“Neoconservatism” is a concept, or rather a label, which means different things to different people. Originally coined in the mid-1970s as a term of derision, particularly in the pages of Dissent magazine, its intent was to place certain rightward-leaning public intellectuals beyond the pale of the liberal consensus. Soon, however, some of these intellectuals reappropriated the label as a badge of honor to distinguish themselves from what they considered an effete and bankrupt liberalism. The most prominent among them, self-proclaimed godfather of the movement Irving Kristol, thus famously defined a neoconservative as “a liberal mugged by reality.” From Peter Steinfel's 1979 study of the movement onwards, scholars have differed on whom exactly ought to be included. Some have emphasized the role of a number of New York intellectuals, who drifted increasingly to the right after converting from radicalism to liberalism around the time of the Second World War. Others have focussed on the “Scoop” Jackson Democrats and other liberal defense hawks, disillusioned with both détente and Carter's humanitarian foreign policy. Many recent authors, finally, seem to have forgotten the historical origins of the term entirely, taking neoconservative simply to mean those Republicans in the Bush administration who pushed for a war against Iraq.

The French historian Justin Vaïsse is the first to convincingly join these three strands together into a single analysis of neoconservatism that embraces both the political and the intellectual history of the movement. The bulk of his research focusses on the Jackson Democrats – whose rise he terms the “second age” of neoconservatism – and their gradual migration from the Democratic Party to the Reagan administration. However, he does not ignore the earlier age rooted in the world of the New York intellectuals, nor the reemergence of the movement – or at least the label – in the twenty-first century, and he takes care to analyze both the continuities and the differences between these three “ages” of neoconservatism.

While this analytical framework is generally effective in linking together the various groups to have been labeled “neoconservative,” it tends to obscure the fact that the first and second generation were tied together far more closely than either was to the third. Moreover, it forces him to adopt a rather general definition in his overarching interpretation of neoconservatism as “fundamentally a manifestation of patriotism or even nationalism.” Such a definition nearly erases the differences between neoconservatives and more traditional Republican defense hawks, or “assertive nationalists,” such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, whom Vaïsse himself emphasizes were allied with but distinct from the neoconservatives. Such quibbles aside, Vaïsse has produced by far the most historically comprehensive and analytically coherent study of neoconservatism to date, with a companion website where interested students can access the most important primary documents on the topic.