A Lion in Zion

THE NEW CRITERION, November 2024

A lion in Zion

On “All About Herzl: The Exhibition” at the Temple Emanu-El Bernard Museum of Judaica, New York.

The raid on the town can only be described as an atrocity. Terrorists from across the border descended on the remote village and quickly overran its defenses. Trained and supported by a hostile state, which had planned the attack as part of a larger proxy war, tribal mercenaries went door to door “with horrid shouting and yelling,” according to one eyewitness account, “like a flood upon us.”

Over the course of the day, the attackers brutalized and murdered as many residents as they could find. They bludgeoned and burned the townspeople in their homes. People of all races and backgrounds fell victim to the assault. Anyone the terrorists could not round up to take back across the border as either a hostage or domestic slave was slaughtered. Women and infants, along with the infirm, were specifically targeted.

By the next day, ten men, nine women, and twenty-five children lay dead out of a population of 291, with more than a hundred people taken hostage. Nearly half the town was reduced to ashes as the attackers looted what remained. Even if they survived the initial onslaught, husbands and fathers had to watch as their wives and children were slain for not keeping pace on the forced march back to enemy territory.

Meanwhile, those who survived back home attempted to raise the funds to pay the kidnappers for the return of their kin—often in vain. Negotiations dragged on for years while the participants in the raiding party fought over the booty. Hostages had to renounce their faith as they were forced to live with their attackers. Half the captives never made it home. Eventually, one survivor gave witness to the massacre in a book that galvanized public opinion. Its title was The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion.

The Deerfield Massacre of February 29, 1704, described above, is a reminder of the brutalities Americans endured in the creation of what became the United States. The attack on a remote village in the Connecticut River Valley by Mohawk Indians and their allies, crossing the border from Canada along with their French enablers, was just one episode in what historians know as Queen Anne’s War (1702–13), part of the greater War of the Spanish Succession.

Nation-building is a difficult business. Often the outsize burden of cultivating a wilderness and taming a border can only be endured through faith. America’s early settlers, persecuted across the Atlantic, found power in their belief in the City upon a Hill, in creating the New Jerusalem that would become their Manifest Destiny. Some three centuries on, a similar faith in a Promised Land, a Zion, inspired Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) to envision what became, just a few decades after his death at age forty-four, the modern State of Israel.

A small but potent exhibition now on view at New York’s Temple Emanu-El Bernard Museum of Judaica called “All About Herzl” delivers on its promise to reveal this latter-day nation-builder through primary documents and the iconography that came to surround him.1 Drawing on the Central Zionist Archives of the World Zionist Organization (here mostly in facsimile) and the David Matlow Collection of (original) Herzl memorabilia, the fascinating exhibition curated by Warren Klein presents the Zionist behind Zion and the cultural artifacts he and others deployed to inspire Israel’s creation.

A delegate card from the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, Collection of David Matlow, Toronto. Photo: Kevin Viner.

The exhibition begins on East Sixty-fifth Street, where a banner for the show depicts Herzl in profile, hands clasped together beneath his Assyrian beard, leaning over a railing and gazing out at the Fifth Avenue façade of Temple Emanu-El and the Brooklyn Bridge. As with much Herzl iconography, this image represents a wishful concatenation. Herzl never visited the United States. The picture is rather a combination of Ephraim Moses Lilien’s 1901 photograph of Herzl overlooking the Rhine from his hotel balcony in Basel, Switzerland, taken as he attended the fifth Zionist Congress, with modern images of New York. For the exhibition-goer, a further opportunity to be seen in Herzl’s shadow continues just inside the lobby. Here visitors can stand beside a life-size statue of Herzl, arms folded, positioned in front of a backdrop of a Zionist Congress.

