Standing on the corner or creating the art. There are a lot of people like the police or whoever telling them to get off the corner. So they had the suffrage to go through that and go through that so theres a big responsibility. As a consumer i dont mind supporting them. Im in hiphop but i would still supported. I dont know there is a museum or whatever but people do need to be accountable if they have a lot of money and at least be recognized for being accountable. I want to thank our panelists for being here this afternoon. This is vintage thing conversation about the new urban aesthetic. Thank you very much to the audience. [applause] we are out. [laughter] [inaudible conversations] that concludes our coverage from the 2014 harlem book fair. If you missed any of the panels from todays festival you can watch them tonight starting at midnight eastern time. Up next in 1995 professor Irving Kristol discusses book neoconservatism the autobiography of an idea, selected essays 19411942 with brian lamb on booknotes. They talked at length about the development of the personal philosophy which started with marxism in the 1940s. His outlook became more conservative over the years when the term neoconservative was drawing criticism of kristallnachts work in the 1980s. Kristol died in 1989. This is about one hour. Cspan Irving Kristol, author of the autobiography of an idea neoconservatism, when was the first time you ever heard that word uttered . Guest it must have been sometime in the mid1970s. It was not my term. I did not invent it. I believe it was invented by someone who was criticizing me and thought that that was a term of opprobrium. I decided that it was a pretty good description of, in fact, what i was thinking and feeling, so i ran with it. Cspan what does it mean . Guest what it means is thatit refers to a constellation of opinions and views that is not traditionally conservative but is conservative and is certainly not liberal. And since i and others who have been called neoconservatives move from being liberals to being a kind of conservative, then neoconservatism seemed have in the book as to what year they were written. I dont know if youve done this. Guest no. Cspan fortyone pieces, and they were written from the 1940s to the 1990s. The most were written in the 70s18 of the 41. Why would you guess that the ones you chose for this book were written in the 70s . Guest i think its because things, particularly intellectual, political things, intellectual and political ideas, were more in flux in the 1970s than either before or after. I mean, that was the decade of transition, so far as i was concerned. Now in 1968, i still voted for hubert humphrey, but by the nineby 1974, i realized i was going to become a republican, and by that time the term neoconservatism had been invented, and i decided i was also a neoconservative. Cspan a couple of other numbers here only two come from the 80s, and then 12 come from the 90s. Why that big jump . Guest im sure thats just an accident. I mean, there are many essays ive written that are not in this book, more journalistic essays, more timely essays i did not bother to include. And i think i wrote a lot of such essays on economics, for instance. Even though im not an economist, i was sufficiently wellversed, i do think, to write on economics. But i did not include most of those or strictly political analyses of particular elections. So i would think thats why its so, but, frankly, i dont remember all the essays i wrote in the 1970s. Cspan at one point in one of the essays, you admit to working for the cia. Guest yeah. Cspan whats that about . Guest oh, back in the 1950s, i was in london, coediting encounter magazine with Stephen Spender, and i left in 19the end of 1958. Stephen and i founded the magazine in early 53. I left at the end of 58. And then i guess it was in the mid60s or thereabouts that it was revealed that, in fact, we thought we were being subsidized by an American Foundation called the fairfield foundation, and, in fact, that was a front for the cia, and it was cia money, and. Cspan howd you find out . Guest it was made public in the press. I dont know how they found out somebody leaked, obviously. But i didnt inquire and i didnt care, really. Cspan what was your reaction at the time . Guest i was annoyed. I didnt want to work for the cia. If i had known there was cia money involved, i would not have taken that particular job. Cspan why would they want to fund the encounter magazine . Guest now thats why anthere were rumors that there was some government money behind it, but the question occurred to me that just occurred to you why on earth would they want to fund a magazine that Stephen Spender and i were editing and whichwhose general political outlook was liberal, not at all conservative . This was, after all, in the eisenhower years. Mr. Dulles, i believe, was then head of the cia. It didnt make any sense to me. But it turned out, in fact, there was a liberal group within the cia that thought it very important to have an intellectual magazine in europe and, indeed, worldwide. We were an english language magazine and, in the end, pretty much a british magazine, but the idea was that we were supposed to be more cosmopolitan than that. And they decided to support the magazine, and once they started supporting it, it was a very successful magazine. They became very proud of it and didnt let it go until they had to. Cspan the first 39 pages of this book areyou say are fresh, brandnew, no ones ever read them before. What are they about . Why did you. Guest its an autobiographical memoir about my own personal intellectual development, and i didnt want to prepublish it. Some of it is quite personal. Some of itwell, let me put it this way. This is a book in which all the other essays have previously been published. This essay i wanted to be fresh its in some ways the most important essay, from my point of view, that i ever wrote since its about me, and i wanted that fresh in the book. Cspan you start off in the very beginning and you say thatget past the preface here to thatyou say that youve been a neomarxist, a