The Neoconservatives: The Origins of a Movement by Peter Steinfels

Author:Peter Steinfels
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781476729701
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Why Neoconservative?

The first question is essential. To a large extent, Bell has been labeled a neoconservative because he runs with the neoconservatives. Kristol is an old friend, whom Bell repeatedly cites as such. His references to Kristol, with whom he founded The Public Interest, to Seymour Martin Lipset, a collaborator on several projects, to Samuel P. Huntington, a colleague at Harvard, to Herman Kahn, and to other neoconservatives almost always express agreement. If he takes exception to some of their views, the difference has not been such as to provoke him to public criticism. And yet it must be acknowledged that Bell adamantly refuses the neoconservative classification. The “designation is meaningless,” he writes; it is a tag created by book reviewers and journalists to label work that otherwise resists labeling—a “new cultural criticism” that “seeks to transcend the lines of the present debates and to present the dilemmas of the society within a very different framework.”

Bell is not at all evasive about what, if not a neoconservative, he actually is: “I would say, quite seriously, that I am a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture.”

What this means, first of all, is that Bell believes in the welfare state: a society’s economic policy should “establish that ‘social minimum’ which would allow individuals to lead a life of self-respect” and should provide “work for those who seek it, a degree of adequate security against the hazards of the market, and adequate access to medical care and protection against the ravages of disease and illness.” This is closer to “welfare liberalism” than to socialism: it says nothing about workers’ control over their own output and the conditions of production; it says nothing about the tendency of market capitalism to transform human relations into “commodities.” Bell does approach socialism in his belief that wealth should not “be convertible into undue privilege in realms where it is not relevant”: he does not spell out the implications of this principle, but judging from the reference in his argument (an article by Michael Walzer in the socialist journal Dissent), such a limitation on the power of money might very well require major economic reforms.

As “a liberal in politics,” Bell believes (1) that the individual and not the group must be the primary unit of a political system; (2) that beyond the point of a “social minimum,” rewards and position in society should be determined by individual achievement, “the criterion of merit,” rather than being inherited or prescribed or allocated by “numerical quota”; (3) that a distinction must be maintained between the public and the private realms, “so that not all behavior is politicized”; (4) that political power, barred from the private realm, should govern the public one according to the “rule of law which applies equally to all, and is therefore procedural: it does not specify outcomes between individuals.”

By “a conservative in culture,” Bell means that he respects tradition, believes “in reasoned judgments . . . about the qualities of a

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