Norman Podhoretz Collected

THE NORMAN PODHORETZ READER: A SELECTION OF HIS WRITINGS FROM THE 1950s THROUGH THE 1990s

Edited by Thomas L. Jeffers with an introduction by Paul Johnson

Free Press, $35, 496 pages

REVIEWED BY GERALD J. RUSSELLO

The outline of the story of neoconservatism is well known: In the 1960s and 1970s, a generation of intellectuals abandoned their former liberalism (and, in some cases, radicalism) and embraced capitalism and American culture. Along with other elements of the conservative movement, they were a crucial component of the coalition that brought Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980.

Although neoconservatism was considered to have faded after the end of the Cold War, recently it has been at the center of controversy. Critics on both the left and the right have blasted neoconservatives for their role in shaping policy following September 11.

The neoconservatives, for their part, have replied in kind; as Paul Johnson states in his introduction to this collection of essays, for intellectuals the war of ideas is a blood sport.

Norman Podhoretz is one of the patrons of neoconservatism, and this collection provides a snapshot of his writings over five decades. The path Mr. Podhoretz followed from a liberal to what Joshua Muravchik has called “the conductor of the neocon orchestra” has become a hallowed part of American intellectual history.

The son of a dairyman who grew up in the Jewish neighborhood of Brownsville, Brooklyn, Mr. Podhoretz became a celebrated writer and editor on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He has written with great sensitivity on this transformation, and with less sensitivity on his former radical colleagues.

In “The Norman Podhoretz Reader,” we see the Brooklyn boy struggling with the fact that he has, in fact, been educated at Harvard and Cambridge, an education that has in some sense forever distanced him from his home. This sometimes jarring disjunction between his poor upbringing and his current circumstances has not been lost on him. The excerpt from his memoir “Making It” calls his acceptance of the intellectual life a “brutal bargain.”

Mr. Podhoretz in fact went through a double separation, first by leaving his life in Brooklyn for the world of ideas, then second (as recounted in his 1979 book “Breaking Ranks”) by leaving the left for neoconservatism. He speaks movingly of the struggle between his roots and his aspirations, in words with which anyone who has had a similar conflict will sympathize.

The selections here range from Mr. Podhoretz’s famous essay “My Negro Problem — and Ours” to studies of intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin. Although perhaps best known for his writing on politics, Mr. Podhoretz in fact got his start as a student of literature. He studied first at Columbia under Lionel Trilling and then at Cambridge under the great critic F.R. Leavis.

Mr. Podhoretz soon found himself, however, not in academe but on the front lines of intellectual debate. He joined the journal Commentary in 1955, upon his discharge from the Army, and after becoming editor remained at its helm for the next three and a half decades. Like T.S. Eliot at the Criterion, Podhoretz marked the journal with his own personality, and it soon joined the small cluster of first-class American journals of opinion.

Public intellectuals are now treated with some disdain, since anyone with access to the Internet now offers his or her unsolicited opinions, and talking heads fill the Sunday morning talk shows. But the neoconservatives were the real thing; for them, intellectuals needed to be engaged with the world.

Mr. Podhoretz’s takedown of the overrated Berlin, for example, is based on the conclusion that he fell short when it came time to defend the liberal pluralism he championed in his writings. While sympathetic to Berlin (whom, as with the subjects of many of these essays, he had met personally), he nevertheless finds that the historian of ideas was a “great equivocator” on the pressing issues of his day, and a poor role model for contemporary intellectuals.

His reassessment of George Orwell, “If Orwell Were Alive Today,” likewise focuses on the congruence between Orwell’s life and his words.

Although most neoconservatives did not move right until the counterculture was in full swing in the later 1960s, in retrospect Mr. Podhoretz’s 1958 essay “The Know-Nothing Bohemians” makes their choice seem obvious. His revulsion at the philistinism and anti-bourgeois posturing of writers like Jack Kerouac would become a common neoconservative opinion, as would his disappointment with the work of Norman Mailer.

The destructiveness of the New Left was foreign to the neoconservative sensibility, which even before it became conservative was rooted in ideas and their expression; these in turn necessitated a respect for the cultural achievements of the West.

Ultimately, the anti-culture of the left is what drove many of them away. Indeed, the neoconservatives’ battles on behalf of standards in higher education and against ideologies like multiculturalism may be their strongest legacy.

The great Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek once wrote that an intellectual movement “has its greatest success when it ceases as such to exist because its leading ideals have become a part of the dominant thinking.” So it has been with neoconservatism, at least until recently. Yet that dominant thinking has never been as monolithic as some have supposed. Even as neoconservative ideas became absorbed into mainstream American political culture, the influence has worked in the opposite direction.

Neoconservatism is not the same as it was in the 1970s. While once receptive to large-scale welfare programs, for example, Mr. Podhoretz finds that most neoconservatives now share the general conservative hostility toward the welfare state and its assumptions about social engineering.

Even in foreign policy, where neoconservative opinion is thought to be uniform, Mr. Podhoretz describes (in the late 1990s) a split between the “Wilsonians” and the “realists,” a fight that has assumed greater prominence given American actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The disillusionment with liberalism that Mr. Podhoretz and his generation of intellectuals suffered through was, of course, only one of a cluster of responses that formed the conservative movement. The writer and critic Russell Kirk, for example, who was just a few years older than Mr. Podhoretz, came to conservatism as a young man during the Second World War without ever finding attractive the temptations of the left. It was similar with William F. Buckley, Jr., whose youthful broadside “God and Man” at Yale marked him from the outset as something of a reactionary.

On a much smaller scale, a generation after Mr. Podhoretz my own relatives retreated into a Sicilian Catholic enclave in Brooklyn, largely isolated from the crazy years of the 1960s and 1970s. They and others like them became what were called Reagan Democrats.

Neoconservatives have distinguished themselves in focusing on the practical implications of policy, which was largely a new element to American conservatism (Robert Taft being the most conspicuous exception in his attention to policy details). This focus was joined with a background in political ideas and texts that differed from the usual conservative canon, a result of the liberal background of the neoconservatives themselves.

At the beginning, they perhaps knew more Hannah Arendt than Henry Adams and more Marx than “The Federalist.” Yet there is also, as evidenced here from Mr. Podhoretz, a sincere affection for America itself, and in particular for the working-class backgrounds from which many neoconservatives came. That affection for their America ultimately overcame their ideological predilections.

This was not the only America, of course, and if these selections have a flaw it is that there is little here on the nation beyond New York City and Washington with their literary and political circles. These two influences are sometimes at odds, but the tension between them is what gives neoconservative writing its characteristic style, a style very much in evidence in this important collection.

Gerald J. Russello lives in Brooklyn.