Trigger warning! These early chances to see yourself beside the founding father of the State of Israel, even the option to take a selfie with him, reveal a show that is unabashedly pro-Herzl, pro-Zionist, and upbeat about his nationalist vision. Like the energized state he inspired, Herzl understood the joys that could be released from Jewish sorrow, a fact reflected in the show’s sometimes lighthearted application of Herzl-iana. The mascot for David Matlow’s own “Herzl Project,” for example, based in Toronto, Canada, and established “to inspire people to be a little like Herzl and pursue their dreams,” is a Herzl-faced hockey player. At a moment when Israel’s frontiers are under vicious assault and cosplaying Mohawks are attacking America through its ally, the absence of doubt here for Herzl’s vision is refreshing. For those looking for a counterpoint, there is always Columbia University.

Whatever else you think of him, Theodor Herzl must be the most consequential theater critic in modern history. The Austrian-born playwright went from working as a cultural correspondent in Paris to inspiring what has become a nuclear-armed state. In the final eight years of his life, Herzl foresaw the descent of liberal Western Europe into barbarism as well as his own reburial in his future nation (by design, he was initially interred in Vienna in a transportable metal casket).

Herzl identified the mechanisms to turn his vision into a groundswell and to set its gears in motion. He mapped out a state that would serve as a beacon and bulwark for the region. In his utopian novel of 1902, Altneuland (The Old New Land), he envisioned a desert transformed into a Jewish metropolis. One translation of this book’s title provided the name for the city of Tel Aviv.

Herzl was not your obvious nation-builder. Born into an affluent, assimilated Jewish family in what is now Budapest, he attended a Protestant high school, where he studied German literature and poetry and at first looked down on “shameful Jewish characteristics.” The exhibition includes such artifacts as Herzl’s second-grade report card (in facsimile, ca. 1867) from the Israelitische Hauptschule Pest along with a rare photograph of him clean-shaven (ca. 1880).

When his family relocated to Vienna, Herzl joined a German nationalist fraternity and remained a member despite its growing anti-Semitism. In 1891, he moved to Paris as a correspondent for Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse at a moment of populist turmoil in the French Third Republic. Three years later, anti-Jewish sentiment came to a head in the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer falsely accused of spying for the German Empire. The exhibition contains several illustrations from this trial and the subsequent degradation ceremony that divided French opinion. If liberal Western Europe could turn so fiercely against its Jews, Herzl reasoned, no amount of assimilation would solve what he called the “Jewish problem.” The only solution, he argued, could be found in the title of his 1896 manifesto, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). Several editions, including English, Spanish, Hungarian, Yiddish, Polish, and Arabic translations, are here on display.

A bust of Theodor Herzl, Collection of David Matlow, Toronto. Photo: Kevin Viner.

Calling in his preface for the “restoration of the Jewish State,” Herzl maintains that the “world resounds with outcries against the Jews, and these outcries have awakened the slumbering idea.” The “misery of the Jews,” he continues, can be turned into a new nation’s “propelling force.” History has shown that “the absorption of Jews by means of their prosperity is unlikely to occur,” since the hatred directed at them by their host nations—of “vulgar sport, of common trade jealousy, of inherited prejudice, of religious intolerance, and also of pretended self-defense”—is a “remnant of the Middle Ages, which civilized nations do not even yet seem able to shake off, try as they will.” In fact, the “longer Anti-Semitism lies in abeyance the more fiercely will it break out,” Herzl continues, since the “world is provoked somehow by our prosperity, because it has for many centuries been accustomed to consider us as the most contemptible among the poverty-stricken.” On the question of where this new Jewish state should be established, in one famous passage, Herzl weighs the two areas of recent settlement—“Palestine and Argentine:”

Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home. The very name of Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvelous potency. If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.

Driven by necessity, Herzl concludes that the “Jewish question is no more a social than a religious one, notwithstanding that it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question, which can only be solved by making it a political world-question.”

By expanding Judaism from a shared ancestry and religion into a “political world-question,” Herzl found his earliest critics in assimilated Jews. They saw his Zionist call (a term he did not invent but deployed in a new way) as unnecessarily tendentious. At the same time, many orthodox observers believed that only Hashem, and not man, should aspire to return the Jews to Jerusalem (a handful of their descendants can today be seen joining the campus Hamas-niks). It was in the unreformed East, where Jews lived with no pretense of assimilation, that Herzl found his most fervent believers and the misery to shape his nation’s “propelling force.”

