About the public interest.(LOOKING BACK)

I ARRIVED at The Public Interest in the spring of 1994. Irving Kristol would soon, in an excess of modesty, declare neoconservatism a generational phenomenon, now absorbed into a larger conservative whole. Yet less than a decade later, I was fielding phone calls from curious reporters as far off as Argentina, Japan, and various European outposts who wanted to know what neoconservatism was. They would ask me to speak to its influence on the Bush administration's foreign and social policies, and its relation to the Religious Right. Neoconservatism was apparently back.

Of course, the September 11 attacks and the war in Iraq were the proximate causes of this resurgent interest in neoconservatism. But it's also the case that neoconservatism, especially as it came to be embodied in The Public Interest, has left a unique and lasting imprint on American intellectual life, and on American conservatism in particular. It will be the task of historians to assign The Public Interest its place and to assess its contribution. What I can offer at present, in this our fortieth anniversary year, and our last issue, are a few provisional reflections.

I would begin with what's most obvious but perhaps also overlooked, the journal's name. The founders of the PI believed in something called "the public interest." If they were less than certain about what that public interest was, they were in agreement that it existed and could be at least partially apprehended and approached by reasonable, decent human beings. Their authority on this matter was Walter Lippmann--hardly surprising, because the early generation of PI contributors were, generally speaking, liberals or social democrats of one sort or another. They eschewed an ideological approach to politics and public policy, were hesitant to raise questions of fundamental principle, and were of a skeptical frame of mind. Meliorism was their watchword. At the same time, they were upholders of the idea of "the public interest," called their magazine by that name, and affirmed, in an editorial statement in the PI's first issue, that a democratic society "has a greater need than any other to keep the idea of the public interest before it."

THIS belief in the public interest was by itself enough to distinguish what became known as neoconservatism from the more libertarian or business-oriented conservatism of that period, and it would soon contribute as well to the journal's move away from an increasingly value-neutral mode of liberal thought and politics.

That the PI would eventually become known as one of the leading neoconservative journals should alert us to something important about its character. The Public Interest was never simply a journal of the social scientific method. Of course, the PI is best known, and properly so, for the articles it published over the years by leading economists, sociologists, and other more empirically minded social scientists. But social scientists, as a class at least, are notoriously loath to raise larger questions of the public interest--that is, "value" questions about the general welfare or, to use an older vocabulary, the good society and the life well lived. This was not the case for many of the PI's writers, who saw such questions as intrinsic to their inquiries. As early as 1971, in an editorial note in these pages, Irving would observe that the most pressing questions facing American society were matters "of political philosophy, not of economics or sociology or public policy in the conventional sense of that term." And he insisted that "we must go behind the smaller questions in order to contemplate the larger answers they tacitly demand." Indeed, it would have been a strange thing for the writers and editors of a journal named The Public Interest to have thought otherwise.

If in 1965, the date of this journal's birth, liberals were still comfortable talking about matters relating to the public interest, this would soon change. There is no need to rehearse this history here. It is all too well known. Suffice it to say that in the excesses of the cultural revolution of the sixties, liberals became increasingly hostile toward the notion of a larger public good and public ...