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The role of a public intellectual in a democracy is not one that is easily understood or described. In our contemporary media culture in which celebrity is measured solely by notoriety rather than the force of a person's ideas, it is difficult to imagine how a person such as Irving Kristol can be properly appreciated.Kristol, who died last week on the eve of Rosh Hashanah at 89, was not that well known outside of the realm of intellectual life. He didn't write best-selling books or edit mass circulation magazines. In fact, the number of his fellow Americans who actually read anything he had written was probably relatively small, certainly far fewer than the many millions who watch his famous son William (who is himself a formidable intellectual voice and the editor of the Weekly Standard magazine), speak on network television about the issues of the day. But the reach of Kristol's ideas can be seen not only in his role in the creation of an important intellectual movement - neo-conservatism - of which he was said to be the godfather, but in the way his critiques of liberalism irrevocably changed the national political conversation.

Like many another child of Jewish immigrants who came of age during the Great Depression, he was a socialist during his youth and a liberal as a young man. But unlike so many people who start out in one place and then spend the rest of their lives trying to prove, against the force of events and reason, that what they originally thought was always right, Kristol's keen mind would not let him stand still as history moved past the era of the New Deal.