Ideology V: Comments

I was surprised to read in Stephen Tonsor’s essay “The Foundation and the Academy” [May 14] that Iamanex-Trotskyist convert to neoconservatism. First, I was never a Trotskyist. Second, I am not a neoconservative. I was—and to the extent the terms still have any meaning—a right-wing socialist, or, since I do not like any affiliation with “right-wing,” a Social Democrat. (That history has been restated most recently in my essay “First Love and Early Sorrows,” in Partisan Review [#4, 1981].)

Mr. Tonsor also writes that Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb “were leading figures in the Trotskyist club at the University of Chicago.” Not so. Mr. Kristol was never a student at the University of Chicago. Miss Himmelfarb was a graduate student there in the last years and shortly after World War II, but had left the Trotskyists in New York by 1940-41, as had Mr. Kristol.

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I was surprised to read in Stephen Tonsor’s essay “The Foundation and the Academy” [May 14] that Iamanex-Trotskyist convert to neoconservatism. First, I was never a Trotskyist. Second, I am not a neoconservative. I was—and to the extent the terms still have any meaning—a right-wing socialist, or, since I do not like any affiliation with “right-wing,” a Social Democrat. (That history has been restated most recently in my essay “First Love and Early Sorrows,” in Partisan Review [#4, 1981].)

Mr. Tonsor also writes that Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb “were leading figures in the Trotskyist club at the University of Chicago.” Not so. Mr. Kristol was never a student at the University of Chicago. Miss Himmelfarb was a graduate student there in the last years and shortly after World War II, but had left the Trotskyists in New York by 1940-41, as had Mr. Kristol.