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I looked at my own paper and (in addition to the Nash book, that someone already recommended), here are some other books & articles I found useful:

Kristol, I., “American Conservatism, 1945-1995,” The Public Interest (Fall 1995), pp.86-87

Sleeper, J., “The Fall of the Liberal Establishment,” http://hnn.us/articles/4526.html

Podhoretz, N., “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” Commentary (Mar. 1996), http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/neoconservatism–a-eulogy-8533

Fonte, J., “Why There is a Culture War: Gramsci and Tocqueville in America” http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/FonteCultureWar.php

Collier, P. and Horowitz, D., Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the ‘60s (1996)

Wattenberg, B., The First Universal Nation (1992)

Schlessinger, A., The Disuniting of America (1992, 1998)

Review by MacDonald, H., Commentary (June 1992), http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-disuniting-of-america–by-arthur-m–schlesinger–jr–7982

Kristol, I., “The Neoconservative Persuasion,” The Weekly Standard (Aug. 2003), http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/000tzmlw.asp?page=2

Krauthammer, C., Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World (2004)

Wattenberg, B. interviewed by Steigerwald, B., “Ben Wattenberg’s Fighting Words,” FrontPageMag (01 Dec 2008), http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=33242

Kesler, C., “All Against All,” National Review (18 Aug 1989), http://www.claremont.org/publications/pubid.483/pub_detail.asp

The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment (Kabaservice, G.)

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P.S. there probably is sufficient support for Bagus’ position, but it’s a matter of digging deep into primary sources, but for that one would have to know where to look, and, alas, I’m not familiar enough with the key figures to point you in the right direction on that.

If you e-mailed Professor Bagus – Philipp.Bagus @ web.de (no spaces) – he might be happy to point you to where to find good primary sources to support his thesis.

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When doing scholarly work be sure to not just read & cite critical materials. Even if you’re position ends up being critical, you can inform it a lot by including a variety of sources.

So on that basis I’ll recommend “Neoconservatism:
The Autobiography of an Idea” by Irving Kristol, and Douglas Murray’s “NeoConservatism: Why We Need It”

More critically, and written by an Austro-libertarian friendly author, is “Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea”, by C. Bradley Thompson

One thing I’ll recommend for sure is to nail down your definition of what and who constitutes neoconservatism. For example, is William Bennett a neoconservative under your definition? If so, you’d want to examine his work and the ideas behind it. Is Charles Murray a neoconservative under the definition you’ll be using? If so, dittoes. Likewise, David Brooks – if he is, under your definition, then look at his works. What, if anything, distinguishes the ideas they promoted from, say, Paul Weyrich and other “movement conservatives?” Why did “neoconservatives” become “conservative” and why were they welcomed (at least initially) by the broad right?

What about the various people at The Weekly Standard, to include, say, Fred Barnes, and all those who had a vision of “National Greatness Conservatism?” You’d want to read their articles, not *just* the articles by their opponents.

On critical stuff, I can recommend this article by Paul Gottfried as a sort of starting point: http://www.unz.org/Pub/PolicyRev-1987q4-00064 and then some of his books & articles written since then on the conservative movement as a whole, which positions neoconservatism within it and the tensions and antagonisms that developed between neoconservatives and movement conservatives. Also by Gottfried, by way of starting point, is this exchange between him & some others: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/a-note-on-leo-strauss/ on the significance (or lack theirof) of Leo Strauss, and what Strauss “really believed” or didn’t believe, and the like. I’d recommend reading for sure the other posts he links to, and then, if you can, his book on Strauss. Take a special note of the division between “East Coast Straussians” and “West Coast Straussians” and try to decide whether you think Strauss is as significant to “neoconservatism” (as a broad intellectual movement) as many critics think it is (my own conclusion is that, ultimately, no – he was important in shaping the outlook of some, but not nearly so many. What was really the drive behind “neoconservatism” as a distinct phenomenon was that old New Deal Liberals and some of the non-counterculture Left, disaffected by the New Left and its takeover of liberalism & the Democratic Party became exiles, and these exiles were welcomed into the conservative movement without having changed their own principles – they remained basically New Deal Liberals. The neoconservative movement, at the intellectual level, did contain a number of significant “Straussians,” but these weren’t even a majority among “neoconservative” intellectuals. So, 1) Strauss’s influence has been overblown by many of his critics and 2) Strauss didn’t say/argue half the things his critics say he argued. But come to your own conclusion – and note that what I just wrote does not mean I agree with neoconservatives, or that I think highly of Strauss. Not even all critics of neoconservatism as such reach the same conclusions).

I’d recommend scholarly articles for your paper, and certainly use them as sources, but from my experience researching varieties of conservatism for a research project I did a couple years ago myself, scholarly articles on neoconservatism, written as they are from a left-progressive perspective, are almost uniformly atrocious, written by people who don’t understand conservatism as a whole much less neoconservatism, or really care to, but simply reflect their prejudices back to each other rather than offer any kind of informed critique. The fact that they’re published in “serious” scholarly journals of political science or history is (or should be) an embarrassment to the academic professions.

