Why did neoconservatives join forces with neoliberals? Irving Kristol from critic to ally of free-market economics

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper demonstrates how the neoconservative programme, as articulated primarily by Irving Kristol, offered a conservative viewpoint distinct from and theoretically opposed to neoliberalism. It does so by explaining the founding vision of Kristol and Daniel Bell’s influential neoconservative journal The Public Interest, and the former’s subsequent response to the social and political contestations of the late 1960s. The also paper provides an explanation of how Kristol’s strategy of moral and cultural insurgency – within institutions such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal – attempted to fill in the practical gaps of neoliberalism’s economistic understanding of the defense of American society. The concluding section will reflect on the extent to which this critical exchange between neoconservatism and neoliberalism during the period of both movements’ political maturation, from roughly 1965 to 1980, provides an answer to long-held questions about the possibility of a viable conservatism in America.