"Salons"
Wilfred McClay, at First Things, reviews The Neoconservative Persuasion, a posthumous collection of essays by Irving Kristol. He offers a description of the setting Kristol sought to create in his magazines and associations:
“'I decided that I wanted to create a salon,' he once told me, and that was just what he did. All the magazines he edited, most notably The Public Interest, and all the institutions he helped sustain, most notably the American Enterprise Institute, were that salon, an archipelago of gathering places where those who were like-minded, but not too like-minded, could have fruitful conversations and exchanges leading to enlivened inquiry and intellectual breakthroughs. It is not entirely surprising that emphasis on his achievements as an intellectual place maker should crowd out consideration of his own writing."
Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily.
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