But you’ll probably have to include some as sources, even if you end up being very critical of them (without this meaning you end up endorsing neoconservatism. It’s one thing to be critic of something – any boob with a PhD can do that, it seems; what’s important to be an informed and accurate critic of that thing).

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kwgeralds: “If there is no evidence of predatory pricing by a company in American history… where did Anti-Trust legislation get its support?”

If Rothbard is right, virtually every anti-cartelization/anti-monopoly measure/policy/regulation/law was actually intended to do the opposite. He explains this theory in a series of elections collected:

http://mises.org/media.aspx?action=category&ID=217
(these lectures are in reverse order; the first one is at the bottom and you work your way up).

The problem for would-be cartel-formers & would-be monopolists starts with what game-theorists would call a “Prisoner’s Dilemma” – the cartel as a whole could, in theory, prosper more if they all stuck to the agreement, but individually each member of a cartel has an incentive to “defect” – to cheat on the agreement to gain more market share. But when they all do that, the cartel falls apart. So they need something to force all the members to stick to the agreement.

To solve that, they first turned to trust-building: conglomeration. If they were all part of the same corporation (Trust), then they wouldn’t defect from the agreement. But open entry foiled that. So they needed something even stronger, and for that they turned to the State.

Rothbard’s argument, leaning on the Kolko book (that Woods also recommends but which I haven’t read yet – I ordered it yesterday) is that virtually every regulation sold to the public as preventing combinations has in fact – in intended fact – promoted them. (We see that down to today in modern legislation like Sarb-Ox and Frank-Dodd, both of which were sold to the public as “protecting the little guy” but which in fact make it more difficult for small firms to operate, for new startups to get into the market, and thus intrench large incumbent firms).

Rothbard also argues that the idea of “regulatory capture,” while superficially plausible, is actually incorrect, because there was no “capture” – these regulations were always, right from the start, written by one set of businessmen to screw another set (their competitors, potential & actual); this argument was plausible to me even though I haven’t read the books he mentions in this series of lectures, because of my prior knowledge of how the New Deal’s regulations were written.

Anyhow, if you have time for it, I highly recommend those Rothbard lectures – they’re eye-popping. O.o

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Hope is found thinking beyond the election. Out of this particular election; – well I was going to write “nothing good can follow” but even that is too melodramatic. It’s possible that tiny amounts of good could follow, depending upon how it goes. And if people re-elect their permanent government, then opportunities for the future will follow.

We should be neither panglossian nor defeatist: the next five-to-ten years of American life, of Western life, promise to be very grim and difficult indeed. It is quite possible that during this, electorates will turn to even worse options, if, once again, out of this those who set The Narrative are able to promote the belief that “freedom failed, and only giving more money and power to the state can save you.” After all, so much is “baked into the cake” this election time, due to already-ongoing fiscal & monetary policies that no sane person would want to win and thus be in office holding the bag when it implodes.

But out of this also comes the opportunity to do what people here are doing; not just learn, but share and expand belief in liberty, and the understanding that personal liberty is directly tied to economic liberty (and thus that the alternative of the left, “economic rights” – rights in the sense of “right to have your needs provided for you by someone else – are a chimaera).

Me, I have a hard time still disassociating myself from elections and which establishment party (the Inner Party, the permanent party of government, or the Outer Party, the party that exists as its foil, and as a scapegoat claimed to embody “capitalism”) wins or loses. I’m still unable to emotionally disconnect from that. But if you can, you’ll realize that getting worked up over the election is unnecessary. You can focus on the big picture, and sharing, thus expanding, the knowledge of real liberty and sound economics. This gives an achievable goal for a better future. Out of this will come opportunities in the future.

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We live in an analog world, not a binary world, so there are few concepts one can point to that have no counterpart-examples in other parts of the world. Multiculturalists and various others (Amartya Sen is very good at this, in his The Idea of Justice) can point to episodes or examples in various non-western civilizations to say that “see, this idea or that idea is not the exclusive province of the West” (usually these people also engage in invidious comparisons through selective use of historical examples to try to paint a picture that non-western societies are or were better than the West). But usually what they end up constructing is an image of non-western societies as precursors to the sort of 20th century Progressivism that is taught at, say the LSE (where, say, Sen both learned & taught), or in Western legal scholarship (Ghandi was a English Lawyer before he was any kind of Indian Nationalist).

All that is by way of saying: Nothing I might point to as unique to Western Civilization is unique in any absolute sense. Western Civilization has just been more (or less) successful in developing certain concepts. Among these are:

1) the idea of the worth of the individual, which is ultimately derived as much from Christianity as from any philosophical traditions (certainly one doesn’t find much weight given to the individual in Plato’s “Republic” or “Laws”). From this developed a greater emphasis on individual liberty.

