Vanguard News Network
VNN Media
VNN Digital Library
VNN Reader Mail
VNN Broadcasts

Old August 26th, 2009 #1
Alex Linder
Administrator
 
Join Date: Nov 2003
Posts: 45,756
Blog Entries: 34
Default Origins of term 'neoconservative'

Who Named the Neocons?

By Benjamin Ross

Who named the neoconservatives? You are looking at the perpetrator, or so it is believed. Dissent and its circle, in the early 1970s, invented the term to denigrate the right-moving intellectuals who wrote in Commentary and the Public Interest. The name first appeared in print here, in a Fall 1973 article by Michael Harrington entitled “The Welfare State and Its Neoconservative Critics.” The neocons, it is said, resisted the designation at first and began to use it only after it had gained wide acceptance.

This history can be found in dozens of books, articles, and Web postings; the best-annotated version is in S. M. Lipset’s 1996 book American Exceptionalism. But—you’re reading Dissent, after all—the story really is more complicated.

The word neoconservative has (Internet search tools now reveal) a long prehistory of use in academic and quasi-academic writing to describe any new variant of conservatism. I found it used in 1883, in a periodical that featured excerpts from Karl Marx’s new book Capital. [2]

In the late 1960s, it seems, neoconservatism began its transformation from academic neologism to part of the language. By this time, the term had developed two specific meanings for historians alongside its more general usage. It designated either the integral nationalists of Weimar Germany, such as Arthur Möller van den Bruck, [3] or the American historians who reacted against Charles Beard, Carl Becker, and their liberal interpretation of the Revolutionary era. [4] It was in the latter sense that the word made its first appearance in the New York Times, in a May 26, 1968, book review by Columbia University historian Richard Morris. It described—of all people—Staughton Lynd, in some of whose work Morris found “an updated and perceptive brand of neoconservatism.” It recurred annually in the Times thereafter. [5]

It seems to be in the early seventies that neoconservative became a regular part of the Dissenters’ vocabulary. Harrington later recalled that the word “was in common use among Dissent editors and other associates of mine.” [6] In 1973, Dissent ran a series of polemics against what the magazine called—everywhere but in Harrington’s piece—“new conservatives.” Rereading these essays, it seems clear enough that “new” had been substituted for “neo.” Consider this passage by Joseph Epstein from Spring 1973:

Other intellectuals show one or another aspect of the new conservatism in high relief; in Irving Kristol the full and finished edifice is on display. He is at once the new conservatism’s leading journalist-publicist and its prime exemplar.

Six months after Epstein’s, Harrington’s article appeared with neoconservative in the title. The red pencil may have been stayed this once to avoid ambiguity: “The Welfare State and Its New Conservative Critics” could have been misinterpreted to refer to new critics offering the same old conservatism. In any case, this was not the first use of the word in print by the Dissent circle. On September 30, 1973, a few weeks before the Harrington article reached subscribers, Dissent contributor Martin Kilson had this in the New York Times Magazine letters column: “On the quota issue—and others, too—the American Jewish Committee and Commentary ought to come out of the neoconservative closet.”

A lexical shift was under way: along with continued use in reference to revised conservatisms, [7] neoconservative gained the new meaning of a former liberal or leftist who had moved right. [8] But did the Dissenters mean neoconservative as a derogatory name for a specific group or was it still a general descriptive term? On first examination the texts support the former view, [9] but read carefully they do not rule out the latter. And the editorial preference for “new” over “neo” is instructive in itself. Academic jargon would rank much higher than political invective on any list of editor Irving Howe’s dislikes; his diligent avoidance of neoconservative in this period suggests he understood the word as jargon.

The Rosetta Stone that unlocks this linguistic puzzle is the next appearance of neoconservative in Dissent. It was in Fall 1975, just as Daniel P. Moynihan’s appointment as ambassador to the United Nations began to propel the word into prominence. An article by John P. Diggins used it to describe William F. Buckley’s early collaborators Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, Will Herberg, and James Burnham. [10] The conservative writer B. Bruce-Briggs demurred in the Spring 1976 issue:

one must quibble with his use of the term “neoconservatives” to label the ex-Marxists who went over to the right before 1950. In contemporary usage, “neoconservative” labels those liberals who would not accept the “New Politics” shift during the mid1960s; they are careful to keep their distance from the premature antiliberals of Buckley and company. On the right, as the left, sectarianism demands scrupulous care in nomenclature.

