DANIEL BELL
629
In 1952, the idea that a number of New York intellectuals
might extol the virtues of America occasioned , as I have noted, as–
tonishment, incredulity, and even outrage. In 1984, we see a dif–
ferent phenomenon on the cultural scene: a set of highly vocal con–
servative intellectuals for whom the affirmation of America and
capitalism has become the ground of their existence, and for whom
criticism of America is an affront. These intellectuals have positions
in the government, a number of vigorous and influential magazines
(The Public Interest, Commentary, The New Criterion, This World,
blan–
keting the areas of domestic public policy, foreign policy, the arts,
and religion); more specialized magazines such as
Public Opinion,
Regulation,
the
Policy Review;
a half-dozen student magazines. And,
as the guardian of public virtue, the Committee for a Free World.
In the normal course of events, all of this would be welcome.
Conservatism, while having a distinguished lineage in English and
European history, has never been central to American thought and
debate . Henry Adams was a soured, embittered man who detested
the plutocracy for its coarseness and the government for its corrup–
tion and rawness. H .
L.
Mencken mocked the "booboisie." The
Southern Agrarians Qohn Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert
Penn Warren) spoke eloquently of a rooted tradition, but their gos–
samer politics was one of nostalgia. Walter Lippmann , the only
intellectual who invoked natural law (in his
The Public Philosophy),
was feared by the Midwestern Republicans for his anglophilia and
admired by the liberals for his style and sentiments, but never read
seriously by either . The striking thing, in fact, is that the conserva–
tive current in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century America
was deeply anticapitalist, and decried the grossness of uninhibited
money-making and the destruction of "traditional" American values
by the rising industrialism.
The appearance of a group of sophisticated individuals who
themselves had emerged out of the detritus of Marxism and the
pieties of radicalism gave rise to a genuine set of intellectual debates
on the crucial issues of political philosophy- the character of dis–
tributive justice; the nature of rights and obligations; the limits, if
any, on individualism; the virtues, and what they might be, of
capitalism; the possibilities of community; the role of morality in
foreign policy.
Unfortunately, those intellectual debates of the 1970s have
shrivelled in the 1980s. And one also sees, in odd instances, the rap–
prochement of neoconservatives with the New Right , against the
