In this book, Stephen Feldman traces the development of neoconservatism as an intellectual movement, and its influence on politics, policy, and law from the 1960s into the 2000s. As his title suggests, his main interest is the influence of “neoconservative politics” on the Supreme Court’s decisions and jurisprudence. The book is both comprehensive and concise. It provides a careful and mostly balanced treatment of the development and influence of neoconservatism over approximately 50 years, although at times it seems to oversimplify neoconservative views and to overstate its impact. The book provides a useful and plausible historical narrative of the rise of neoconservatism, its influence on Republican politics, and its path onto the Supreme Court. Nonetheless, political scientists who specialize in law and courts will find the book wanting in several respects.

After a short introduction, the substantive chapters begin by chronicling the shift in the political theory driving the American polity from republican democracy to pluralist democracy in the 1930s and post—New Deal/World War II. Although the form and predominant theory of American democracy have certainly evolved and changed over time, the starkly dichotomous manner in which the book describes this evolution seems somewhat simplistic. While American democracy became more pluralistic throughout the middle part of the twentieth century, an intellectual movement that became “neoconservatism” was growing. Although he does not break new ground in tracing the development of neoconservatism, Feldman nicely chronicles how New Deal Democrats disenchanted with developments in the Democratic Party and American society in the 1960s and early 1970s—namely, Great Society policies and the tolerance or even embracement of the counterculture and pacifism exemplified by the McGovern wing—bolted from the party. Searching for an alternative, early neocons, such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, were influence by the political thought of Leo Strauss. According to Feldman, this led to early neocons’ rejection of the pluralist democracy that had taken root in the United States throughout the twentieth century, and their commitment to return to republican democracy and moral clarity. Some who are familiar with the writings of early neocons claim that Kristol, Podhoritz, and others “transformed” from liberals to neocons, whereas many of them did not think of themselves as transformed but, rather, that the Democratic Party and liberalism had been transformed.

Early in the book the author correctly distinguishes neoconservatism from other factions in the conservative movement, such as the traditional conservatism influenced by Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk and the libertarianism influenced heavily by Friedrich Hayek (who, it is worth noting, famously denied being a conservative). However, I do not think he pays enough attention to those distinctions throughout the book. In fact, in several places, he emphasizes the “overlap” among these strands of conservatism. For example, in comparing the constitutional thought of Lino Graglia, Robert Bork, Richard Epstein, and Randy Barnett, Feldman concludes that that “traditionalist and libertarian conservative constitutional theories both overlap considerably with neoconservatism” (pp. 79–80). In sum, because neocons share an emphasis on moral clarity with traditionalists, and a distrust of government with libertarians, Feldman’s account emphasizes these similarities and seems to de-emphasize the differences among all three camps.

The historical narrative pursued by the author is that “[u]ltimately, Reagan and neoconservatism, united together, became a potent political force” (p. 53), and “under the charismatic succor of Reagan’s big tent, neoconservatism cross-pollinated with other forms of conservatism … with neoconservatives often leading the way” (p. 53). This resulted, according to Feldman, in the appointment of conservative, and mostly neoconservative, justices. In this way, neoconservatism migrated to the Supreme Court and, in the author’s view, became the primary influence on the Court’s jurisprudence and decision making. Throughout the second part of the book, he identifies policy and legal outcomes that seem to be the result of neoconservatism. In fact, he concludes, “Not only is the Roberts Court unequivocally conservative, it can reasonable be characterized as predominantly neoconservative” (p. 97).

I doubt that most political scientists will quibble with the basic historical narrative in this book, or the characterization of the five-member majority of the current Supreme Court as essentially conservative. Feldman’s basic account is not only plausible but probable. Additionally, he reminds us that modern conservatism is not monolithic, and thus when we describe the Republican Party, or the majority of the Supreme Court, we should be cautious in oversimplifying the ideological character of those institutions. However, I think that law and courts scholars are likely to quibble with at least three aspects of this work.

First, the author’s narrative could fit nicely into the well-developed historical institutional and regimes politics literatures, but he does not situate his research in that literature (and, in fact, he virtually ignores it). The value added of historical institutionalism and especially political regimes theory would be to help the author analyze the more complex nature of both the overlap and the distinctions between the various strands of conservative political thought in terms of partisan coalitional politics, and evaluate the role of the Court in furthering the interests of the Republican coalition during this time. Drawing more explicitly from the insights of scholars such as Cornell Clayton, Howard Gillman, Mark Graber, Thomas Keck, Kevin McMahon, and Keith Whittington would have furthered the analysis in several ways, including my second and third points here.

Second, there are some causal problems with the author’s analysis. The claim is that neoconservatism is the cause of outcomes on the Supreme Court. Feldman acknowledges that a number of outcomes are consistent with other types of conservativism, namely, traditionalism or libertarianism, but he claims that not many cases can be called libertarian and traditional, and so neoconservatism must be the driving force or, essentially, the explanatory variable for Republican-appointed justices’ votes. Setting aside for a brief moment his sometimes problematic characterization and interpretation of many Court decisions, this may not be the case. As he acknowledges several times, neoconservatism has a significant element of pragmatism to it. And given the nature of the conservative coalition, it seems just as likely to me that the ideas of libertarians and traditionalists are the driving forces in many Court decisions, and often times for pragmatic reasons at the end of the sentence ending with “…neocons supported those ideas.” This is why neoconservatives find themselves joining the more conservative and libertarian Republican Party, and not vice versa.

Third, and following from the first two points, I think that many law and courts scholars who read this book will question Feldman’s characterization of individual justices and specific Court decisions as being primarily neoconservative. For example, he characterizes Chief Justice John Roberts as a staunch neocon, when much of Roberts’s behavior on the Court seems more consistent with the prudential approach of traditionalists. In discussing Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence in United States v. Lopez (1995), Feldman writes that it “closely paralleled Richard Epstein’s neoconservative (libertarian) article arguing for a return to a pre-1937 concept of the commerce power” (p. 105; parentheses in original). While most scholars would characterize both Thomas’s and Epstein’s arguments as primarily—and not parenthetically—libertarian, Feldman’s description appears to characterize them as primarily neoconservative by placing the libertarian label in parentheses. Moreover, the book ignores a range of issue areas that might tell a different story from the one advanced by the author. For example, much attention is given to the issue area of criminal procedure, in which there are numerous examples of judicial behavior that are not consistent with Feldman’s account. For example, Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s vote in Dickerson v. United States (2000), which essentially upheld Miranda v. Arizona (1966), and many of Justice Antonin Scalia’s pro-criminal-defendant votes in Fourth Amendment cases, cannot easily be squared with neoconservativsm. These and other such examples are left unaddressed.

Clearly, neoconservatism has been influential not only as an intellectual movement but also in partisan politics and on the Court, and Neoconservative Politics and the Supreme Court helps us understand this influence in a broader historical context. But the extent and form of the neocon influence is probably much more complicated than depicted here, and better understood through coalitional politics and issue evolution over time, as regime politics scholars argue. Nonetheless, this book makes a solid contribution to our debates over, and understanding of, the current Supreme Court majority’s so-called conservative disposition.