Middle-Aged Meliorists

"You appear to be publishing a middle-aged magazine for middle-aged readers," scoffed one reader after a look at the advance galleys of a new quarterly, The Public Interest. On thinking it over, Editors Daniel Bell, 46, and Irving Kristol, 45, took the crack as a compliment. "Young people tend to be enchanted by glittering generalities," they wrote in their first issue last fall; "older people are inclined to remember rather than to think; and middle-aged people, seasoned by life but still open to the future, do seem to us--in our middle years--to be the best of all political generations."

Concrete Critics. With their second issue, which appeared last week, Bell and Kristol continue their reasoned dialogue with reasonable middle age. Articles range from the obsolescence of U.S. public schools to the trend toward small business in the U.S. economy to the theoretical and practical relationship between men and computerized "thinking" machines. First-rate social critics in their own right, Bell and Kristol have years of experience editing and contributing to such magazines as Commentary, Encounter and FORTUNE. They hope that The Public Interest will provide politicians with the latest insights of the intellectual community, while giving intellectuals an understanding of the process of government.

Friends since their undergraduate days at the City College of New York, where they both developed a boundless disdain for ideologies of both the right and left, the two editors emphasize fact and information in their magazine, avoid simplistic political stances. "Too many intellectuals," writes Kristol in the current Public Interest, "express decided views on automation, disarmament, urban renewal, and all sorts of other matters on which they are inadequately informed." Adds Bell: "If the function of the intellectual is to criticize, I say to the intellectual: specify--translate ideas into concrete programs."

No Carping. Like most other "little" magazines, The Public Interest is not likely to become self-supporting in the near future. But Bell and Kristol, who now rely on backing from Wall Street, and other friends, are pleased by the early response; they estimate a circulation of 5,000 or more at $1.50 a copy. A professor of sociology at Columbia University, Bell commissions most of the stories, for which the authors are paid a token $100; Kristol, executive vice president of Basic Books, does most of the editing. Their magazine, they hope, will re-create some of the atmosphere of 19th century England when intellectuals took a passionate interest in their government, and were not satisfied merely to carp contentiously from the sidelines. "We are not interested in the ordinary expose," says Kristol. "We are incurable meliorists. We think that the people in Washington are doing as good a job as anybody can. They would do an even better one if they were given all the information."

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