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 those were a very stimulating perithat was a very stimulating period for all of us. At our luncheons, we never talked about law, about which, of course, i knew very little. We talked mainly about religion and economics, religion being my subject and economics being Jude Wanniskis subject. And everyone was interested, and we became very good friends and have been very good friends, all of us, since then. Cspan did you ever talk about some of the things weve just talked about inin the slike aristotle and plato and whether. Guest oh, sure. Cspan of those three men, like judge silberman at the Appeals Court here or Justice Scalia at the Supreme Court or robert bork, the former Appeals Court judgedid they read all the same kind of things that you read . Guest i think some of them were moved to. Yeah, some of them probably had already. I dont know. But they were interested. I mean, these are not just lawyers, these are not just legal thinkers. All of these people are what we would call intellectuals, namely have a very broad interest in ideas. And the thing they liked about being at aei is they were able to indulge that interest in ideas. Cspan do you have to bei dont know how to ask thisdo you have to be smart to be an intellectual . Guest it helps. Cspan and when i say smart, do you know what that means . Is there a cutoff point at that iq level . Guest no. No. It means you have to be able to cope with abstract ideas comfortablyor uncomfortably sometimes, but thats all right too, wrestling with them. But, i mean, there are a lot of people, i suppose most people arecan get along very well without coping with abstract ideas, and thats ok, too. But, yes, i think you have to be pretty smart to be an intellectual. Cspan you mentioned reading about theology. Where do you come out in youri think you wrote in here youre 75, right . Guest yeah. Cspan . In your 75th year about god . Guest oh, ive never had a problem with god, never. Even when i was a young trotskyist, i never had a problem with god. I mean, the socalled existence of god was never a problem for me. I mean, ihowever you define godand that is a serious theological matter, what you mean when you use the word god is a serious theological matter but i had no doubt, ever since i read the opening of the bible, that, yes, there is such a thing as original sin, and we all live with it. And if you want to understand the human condition, reading the fopening of the bible is as good a place as any, the best i think. And so that part of religion has simply never been a problem for me. Cspan the last several essays in your book, of the 41, is about judaism or about being a jew. Guest mmhmm. Cspan where are you . Are you a practicing jew . Guest sort of. That is, im a member of a jewish congregation, and i go to synagogue on the high holidays. I attend bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs. I do not observe jewish law because i never did. I think if i had it to do over again, i would be more observant. But i dont have it to do over again, and im not going to completely change my life now. Thats rather silly, i think. But being jewish has never been a problem for me. Cspan what does that mean . Guest well, iiyou know, i. Cspan what is being jewish . I mean, what iwhats the culture . Guest well, its not a question of culture. Its a question of identity. I always knew i was jewish. I never thought of not being jewish. I was always very pleased to be jewish. After all, not everyone is a member of the chosen people, and so i just went along. Even when i was not all that observanti still am not all that observantbeing jewish just came naturally to me. Cspan another thing that i counted up in the book was mentions in the book about different people. This is not scientific, and i actually checked the index, counted them upbut i thought it was interesting on president s, how many times president s were mentioned, and i donti dont even know if you know this or not. Guest no. Cspan the president mentioned the most was Ronald Reagan. Hes mentioned on 11 different pages. By the way, john kennedy, harry truman and jimmy carter are not mentioned at all. Talk about that. Guest i admired john f. Kennedy and voted for him, but the importance of Ronald Reagan for someone like myself, a neoconservative, is that he brought neoconservatism into the conservative spectrum. Ronald reagan was he first republican president to praise franklin d. Roosevelt. Newt gingrich has since followed him in that. Now this was a breakthrough. It meant that the Republican Party, unlike, say, the Goldwater Republican Party of 1964, was no longer fighting against the new deal; that it was possible to think of reforming many of the institutions bequeathed to us by the new deal, but that the issue of the new deal was behind us. And acceptance of the new deal in principle, if not in all of its details, was one of the basic differences between neoconservatives and traditional republican conservatives, who were still fighting against the new deal. But once Ronald Reagan began praising franklin d. Roosevelt as a kind of predecessor, and as i say, Newt Gingrich does exactly the same thing nowthe Republican Party has changed. Not everyone in the Republican Party has changed, but it is an important fact that these two leaders ofwho helped define the modern Republican Party spoke so well of franklin d. Roosevelt. Cspan any idea of why you wouldnt write much about john f. Kennedy or jimmy carter . Guest well, jimmy carter didnt exist for me. Its as simple as that. John f. Kennedy i admired; as i say, i voted for him. I thought he had the potential to be a great president , and then, of course, he was assassinated. I was somewhat disillusioned by the time he was assassinated. But why didnt i write about john f. Kennedy . Maybe i did at some point. I dont know. I think what happened is that he was out of the picture, as he had been gone, before i started writing steadily on current affairs, which really began in the late 60s, early 70s. Cspan today do you still have a relationship with the wall street journal . Guest yes, i still write occasionally on their oped page, a short essay. I used to write much more frequently. Iti think age is beginning to show, and also i dont want to keep repeating myself, so i dont write unless i feel i have something to say. But, yes, im still happy to have this wonderful