In 1979, Peter Steinfels identified a new movement and predicted it would be the decade’s most enduring legacy to American politics. In a new Introduction he describes its evolution from a reaction to Sixties' social change into an entrenched political force promoting an assertive, even belligerent, foreign policy.
More than three decades ago, in
The Neoconservatives
, Peter Steinfels described a nascent movement, predicting that it would be the sixties’ “most enduring legacy to American politics.
” Now, in a new foreword to that portrait, he traces neoconservatism’s fateful transformation. What was a movement of dissenting intellectuals creating a new, modern kind of conservatism became a phalanx of political insiders urging the nation to flex its muscles overseas.
describes the founders of the movement, disenchanted liberals recoiling from the turmoil of the sixties, a decline in authority, and a loss of tough-minded leadership at home and abroad. Written contemporaneously to the birth of a movement that would profoundly mark American history,
holds clues, Stein­fels argues, to how and why neoconservatism swerved from its original promise even as it successfully implanted itself as an influential and aggressive element in our politics. This is a landmark book, “an important contribution to understanding the influence of ideas on American politics” (
Congress Monthly
).