Neoconservatism Revisited

Yesterday, Ben Ross of Dissent posted in the comments, contesting the etymology of the term "neoconservative" that I cited back on May 25, 2008. Evidently, Michael Harrington was not the one who coined the term in 1973, as Jonah Goldberg (and others, including me) have been led to believe. In an article from the Summer 2007 issue of Dissent, Ross writes:

The word neoconservative has (Internet search tools now reveal) a long prehistory of use in academic and quasi-academic writing to describe any new variant of conservatism. I found it used in 1883, in a periodical that featured excerpts from Karl Marx’s new book Capital.

In the late 1960s, it seems, neoconservatism began its transformation from academic neologism to part of the language. By this time, the term had developed two specific meanings for historians alongside its more general usage. It designated either the integral nationalists of Weimar Germany, such as Arthur Möller van den Bruck or the American historians who reacted against Charles Beard, Carl Becker, and their liberal interpretation of the Revolutionary era. It was in the latter sense that the word made its first appearance in the New York Times, in a May 26, 1968, book review by Columbia University historian Richard Morris. It described—of all people—Staughton Lynd, in some of whose work Morris found “an updated and perceptive brand of neoconservatism.” It recurred annually in the Times thereafter.

Later, Ross explains that at Dissent, the term was being used to describe conservatives (like Russell Kirk) who had taken conservative thought in new directions in the recent past as well as to define Cold War liberals like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz who had found a new home on the right by the early '70s. Thus:

A neoconservative, for the Dissenters of the early 1970s, was either someone with a new variant of conservatism or a former leftist who had moved right. The term was applied to the [latter] group that evolved into today’s neocons, simply because they were the new conservatives of immediate concern. But its meaning was not limited to them. It was elsewhere that neoconservatism became a name rather than a description.

It is an informative article that is well worth your time to read. Thanks to Ben Ross for pointing me to it.

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On a less-weightier note, while surfing the web yesterday I came across this old entry at Ace of Spades about a would-be Internet diva. While self-confidence is necessary trait to have, it must always be tempered by humility, as I'm sure Ms. Passey came to discover.

A review of Tom Kratman's A Desert Called Peace will be posted tomorrow. Happy Monday!