Ruckmaker
I see the good uploaders at Unz.org, not inclined to rest content with having liberated from the stacks and thence unto a waiting scholarly world online the page-image archives of dozens of such historic periodicals as Encounter, have recently added to their impressive range the first five years (1977-1982) of Inquiry, the biweekly (later monthly) financed by the Cato Institute, who published it first from San Francisco throughout the Carter years and then from Washington, DC throughout the first Reagan term, the magazine's work in the world apparently complete with the re-election of the Gipper (laughter). In addition to front-of-the-book investigative reporting on the latest depredations of corporate-state crony capitalism and the foreign policy advancing its nefarious ends, the back of its pantomime-horse book was likely in any given issue to feature, among dozens of other pleasantly surprising contributions, Murray Rothbard on Henry Hazlitt, Anthony Burgess on Kingsley Amis, John Gray on Leszek Kolakowski, Alan Ryan on Isaiah Berlin, or Maurice Cranston on Robert Nisbet. Browsing theInquiry archives last night, after thirty years when they were just barely an inch down my memory hole, afforded me plenty of where-are-they-now moments, and just as many they-were-here-then ones as well. I append an email of mine from December 1, 2010:
One of the pleasures of being a high-school libertarian in the late 1970s came for me in the fact that every two weeks as I stepped off the school bus and opened the mailbox at the end of our driveway, I could count on a gleaming new copy of Inquiry magazine, launched in November 1977 by the Cato Institute in its original San Francisco years. Even among journals of political opinion, a genus often likened to a pantomime horse, with its "politics in the front of the book, culture in the back" aspect (much like the mullet, with the words "business" and "party" to suit),Inquiry was a blend as unorthodox and yet as indicative of shifting Carter-to-Reagan years intellectual alignments as the cross-partisan cultivations of its sponsoring foundation would reveal themselves long after it had as of 1982 decamped to the nation's capital.
The "outreach" aspect of Inquiry vis-a-vis the wider intellectual world, its deliberate avoidance of both "movement" insider politicking and hard-line application of free-market theory to domestic public-policy questions*
the topical front matter, after the opening editorials which often took on national-security and foreign/military-policy issues from a left-libertarian/non-interventionist/civil-libertarian perspective, was headlined regularly by an evolving gentrified version of 1960s Bay-Area investigative muckraking, at the divers and heavily-reported crossroads where big business meets big government in government contracting, corporate welfare and interlocking/revolving-door managerial directorates; where the CIA-enhanced alliance of US foreign policy with authoritarian right-wing regimes abroad met what would later come to be called imperial "blowback"; and where writers for The Nation and The Progressive sat at the same hotel bar as their counterparts penning op-eds for the Wall Street Journal (and in the case of such rising opinionators as Stephen Chapman, The New Republic).
Perhaps owing to the deep loss-leading pockets of the Koch brothers, the 32-page biweekly was of a rare distinction in design and typography, and its pages were milled of heavy card stock, an aspect that sat well with the proverbially highbrow "back of the book", which ranged across the history of European ideas and culture, and modern literary life, as refracted regularly through a New York/Chicago/London/Oxbridge galaxy of pipe-smoking port-quaffing reviewers familiar to readers of Encounter, The New York Review of Books, and the books pages of the English dailies and weeklies. It was a seminal time for such defining cerebrations, as Inquiry reviewers from the senior common rooms of the mid-Atlantic academy assayed Robert Nisbet's History of the Idea of Progress, the first volumes of the collected essays of the historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin of All Souls, Oxford, and the three volumes of Main Currents of Marxism by the Polish exile and ex-Marxist political philosopherLeszek Kolakowski, also of All Souls (and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago) and a sort of hybrid of Berlin himself and Sidney Hook, and whose work, like that of Berlin, his fellow "tragic liberal", inspired the dissident intelligentsia of Soviet-bloc Central Europe in its struggles over the final decade of the Cold War with an empirical distrust of the sort of totalizing, determinist and mechanist social philosophies, reeking of "scientism", under whose iron banners they had labored in intermittent light.