A bas-relief portrait of Theodor Herzl, Collection of David Matlow, Toronto. Photo: Kevin Viner.

As Herzl devotes much of his book to the mechanics of nation-building—the handling and reselling of assets, the corporate and social entities that must be created, the use of negotiorum gestio, that “noble masterpiece . . . the Romans, with their marvelous sense of justice, produced”—The Jewish State can be a dry read. Yet the manifesto’s arid structure proved to be the kindling that ignited the movement.

As Herzl traveled to Constantinople to negotiate (unsuccessfully) for a parcel from the Ottoman sultan, his followers flocked to see him at the rail stops. Zionist chapters formed in cities across Europe and (to a lesser extent, at first) America. With the paintings, posters, photographs, pamphlets, books, medals, and statues that came to represent him, “All About Herzl” picks up with the abundant memorabilia produced around the early meetings of the Zionist Congress, the annual black-tie affairs that Herzl produced with enough pomp and circumstance to make his vision a reality. “If you will it, it is no dream,” he proselytized. The second Zionist Congress created the Jewish Colonial Trust and its Anglo-Palestine Bank, which went on to become Israel’s Bank Leumi. The fifth Zionist Congress created the Jewish National Fund for the purchase of land, with the suggestion (made by a Galician bank clerk) that a collection box be placed in every Jewish home.

Herzl gave his life for his cause, dying from the fevered urgency of his dream. In death he became a political martyr, his image an icon, as represented in the exhibition’s final, salon-style hanging of twentieth-century depictions of him, which are inventively varied. In a Rudi Weissenstein photograph from Tel Aviv in 1949, a year after Israel’s founding, we see Herzl’s casket lying in state before its reinterment in Jerusalem—another redeemed captive returning to Zion.

1. “All About Herzl: The Exhibition” opened at the Temple Emanu-El Bernard Museum of Judaica, New York, on September 17, 2024, and remains on view through January 23, 2025. ↩

The Boston Perry

THE NEW CRITERION, October 2024

The Boston Perry

On In the Company of Art: A Museum Director’s Private Journals by Perry T. Rathbone, edited by Belinda Rathbone.

Back before “connoisseurship” became a dirty word, a generation of museum directors learned to “know by the senses” through a Harvard course prosaically titled “Museum Work and Museum Problems.” Created and taught by Paul Sachs (1878–1965), a scion of both Goldman and Sachs and a former Wall Street investor himself, the postgraduate course educated its “scholar-connoisseurs” on matters of quality through visits with art dealers in New York and object lessons and dinners at Sachs’s Cambridge home Shady Hill. The instruction was hands-on, from the study of Greek coinage, to the maintenance of an institution’s physical plant, to the cultivation of museum benefactors. In every case, students honed their powers of discernment while learning how to flip the coin, turn the switch, and seal the deal.

Perry T. Rathbone (1911–2000) was a Sachs graduate who applied these lessons con brio. In the Company of Art presents this museum director’s newly published “private journals” as selected and introduced by his daughter Belinda Rathbone. Beginning in the early 1950s, when he was the director of the Saint Louis Art Museum, but focused on his subsequent and transformative seventeen-year tenure at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the journals and letters collected here find Rathbone “writing in earnest” as he took the helm of a large and luffing institution on the flood tide of postwar expansion. “What dreary galleries, what gloom! And what a behemoth it is!” he wrote to his wife, Euretta de Cosson Rathbone, a highborn British ski racer whom he variously addresses as Rettles, Ret, and Rett, upon arrival in Boston in May 1955.

