U. of C. philosophy prof Leo Strauss has been blamed for the rise of the neocons and even the invasion of Iraq. Now one of his disciples hopes to clear his name.August 24, 2007
By Julie Englander
On a sunny Wednesday last November, 16 students sat around a University of Chicago seminar table with two unpublished typescripts in front of them. The students were taking a course on the philosopher Leo Strauss, and “politics and policy” was the day’s topic. “In some ways it was easy to select the readings for this subject,” announced Nathan Tarcov, a professor of political science, “because Strauss wrote almost nothing about practical politics. I had to scrounge to find much of anything.”
The typescripts—two speeches Strauss delivered in the 1940s—left plenty of questions unanswered. They didn’t lay out in perfect clarity Strauss’s opinions on practical politics; they hinted at them. But Tarcov hoped they would correct what he saw as one of academia’s most sensational urban myths: the notion that Leo Strauss—though he’d died in 1973—was responsible for the rise of America’s neoconservatives and even for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
A number of prominent journalists and writers thought they’d found a method to George W. Bush’s madness in deposing Saddam Hussein. Writing in the New Yorker in May 2003, Seymour Hersh claimed that “the Straussian movement has many adherents in and around the Bush Administration,” most notably Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense, and Abram Shulsky, director of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. Hersh wrote that these Straussians agreed with their guru, a scholar of Plato, that there are “truths [that] can be comprehended only by a very few, and would be misunderstood by the masses.” Thus the “noble lie” (a phrase from Plato’s Republic that Strauss liked to use) that Bush and Powell told the American public: Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, and we’ve got to go in there, whatever the cost.
Here at the Reader, The Straight Dope’s Cecil Adams once answered an inquiry about Strauss with the assessment that the professor thought such lying “wasn’t just an occasional tactic for the great philosophers, but their routine strategy.” He called Straussianism “a high-voltage version of the impulse that leads the common herd to embrace conspiracy theories, numerology, and tarot readings. In light of all this,” he continued, “the scary thing isn’t that the government may have lied to us—it wouldn’t be the first time—but that for most of the past 20 years our presidents have been lending an ear to adherents of a guy with such a shaky grasp of reality.” Meanwhile on Broadway, the military generals—of Tim Robbins’s 2004 play Embedded were shown worshipping an image of the German emigre, chanting, “All hail Leo Strauss!”
To many who studied with Strauss at the University of Chicago in the 60s, or who studied later with Strauss’s former students, the accusations were puzzling at best and offensive at worst. In 2006, “motivated by a deep sense of gratitude to him as our teacher and, we must say, by a bit of righteous indignation at the injustice being done to him,” Notre Dame political science professors Catherine and Michael Zuckert published The Truth About Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy. Two other correctives appeared last year as well: Leo Strauss: An Introduction to his Thought and Intellectual Legacy, by Thomas Pangle of the University of Texas, and Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism by Yale’s Steven Smith. The Zuckert and Smith books were published by the University of Chicago Press.
Known more for his absorption in the abstractions of ancient philosophy than for any personal political ambitions, Strauss could hardly be held responsible for U.S. foreign policy, according to his defenders. As Tarcov pointed out to his class, the occasions when Strauss spoke up about the political issues of his day could be counted on one hand, and what he did say rarely lent itself to easy interpretation or implementation. “One can’t simply quote a line and say therefore the tax rate should be x, or we should invade these three countries,” he declared.
In fact, Tarcov guessed that Strauss would have advised against going to war in the Middle East. Tarcov himself had felt from the beginning that invading Iraq was a bad idea. As he told WGN radio host Milt Rosenberg in February, “Machiavelli says, in The Art of War, that Europe should never invade Parthia.” Tarcov was using the ancient name for the region that today comprises Iran and Iraq and invoking one of the classics that Strauss worked so hard to revive over the course of his career. “Rome couldn’t subdue Parthia.”
“When I was 16 and we read [Plato] in school,” Leo Strauss once wrote, “I formed the plan, or the wish, to spend my life reading Plato, breeding rabbits while earning my living as a rural postmaster.” A Jew born in 1899 in Hessen, Germany, he earned his doctorate by studying with, among others, Martin Heidegger, who later joined the Nazi party. Strauss might have become a victim of the Nazis, but in the 1930s he was working abroad, in France and England, on the religious thought of Maimonides and the political thought of Hobbes. Unwilling to go back to Germany, he immigrated to the United States in 1937 to take a job at Columbia University.