A neoconservative, for the Dissenters of the early 1970s, was either someone with a new variant of conservatism or a former leftist who had moved right. The term was applied to the group that evolved into today’s neocons, simply because they were the new conservatives of immediate concern. But its meaning was not limited to them. It was elsewhere that neoconservatism became a name rather than a description. [11]

Scientists know that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can sometimes trigger a hurricane on the other side of the earth. In this case, fluttering on the West Side of Manhattan is connected to a hurricane three decades later in Iraq. For the butterfly that has thus flown into history, scrupulous care in taxonomic nomenclature is indeed demanded.

Benjamin Ross contributes frequently to Dissent. He wrote “George Bush’s Philosophers” in the Summer 2005 issue.

FOOTNOTES:

* [1] Norman Podhoretz, in his 1996 Commentary essay “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” gives glimpses of this prehistory. Podhoretz himself in 1963 had called Walter Lippmann and Clinton Rossiter neoconservatives, and he gives earlier citations from George Lichtheim and Dwight MacDonald.

* [2] In Today, vol. 1, p. 276 (1883): “...the principles of neo-Conservatism as expounded by the late Lord Beaconsfield...”

* [3] By 1965, the historian Walter Struve could write that “Right Wingers who hesitated or refused to identify themselves with any political party and who dissociated themselves from the yearning of the more traditional Right to restore the Second Reich have come to be known as neoconservatives.’” “Hans Zehrer as a Neoconservative Elite Theorist,” American Historical Review, vol. 70, pp. 1035-1057 (1965). It appeared in this sense in a July 12, 1970, New York Times book review by Gordon Craig. This usage appears to be an invention by English-language historians; Fritz Stern, in Five Germanys I Have Known (New York, 2006, p.72) asserts otherwise, but gives no citations. The usual German terminology is Jungkonservativen or the konservative Revolution.

* [4] For example, S. G. Brown, “Democracy, the New Conservatism, and the Liberal Tradition in America,” Ethics, vol.66, pp. 1-9 (1955).

* [5] In addition to the two Times appearances cited in previous notes, it was used by Tom F. Driver in connection with the comic strip “Peanuts” (February 2, 1969) and by Richard Elman to describe the French extreme right (November 21, 1971).

* [6] Partisan Review, vol.55, no.1, p.82 (1989). This usage, at least in reference to Commentary and the Public Interest, must have commenced after the word started to show up in the Times in mid-1968. The September-October issue of Dissent could still refer to "a wide gamut of journals ranging all the way from Commentary and Dissent to Studies on the Left and Fuck You, a Magazine of the Arts."

* [7] In the July 10, 1974 New York Times, Stanley Hoffmann, an occasional Dissent contributor but not really a member of the magazine’s circle, described as neoconservative the policies of French president Georges Pompidou. The use of the word for 1920s German rightists persists to the present day, as in Fritz Stern’s Five Germanys I Have Known.

* [8] In an October 13, 1975, New York Times column, Anthony Lewis defined the term as “intellectuals, expectably liberal, who became critics of much liberal doctrine.”

* [9] Especially in Epstein’s Summer 1973 discussion of “the new conservative intellectuals” responding to correspondence from Midge Decter.

* [10] This usage demonstrates both the lexical shift which had already occurred and the shift which had not yet reached the Dissent group. In the 1950s, it was Clinton Rossiter, Peter Viereck, and Russell Kirk who were described as neoconservatives by their contemporaries. (The term appeared in this sense, among other places, in Dissent, in the Summer 1955 issue.) These thinkers were, by biography and in temperament, almost the antithesis of the ex-leftists whom the word came to designate in the mid-1970s.

* [11] A text that has been read to point the other way is Kristol’s neoconservative manifesto in the January 19, 1976, Newsweek. Kristol begins by saying that since the New York Times, Time, and Newsweek are now calling us neoconservatives, we might as well accept the name. But this is best understood as a rhetorical device aimed at preserving the neocons’ claim to be the true heirs of the New Deal liberalism they were abandoning. A writer of Kristol’s temperament, offered a platform in Newsweek, would surely employ it for political purposes rather than philological ones. And even if Kristol is taken at his word, it begs the question of where the mass media--not avid readers of Dissent then or now--picked up the word.

Last edited by Alex Linder; August 26th, 2009 at 11:41 AM.
 
Reply

Share


Thread
Display Modes


All times are GMT -5. The time now is 10:45 AM.
Page generated in 0.20012 seconds.