Irving Kristol, the "godfather" of neoconservatism and one of our most important public intellectuals, played an extraordinarily influential role in the development of American intellectual and political culture over the past half century. These essays, many hard to find and reprinted here for the first time since their initial appearance, are a penetrating survey of the intellectual development of one of the progenitors of neoconservatism. Kristol wrote over the years on a remarkably broad range of topics — from W. H. Auden to Ronald Reagan, from the neoconservative movement's roots in the 1940s at City College to American foreign policy, from religion to capitalism. Kristol's writings provide us with a unique guide to the development of neoconservatism as one of the leading strains of thought — one of the leading "persuasions" — in recent American political and intellectual history.