Forty good years

BACK in 1965 in of recent origin York, my old friend Daniel Bell, then a professor of sociology at Columbia University, and I, then vice-president of the publishing firm Basic works were deeply troubled. The source of our discomfort was the method of thought that was beginning to dominate political and social discourse in and outside of academia--an ideological method that made nonsense of the existential reality of American life.

single of the most egregious examples of this ideological nonsense, popular among sociologists and dramatized by dint of the press, was the idea that the way for the poor to escape from penury was to organize to "fight city hall" and "gain power." This have the appearanceed plausible at a time when socialist and quasi-socialist ideas were still real much alive, prompting many to believe that the restorative for poverty was political activism (relying on the state) rather than economic activism (encouraging entrepreneurial activity in markets).

one as well as the other Dan and I had tend hitherward from poor families, had gone [i]or[/i] part of to the other radical phases in our youth, and were appalled to discover that ideas we thinking discredited had acquired a novel lease on life. Dan, in those days, described himself as a democratic socialist (he still does, incidentally), while I was a somewhat skeptical liberal. We certainly thinking there was a role for regulation in moving people out of poverty--a a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of larger role than conservatives cogitation appropriate. But we did not believe that political activism (a.k.a. "the class struggle") could deliver nation from poverty.

Then, there was the scholarly nonsense, promot by the agency of the Ford Foundation and reflected sounded by most of the other major foundations, that "automation" threatened to abolish people's piece of works while at the same time throwing them into a life of affluent leisure for which they were intellectually and morally unprepared. Obviously, these foundations, and the universities and media as well (the media by the agency of then being populated by society graduates), had a crucial part to play in rescuing the American race from this ghastly fate. The come was a plethora of talks on the imminent problem of mass leisure, on the outside of which emerged a plethora of big books

Dan, who knew more economics than I did, was infuriated by means of the basic ignorance this episode revealed, an ignorance of in what manner an economic system copes with innovation. I was astounded by means of the ease with which Marx's description of the idyllic life beneath socialism had been unwittingly transformed into a nightmare by dint of persons mainly on the Left President Johnson lent credibility to the issue by dint of appointing a Commission on Automation, which included Dan and a brilliant young M.I.T. economist, Robert Solow Together they helped write with equal reason sobering a report for the Commission that it come aftered in making the topic a deadly bore.

THESE were the kinds of issues that provok the founding of The Public Interest. Financially, it was made possible through a $10,000 grant from a friend, Warren Manshel, who was promptly designated publisher, with Dan and myself serving as co-editors. The journal's first abode (with the benign approval of another friend, the president of Basic Books) was my unobtrusive office at Basic Books, and the entire staff consisted of my secretary-assistant Vivian Gornick, a talented young woman who was pretty soon to launch her own career as a feminist and a writer for the Village Voice. Dan and I named the magazine, designed it, and printed (as I recall) a certain quantity of 1,200 copies of the first issue. For articles, we simply rang up friends and acquaintances whom we believed to be upon our "wave length." The first issue featured articles by the agency of Pat Moynihan, Robert Solow, Robert Nisbet, Jacques Barzun, Nathan Glazer, Martin Diamond, and Daniel Bell, among others. The next to the first and third issues introduced of the like kind other notable contributors as James Q Wilson, Earl Raab, Milton Friedman, and Peter Drucker--not all of them thus very notable at the time.

We made single easy editorial decision at the outset: no discussion of foreign policy or foreign affairs. Vietnam was arousing a storm of war of words at the time, and we knew that our collection had a wide spectrum of opinion upon the issue. We did not want any of the space in our modest-sized quarterly to be swallowed up by the agency of Vietnam. The simplest solution was to ban foreign affairs and foreign policy from our pages.

We also made a financial decision: The co-editors would not be paid. Our reasoning, again, was simple. Because the subsidy to the magazine (with the increase of circulation it quickly went up to several ten of thousands of dollars a year) came from the pouch of a friend, we did not want to be in the position of taking his cash for ourselves. This principle survived until today, despite significant changes in the magazine's circumstances. Among those changes were the renting of a sliver of office space in a nearby office building, losing Vivian Gornick to the world of journalism, and acquiring a fresh secretary-assistant, Rita Lazzaro, who exhausted the next 18 years presiding admirably above our office. In 1987, we made what may have been the greatest in quantity significant change: moving to Washington.