neotrotskyist, a neosocialist, a neoliberal and finally a neoconservative. Guest that pretty much traces the trajectomy oftrajectory of my political beliefs. Iive never been comfortable with any of those doctrines because i always saw problems inherent in those doctrines. I even see problems inherent in conservatism today. I think anyone who has studied the history of political thought would be bound to see problems with conservatism today, which is why i still call myself a neoconservative, though in truth, those who would 10 years ago have been called neoconservatives these days simply call themselves conservatives. The conservative movement has expanded to include us. Cspan whats a neomarxist . Guest its a marxist who never accepted the full doctrine of marxism and who had some severe doubts about some of the important doctrines of marxism, as i always did from the beginning. Cspan whats a neois itis it trotskyite or trotskyist . Guest yeah. Well, its the same thing as a neomarxist, except that i did not want ever to be a stalinist i was always critical of stalinist russia. On the other hand, i found myself, when i was a young socialist, more and more critical of the teachings of leon trotsky, more and more skeptical of them. So i was a neo. Cspan where did you grow up . Guest in brooklyn. Cspan what kind of family did you have . Guest a very stable, traditional family. Cspan brothers and sister . Guest i have onei had one older sister. Shes gone now. And my mother died when i was 16, and we formed a very harmonious household, nevertheless. Cspan what did your dad do . Guest he was in the garment trade, boys clothing, and sometimes business was ok and sometimes, instead of being an employer, he became an employee, depending upon circumstances. Cspan whered you go to college . Guest city college. Cspan what was city college like in those days . Guest well, it was a wonderful place. It had a lot of very bright students, very much interested in politics and very much is interested in ideas along with an interest in politics. And i dontlet me put it this way the faculty, i dont think, was all that distinguished, but a it didnt matter. Most of us students ended up educating each other, and we learned a lot. I learned a lot. It wasi got a very good education at city college, not all of it in the classroom. Cspan you talk about the different alcoves where people sat. Guest yes. Cspan which one were you in . Guest alcove one, which was the anticommunist or antistalinist alcove, where socialists of various kinds and some liberals would congregate and argue and exchange ideas, and it was a very nice alcove. It was my second home. Cspan was that in the cafeteria . Guest yes. All the alcoves werewhenwere in an arc around the cafeteria. Cspan anybody in that alcove that we would know . Any names we would recognize . Guest oh, yes, some of them anyhow daniel bell, melvin lasky, philip selznick, now Professor Emeritus of sociology at berkeley; Seymour Martin lipset, also had been a professor for many years at berkeley. A lot of people who became fairly wellknown academics were in thatirving howe was in that alcove, became a wellknown literary critic. So in terms of subsequent careers, the alcove produced quite a lot of people of some distinction. Cspan who was in alcove two . Guest the communists; that is to say, the stalinists, the people who were apologetic for the soviet union. And they did not produce, i think, as many distinguished people as we did, because they didnt have the kind of intellectual stimulation that we had. Cspan who were some of the people that were in alcove two . Guest i honestly dont recall. They meant nothing to me. Cspan did alcove one or alcove two ever meet . Guest well, alcove two was forbidden to even argue with us i mean, that was the way the communist organization worked. Young communists dominated alcove two, and they felt bad having conversations or even disputes with trotskyists or socialists or any sort of noncommunist, leftwing person cspan who is sydney hook . Guest sydney hook was a professor atof philosophy at New York University and a very distinguished professor of philosophy, who was a peculiar kind of marxist; that is to say, he rejected about half of what i would call marxism, but nevertheless retained some elements of it. He was a wonderful educator and a great writer, and i learned a lot from his writings. I was never technically a student of his, though i became a very good friend of his, subsequently, and i learned a lot from his writings. Cspan Lionel Trilling. Guest well, Lionel Trilling was a professor of literature at columbia and a man whose writings i much admired when i read them in partisan review back inwhen i was in alcove one. Alcove one was a very intellectual alcove. We read partisan review. We were all interested in modern literature, modern poetry, as well as modern politics, and i admired him a great deal. Subsequently, bwhen i became an editor of commentary, i met Lionel Trilling, and we became good friends. Cspan what was commentary . Guest commentary was founded in 1945. It was published by the American Jewish communityAmerican Jewish committee, and it aimed at reaching both a jewish and nonjewish audience. It was awe would now call a somewhat highbrow magazine, and it published a lot of the intellectuals from partisan review. It published a lot of nonjews, of course, and i was an editor there for five years. Cspan i want to make a connection for the audience that may not follow these things in detail. From a booknotes in april, lets watch this and get your reaction to it. excerpt from april, 1995, booknotes cspan how did you and Irving Kristol originally hook up . Ms. Gertrude himmelfarb thats a rather peculiar story. It goes back to our youth. I was very youngi think i was 18 whenwhen we met, and i think he was probably all of 20 or Something Like that. And we were both trotskyists. We were both very myoure surprised at that. We were very much involved in the radical movement. And we met at a trotskyist meeting, and we were married a year later. Cspan where . Ms. Himmelfarb and thats ourinin new york, in