The following year Strauss became an American citizen and began a professorship at the New School for Social Research in New York. In 1949, wooed by president Robert Maynard Hutchins, he moved to Hyde Park to teach political philosophy at the University of Chicago. He labored to redress what he saw as the failings of modernity, the popular social theory that through science and enlightenment a perfect society was possible. Strauss considered such thinking naive if not outright dangerous. Social science, he felt, was obsessed with measuring, predicting, and classifying, with “facts” but not “values.” A political scientist, he argued, might study tyranny backward and forward but not call it a bad thing. How could students taught not to judge recognize tyranny and fascism for the dangers they were and guard against them? “Science,” he proclaimed, “cannot teach wisdom.”
In place of the relativism that, for Strauss, threatened a decline into nihilism, he wanted political science departments to revive ancient Greek and medieval political thinkers—the “premoderns” who posed questions about “the Good” relevant to serious thinkers of every milieu and regime. In particular, he argued, students should read Plato—it was necessary for contemporary social science to understand its “basis or matrix.” The principles “elaborated by the classics may be the indispensable starting point for an adequate analysis, to be achieved by us, of present-day society and its peculiar character, and for the wise application, to be achieved by us, of these principles to our tasks.”
Strauss remained at the U. of C. for 20 years. Though a small man with a “very small voice, and a congenital incapacity to make proper use of a microphone or of a telephone,” according to his student George Anastaplo, he was a captivating teacher with a devoted following. Another student, Werner Dannhauser, wrote that Strauss’s classes were “scheduled from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m., but while they started punctually they usually lasted until 6:00 or even 7:00.” In the wider world of scholarship, Strauss achieved some notoriety as the author of Natural Right and History, in which he examined the “crisis of the West” and attempted to defend the idea of inalienable rights, an idea that had inspired America’s founders, against the onslaught of later ideologies like Marxism.
In his lifetime Strauss was the subject of controversy in large part because of his obsession with the ancients. The controversy centered on his now famous doctrine of esoteric writing, which he’d laid out in Persecution and the Art of Writing. The greatest thinkers, Strauss maintained, wrote in such a way as to provide not one but two meanings to their readers: “a popular teaching of an edifying character, which is in the foreground; and a philosophic teaching concerning the most important subject, which is indicated only between the lines.” The “exoteric” meaning was apparent; only the clever few who read closely and knew where to look could glean the esoteric meaning. Great philosophers wrote this way, Strauss believed, because “freedom of inquiry, and of publication of all results of inquiry,” wasn’t guaranteed.
In Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss touched on his idea of the noble lie. Philosophers “believed that the gulf separating ‘the wise’ and ‘the vulgar’ was a basic fact of human nature,” Strauss told readers, and the vulgar were generally suspicious of philosophers. So philosophers had to employ subversive means: “noble (or just) lies,” “pious frauds,” the “economy of the truth.”
This can be a difficult notion to swallow, Strauss acknowledged. “Every decent modern reader is bound to be shocked by the mere suggestion that a great man might have deliberately deceived the large majority of his readers,” he wrote. “And yet, as a liberal theologian once remarked, these imitators of the resourceful Odysseus were perhaps merely more sincere than we when they called ‘lying nobly’ what we would call ‘considering one’s social responsibilities.’”
He was known to be a Zionist, but mostly Strauss’s personal politics remained mysterious. Even devoted students like the Zuckerts were frustrated in the 60s trying to guess their teacher’s position on the hot-button issues of the day, like Vietnam and civil rights. Catherine Zuckert recalls a classmate asking Strauss a question about contemporary America. Strauss replied that he didn’t feel qualified to comment, as he wasn’t born and bred here. He was rumored to have voted for Adlai Stevenson twice in the 50s, but then he signed a 1972 ad in the New York Times by a group called Academics for Nixon.
In 1985, 12 years after Strauss’s death, Oxford classicist Myles Burnyeat wrote a scathing critique of his ideas and influence, “Sphinx Without a Secret,” in the New York Review of Books. “Strauss’s interpretation of Plato is wrong from beginning to end,” Burnyeat argued. “There is much talk in Straussian writings about the nature of ‘the philosopher’ but no sign of any knowledge, from the inside, of what it is to be actively involved in philosophy.”
Two years later, Allan Bloom, Strauss’s best-known student, published a defense of sorts: The Closing of the American Mind. In glorifying the classics and critiquing the modern university, Bloom’s best-seller helped lay the ground for the culture wars of the 90s.
In 1988, one of Strauss’s most vociferous critics published an entire book on the debate over Strauss. Shadia Drury, professor of philosophy and political science at the University of Regina in Canada, wrote in The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss that she had once been dismissive of Strauss’s scholarship and, like Burnyeat, “perplexed as to how such rubbish could have been published.” But once she began to see Strauss as not a mere scholar but also a philosopher in his own right, she became fascinated by him—and alarmed. She set out to expose Strauss’s thought for the dark, perverse, nihilistic philosophy that she understood it to be. “Strauss believes that men must be kept in the darkness of the cave,” she wrote, “for nothing is to be gained by liberating them from their chains.”
