ABSTRACT
WHAT NEOCONSERVATIVES BELIEVE Long before E. D. Hirsch presented his views on culture and curriculum, the foundations of a neoconservative vision were being laid. Writing in 1979, Peter Steinfels examined the major tenets of neoconservative thought in Th e Neoconservatives: Th e Men Who Are Changing America’s Politics. Th ese included the presumption that “a crisis of
authority” had “overtaken America and the West generally,” that the crisis was “primarily a cultural crisis, a matter of values, morals, and manners,” that government was the “victim of overload,” and that such dissolution could be confronted through an insistence that “authority be reasserted” and “government protected” (pp. 53-69).
