and Clarke, America alone, pp. 182–201.

30 Halper and Clarke, America alone, pp. 182–201; Friedman, The neoconservative revolution, pp. 205–23; Grandin, Empire's workshop, pp. 140–50; Ginsberg, The fatal embrace, pp. 211–12.

31 Both Dorrien, The neoconservative mind, and Gillian Peele, Revival and reaction: the Right in contemporary America (Oxford, 1984), forecast the eventual absorption of neoconservatism by the wider New Right on the very reasonable grounds that neoconservatives had altered their earlier liberal positions on abortion and school prayer inter alia in order to minimize antagonism between themselves and other groups on the Right. Only if one assumes, as Michael Lind does, that the goal of neoconservatism was to take over the Democrats (in the 1970s) and the Republicans (in the 1980s) does absorption count as a failure. See Lind, Up from conservatism, pp. 56–62.

32 Ginsberg, The fatal embrace, pp. 145–224; Marc Dollinger, Quest for inclusion: Jews and liberalism in modern America (Princeton, NJ, 2000), pp. 224–7; Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: the Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against liberalism (Cambridge, MA, 1985), pp. 47–54.

33 Amy Chua, World on fire: how exporting free market democracy breeds ethnic hatred and global instability (London, 2003), pp. 77–94.

34 Richard Perle and David Frum, An end to evil: how to win the war on terror (New York, NY, 2003); Michael Ledeen, The war against the terror masters: why it happened, where we are now, how we'll win (New York, NY, 2002).

35 Peter Novick, The Holocaust and collective memory: the American experience (London, 1999), p. 190.