Strauss, according to Drury, maintained that the truth is not merely difficult to discern but so dangerous and detrimental to our well-being that it should be kept under wraps at all costs. “Is there a truth so terrible that it threatens to wreak havoc on society unless it is kept secret?” Drury asked. “I will show that for Strauss, religion and morality are two of the biggest but most pious swindles ever perpetrated on the human race. But paradoxically, there would be no human race were it not for these swindles.”
One startling idea Drury put forth was that Strauss favored not democracy but what is known as “the tyrannical teaching.” She wrote, “Strauss is not very explicit about this, but he makes it clear that absolute rule without law, if it is wise, is infinitely superior to the rule of law.”
Tarcov and the Zuckerts took Drury’s book seriously as the work of a fellow scholar. But “Strauss somehow becomes a mixture of Machiavelli, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Thrasymachus, in a way that seems to me to miss his critiques of those thinkers,” Tarcov observes. A less serious work, in Tarcov’s opinion, was Drury’s 1997 follow-up, Leo Strauss and the American Right, in which she attempted to tie the rise of Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress to Strauss’s ideas. In 2005 Drury reissued her original book with a new, impassioned introduction. “There is no denying that Strauss shaped the minds of the men who embarked on a foreign policy that has had monumental ramifications for America and for the world,” Drury wrote. “I criticize Strauss for cultivating an arrogant, unscrupulous, and mendacious elite—an elite that has a profound contempt for the rule of law, for morality, for ordinary people, and for veracity.”
By the time the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Strauss was getting it from all sides. Depending on who you asked, he was an inconsequential curmudgeon, an academic hack, a reactionary fascist, or a democratic imperialist orchestrating American foreign policy from the grave.
In his 2003 New Yorker article, Seymour Hersh traced Paul Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky’s delusions of grandeur and own “noble lies” to Strauss and the University of Chicago, where both men “received their doctorates under Strauss in 1972.” In fact, Strauss had left the U. of C. four years earlier. Wolfowitz took some courses with Strauss, but he wrote his dissertation on mathematical models and nuclear proliferation under the guidance of Albert Wohlstetter. Shulsky did claim Strauss as an influence, as in the 1999 essay “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous),” written with Gary Schmitt. With a wink at students of Greek philosophy, Shulsky and Schmitt wrote that just as social scientists often could not see the forest for the trees—Strauss’s case against them—so was the American intelligence community blind to “big picture” issues and threats to national security.
About the same time that Seymour Hersh was writing in the New Yorker about a Straussian cabal, James Atlas had an article in the New York Times detailing the Straussians-as-orchestrators-of-empire theory. “According to one school of thought, our most recent military adventure turns out to have been nothing less than a defense of Western civilization—as interpreted by the late classicist and political philosopher Leo Strauss,” he wrote. “If this chain of events seems implausible, consider the tribute President Bush paid in February to the cohort of journalists, political philosophers and policy wonks known—primarily to themselves—as Straussians. ‘You are some of the best brains in our country,’ Mr. Bush declared in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, ‘and my government employs about 20 of you.’”
Atlas’s article outraged Brian Leiter, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Texas, but not because he’s a defender of Strauss. “Philosophers ought to be concerned when their field is misrepresented in the media,” Leiter wrote on his Web site, philosophicalgourmet.com. “The Times ought to make clear that, whatever the influence of Strauss among intellectual lightweights and political hacks like Paul Wolfowitz and William Bennett, he is viewed by actual scholars as a politically motivated and unreliable scholar, whose philosophical competence is minimal at best.” More recently Leiter told me, “Straussianism is a pathology of American philosophy departments. They have this niche, and they reproduce.”
Tarcov thinks the charges levied at Strauss are bizarre. He defends Strauss as a thinker—“He did more than anyone I know of in the 20th century to revive the centrality of the notion of philosophy as a way of life”—and refuses to lay the invasion of Iraq at his feet. “You can probably give as well as I an account of how it happened,” he says with a shrug. “You know, people were eager to come up with some explanation for our foreign policy.”
