Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement

The influential neoconservative movement is a complex and often surprising thing in this incisive historical study. Brookings Institution senior fellow Vaïsse subdivides the movement's dramatic evolution into three distinct “ages.” Neoconservatism began in the 1960s, he contends, with a purely domestic agenda: to yank the Democratic Party away from what were seen as the excesses of the New Left and the failures of the liberal welfare state. It shifted focus in the 1970s and '80s to a crusade against the Soviet empire, and allegiance to Ronald Reagan. And it wound up in the 1990s as a faction of the Republican Right, espousing a utopian mission of spreading democracy through military force. Vaïsse examines the intellectual evolution of leading neocon thinkers like Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and William Kristol; explores the impact of neocon journals and think tanks; and recounts the movement's love-hate relationships with Democratic and Republican administrations. His critical but evenhanded treatment brims with insights, including his intriguing but underdeveloped analysis of neoconservatism as a latter-day Jacobinism fusing militant nationalism with universalist ideology. Vaïsse's is one of the most lucid and sophisticated accounts yet of this crucial political force. (May)