The journals of many a not-for-profit manager might have limited appeal, even ones documenting important moments, but Rathbone’s were never weighed down with meetings and memos. “My father’s journals are filled with his feelings,” notes Belinda, a New Criterion contributor who has written about Sachs for these pages (“Museum work & museum problems,” December 2018). In the Company of Art locates her father “at the peak of his powers, at the crest of his career, old enough to look back as far as he could look forward.”

The journals convey the observations of a seasoned connoisseur—not just of art, but also of the many famous figures he encountered and occasionally even of himself. Attached to the “educated eye” Rathbone developed through Sachs was an aptitude for concision. Intended for his readership alone, these discerning journals impart their own literary lessons in the elegant powers of description.

Elegance is the stock-in-trade of museum directorship, of course, especially as it comes to the dark arts of benefaction, but Rathbone cut his high polish with just enough world-weariness to make his personality revealing. He drove a 1936 Ford Phaeton, a memento from his sandbox days as a curator in Detroit, well into the 1960s. “Trained in the courtship of the rich,” writes Belinda, “he also learned to see through them.”

Rathbone’s observations could be frank, but they were rarely biting, at least as selected here in these breezy two hundred pages. The appreciation he showed for his own life’s good fortunes conveys an honest ease that grounded his judgment. “I know my life is rich,” he wrote on October 1, 1962, reflecting on “how omnivorous time swallows up the detail of our lives,” but, as he continues, “to read about it makes it seem richer than I could ever remember it to have been.”

Latter-day readers of these journals will be drawn to Rathbone’s character sketches, especially as they concern the notable and quotable. (As the editor, Belinda provides footnotes to better our understanding of person and place.) “After giving him the benefit of the doubt for two days, decided he was a man of limited intelligence,” he writes of Willem de Kooning, after serving on an awards jury with the painter at the Chicago Art Institute. “Quite expressionless. And a staccato monotony of speech I found rather tiring” (October 1, 1953).

“His quite unassuming behavior won me at once, never permitting me to feel odd or even self-conscious,” he notes of a visit to the museum by Aldous Huxley. “He walks with a curious bending gait, a sort of lope, and he looks at the world through the palest of blue eyes, almost as if veiled with mist” (October 14, 1960).

“He’s a sharp observer and a quick, rather tart, talker,” he says of his time with Kenneth Clark, the wartime director of London’s National Gallery and soon to become the television host of Civilisation. “He does look extraordinarily like a turtle . . . not only round the nose and mouth, but even in the eye. And he’s a bit snappy too; even knows and admits he’s been rude” (April 4, 1962).

“Picasso’s eyes are unforgettable and also his delicate tapered fingers,” he writes to Ret from Peggy Guggenheim’s Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice, after a visit to Cannes. “He was like a child in the studio, following all our interests and enthusiasms and bringing out his special treasures for us to enjoy—Degas pastels and the two tiny portraits by Douanier Rousseau” (July 6, 1964).

“Of all the sculptors I have known—Moore, Marini, Calder, Milles, Lipchitz, Marcks,” he notes on a visit to Japan, “Noguchi is the only one who lacks basic kindliness” (March 26–April 14, 1974).

Along the way, we learn about the sticky business of museum acquisition (“a repellant creature,” he writes of one dealer who tried to cut him in on a sale, which he declines, “but he cannot be ignored”; October 18, 1953). There are the expected grievances around the museum board (“an admirable man of the law but possessing not a fiber of aesthetic sensibility,” he says of one trustee; October 13, 1960). Difficult donors conspire to take up his time (“She has a way of detaining her guests—more like a jailer than a hostess”; letter to Ret, June 20, 1964). Museum renovations keep him awake at night (“I can see these galleries as if I were in them, every detail. It is inimical to sleep”; October 26, 1961). Loans are to be pursued even if beyond reach (“Seems to be no hope of bringing the Gioconda to Boston, but at least the effort has been made. . . . Now we can relax”; December 19, 1962). At the same time, the prerogatives of modern art confound him (“I am more at sea than ever over how to formulate a policy of acquisition in the field of modern art for a great museum of historical art like the MFA”; January 31, 1964).

