Irving Kristol knew his enemies. In 1956, when the godfather of neoconservatism was an editor at Encounter magazine, he recognized Michael Oakeshott as one of those enemies: a man whose ideas were antithetical to his own. Oakeshott, then a 55-year-old professor of political science at the London School of Economics, had sent to Kristol for Encounter’s consideration a manuscript entitled “On Being Conservative.” “It was beautifully written, subtle in its argument, delicate in its perceptions, and full of sentences and paragraphs that merit the attention of anthologists, perhaps even centuries, to come,” Kristol recalled in 1996. “But,” he continued, “the truth is that, while I admired the essay immensely, I did not really like it. Which is another way of saying that I disagreed with it.”
