An Intellectual Evolution: The Conversion Of Irving Kristol And The Rise Of Neoconservatism

Neoconservatism was one of the most influential forces of the 20th-century American politics. In China, much has been written about its political achievement while its emergence and development are relatively less studied. Of those works that do deal with these two topics, most turn out to be sketchy, treating them either as background information or as only part of the American political current of the 1960s. Works on neoconservatives in China, meanwhile, mostly study these people as a group instead of individuals, focusing on the political common ground they shared instead of the whole intellectual picture of a particular member. The thesis, therefore, attempts to "see a world through a grain of sand", tracing the development of neoconservatism to its intellectual root and chooses one prominent conservative figure—Irving Kristol as its focus. The thesis, however, is not a biographical depiction of Irving Kristol's life. Instead, it selects only a period of his political life—his drift to the right, which the thesis regards as crucial to the rise of neoconservatism, and emphasizes more the making of his political ideology than the details of his life.The thesis first examines Irving Kristol's early experience as a New York Jewish intellectual, in an attempt to locate the "personal factors" that contributed to his political rightward drift. Then it proceeds to explore the "social factors" that led to Kristol's conversion to neoconservatism, discussing how liberalism in the 1960s, reflected in "Great Society" and counterculture movement, offended Kristol and compelled him to construct a political ideology against it. In order to redress the error made by American liberalism and to reinsert the spirit of political prudence, Irving Kristol advocated a combination of economic liberty on the one hand and moral authority on the other. Then the thesis probed deeper into Kristol's political ideology, exploring where he derived his skepticism and three explanations were provided:his ethnicity, his academic experience and his philosophical links. In the last part, the thesis discusses the contributions Irving Kristol made to the rise of neoconservatism as an influential political force and the limitations of his ideology as well. What the thesis attempts to do is to chart the intellectual development of Irving Kristol, the political godfather of neoconservatism, so as to delineate the formative stage of the construction of neoconservative ideology and, in turn, obtain a better understanding of neoconservative policies.