Readers might appreciate Rathbone’s astringent comments on modern architects and urban planners, especially as compared to the lust for anti-contextual additions at today’s institutions. “Americans in the middle of the twentieth century live at the mercy of highway engineers and ‘traffic experts,’” he laments (January 31, 1964). Meanwhile, “Harvard only builds ‘centers’ today,” he writes of the university’s brutalist new home for contemporary art, which features a highway-like ramp. “Nor has this tortured pile of concrete designed by Corbusier any apparent logic within or without” (December 18, 1962).

At the crux of this volume are Rathbone’s interactions with the Kennedy administration and in particular his time with the First Lady. For this head of Massachusetts’s flagship museum, Camelot came calling in a way that might otherwise have been reserved for Washington’s National Gallery. At first, Rathbone begs off his invitation to the inauguration. “Who wants to be swallowed up amidst thousands”? (January 16, 1961). In the end, a blizzard and a railroad strike conspire to keep him away. Nevertheless, three weeks later, “Mrs. Kennedy telephoned me this morning from the White House! I couldn’t have been more surprised and thought for an instant that someone was pulling my leg” (February 4, 1961).

After lending a suite of American watercolors, the Rathbones travel to the White House to see these works by Sargent, Homer, Prendergast, and Hopper hanging in the West Sitting Room. “The charming Mrs. Kennedy soon appeared. Her ultra simple attire made me feel that I belonged to a different generation. In a way it stated the triumph of the proletariat” (April 18, 1961). Later that year, Rathbone returns for a concert in the East Room by Pablo Casals: “a glittering company all around absorbing great sonorous music from a great artist, I was conscious of my privilege every moment” (November 17, 1961).

Museum directors must be acquisitive by nature, especially those leading American institutions in times of growth. Rathbone was a treasure hunter out of necessity, a swashbuckler who enjoyed collecting personalities and far-flung experiences perhaps even more than the art itself, at least judging by the attention paid to each in these journals. “I am always surprised at my success” (October 1, 1960).

The happy disposition revealed here conveys an innocence on the subject of Rathbone’s ultimate denouement and serves in part to exonerate his fateful lapse in judgment. The matter concerned “The Boston Raphael,” the title of Belinda’s previous book on her father and the cause of his resignation from the MFA. Charged with landing the big one in honor of his museum’s centenary year, Rathbone acquired a Raphael portrait from Italy that proved to be anything but—“maybe Lorenzo Costa on a good day,” said one expert. After much fanfare, the means of its acquisition were challenged and the painting restituted to Italy, where it now resides off-view.

Of this “greatest of all adventures,” he writes to Rett in the days after negotiating its purchase on the Italian Riviera, “I spent the afternoon sunbathing and I swam and swam again from the rocks.” Although he lived for another thirty years after this letter from the Hotel Porta Rossa, Firenze, of July 15, 1969, Rathbone’s charmed journals, at least as collected here, had just about reached their end.

The Prophet of Imprudence

THE UNIVERSITY BOOKMAN

The Prophet of Imprudence.

A review of “The Politics of Prudence,” by Russell Kirk, Introduction by Michael P. Federici; Regnery Gateway, 314 pages, $19.99.

The early 1990s appeared to many in America as a moment of conservative ascendancy. Forty years had passed since Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind, in 1953, a book that was originally titled The Conservative Rout. Now it was the progressives who were the ones seemingly being routed. Conservative pundits, publications, and foundations were pushing conservative policy in the onetime liberal redoubts of Washington and New York. Ronald Reagan had won an unprecedented forty-nine states to secure his reelection in 1984; his triumphant presidency paved the way for the election of his vice-president George H. W. Bush in 1992 and another four years of Republican administration. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher had reflected the spread of the conservative mind abroad. Meanwhile, and most astonishingly, the onetime colossus of the Soviet Union had lost its grip on Europe and had been vanquished—its ideological boot lifted from all but a few of the world’s backwaters and faculty lounges.

