It is axiomatic in commerce that birth and destruction are two sides of the same coin. It was Joseph Schumpeter who brought the term creative destruction into our language.
The same is true in the intellectual world. David Brooks calls to our attention the ending of Public Interest Quarterly. This is the magazine that created the current intellectual ferment.
Public Interest began in 1965 among a circle of intellectual friends Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Daniel Bell. The first two are alive and have remained active on the magazine for forty yearsAmerica, from education to working conditions and to the economic welfare of the bottom income group.
They all began as Democrats supporting Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. They all shared the Liberal belief that the Great Society would bring with it welcome improvements in
These men and the coterie that gathered around them had three defining qualities: intellectual openness, honesty and intense interest in policy.
Combine these three defining qualities with the actual outcome of the Great Society implimentation, as measured after ten years, failure, and you get intellectuals who were forced to reject the utopian ideas of Liberalism and find a new basis for policy.
These men and a dozen more created the modern intellectual world. They published the core ideas in Public Interest.
Today, more than twenty years later, Public Interest can retire. There are now so many innovative policy ideas in America, influential public intellectuals and vast new media outlets that support fresh thinking, that the parent of this movement can retire.