brooklyn. It was actually in brooklyn. Cspan now what werewhat were those meetings all about . Ms. Himmelfarb well, they were rather fthey were ratherrather ludicrous from any point of view, and even at the time, i think we thought that they were ratherrather odd, rather bizarre. Well, there we were, young, very militant socialists who thought we were going to reform the world. I forget what wethe Young Peoples Socialist League fourth international, i think, was the grand name that was given to this little group, and we were going to convert this little group ofofwe, thisthis handful of people, were going to convert the masses to socialism, i suppose, was the idea. So thatthatthatsthat was thethe ostensible background of all of this. end of excerpt cspan your wife. Guest yes. Well, one of the reasons i have always looked back with some good feelings toward my rarather brief period as a trotskyist is i met my wife there. I was, in fact, 20, and she was 18. We were married a year later and have been married now for 53 years, so thatthat successful marriage came out of the trotskyist movement. Also i met many of my lifelong friends there, and also i got a very good, intensive, Early Education in marxism and leninism, which carried me right through the cold war. I really didnt have to do any studying in marxism and leninism after i had left the trotskyists. Cspan who is leo strauss . Guest now, leo strauss was a professor of political philosophy at the university of chicago. I got to know him much lateroh, i guess it would have been in the late 1940s. He was a teacher of some friends of mine who said, you must read this man and learn from him, which i began and did. I then met him. Hes called mr. Strauss. To this day, the students of his students callrefer to him as mr. Strauss. No one ever firstnamed professor strauss. And never professor strauss, only mr. Strauss. he was a very impressive teacher whowhose basic idea was you want to study politics, study plato and aristotle, and then try to understand modernity and modern politics in the light of their ideas. And its a very fruitful way of looking at modernity. And he has produced dozens and dozens of firstrate students, whose students have now produced firstrate students, who are now into the fourth generation, as it were, of socalled straussians. Cspan back in those days, did you seek out this kind of training, or did you happen on it . Guest both. You know, i was a young intellectual. I mean, it was in the pretv erera. I was a bookworm, had been a bookworm. I was very interested in ideas. The socalled deeper the idea, the more interesting i found it i had never really studied plato and aristotle, but when i began to read leo strauss, i did begin to study them on my own. This was after i was out of college. And it seemed to me that he was on to something very important; that they knew things about us that we did not know about them; that in some ways they understood us rather better than we understood them. And so i became veryoh, i wouldnt say reverential, but certainly veryvery respectful of classical political thinking, namely premodern political thinking, and i read a lot in that field. Cspan of those early writers, who would be your favorite . Who wouldwhoswhats the one book you would read for the basis of thought thats brought you through these years . Guest i think it would be aristotles politics or his ethics. Hard choice. Iit would be aristotle, not plato. Cspan did he preach in his writing . Guest no, no. Forbut hehe didnt even write, so far as i know. Hehe talked, and people wrote it down. He may have written. But did he preach . He had disciples, he had students. They used to walk around, and he would talk to them. Cspan what was his theme . Guest well, his theme was what is the purpose of life . Nothing less. And the purpose of life is to lead a fully human life, and a fully human life is determined not by some cacapricious idea, but by nature, what nature intends us to live; that we are a species with a destiny, special destiny, and to realize our full humanity, we had to first live in society and then we had to think about the implications of everything we knew. Cspan you say in the introduction that reading theology is one of my favorite relaxations. guest yes. Well, it is a way of being introduced to and getting acquainted with very deep and large ideas, and i like those deep and large ideas. Im no theologian, though ive written about religion, but i find them stimulating. Ii like being stimulated by those very large ideas, about the meaning of life and whether there is god and what is god, if there is god, and what is the relation of organized religion to morality. All of those questions tantalize me. Cspan jumping from your alcove one and that group way beyond to just a few years ago, you write about, at the American Enterprise institute, having lunches every day with robert bork and nino scalia and Laurence Silberman and then Jude Wanniski. What was that all about . Guest well, i wasi had taken a leave of absence from my teaching at nyu, a sabbatical, to learn economics. I felt at that point, economics was becoming important. Up until that point, i assumed that lorjohn maynard keynes had said everything there was to say about economics. But once we got stagnation and inflation at the same time, it was quite clear that someone had to revise economics. And although i knew i couldnt do it myself, iat least i wanted to understand what was going on. So i took the year off, and i came to washington at the American Enterprise institute, and mr. Ford had just lost the election, so that Laurence Silberman and bob bork and nino scalia all came out of government. And before going on to their other careers as judges or as professors, they spent Something Like six months at the American Enterprise institute. And we had no cafeteria then, we had no lunchroom, so wethe four of us brownbagged it every day and just talked. Then Jude Wanniski came down on a fellowshiphe was writing his book thenand he started talking to us about supplyside economics, which was very interesting and about which we knew nothing, and th