And yet, the thinker who had put the conservative mind in motion was not declaring victory. In 1993, a year before his death, Kirk published The Politics of Prudence. The collection of eighteen of his lectures given over five years—seventeen delivered at The Heritage Foundation, one at Hillsdale College—was more than a restatement of the moral imagination. It was also a conservative remonstrance to the movement that claimed its mantle. Thirty years on, Gateway Editions has now published a new edition of this collection that seems nothing if not prophetic. As the conservative mind is again on the defensive in America, or at the very least in a state of mental confusion, The Politics of Prudence suggests that no less than the imprudence of conservatives is much to blame for the latest rout. Thirty years ago, few conservatives wanted to hear such a message. Today it calls out as a testament to what went wrong and a corrective for what’s to come.

Conservatism, Kirk argued, is a “disposition of character rather than a collection of reified, abstract political doctrines,” as Michael P. Federici explains in this edition’s new introduction. “It is the rejection of ideology rather than the exercise of it.” The conservative mind, like the book The Conservative Mind, Federici continues, begins with Edmund Burke and the Burkean “opposition to the French Revolution and the rise of radical and revolutionary ideological movements that centralize power as a means to escape the limits of the human condition.”

In his opening chapter, Kirk lays into what he calls the “errors of ideology.” Quoting the American historian H. Stuart Hughes, Kirk writes, conservatism must be the “negation of ideology,” since “all ideologies work mischief.” An ideological false faith in “mystical Progress, with a Roman P” only leads to a “dubious Terrestrial Paradise…. that always, in reality, has turned out to be an Earthly Hell.” This “cult of progress, whose votaries believe that everything new necessarily is superior to everything old,” sends us on a “march toward Utopia,” where the “ideologue is merciless.” In the place of true faith, “Ideology provides sham religion and sham philosophy.” 

Absent such an ideology, the conservative must rely on prudence, one that is “judicious, cautious, sagacious,” Kirk explains. “Plato, and later, Burke, instruct us that in the statesman, prudence is the first of the virtues.” Since “‘conservatism’ possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata,” the prudential conservative instead looks to “custom, convention, continuity.” Disciplined in a “state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order,” the conservative understands “variety,” “imperfectability,” and “voluntary community.” A close link exists between “freedom and property,” and power is best retrained and decentralized in the pursuit of genuinely “prudent change.” It was just such “old restraints upon power,” Kirk reminds us, that the “French and Russian revolutionaries abolished,” and which progressives still pursue.   

Delivered late in life, The Politics of Prudence in part serves as a welcome restatement of The Conservative Mind of forty years prior and something of a summary of Kirk’s life work. We are reminded of The American Republic by Orestes Brownson, Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, and I’ll Take my Stand: the South and the Agrarian Tradition. Marcus Aurelius, Ambrose of Milan (“it has not pleased God that man should be saved through logic”), and G.K. Chesteron’s elevation of the “democracy of the dead” all make welcome appearances. T. S. Eliot, the subject of the final chapter in The Conservative Mind and a friend of Kirk’s, also returns here with the wisdom of his Notes towards the Definition of Culture: “one thing to ascertain is the limits of the plannable.” Further chapters reacquaint us with the German economist Wilhelm Röpke (“the age of immaturity, of restless experiment, of youth, has in our time become the object of the most preposterous overestimation”) and the British social critic Malcolm Muggeridge (“the enthronement of the gospel of progress necessarily required the final discrediting of the gospel of Christ”).

As the book continues, just like the lectures these chapters are based upon, what becomes apparent is that such reminders and restatements are also rebukes, intended not for progressive ideologues but for a self-professed conservative audience. In these later chapters, Kirk takes aim at what he sees as an emergent and dangerous conservative ideology, one based in populism, libertarianism, and neoconservatism. In the chapter “Popular Conservatism,” for example, Kirk shows little patience for the wisdom of the masses: “a Populist, whose basic conviction is that the cure for democracy is more democracy, conserves nothing.” 

