The Public Interest
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Public Interest was a quarterly public policy journal founded by established New York intellectuals Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol in 1965. It was a leading journal on political economy and culture, aimed at a readership of journalists, scholars, and policy makers. Its varied content included, e.g., the performance of the Great Society, the fate of social security, the character of Generation X, crime and punishment, love and courtship, the culture wars, the tax wars, the state of the underclass, the salaries of the overclass. It eschewed foreign and defense policy.
The magazine published such prominent writers and scholars as Seymour Martin Lipset, James Q. Wilson, Peter Drucker, Charles Murray, James S. Coleman, Anthony Downs, Aaron Wildavsky, Mancur Olson, Jr., Michael Novak, Samuel P. Huntington, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Martin Feldstein, Leon Kass, Irwin M. Stelzer, Daniel P. Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, Glenn C. Loury, Stephan Thernstrom, Abigail Thernstrom, Charles Krauthammer, Francis Fukuyama, and David Brooks.
Irving Kristol was the dominant personality, especially after Daniel Bell relocated to Harvard in 1969. Bell, troubled by what he perceived to be an excessively conservative slant, withdrew in 1973, and was replaced as co-editor by the sociologist Nathan Glazer. Kristol continued on, and the magazine become known as the principal house organ of neoconservatism, a hostile label which Kristol embraced. The magazine's sub-editors were considered apprentices, and were seeded into high journalism, academia, and government staff posts. Many policies forwarded by the magazine were absorbed into the mainstream of public policy.
Kristol relocated to Washington, D.C., and took the magazine with him. In the early 21st century, Kristol was aging; there was no obvious strong successor; and foundation support was flagging. Its last issue was printed in spring 2005. Towards the end its readership had declined significantly, most likely because demand for quarterlies had fallen as the pace of news and information technology had increased. Kristol wrote on the history of the journal in his article "Forty Good Years" in the final issue.
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