Review: The Neoconservative Mind
| Author: | Gary Dorrien |
| Review Date: | 09/23/2003 |
| Basic Summary: | Religion Professor and Episcopal Priest Gary Dorrien attempts to delineat an intellectual and biographical history of the neoconservative movement. |
This is not a good book. I credit it on the assumption that it was one of the first thorough investigations of neoconservative ideology and history, but it is still not a good book.
Chiefly, the book suffers from an excess of biography and a deficiency of intellectual narrative. The method is reasonable: focus on the chief figures in neoconservatism, and the outlines of the movement will come to light through their history and their writings. But instead, what we get is five biographies that add up to less than the sum of their parts. The book may describe everything that Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Michael Novak, Peter Berger, and James Burnham ever wrote, but it is never clear how their lives intersected, what ideas united them, or how their ideas interacted to become a movement. Instead, you must take it on faith that these are the important men of neoconservatism and that their ideas accurately represent neoconservatism.
Although Dorrien does a fairly good job of contrasting neoconservative arguments with their counterarguments, he introduces too many of his own criticisms of neoconservatism into the mix. Abandoning feigned objectivity is not the problem - many books could benefit from such an engaged treatment. No, Dorrien's failure is that his critiques are generally weak, but passed off as if they were authoritative. Too often, Dorrien will spend a page explaining neoconservative treatise, and then dismiss it with a mere sentence.
It's hard to take such brief "rebuttals" to significant ideas very seriously. It's even harder now that some of Dorrien's own arguments have been disproven by time. For example, Dorrien claims that neoconservative arguments about democratization are disproven by the lack of democracy in East Asia - a reasonable criticism when the book was written, perhaps, but not very convincing today after democratization in Taiwan, South Korea, and Indonesia. Similarly, Dorrien predicts in the book's conclusion that the end of the Cold War means that neoconservatism will never again be so united, or so predominent in the conservative movement. That prediction looks pretty silly today, as left-wing pundits and politicians decry the influence of a cabal of neoconservatives around Bush.
Finally, a note about a specific, but particularly galling, flaw in the book: Dorrien repeatedly returns to the concept of the "New Class" as a critical point in the neoconservative universe. Yet the idea's birth is poorly explained, and its evolution left as an exercise to the reader. Dorrien gives us point A - the idea's origin in 1939 - and point B - its use today - and doesn't draw a line between the two.
Near as I can tell, the idea began as a Marxist interpretation of 1930s totalitarianism. It claimed that in addition to capitalists and proletarians there was now a third class, the managerial class. This "new class" was acting as all classes did by creating an ideology to justify its own pursuit of power. And, in fact, the managerial class was winning, in Germany, in the Soviet Union, and in America.
The idea was kept alive by the ex-Trotskyist neoconservatives, and in their hands it mutated into a softer complaint about the intellectual/professional class in the United States, which was increasing state power and changing education in order to further its own power domestically.
At least, that's my understanding of it. It's an interesting idea. I just wish I understood it better - and had more confidence in my understanding - but Dorrien leaves it underexplained.