Tarcov, who was born in Chicago and grew up in New York City, had declared a history major at Cornell in the 60s. But when he took a political philosophy class there with Allan Bloom, he was turned on to something new. “It had seemed so clear to me—every high school sophomore knew!—that all human thought is historical,” Tarcov says. The idea Bloom and his teacher Strauss professed, that there was something universal to learn from classical and ancient philosophy, that the old books weren’t just dusty relics of another era, was “earthshaking.” Tarcov was so intrigued by what he’d learned from Bloom that he applied to grad school not in his major but in philosophy and political science. He enrolled at Claremont Graduate School in California in 1968 and took classes—one on Socratic dialogues and one on Rousseau—with Strauss himself, who, having retired from Chicago, was teaching there that year. “I even managed,” says Tarcov modestly, “screwing up my courage, to ask him if he would give me a one-on-one tutorial.” Strauss consented.
A slight, gray-bearded man, Tarcov is mild mannered but prone to outbursts of laughter, sometimes at his own jokes. In his office he’s hung pictures of many of the thinkers he studies and teaches—Machiavelli and Socrates, for example—and also the famous image of a Tiananmen Square protester facing down tanks. Trotsky, whom he admired as a teenager, is also on the wall. “I decided one shouldn’t abandon an old friend,” he explains.
In 1978, not long after Tarcov completed his doctorate and began teaching at the University of Chicago, he entertained the possibility of life outside the academy. He phoned Paul Wolfowitz, with whom he’d been friendly at Cornell (Wolfowitz was a senior there when Tarcov was a freshman), for advice about jobs in politics. Wolfowitz had been working in the State Department under President Carter and served on a transition team when Reagan was elected. He was then appointed director of the department’s policy planning staff, and he brought Tarcov on board as a speechwriter for the new secretary of state, Alexander Haig. Tarcov’s first day at work was March 31 30, 1981—the day Reagan was shot. The hostages, who’d recently been released from Iran, were scheduled to visit the State Department that day, but the distracted White House hadn’t composed the president’s welcome. Tarcov was given 45 minutes to draft a speech for a State Department official to deliver in Reagan’s stead.
While Tarcov enjoyed his sojourn in Washington—he speaks appreciatively of the access he had to “a lot of very smart people”—it was “a very different mode of life” from the ivory tower he was used to. “I don’t think I ever went to a meeting where anyone spoke for more than a couple of minutes,” he says. “Whereas, as you know, we’re incapable of that in academia.” With nothing but daily deadlines confronting him, Tarcov found it hard to maintain an academic’s long view. So after 15 months he went back to the U. of C.
Strauss’s own thoughts and beliefs can be hard to untangle, and to some extent Michael Zuckert can’t blame journalists for turning to Shadia Drury for guidance—which is what he believes they did in 2003. “Strauss isn’t a project for a minute or a day,” he observes. “There’s no way to get a quick take on him.”
Catherine Zuckert valued Strauss enormously as a teacher, but she’s wary of being labeled a disciple. “It’s not always clear what people are saying when they use the term Straussian,” she says. She was introduced as such on a recent panel and protested to the moderator. “Did he mean conservative? elitist? ahistorical? liar? I told him, ‘I don’t know which sin you’re accusing me of.’”
Figuring enough was enough, in 2006 the Zuckerts published The Truth About Leo Strauss. They described Strauss’s encounters with ancient and modern philosophy and pictured him as a skeptic and moderate who had conflicted feelings about modern democracy (as he did about modernism generally) but thought it better than the alternatives. They asked, “Does the Platonic/Straussian doctrine of the noble lie serve to justify the kind of alleged lies critics of Strauss... lay at his doorstep?” They went on, “This is not to say that political leaders do not on occasion do such things, but again, they did not learn to do this from Strauss.”
“A lot of stupid and unfair things were said about Strauss,” says Michael. “The idea that he had some big political agenda is just nutty.”
Yale’s Steven Smith concedes in the preface to Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (also published last year by the University of Chicago Press) that Strauss “has always been something of an exotic plant” and is undoubtedly “an acquired taste.” But he was “a friend of liberal democracy—one of the best friends democracy has ever had.”
While putting together the book, Smith recalled a paper he’d come across a decade earlier in the Strauss archives at the U. of C. It was the typescript of a talk Strauss gave at the New School in 1942, “What Can We Learn From Political Theory?” A quick glance showed that its topic fell outside the scope of his research at the time, but the memory stayed with him, and in 2005 he suggested the paper to Tarcov, who was looking for examples of Strauss’s thinking during his New York days.
In the special collections of the U. of C.’s Regenstein Library, 51 boxes house Strauss’s unpublished literary remains. In addition to texts of lectures Strauss gave, there’s a fair amount of what archivists call ephemera. “There are folders,” Tarcov says with some amazement in his voice, “that have titles like ‘Natural Right’ or ‘Hobbes.’ There are scraps of paper. Scraps of paper!” He begins to laugh. “With notes on them! In no order!” Despite the chaos, Tarcov found his way to the talk Smith had told him about. Delivered in 1942, “What Can We Learn From Political Theory?” answers its own question with a surprising “not much.”