Where the pages of the book section of Inquiry turn from British Museum buckram to West Side warfare, from Westphalia and Weimar to Washington and Whitehall, the voices enlisted were no less susceptible to arching the eyebrows of a youngster in search of lively polemical fire: those in 1979 finding themselves asking, I Wonder Who's (Reviewing) Kissinger Now? would have found their answer, in inquiring thus ofInquiry upon the publication of The White House Years, in the form of an MIT linguist and inveterate kabuki scourge of US hegemony-cricket by the name of Noam Chomsky.*
And when round the end of that same year the veteran Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz published Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir,* the second of his three apologias for his sharp-elbowed practice of life as a New York literary-political intellectual of the recovering-radical stripe -
the magazine's reviewer, an anarcho-capitalist curmudgeon by the name of Professor Murray N. Rothbard, inverting Hannah Arendt on Adolf Eichmann in a review entitled "The Evil of Banality", laid him on the green with a hissing cattiness toward marquee neoconservatism
cognate with that seen in Playboy that year from the hand of one Gore Vidal ("Sex is Politics"), sporting with "the Hilton Kramer" as though the bow-tied latter, the onetime NYT art critic due to found the rearguard-pessimist arts monthly the New Criterion three years later, were a Catskills hotel.*
Inquiry at its peak attained a circulation of around 30,000, and upon the refashioning of the Cato Institute coincident with its move from San Francisco to Washington, DC in 1982, was sold off to the Libertarian Review foundation, whose own titular monthly was folded into it as Inquiry converted from a biweekly to a monthly. As with its birth-parent foundation itself, the magazine pared its topical focus down more closely toward public policy and other proverbial aspects of Beltway intellectualism, and breathed its last in 1984. A Cato retrospect from the foundation's 25th anniversary in 2001 sums up its history and striking range of contributors:
The "outreach" aspect of Inquiry vis-a-vis the wider intellectual world, its deliberate avoidance of both "movement" insider politicking and hard-line application of free-market theory to domestic public-policy questions*
*Such issues were the province of, in the first instance, Murray Rothbard's spare 8-page bimonthly newsletter Libertarian Forum, chockablock with faction fights, and the Libertarian Review (PDF back issues courtesy Jeff Riggenbach, a former editorial staffer and distinguished movement elder now; contributors included future Reagan economist Bruce Bartlett, future Slate press critic Jack Shafer, and the late WBZ-AM Boston conservative-libertarian radio talk-host David Brudnoy, the latter as movie reviewer)
a former Kephart-financed monthly review of books turned opinion-journal
edited, also from San Francisco and with Koch funding, by the late and colorful Roy Childs,
a jovial and bespectacled brown-bearded bear of a man with whom I, five years later in late 1984, running the lower-Manhattan storefront of Laissez-Faire Books on weekends, shared many a chat over packs of my blue Dunhills and his signature thin dark-brown Nat Sherman cigarettes.*
- and, on the other, by reason magazine from the southern end of the Golden State, whose signature articles, less cultural in nature then than those of its Bay Area ideological cousins, advanced private-sector solutions to the provision of public goods, and the Promethean innovations of diversely wonkish and SF-reading Californicated techno-futurists.
a former Kephart-financed monthly review of books turned opinion-journal
edited, also from San Francisco and with Koch funding, by the late and colorful Roy Childs,
a jovial and bespectacled brown-bearded bear of a man with whom I, five years later in late 1984, running the lower-Manhattan storefront of Laissez-Faire Books on weekends, shared many a chat over packs of my blue Dunhills and his signature thin dark-brown Nat Sherman cigarettes.*
*We had first met when he (along with Murray Rothbard, Israel Kirzner [my professor for "Foundations of Capitalism", NYU, Spring 1983], Leonard Liggio, Roger Garrison, &c.) lectured at Cato's 1979 summer seminar in political economy at Dartmouth; I remember him tossing off laddish jests with the future George Mason econ-blogger Tyler Cowen, and future Fed governor Randy Kroszner, then high school students then, in the lecture hall one morning before the other attendees, most of them older professionals, arrived; Tyler and Randy stopped into LFB one Saturday or Sunday afternoon in 1984, when I broke them up with my cassette-trained Ludwig von Mises imitation.