relationship with the wall street journal. Cspan go back and trace, as you do in the book, all the connecting points with the National Review and the wall street journal editorial page and bob bartley and you and on and on and how you get to where you are today. Guest a lot of connections. I never had much of a connection with National Review. Ii think ive written for it once, but i became more and more friendly with bill buckley in the course of the late 60s and 1970s. So now. Cspan wherewhere were you in the 60s . Whered you live . Guest i wasbefore gogetting a teaching position at nyu, i was executive Vice President of the Publishing House basic books, then a very small Publishing House. It has, by now, grown. And i was in the Book Publishing business. But i was, at the same time, writing. And in 1965 i had started, along with dan bell, this quarterly magazine of ours, the Public Interest, which is just celebrating its 30th anniversary. Where were we . Cspan well, we wanted to go from therewe were talking through the National Review. As a matter of fact, you say in thein the early days that the National Review and you didnt agree. Guest yes, i wrote about the National Review in rather critical terms. It was not my kind of conservative sview. Itit was really oldfashioned republican conservatismherbert hoover conservatism, you might say, or Calvin Coolidge conservatism. Neither of those two president s have ever been icons of mine. So i was aloof from them. Now in the case of the wall street journal, it wthat was, to some degree, just happenstance. Bob bartley read the Public Interest after it was founded in 1965 and, apparently, he got very interested in it sufficiently to write a piece for the journal, whichwhose title i well remember, as you can understand why. It was Irving Kristol and friends. Cspan and bob bartley is today the editorial page. Guest yeah, bob bartley was then. Cspan . Boss. Guest . In the washington office, a reporter for the journal. He then became editor of the editorial page. Today hes editor of the wall street journal. In those days, heonce he became editor of the editorial page, he asked me to write regularly for them, which, of course, i was happy to do. And that began a relationship which has lastedand a friendship which has lasted to this day. What other connection are you interested in . Cspan well, ii could jump to the fact that your son now has a new publication. And when i ask you that. Guest right. Cspan . Called the weekly standard. Guest im sure its going to be an excellent publication. Cspan but inin the middle of all this, youve rmore than once referred to theideas matter. And i guess thats what im getting at is how do ideas move in the society andand your publicinterest publication went to the wall street journal, you know, and now this isnew publication. Is yourwhat wouldhow would you assess your sons position at this point with that publication . How does that relate to the discussion going on in town . Guest well, my sons magazine is going to be a conservative magazine, independent conservative, and iwhether it could be called neoconservative by now almost doesnt matter. But ideas do matter, and my son, i guess, learned that in our household, since both his mother and father believe that, always we have always believed that. That we learned from the left, by the way. I mean, the left has always understood that ideas matter, sinceif you look at the russian revolution, it was created by a small handful of people with ideas, as was, in fact, the french revolution. Ideas do matter. The right has rarely understood that, the right being more interested inin pragmatic Affairs Business and government andas an administrative organism. And one of the things i think neoconservatism has contributed to contemporary conservatism is a strong belief and a strong acknowledgement that ideas do matter. Newt gingrich believes that ideas matter. And i think the presidencies of reagan and the current control of Congress Show that ideas, in fact, do matter. Cspan where is theiin the society today, wheres the influence . Where do you see thethe power of ideas coming from today . Guest well, they clearly are not coming from liberalism, which is in terrible trouble intellectually. I mean, i can point out how much trouble it is simply by asking you to name me the leading liberal columnist of the day. The best and most wellknown columnists are conservative or neoconservative george will, Charles Krauthammer and others. Ideas are coming from the left. The left is anthe left is an ideagenerating organism, but they are very peculiar ideas, very seditious, which is obviously what the left always wants, but half the time not quite comprehensible. The left has become so academic in our days, so irrelevant in one sense, except in the educational system, where it is very relevant, but it no longer is populist as it once was. The right has become populist; that is, conservatism has become populist aiming to speak to ordinary people. And i think the most interesting ideas todayand i dont know anyone who really disagrees with thiscome from the various conservative think tanks, plus some individual conservative scholars in the universities. Cspan you say in the book that your wife, gertrude himmelfarb, is a anglophile and youre a francophile. Guest ive become something of a anglophile since then. Cspan what iswhat do either one of those mean . Guest well, an anglophile is someone who thinks britain is an especially admirable country to be studied and learn from. The francophobefrancophile believes that about france. As it happened, by sheer accident, i spent my last year in the army after the war in marseille, and so i got relatively steeped in French Literature and french thought, and so i was more of a francophile than an anglophile. My wife did her ph. D thesis on the Great British historian lord acton, so she became an anglophile. But by now, the two have merged, as a result of 53 years of marriage. Both phileas are now one. Cspan you write about historians. What do you think of historians today . Guest historians today . Cspan historians. Guest well, there are some very good historians today, but of course historians today in this country, as in oother western countries, have been influenced by what is called postmodernism; that is to say, relativism of an extreme kind, plus all sorts of other ideas as to what the function of a historian