Who Named the Neocons?

Who named the neoconservatives? You are looking at the perpetrator, or so it is believed. Dissent and its circle, in the early 1970s, invented the term to denigrate the right-moving intellectuals who wrote in Commentary and the Public Interest. The name first appeared in print here, in a Fall 1973 article by Michael Harrington entitled “The Welfare State and Its Neoconservative Critics.” The neocons, it is said, resisted the designation at first and began to use it only after it had gained wide acceptance.

This history can be found in dozens of books, articles, and Web postings; the best-annotated version is in S. M. Lipset’s 1996 book American Exceptionalism. But—you’re reading Dissent, after all—the story really is more complicated. [1]

Norman Podhoretz, in his 1996 Commentary essay “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” gives glimp...

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FOOTNOTES:

[1] Norman Podhoretz, in his 1996 Commentary essay “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” gives glimpses of this prehistory. Podhoretz himself in 1963 had called Walter Lippmann and Clinton Rossiter neoconservatives, and he gives earlier citations from George Lichtheim and Dwight MacDonald.
[2] In Today, vol. 1, p. 276 (1883): “...the principles of neo-Conservatism as expounded by the late Lord Beaconsfield...”
[3] By 1965, the historian Walter Struve could write that “Right Wingers who hesitated or refused to identify themselves with any political party and who dissociated themselves from the yearning of the more traditional Right to restore the Second Reich have come to be known as neoconservatives.’” “Hans Zehrer as a Neoconservative Elite Theorist,” American Historical Review, vol. 70, pp. 1035-1057 (1965). It appeared in this sense in a July 12, 1970, New York Times book review by Gordon Craig. This usage appears to be an invention by English-language historians; Fritz Stern, in Five Germanys I Have Known (New York, 2006, p.72) asserts otherwise, but gives no citations. The usual German terminology is Jungkonservativen or the konservative Revolution.
[4] For example, S. G. Brown, “Democracy, the New Conservatism, and the Liberal Tradition in America,” Ethics, vol.66, pp. 1-9 (1955).
[5] In addition to the two Times appearances cited in previous notes, it was used by Tom F. Driver in connection with the comic strip “Peanuts” (February 2, 1969) and by Richard Elman to describe the French extreme right (November 21, 1971).
[6] Partisan Review, vol.55, no.1, p.82 (1989). This usage, at least in reference to Commentary and the Public Interest, must have commenced after the word started to show up in the Times in mid-1968. The September-October issue of Dissent could still refer to "a wide gamut of journals ranging all the way from Commentary and Dissent to Studies on the Left and Fuck You, a Magazine of the Arts."
[7] In the July 10, 1974 New York Times, Stanley Hoffmann, an occasional Dissent contributor but not really a member of the magazine’s circle, described as neoconservative the policies of French president Georges Pompidou. The use of the word for 1920s German rightists persists to the present day, as in Fritz Stern’s Five Germanys I Have Known.
[8] In an October 13, 1975, New York Times column, Anthony Lewis defined the term as “intellectuals, expectably liberal, who became critics of much liberal doctrine.”
[9] Especially in Epstein’s Summer 1973 discussion of “the new conservative intellectuals” responding to correspondence from Midge Decter.
[10] This usage demonstrates both the lexical shift which had already occurred and the shift which had not yet reached the Dissent group. In the 1950s, it was Clinton Rossiter, Peter Viereck, and Russell Kirk who were described as neoconservatives by their contemporaries. (The term appeared in this sense, among other places, in Dissent, in the Summer 1955 issue.) These thinkers were, by biography and in temperament, almost the antithesis of the ex-leftists whom the word came to designate in the mid-1970s.
[11] A text that has been read to point the other way is Kristol’s neoconservative manifesto in the January 19, 1976, Newsweek. Kristol begins by saying that since the New York Times, Time, and Newsweek are now calling us neoconservatives, we might as well accept the name. But this is best understood as a rhetorical device aimed at preserving the neocons’ claim to be the true heirs of the New Deal liberalism they were abandoning. A writer of Kristol’s temperament, offered a platform in Newsweek, would surely employ it for political purposes rather than philological ones. And even if Kristol is taken at his word, it begs the question of where the mass media--not avid readers of Dissent then or now--picked up the word.