Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea.

• Author: Peters, Charles

Although this is mostly a collection of previously published essays, it is notable because of the new "autobiographical memoir" that begins the book. I was especially interested in the memoir because Kristol is trying to use a life story to explain how ideas grow out of experience. I had made a similar attempt in my autobiography, Tilting at Windmills. Kristol and I have much else in common. We have both been accused of being "godfathers" of related movements: neoconservatism in his case, neoliberalism in mine. We have both founded publications that have as one of their purposes exposing the mushiness in liberal thought--his, The Public Interest, did it with essays and social science research; mine, The Washington Monthly, with journalism. Both of us have been called to this mission in considerable part by the influence of my teacher and his friend, Lionel Trilling. Both of us had contempt for the kind of liberal who thought it McCarthyite to suggest that Stalinism was evil or even to call a communist a communist. (That in expressing this contempt Kristol sometimes betrayed too little respect for the First Amendment was pointed out in cogent letters to Commentary from Alan Westin and Joseph Rauh in response to Kristol's famous--or infamous to many on the left--"Civil Liberties 1952--A Study in Confusion.")

We each had childhood experiences with religion that, in Kristol's words, which are equally applicable to me, "made it impossible for me to become anti-religious even though my subsequent intellectual commitment kept trying to steer me in that direction." Like so many other young people in the thirties and forties, we had adolescent flirtations with socialism. We also went through a period of intellectual snobbery that was characterized in both our cases by an avoidance of any movie that wasn't foreign. In fact, we almost certainly went to the same movie theater, the Thalia off Broadway on 95th Street. In the late forties, Kristol lived in an apartment above the 96th and Broadway Bickford's where I often had coffee because I lived a block or two away and they kept the price at a nickel long after most other restaurants had raised it.

But there our similarities end and the differences begin. Irving Kristol has come to stand for many things I think are wrong in today's politics. The contrast in our life experiences--and in the way we remember and think about those experiences--helps explain the way our ideas differ today. "Bohemia," Kristol...