2) city-states and political pluralism became much more highly developed in the west, in part because of the constant tension between the demands of the “polis” (political authority) on the one hand vs the demands of “faith” on the other. This sort of ‘split’ never really developed in, say, Islam, in part because even when the Caliph-as-spiritual-leader was separated from the Sultan-as-political-leader, one was always clearly overshadowed by the other. In places like China, despite some early promising concepts that developed (many Austro-Libertarians see Taoist theory as kindred), unitary authority was always very strong.

3) Out of the above developed concepts of “private property + the rule of law” that were more or less better observed in the West than elsewhere. Many other places long retained the idea that the Monarch or the Celestial Emperor owned everyone, including the people, and could expropriate anything and everything by simple decree or whim, without having to follow an established procedure and norm open to all. Now, in the West there is also this concept, embodied in, say, Eminent Domain – which just further highlights that we live in an analog world rather than a binary one. But in the West, over time, property and persons received greater space for autonomy and thus spontaneous orders had a better chance to develop than in other places.

Quite often it is qualitative distinctions, rather than absolute distinctions, that end up making quite a bit of difference. One can find, for example, entrepreneurial spirit in populations all over the globe. However, the degree to which this is allowed to flourish varies considerably.

4) entrepreneurial independence leading to economic development. Quite often it is – very accurately, actually – pointed out that the government in, say, China did this or that wonderful thing, or the Mughal Emperor ordered the construction of that wonderful thing, and so on. But this emphasizes the very top-down approach that has been common in most non-Western civilizations. While this also happens all too often in Western history, there was a critical degree of difference, and this allowed Western-derived cultures to ultimately leap ahead.

5) Ultimately a much lesser dependence upon “magical” explanations for events. While there are “rational thinkers” in all cultures, the sort of causal explanations people look for matter. Even civilizations like China, which did not have much of a divine-based religious tradition, did have a sort of animism. Animism is often celebrated by multiculturalists today, because of it’s supposed emphasis on “nature-as-a-living-thing.” But this inhibits scientific explanations. Conversely, Western Christianity had the concept of a “miracle,” but while some may scoff at “miraculous” explanations, there is a critical difference between a “miraculous” explanation for unusual events, and “magical” explanations; “miracles” are “exceptions” to an underlaying pattern of normality, while “magic” or “the spirit of this river, this rock, this lake, this swamp” (“Oyashiro-sama’s Curse”) inhibits the growth of scientific thinking. (The Western, Hebraic-derived, version of monotheism probably deserves more credit for Western successes than modern-materialist theorists generally credit it with. Note also in this sense, Christians and Muslims do not really ‘worship the same God’ – even if one accepts that in other senses, they do. This in part has to do with what might seem like an almost trivial distinction/difference in the ways in which Islamic philosophers and Western philosophers interpreted neoplatonism & Aristotelian metaphysics and incorporated it into their theology. However, when it comes to philosophical ideas & concepts, seemingly small differences can end up making enormous differences – see also how “positive freedom” is derived, and leads to near total statism, vs. the classical liberal definitions of liberty – and note how some very influential & well-meaning early classical liberals, with small errors in how they described & defined liberty, led people to extrapolate liberty-destroying statist Dewyite “positive-liberty” out of it [of course, Dewey was also a Progressive, but he could “legitimately” lay claim to following the implications of some versions of classical liberal theory to their natural conclusions, precisely because of the small, seemingly trivial errors some – many – early classical liberals made. But, I digress – by way of illustrating the earlier point).

6) relative ease of sharing of knowledge & information – this starts with the fact that Western civilization adopted an alphabet that is comparatively easier to learn than some alternative scripts. It continues forward with the ongoing Western idea that knowledge is not just the province of a select claque (something that ultimately inhibited, say, the Ottoman Empire – which shut down printing presses) or mandarinate. This too lead to scientific growth.

7) Much better organizational expertise and personal, individual initiative down to relatively low levels. This enabled not just the growth of Western economics & science, but better skill at warfare. Now here we might also point out something: as Asimov wrote, “it’s a poor blaster that doesn’t point both ways.” Concepts, like any tool, have “good” and “bad” uses. The West’s organizational superiority, along with it’s entreprenurial spirit (several imperialist enterprises began as private joint-stock operations), and the like also helped the West dominate the rest of the world.

Now, multiculturalist progressives and other superficial thinkers will point to this and say that it is the big flaw in Western Civilization – it’s imperialism, colonialism, and history of dominating other cultures, and without the West there would have been peaceful cooperation as the world would have taken another path. Well, a real historian would note that simply because the West managed to succeed at these things to a greater degree than other cultures ended up doing; just about every civilization and culture has its history of dominion-seeking and libido dominem, certainly every major one.

But from a libertarian perspective, this doesn’t excuse any domination, either of people within the West, or non-Westerners. I suppose then the biggest flaw, from an Anarcho-libertarian perspective, is that while the West developed concepts of liberty and non-aggression to the highest degree, the West has been slow in not just recognizing but following the implications of these principles.

Now, as for my part, I’m not fully convinced by anarcho-libertarianism. But that’s a subject for another time – in the meantime this post is long enough (and probably I left some things out or muddled them, as I wrote this extemporaneously).

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