ABSTRACT
Irving Kristol was born in 1920, in Brooklyn, New York, and died in 2009, in Washington, DC. In the days and weeks following his death on 18 September, a large flow of obituaries and tributes swept newspapers and magazines, mainly in the United States (US), Britain and Australia. A common topic was that Kristol had been the 'godfather of neo-conservatism', an expression mainly associated in the media at that time with the war in Iraq. In fact, neo-conservatism vastly preceded the intervention in Iraq in 2003. Kristal's contributions to public life have in fact been intertwined with the academic work of his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, the distinguished American historian of Victorian Britain. This chapter recalls some of their seminal contributions to the critical understanding of the moral underpinnings of western free societies. Irving Kristol famously said that 'a neoconservative is a liberal who was mugged by reality'.
