Nathan Glazer: Up from the Alcove with Irving Kristol.
[Nathan Glazer is a contributing editor of The New Republic.]
When Irving Kristol joined the new magazine Commentary, he distinguished himself from the other editors--Clement Greenberg, part-time then, Robert Warshow, and me. First, he had an interest in politics, real politics, electoral politics, and not just the politics of left-wing anti-Stalinists, mulling over what was living and what was dead in Marxism, the fate of socialism, the future of capitalism, communist influence in the intellectual world--no mean issues, but hardly ones to affect who won and who lost an election. So Irving discovered the wonderful political reporter and analyst Sam Lubell in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post, persuaded him to write for Commentary, and made me an enthusiast for his books, now hardly noted (although Sam Tanenhaus’s recently published The Death of Conservatism uses one of Lubell’s central theses as a guiding theme). None of the rest of us had ever read or noticed The Saturday Evening Post.
And second, Irving was interested in theology and religion and in theologians--Protestant and Catholic theologians, to be sure (Reinhold Niebuhr and Jacques Maritain, and there were others). But he then decided--it had occurred to none of the rest of us--that he ought to know more about Judaism, and he was able to recruit me to join a Talmud study class, for which we found a willing junior faculty member of the Jewish Theological Seminary. The class met only briefly, but its initiation was something that could not have been expected from any of the other editors.
I think back to these early days because it seems to me that Irving was all of a piece, almost from the beginning. No comment on his passing has failed to mention the young Trotskyist of Alcove 1 at ccny. But what other young ex-Trotskyist of 1943 would have been interested in reviewing Lionel Trilling’s E.M. Forster, and in going back to Trilling’s 1940 Partisan Review essay on T.S. Eliot’s Idea of a Christian Society? In that review in Enquiry--“a journal of independent radical thought,” actually an organ of ex-Trotskyists--Irving tells us that Trilling “subjected the liberal-socialist ideology to a vigorous and pointed chiding.” He quotes Trilling’s criticism of the idea that “man, in his quality, in his kind, will be wholly changed by socialism in fine ways that we cannot predict: man will be good, not as some men have been good, but in new and unspecified fashions.” Socialism and radicalism, in this view, expect too much from politics, from reform, from, indeed, revolution--they will not, cannot change man in his essential qualities. The “moral realism,” Irving writes, of Forster and Trilling is better: “It foresees no new virtues. … It is non-eschatological, skeptical of proposed revisions of man’s nature, content with the possibilities and limitations that are always with us.”
Irving quotes approvingly Forster’s “two cheers for democracy: One because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough.” That is all that any political ideal warrants.
That was 1943, and 66 years of writing, magazine editing (Encounter, The Reporter, The Public Interest), magazine founding, stimulating young writers, and promoting liberal capitalism followed. But it was always only “two cheers for capitalism,” despite his columns in The Wall Street Journal and his close involvement with the American Enterprise Institute. As early as 1970, Irving was in complete agreement with Daniel Bell, his co-founder and co-editor at The Public Interest, on “the cultural contradictions of capitalism,” on how capitalism inevitably undermines itself. Irving wrote that capitalism had pledged three things: affluence, individual liberty, and “the promise that … the individual could satisfy his instinct for self-perfection--for leading a virtuous life that satisfied his spirit (or, as one used to say, his soul)--and that the free exercise of such individual virtue would aggregate into a just society. . . . It was only when [this] third promise … was subverted by the dynamics of capitalism itself, as it strove to fulfill the other two--affluence and liberty--that the bourgeois order came, in the minds of the young especially, to possess a questionable legitimacy.”
No one has put it better. Irving later noted that “bourgeois society was living off the accumulated moral capital of traditional religion and traditional moral philosophy, and that once this capital was depleted, bourgeois society would find its legitimacy ever more questionable.” And so his tolerance and sympathy for religion, the more orthodox and traditional the better. That was questionable, and rubbed many (including me) the wrong way. In the latter days of The Public Interest, there were too many articles on how public policy could help promote marriage and stem the decline of the traditional family. Following the disciplinary tendencies of most sociologists, who simply project an ongoing change into the future, I thought neither traditional religion nor the family could resist the onslaught of commercial society...
