Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea.

Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, by Irving Kristol (Free Press, 493 pp., $25)

Mr. Mansfield is a professor of government at Harvard and the author of Machiavelli's Virtue, due out in April from the University of Chicago Press.

IRVING Kristol's memoirs, a collection of the articles he wishes to remember, shine with his charm and his intellectual mastery. He starts with a new "autobiographical memoir" in which he mentions that when he was young and needed a job, Sidney Hook would come to the rescue. With that example, Kristol himself has come to the rescue of many conservative graduate students, some of them mine. His son, William, for whom he bears a greater responsibility, was also a student of mine. But I am going to show that gratitude in a reviewer can sometimes be an aid, not a hindrance, to doing justice to an author.

To begin with the issue of most interest to readers of NR, what is neoconservatism? Mr. Kristol subtitles the book "The Autobiography of an Idea," and he remarks that neoconservatism as a distinct phenomenon and a separate movement is now over, having been absorbed into a wider conservatism. He notes that his son and others of the younger generation no longer feel any need for the "neo." From this it might be inferred that neoconservatism represented nothing but stages of conversion to what NR readers might wish to call the real thing -- stages necessary, one might suppose, to the dignity of a man in the process of changing his mind. Real conservatives, it could be said, ought to be able to understand that necessity; and moreover, thinking of the desirability of constructing a conservative majority, they should not get into the habit of scorning those who come to agree with them.

But this will not do. Kristol's book is full of foresight, and as an autobiography it is, to put it mildly, not a text of tortured self-justification. He cites specific differences between neoconservatives and traditional Republicans: Republicans were too pro-business, not close enough to ordinary Americans (like himself!), too budget-conscious, and too suspicious of energetic Presidents. As for libertarian conservatives, he says that they were so opposed to the welfare state that they failed to produce a conservative version of it and wasted their fire on an abstract enemy, statism. Neoconservatives, being disillusioned liberals, contributed a critique of liberalism as it actually was and from within.

Most important, the neoconservatives believed in ideas: "The truth is that ideas are all-important." Kristol contrasts his belief with the conservatism of Michael Oakeshott (among others), for whom the human resistance to ideas and the many parochial comforts of life not to be deduced from our universal nature are the main truth. One can make an idea out of the resistance we offer to ideas, and that might be the substance of Oakeshott's conservatism. Kristol considers that conservatism too European, not right for an America that must be a universal idea because it can attract and receive all kinds of immigrants -- including Jews.

Hardly any neoconservative is not a Jew, but then again, hardly any Jew is a conservative. So neoconservative Jews are above all critics of other Jews: they cannot be explained by their Jewishness unless it is Jewishness rightly understood by a very few. Kristol says that America must be an idea because the only alternative is plain luck, or Divine Providence: "I really cannot believe that Americans are a historically unique and chosen people. I am myself a Jew and an American, and with all due respect to the Deity, I think the odds are prohibitive that He would have gone out of His way to choose me twice over."

The American idea is democracy, a form of government that permits a man, as in the joke above, to say that he is a Jew before affirming he is an American. Most Jews are liberals, Mr. Kristol remarks, because they think that the secular humanism of liberals will guarantee Jews against anti-Semitism and make America their home. But the price exacted by liberalism is to transform Judaism into secular humanism. For Kristol, the price is prohibitively high for Jews and for liberals as well, since, as he repeats with emphasis, man is essentially religious, or "theotropic."

The two men who had the greatest influence on his thinking, Kristol says, were Lionel Trilling in the 1940s and Leo Strauss in the 1950s, both subtle writers, though in different ways. Kristol is not a subtle writer, or he is not a writer who wants readers to think he is subtle. In his essays the main point is always made obvious, and as a thinker he makes us aware that wisdom is a neighbor to common sense. For Kristol is a thinker. Though he can pretend to be afraid of scholarly criticism, his essays on Machiavelli, Adam Smith, Freud, and Einstein are considerable enough to have pleased and instructed his two mentors.

Especially in a democracy, common sense has political power. If one wishes to make wisdom effective, and bring it into politics, one must simplify. Kristol is a master of deliberate simplification, a faculty he calls "thinking politically." It is not oversimplification, because the purpose is not to put across something dubious but rather to tell the truth in such a way that it will be heard. "Rhetoric" is an old name for what he does, though it applies more to his way of telling than to his way of thinking.

Kristol's way of thinking requires that one see things as a whole, not overlooking the forest for the trees. To do this, one must free oneself from the specialization and from the objectivity of the scholar or the social scientist. Kristol, for example, shows us what "economic thinking" is as a whole by looking at economics carefully but not as a specialist. He reads Adam Smith, the original economist, who, unknown to economists today, is also the premier economist. Having seen economics as a whole, Mr. Kristol can see what it amounts to -- which is the same as where it is tending. Where it tends is its political impact, to which no citizen (or scholar) can be indifferent.

But "not being indifferent" does not mean that one should be caught up in partisanship. Social-science objectivity doesn't care about the political result (so it claims), and yet it is as easily fooled as the blindest partisan. Kristol cares but isn't fooled. He follows the example of the Founding Fathers -- and he is one of a very few to appreciate the key to their success, which is to see the weaknesses of the very thing they were founding, those of popular government.

Mr. Kristol is able to say in one sentence what John Rawls's theory amounts to: "that a social order is just and legitimate only to the degree that it is directed to the redress of inequality." This summary would be disputed, perhaps by Rawls himself, but it is both true and wise. It is also common sense, though far from commonly understood. Other examples of Kristol's successful simplification are in his views of the strengths and weaknesses of liberalism, of social science (and why social scientists find it difficult to think politically), of modernism (and the contradiction Trilling saw between the lessons of modernist literature and the politics of the liberals who read it), and of the novel (its prosaic, democratic heroism).

These simplifications do not leave anyone under the illusion that life is simple. Life, he explains, can be understood in part by science, but "scientific method" properly refers only to the method of verification and not to a nonexistent method of discovery. The truth we discover, it seems, can be either religion or philosophy; neither is able to conquer the other. It is just as well. Kristol resists the modern utopianism he described, which says that a perfect society is possible. He is content to stay within the ancient utopianism that allows us to dream but fears the "diabolical aspect to the power of technology." Ideas are all-important, but when in modern times they have been taken as all-powerful, they have brought confusion and woe. In this sense Irving Kristol has always been -- by his account even from his Trotskyist days -- a conservative without qualification, content with the limits to human power.