© Columbia University Press
American Neoconservatism: The Politics and Culture of a Reactionary Idealism
July, 2011
Cloth, 256 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-70228-7
$30.00
Jean-François Drolet critically engages with the intellectual foundations of American neoconservatism. Blending international relations, political theory, and the history of ideas, his volume moves beyond debates over the foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration and addresses the philosophical foundations informing this “new” and influential conservatism.
Drolet reviews neoconservative discourse on a wide range of issues, such as democracy, capitalism, the liberal state, national security, international law, and global liberal governance, and he highlights the systematic links between domestic and international forms of neoconservative political sociology. Challenging the movement’s carefully crafted public image, Drolet defeats the claim that American neoconservatism is a centrist, “liberal” alternative to the right-wing establishment, and he firmly refutes the notion that neoconservatism is committed to the Enlightenment discourse on liberalism. Rather, he reveals an authoritarian form of cultural and philosophical conservatism that ferociously feeds on liberal values and practices. Drolet paints neoconservatism not as a conservative variant of liberalism but as an atavistic response to liberal modernity. He argues the movement owes more to the authoritarian, intellectual milieu of interwar Europe than to the liberal tradition its practitioners allegedly hope to reform and protect.