- and, on the other, by reason magazine from the southern end of the Golden State, whose signature articles, less cultural in nature then than those of its Bay Area ideological cousins, advanced private-sector solutions to the provision of public goods, and the Promethean innovations of diversely wonkish and SF-reading Californicated techno-futurists.
the topical front matter, after the opening editorials which often took on national-security and foreign/military-policy issues from a left-libertarian/non-interventionist/civil-libertarian perspective, was headlined regularly by an evolving gentrified version of 1960s Bay-Area investigative muckraking, at the divers and heavily-reported crossroads where big business meets big government in government contracting, corporate welfare and interlocking/revolving-door managerial directorates; where the CIA-enhanced alliance of US foreign policy with authoritarian right-wing regimes abroad met what would later come to be called imperial "blowback"; and where writers for The Nation and The Progressive sat at the same hotel bar as their counterparts penning op-eds for the Wall Street Journal (and in the case of such rising opinionators as Stephen Chapman, The New Republic).
Perhaps owing to the deep loss-leading pockets of the Koch brothers, the 32-page biweekly was of a rare distinction in design and typography, and its pages were milled of heavy card stock, an aspect that sat well with the proverbially highbrow "back of the book", which ranged across the history of European ideas and culture, and modern literary life, as refracted regularly through a New York/Chicago/London/Oxbridge galaxy of pipe-smoking port-quaffing reviewers familiar to readers of Encounter, The New York Review of Books, and the books pages of the English dailies and weeklies. It was a seminal time for such defining cerebrations, as Inquiry reviewers from the senior common rooms of the mid-Atlantic academy assayed Robert Nisbet's History of the Idea of Progress, the first volumes of the collected essays of the historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin of All Souls, Oxford, and the three volumes of Main Currents of Marxism by the Polish exile and ex-Marxist political philosopherLeszek Kolakowski, also of All Souls (and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago) and a sort of hybrid of Berlin himself and Sidney Hook, and whose work, like that of Berlin, his fellow "tragic liberal", inspired the dissident intelligentsia of Soviet-bloc Central Europe in its struggles over the final decade of the Cold War with an empirical distrust of the sort of totalizing, determinist and mechanist social philosophies, reeking of "scientism", under whose iron banners they had labored in intermittent light.
Where the pages of the book section of Inquiry turn from British Museum buckram to West Side warfare, from Westphalia and Weimar to Washington and Whitehall, the voices enlisted were no less susceptible to arching the eyebrows of a youngster in search of lively polemical fire: those in 1979 finding themselves asking, I Wonder Who's (Reviewing) Kissinger Now? would have found their answer, in inquiring thus ofInquiry upon the publication of The White House Years, in the form of an MIT linguist and inveterate kabuki scourge of US hegemony-cricket by the name of Noam Chomsky.*
*Whose post-1975 contributions to The New York Review of Books, after his appearance that year in the paper's special NYRoB All-Star supplement on Vietnam, all begin, whether solo or as signer of collective open letters, in the paper's closing pages and with the words "To the Editors:". Chomsky is perhaps the only author to have himself been reviewed serially in that most self-important of elite bellwethers by scholars bearing the same moniker, respectively, as surname and as "Christian", er, make that, "Judeo-" name - Bernard Avishai (1975) and Avishai Margalit (1984). I trust the reader will have already made the inference, eminently justified, that both Chomskyite (Chomskyist?) broadsides reviewed were devoted to the Middle East - and that Chomsky, having come under the scrutiny of two men of standard-issue leftist politics not reflexively hostile to the Jewish state - a Chang and an Eng joined at the Avishai, such that when one coughs "Noam" the other sneezes "Chomsky" - he would be addressing himself "To the Editors" at contentious length, with what the Avishais' fellow philo-Israelite egalitarian Michael Walzer called his "graceless sarcasm", "impersonal and self-righteous hatred" and "ideological denunciation."
