Irving Kristol II

But neoconservatism turned quite literally into a family affair for Mr. Kristol. His wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, a distinguished historian of 19th-century England, wrote books and articles critical of modern permissiveness and urged a return to Victorian values. His son, William, who had been Vice President Dan Quayle’s chief of staff, became a leading spokesman for neoconservatism in his own right as a television commentator, the editor of The Weekly Standard and briefly a columnist for The New York Times. Friends referred to them as America’s first family of neoconservatism.

Mr. Kristol’s weapon of choice was the biting polemical essay of ideas, a form he mastered as part of the famed circle of writers and critics known as the New York Intellectuals, among them the ferocious literary brawlers Mary McCarthy and Dwight Macdonald. Mr. Kristol once described feeling intimidated at a cocktail party when he was seated with Ms. McCarthy on one side, Hannah Arendt on the other and Diana Trilling across from him.

He learned the hard way that he was not destined to be an author of books. In the late 1950s he spent three months researching a study of the evolution of American democracy, only to abandon the project, he said, once he realized “it was all an exercise in futility.” An attempted novel was consigned to his incinerator. “I was not a book writer,” he said.

The four volumes published under his name — “On the Democratic Idea in America” (1972), “Two Cheers for Capitalism” (1978), “Reflections of a Neoconservative” (1983) and “Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea” (1995) — are collections of previously published articles.

As an essayist, Mr. Kristol was sharp, witty, aphoristic and assertive. “Equivocation has never been Irving Kristol’s long suit,” his friend Robert H. Bork said of him. Before achieving his reputation as a writer on political and social affairs, he was a wide-ranging generalist. In the 1940s and ’50s, his subjects included Einstein, psychoanalysis, Jewish humor and the Marquis de Sade.

His erudition could burst out at unexpected moments. An attack on environmental extremists uses a quotation from Auden; a passage about American men’s obsession with golf cites T.S. Eliot. But he could be a verbal streetfighter as well. John Kenneth Galbraith, he wrote, “thinks he is an economist and, if one takes him at his word, it is easy to demonstrate that he is a bad one.” After it was revealed that Magic Johnson had tested HIV positive, Mr. Kristol wrote: “He is a foolish, reckless man who does not merit any kind of character reference.”

Mr. Kristol seemed to need enemies: the counterculture, the academic and media professionals who made up what he called the New Class, and finally liberalism in its entirety. And he certainly made enemies with his harsh words.

Yet underlying the invective was an innate skepticism, even a quality of moderation and self-mockery, which was often belied by his single-mindedness. This stalwart defender of free enterprise could manage only two cheers for capitalism. “Extremism in defense of liberty,” he declared, taking issue with Barry Goldwater, “is always a vice because extremism is but another name for fanaticism.” And the two major intellectual influences on him, he said, were Lionel Trilling, “a skeptical liberal,” and Leo Strauss, “a skeptical conservative.”

“Ever since I can remember,” he said in summing himself up, “I’ve been a neo-something: a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neo-liberal, a neo-conservative and, in religion, always a neo-orthodox, even while I was a neo-Trotskyist and a neo-Marxist. I’m going to end up a neo. Just neo, that’s all. Neo-dash-nothing.”

Irving William Kristol was born on Jan. 20, 1920, in Brooklyn into a family of low-income, nonobservant Jews. His father, Joseph, a middleman in the men’s clothing business, went bankrupt several times; his mother, Bessie, died of cancer when he was 16. “We were poor, but then everyone was poor, more or less,” Mr. Kristol recalled.

In the late 1930s he attended City College, the highly politicized, overwhelmingly Jewish New York institution where his indignation at the injustices of the Great Depression pushed him to the left, but not the far left. In the large, dingy school cafeteria were a number of alcoves where students could gather with like-minded colleagues. There was an athlete’s alcove, a Catholic alcove, a black alcove, an ROTC alcove. But the alcoves that later became famous were Numbers One and Two.

Alcove One held leftists of various stripes; Alcove Two housed the Stalinists, including a young Julius Rosenberg. The Stalinists outnumbered the anti-Stalinists by as much as 10-1, but among the anti-Stalinists were Mr. Bell as well as the future sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset and the future literary critic Irving Howe.

Mr. Howe recruited Mr. Kristol into the Trotskyists, and though Mr. Kristol’s career as a follower of the apostate Communist Leon Trotsky was brief, it lasted beyond his graduation from City College, long enough for him to meet Ms. Himmelfarb at a Trotskyist gathering in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. He fell in love, and the two were married in 1942, when she was 19 and he was just short of his 22nd birthday. Besides William, they also had a daughter, Elizabeth. They, along with their mother and five grandchildren, survive him.