Who Named the Neocons?

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. 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.

The word neoconservative has (Internet search tools now reveal) a long prehistory of use in academic and quasi-academic writing to describe any new vari...