REFLECTIONS OF A NEOCONSERVATIVE 


Looking Back, Looking Ahead. By Irving Kristol. 336 pp. New York: Basic Books. $19.95. 

IRVING KRISTOL is one of the most able, versatile and urbane of America's right-wing intellectuals. He may well be the most influential too, for he is said to dispose of considerable brokerage power behind the scenes. He began as a Trotskyist, as he amusingly recounts in this volume. Later he became a liberal anti-Communist and helped to create the British-American monthly magazine Encounter. He describes here the circumstances in which (unknown to its editors) the magazine was, very remotely, financed from C.I.A. funds. It is a long-dead controversy, and no sensible person now holds it against Encounter, which continues to flourish, albeit on a shoestring. 

Mr. Kristol now teaches at New York University and edits The Public Interest, a periodical of conservative bent and high quality. He finds time to write essays on economic, political and philosophical matters, usually with a current point, and it is these that he has collected. Most of them date from the 1970's and early 80's, Paul Johnson, the former editor of The New Statesman, is the author of ''Modern Times.'' though there are a few reprints from a 1972 collection, now out of print. 

It is not easy to characterize this work, for Mr. Kristol ranges widely. Among other topics, he dicusses the Jewish sense of humor, the relations between Judaism, Christianity and Socialism, the case for censoring pornography and the discontent of modern urban civilization. He has an illuminating essay on Albert Einstein and a whole series on American foreign and defense policy. 

But the core of the book is the relationship between economics and society, and here Mr. Kristol is at his best and boldest. He has been called, and he accepts the term, a neoconservative. To my mind it is an ugly and inadequate label. Conservatives, whether new or old, are engaged in preserving as much of the past and present as possible, and there are many aspects of both that Mr. Kristol finds repugnant. He is not a romantic or an Arcadian; he does not suffer from an excess of nostalgia; he has no formal attachments to traditional religious or secular hierarchies. On the contrary, as these pages make clear, he warmly supports the sensible, empirical pursuit of progress and seems to believe that mankind, while far from perfectible, is capable of slow but indefinite improvement. But he distrusts the ories of almost any kind and disbelieves passionately in utopias. I would call him a skeptical liberal democrat, in the proper sense of these terms, and leave it at that. Mr. Kristol's thesis is as follows. In the second half of the 18th century, the formative period of the modern world, there were two distinct types of revolutionary thinkers, who were responsible for two quite different kinds of revolution. On the one hand, there were the French, the Encyclopedists, the men of the Gallic Enlightenment, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau and so forth, the thinkers who precipitated the French Revolution and all its violent and totalitarian offshoots from that day to this. These men lived in a rigidly hierarchical and compartmentalized society, in which they occupied what Mr. Kristol terms a ''marginal situation.'' They were true intellectuals, a caste apart, different, ''at home in the Parisian salons but not in the society as a whole.'' They thus originated what Lionel Trilling called ''the adversary culture,'' seeing their life and work as a ''mission, to be achieved against the massive resistance of tradition, custom, habit and all the institutions'' of society. French rationalism, Mr. Kristol argues, ''identified the condition of being progressive with the condition of being rebellious.'' 

As he observes, the French concept of revolution and progress has become the dominant one in the 20th century, at any rate among intellectuals, and this has led to a needless fundamentalism in the pursuit of change and so in turn to needless violence. It has also led to the notion that progress is the peculiar property of an enlightened elite, who have a mission to promote it and, if necessary, to impose it on society, even against the will of the members of that society. Naturally, this has been destructive of democracy in any genuine form. The seeds of modern totalitarianism lie in the alienation of Rousseau and Voltaire from their social surroundings. 

BY contrast, Mr. Kristol points to the ''other revolution'' of the 18th century, which has its origins in the Unites States and the Anglo- Scottish Enlightenment, a quite different affair from its French counterpart. He sees an appropriate significance in the fact that the Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith's ''Wealth of Nations'' were published in the same year, 1776. The one introduced bourgeois democracy in its most quintessential form; the other analyzed and illuminated in rational terms the capitalist system then springing into existence. The empirical politics of the one married the empirical economics of the other, and the result was the American Republic, citadel of democratic capitalism, the most stable and on the whole most successful framework for promoting human progress. 

Mr. Kristol notes that George Washington was not a ''revolutionary'' revolutionary; he was very much part of the society of his day, which he found good. Equally, Smith, Hume, Burke and the other thinkers of the Anglo-Scottish tradition were also well-adjusted and comfortable members of their society and never found it necessary or congenial to adopt an adversary posture. As rational as the French, they expressed themselves ''in a calm historical sociology rather than in a fervent political messianism.'' They thought that a good deal of progress had already been achieved, often haphazardly, and that society needed prodding in the right direction, rather than overthrowing and building afresh. They did not believe in gnostic elites; on the contrary, in both Burke's organic view of politics and Smith's view of capitalism, everyone had something to contribute, often unconsciously. Their calmer view of progress was thus better adapted to a stable democracy and more likely to avoid totalitarian pitfalls. So it certainly has proved. 

THERE are, of course, a number of objections to Mr. Kristol's theory of the two revolutions. Why, for instance, did the English and Americans, who, as he shows, had so much in common, spend the critical decade of the 1770's at war - with the American Revolution, ostensibly at least, looking to Paris for information and succor? There are a number of paradoxes here. Again, why has the 20th century, and particularly 20th-century youth, gone for sustenance to the French Revolution, which ultimately failed, rather than to the American, which has emphatically succeeded? One would, in particular, like Mr. Kristol to expand his essay ''Adam Smith and the Spirit of Capitalism'' into a book - testimony to the quality of thinking that has gone into this collection. 

photo of Irving Kristol 


...and I am Sid Harth