Read entire article at The New Republic
When Irving Kristol joined the new magazine Commentary, he distinguished himself from the other editors--Clement Greenberg, part-time then, Robert Warshow, and me. First, he had an interest in politics, real politics, electoral politics, and not just the politics of left-wing anti-Stalinists, mulling over what was living and what was dead in Marxism, the fate of socialism, the future of capitalism, communist influence in the intellectual world--no mean issues, but hardly ones to affect who won and who lost an election. So Irving discovered the wonderful political reporter and analyst Sam Lubell in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post, persuaded him to write for Commentary, and made me an enthusiast for his books, now hardly noted (although Sam Tanenhaus’s recently published The Death of Conservatism uses one of Lubell’s central theses as a guiding theme). None of the rest of us had ever read or noticed The Saturday Evening Post.
And second, Irving was interested in theology and religion and in theologians--Protestant and Catholic theologians, to be sure (Reinhold Niebuhr and Jacques Maritain, and there were others). But he then decided--it had occurred to none of the rest of us--that he ought to know more about Judaism, and he was able to recruit me to join a Talmud study class, for which we found a willing junior faculty member of the Jewish Theological Seminary. The class met only briefly, but its initiation was something that could not have been expected from any of the other editors.
I think back to these early days because it seems to me that Irving was all of a piece, almost from the beginning. No comment on his passing has failed to mention the young Trotskyist of Alcove 1 at ccny. But what other young ex-Trotskyist of 1943 would have been interested in reviewing Lionel Trilling’s E.M. Forster, and in going back to Trilling’s 1940 Partisan Review essay on T.S. Eliot’s Idea of a Christian Society? In that review in Enquiry--“a journal of independent radical thought,” actually an organ of ex-Trotskyists--Irving tells us that Trilling “subjected the liberal-socialist ideology to a vigorous and pointed chiding.” He quotes Trilling’s criticism of the idea that “man, in his quality, in his kind, will be wholly changed by socialism in fine ways that we cannot predict: man will be good, not as some men have been good, but in new and unspecified fashions.” Socialism and radicalism, in this view, expect too much from politics, from reform, from, indeed, revolution--they will not, cannot change man in his essential qualities. The “moral realism,” Irving writes, of Forster and Trilling is better: “It foresees no new virtues. … It is non-eschatological, skeptical of proposed revisions of man’s nature, content with the possibilities and limitations that are always with us.”
Irving quotes approvingly Forster’s “two cheers for democracy: One because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough.” That is all that any political ideal warrants.
That was 1943, and 66 years of writing, magazine editing (Encounter, The Reporter, The Public Interest), magazine founding, stimulating young writers, and promoting liberal capitalism followed. But it was always only “two cheers for capitalism,” despite his columns in The Wall Street Journal and his close involvement with the American Enterprise Institute. As early as 1970, Irving was in complete agreement with Daniel Bell, his co-founder and co-editor at The Public Interest, on “the cultural contradictions of capitalism,” on how capitalism inevitably undermines itself. Irving wrote that capitalism had pledged three things: affluence, individual liberty, and “the promise that … the individual could satisfy his instinct for self-perfection--for leading a virtuous life that satisfied his spirit (or, as one used to say, his soul)--and that the free exercise of such individual virtue would aggregate into a just society. . . . It was only when [this] third promise … was subverted by the dynamics of capitalism itself, as it strove to fulfill the other two--affluence and liberty--that the bourgeois order came, in the minds of the young especially, to possess a questionable legitimacy.”
No one has put it better. Irving later noted that “bourgeois society was living off the accumulated moral capital of traditional religion and traditional moral philosophy, and that once this capital was depleted, bourgeois society would find its legitimacy ever more questionable.” And so his tolerance and sympathy for religion, the more orthodox and traditional the better. That was questionable, and rubbed many (including me) the wrong way. In the latter days of The Public Interest, there were too many articles on how public policy could help promote marriage and stem the decline of the traditional family. Following the disciplinary tendencies of most sociologists, who simply project an ongoing change into the future, I thought neither traditional religion nor the family could resist the onslaught of commercial society...