is. So i think, like many of the academic disciplines in the humanities, history is in a state of crisis, and historians are muddling around in this state of crisis. Cspan you say that no ones ever written a book about the federalist papers . Guest thatat the time that i wrote. Cspan it was 1970 or Something Like that. Guest yeahno one had ever written a book about the federalist papers. Cspan has that changed . Guest you know, im not sure. One swiss scholar wrote a book about the federalist papers. I thinki havent followed it that closely. I think there may be aa few books. Cspan whatwhat was. Guest but, you know, its interesting the way its ignored. I mean, its almost impossible, if youre a Political Science major at any university, to take a course in the federalist papersor in law school school, for that matter. Youd think law school would be interested in finding out what the founders really thought. But, no, there are no courses in the federalist papers, or at least not many, either in law schools or in Political Science departments. Cspan why do you thinkletwhatshow important were the federalist papers . Guest well, i think if you want to understand the political philosophy of the founders, theyre very important. I mean, what else do you have to go by . You have to go by the arguments that they proposed for the ratification of the constitution. I mean, this was their explanation of why the constitution should be adopted. You have the debates of the constitutional convention, plus the federalist papers, plus, i guess, the ratification proceedings in the various states. But the federalist papers are so brilliantly written, largely by madison, some by jay, and are full of so much political wisdom that i really feel that as part of aan education in american politics, students should be required to read a lot of the federalist papers, not just one or two, which is what often happens today. Cspan in a lot of these books that we do, theres a thread that comes through them. You may have started the thread, but the thread are things like hayek and Milton Friedman and a frenchman named tocqueville and almostand you write about the fact that you wanted to do a followup to the tocqueville democracy in america book. Whatwhat wouldwhats your connection to tocqueville . Guest i read him. My connection with tocquevillei didnt know tocqueville until around i guess it was the 1950s or late 40s, Something Like that, when democracy in america was reissued. It hadwas out of print, and i read it and i said, this is an absolutely wonderful and profound book. its still probably the best book ever written on ameron american democracy. And when i leftwhen i left the reporter magazine atin 1960, i decided i was going to write a book on democracy, and i tried. And i collected a lot of notes, and i spent three months on it, working very dilgentlydiligently, and i realized it was beyond me; that i just didnti had a lot of ideas. They didnt cohere and wouldnt cohere into a book. So i decided to become a professor instead. But, yes, tocqueville was a great and profound thinker. Cspan you say that no one ever calls himself a tocquevillian. Guest no, but, of course, look, i mean, hehe did not found a school, and for many decades in the United States he was ignoredmany. As i say, when i was in city college, no one read de tocqueville. Hardly anyone had ever heard of him. Cspan ii dont know whether you can do this, but youwhen you read a book like yours, and itsas iagain, its got 41 essaysyou get a sense that theres these different strata in the United States, and theres a strata up here that pays attention to hayek and tocqueville and all these names, and then it comes down to a next level, goes all the way down to the average person. Whhwhat do you think of people that are justthe common person that never gets into this . How much of this influences them, and whereand how does it come through the system . Guest well, itll influence them obliquely and indirectly. Look, those people are my family, goodness. I mean, ive no problem with ordinary nonintellectual people. I have 34 first cousins, and so far as i know, i was the only intellectual in the family. But i love them all. Theyre fine people. But the ideas filter down through the educational system, through the media, through a few politicians who are always hungry for ideas by which to distinguish themselves from the crowd of other politicians. And before you know it, an idea has gained some momentum, and there it is on the agenda. A lot of it is accident. You never know how and where and when ideas are going to impinge on reality. Ronald reagan was persuaded to adopt supplyside economics by jack kemp, who got it from wanniski and, to some degree, from myself. And he had a council of economic advisers during his campaign. Of the 12 members of that council, one was in favor of supplyside economics. All the other very distinguished economists were originally against it. But jack kemp persuaded Ronald Reagan this was the way to go, and in the end, they all fell into line, and thats the way ideas have impact. I mean, its notnot quite predictable whats going to happen. Cspan so youre saying that somebody watching this out there, who might consider themselves a benefactor or a victim of supplyside economics, that it all started back here with you. Guest with me . No. Cspan and if you go back beyond. Guest well, iit started with Jude Wanniski and aa few other people. Cspan but where did they getor where do you get your base for supplyside economics . Guest well, i got it from Jude Wanniski. Cspan and where did he get it . Guest he got it from a couple of economists, one out in california, one thatdown at columbia, who were rather unorthodox economists. Cspan where did they get it . Guest they invented it. Cspan just dreamed it up. Guest yeah. They invented it. I mean, it was an original idea with them. Cspan you cant go back. Guest . In some version or another. Cspan you cant go back to aristotle or plato or montesquieu. Guest no, no. Cspan . Or somebody for this thing . Guest no, no. There is original invention in thein the history of ideas. People do have original ideas sometimes. Cspan you defend the critics. Yourthe people thatyou defend yourself, basically, here on supplyside economics, sayingyou tell us why. I mean, the people that criticize the Ronald Reagan era for bankrupting the country. Guest well, itit really is colemack