And when round the end of that same year the veteran Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz published Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir,* the second of his three apologias for his sharp-elbowed practice of life as a New York literary-political intellectual of the recovering-radical stripe -
*Though both its title and that of N-Pod's inaugural volume thus, Making It, conveyed well enough their author's inveterate libido to thumb the eyes of all those hapless enough to have dined with him in his Sammy Glick phase without following him out of the wilderness and into the vast and lonely desert of the deep-pocketed foundation-fed NYC/Beltway center-Right, whence he would come to find Ronald Reagan soft on the Soviets and the hired ink-stained guns of the American culture industry of insufficient fealty to the tenets of Capitalist Realism, it was only with the title of his third and last (a fellow can only hope), Ex-Friends, that even the least of the ideological naifs among us came to realize that he really, really Meant It when he showed us all three times how happy he was to have shown himself the collective door of Manhattan's salon-gauchistes.
the magazine's reviewer, an anarcho-capitalist curmudgeon by the name of Professor Murray N. Rothbard, inverting Hannah Arendt on Adolf Eichmann in a review entitled "The Evil of Banality", laid him on the green with a hissing cattiness toward marquee neoconservatism
"Were this a just society, Podhoretz would be spending his years as a writer for some AFL-CIO sheet, trotted out at union conventions as one of their resident intellectuals."
cognate with that seen in Playboy that year from the hand of one Gore Vidal ("Sex is Politics"), sporting with "the Hilton Kramer" as though the bow-tied latter, the onetime NYT art critic due to found the rearguard-pessimist arts monthly the New Criterion three years later, were a Catskills hotel.*
*In a Vidal essay, no matter how grim the matter in hand, or how pressing the logic of the argument, there's always room in which to joke; and it is often the jokes and asides that stick most firmly in the mind. For instance, most readers who've followed Vidal's writing over the years will remember the moment-or rather the several paragraphs-when he labored under the misapprehension that Hilton Kramer was a hotel in the Catskills. - Jonathan Raban, 2008
*One of his silliest pieces, "Sex is Politics", contains a very good line where he is describing a television interview: "All the while, we spoke of Important Matters. I said that I did not think it a good idea for people to molest children. This was disigenuous. My secret hero is the late King Herod." - Auberon Waugh, 1982
*One of his silliest pieces, "Sex is Politics", contains a very good line where he is describing a television interview: "All the while, we spoke of Important Matters. I said that I did not think it a good idea for people to molest children. This was disigenuous. My secret hero is the late King Herod." - Auberon Waugh, 1982
Inquiry at its peak attained a circulation of around 30,000, and upon the refashioning of the Cato Institute coincident with its move from San Francisco to Washington, DC in 1982, was sold off to the Libertarian Review foundation, whose own titular monthly was folded into it as Inquiry converted from a biweekly to a monthly. As with its birth-parent foundation itself, the magazine pared its topical focus down more closely toward public policy and other proverbial aspects of Beltway intellectualism, and breathed its last in 1984. A Cato retrospect from the foundation's 25th anniversary in 2001 sums up its history and striking range of contributors:
The Institute’s early program involved publications, seminars, college lectures, and public policy research.Inquiry, a bi-weekly political affairs magazine edited first by Williamson Evers and later by Glenn Garvin and Doug Bandow, featured such writers as Nat Hentoff, Thomas Szasz, J. Anthony Lukas, Karl Hess, Jack Shafer, Nikolai Tolstoy, Penny Lernoux, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Maurice Cranston, Jonathan Kwitny, Thomas M. Disch, John O’Sullivan, Anthony Burgess, P. J. O’Rourke, Martin Gardner, George F. Kennan, Rose Styron, William Shawcross, Marina Warner, Auberon Waugh, Walter Karp, David Osborne, Christie Hefner, Eugene McCarthy, Ivan Illich, Warren Hinckle, and Simon Leys. Inquiry promised “unconventional, provocative, lively” commentary that would “defy the traditional left-right political analysis.” Its editors chuckled over being called “the best of the right-wing rags” by the New Republic and “a lively, lefty magazine” by William Safire. In The Next Whole Earth Catalog, Jay Kinney called it “the most consistently interesting political magazine around.”
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