Libertarianism gets an ever greater drubbing in the following chapter on “A Dispassionate Assessment of Libertarians.” “They might oppose centralized power, but they are also doctrinaires, contemptuous of our inheritance from our ancestors,” Kirk writes, as well as being a “crowd of political fanatics who ‘license they mean, when they cry liberty.’” Theirs is an “ideology of universal selfishness—at a time when the country needs more than ever before men and women who stand ready to subordinate their private interests, if need be, to the defense of the Permanent Things.” Through its shortcomings, Kirk concludes, “libertarianism, properly understood, is as alien to real American conservatives as is communism.”

Beyond these tart assessments, it is Kirk’s subsequent chapter on “The Neoconservative: An Endangered Species” that remains the book’s most heated and controversial. Questioning the power at one point of a “Zionist minority,” Kirk goes on to state that “not seldom it has seemed as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.” At the time of its delivery, the historian Midge Decter labeled this remark a “bloody outrage, a piece of anti-Semitism by Kirk that impugns the loyalty of neoconservatives.” In hindsight, the quip was at best ill-chosen, as it isolated Kirk’s voice to the margins of the conservative conversation at the time while distracting from what we would now call his broader paleoconservative critique of neoconservative overreach, all coming at a time when it might have mattered most. 

As Kirk was that rare conservative opponent of the first Gulf War (“A war in Kuwait? A war for an oil-can”), we can only imagine what he might have said of the second. With the election of George W. Bush and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the consequences of NAFTA, the housing meltdown, and the hollowing out of the American middle classes, in the years after his death, many of the concerns that Kirk expressed over neoconservatism have only come into higher relief. 

It wasn’t “Zionism” or allegiance to “Tel Aviv” that proved the neoconservative undoing but rather an unquestioning faith for many in “fanciful democratic globalism” and “democratic capitalism,” as Kirk goes on to write, which he calls a “bit of neoconservative cant.” This “New World Order,” Kirk warns, would lead to an “inhumane economy—bent upon maximum productive efficiency, but heedless of personal order and public order.” Such a concern with the “gross national product and with ‘global wealth’” blinded such conservatives, Kirk argues, to the “swelling growth of a dismal urban proletariat, and the decay of the moral order.” 

“You and I are in the death of the Marxist ideology,” Kirk concludes. As the Soviet Leviathan came to an end, he believed it must not be replaced with some American-made Colossus coming out of the “puerile infatuation of the neoconservatives with ‘a new ideology’ or an ‘American ideology.’”  “Soviet hegemony ought not to be succeeded by American hegemony,” he writes. “Mr. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ may make the United States detested—beginning with the Arab peoples—more than even the Soviet empire was…. Increasingly, the states of Europe and the Levant may suspect that in rejecting Russian domination, they exchanged King Log for King Stork.” At the fall of the Evil Empire, Kirk feared most a rising imprudence in its conservative American vanquishers. “America soon is going to wipe out everything else; and in the dazzling delirious joy of that consummation, forgetting to ask what will happen afterward.” 

In one of the book’s final chapters, “Prospects for the Proletariat,” Kirk takes stock of the consequences of the New World Order in the fate of Detroit. The city was once the “arsenal of democracy.” Now it was falling into abandonment and decay. Could we see here the true result of unquestioning “democratic capitalism”: the uprooting of labor, the slicing up of the city’s fabric through public housing and Federal highway bills? An entire book might be written on Kirk’s critique of the automobile, which he called the “mechanical Jacobin.” Would America’s Rust Belt be any better today without a quarter century of adventurism abroad and “free minds and free markets” at home? Conservatives, Kirk warns, must not fall prey to a “latter-day Utilitarianism.” Free of ideology, conservatives should instead nurture a nation’s culture and the “complex of convictions, folkways, habits, arts, crafts, economic methods, laws, morals, political structures, and all the ways of living in community that have developed over the centuries.” Anything less, we might say, would be imprudent.