Because philosophy is fundamentally an approach to knowledge and a search for knowledge, rather than a body of knowledge, Strauss told his audience, we can’t rely on philosophy to tell us what to do in any given situation. The best approach to political action, Strauss said, was the one Winston Churchill advocated to H.G. Wells during World War II. K.M.T., Churchill called his policy—Keep Muddling Through. Still, Strauss said, political philosophy is good for something: “If for no other purpose, at least in order to defend a reasonable policy against overgenerous or utopian thought, we would need a genuine political philosophy reminding us of the limits set to all human hopes and wishes.”
Tarcov was amazed. Here was the most explicit statement by Strauss on the relationship between philosophy and practical politics that he had ever seen. Aside from a letter to the editor of the National Review in 1957 criticizing the magazine for its hostility to Israel and his signature on that ad for Nixon, Tarcov knew of no other clues to Strauss’s take on contemporary political questions. Was there more to be discovered?
He consulted Strauss’s executor, friend, and editor, Joseph Cropsey, who’d made a list of unarchived Strauss material. Only one title on the list appeared to address practical politics in some way. It was “The Re-education of Axis Countries Concerning the Jews,” a talk given at the New School in 1943, before World War II was even over. When Tarcov got his hands on the five-page manuscript, he found Strauss’s handwriting hard to decipher. But what he eventually decoded was as intriguing and surprising as “What Can We Learn?”
“I was certainly struck by how very skeptical he was for the prospects of establishing democracy in Germany,” Tarcov says. In “Re-education,” Strauss doubted that a just government in Germany could be constructed after the war, at least not if the effort were left to the Allies. “A form of government which is merely imposed by a victorious enemy will not last,” Strauss predicted. “Only Germans, only Germans who remained in Germany and shared all the misery of Nazi rule and of defeat, can do it. Only they will be able to speak a language understandable to post-Hitlerian Germany.”
Tarcov says Strauss’s skepticism surprised him—not only because Germany did manage to develop a democracy but because of the subject’s curious relevance to the debate over Strauss’s responsibility for Iraq. “He was wrong!” declares Tarcov. “But he was wrong in the opposite way from what he’s been blamed for—encouraging people to think they can use military force to impose democracy.” Tarcov had always found the link between Strauss and the neocons suspect, but now he had some hard and fast evidence to present to the world that what the neocons said they took from Strauss was not actually there to take. Perhaps in their vanity they’d embraced Strauss’s exoteric discussion of the “noble lie” as the esoteric message only they were smart enough to see.
Tarcov is now in the process of editing the speech, along with “What Can We Learn?” He expects the two to be published in the fall issue of the Review of Politics.
In 2008, Cambridge University Press plans to issue the latest volume in its Cambridge Companions to Philosophy series: The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss. “The ground’s been pretty well covered with 20th century philosophy,” says Andy Beck, commissioning editor of the series. “After we publish the one on Strauss, there probably won’t be too many more.” For Steven Smith, who will be editing the volume, it’s a sign that Strauss has arrived.
Nonetheless, Strauss still has many critics who persist in connecting him to all that’s wrong with American policy. When Brian Leiter learned of the Cambridge project he said, “The fact that it’s bullshit is not necessarily an obstacle. I’m sure the press knows it will sell.” And Shadia Drury recently savaged Smith’s Reading Leo Strauss in the journal Political Theory. When I requested an interview with her she told me she had no more to say about the current Strauss “scholarship.” The quote marks and sarcasm were hers.
“There’s a lot of optical illusion here,” says Michael Zuckert, in terms of deciding what Strauss stood for and who qualifies as a Straussian. “What about Bill Galston?” he asks, referring to a Chicago classmate who studied with Strauss but later worked as a domestic policy adviser for President Clinton. “What about me?” Zuckert, like Tarcov, had also been against George W. Bush’s war from the beginning.
Many of Strauss’s students say a virtue he held dear was open-mindedness. George Anastaplo, who in 1950 refused to sign a statement swearing he was not a communist and as a result was denied admission to the Illinois bar, received a note from Strauss, his former teacher. “This is only to pay you my respects for your brave and just action,” wrote Strauss, no apologist for communism. “If the American Bar and Bench have any sense of shame they must come on their knees to apologize to you.”
Indeed, says Tarcov, it takes an open mind to study Strauss today. “A lot of scholarly work—maybe too much of it—consists of people gathering evidence to prove something they already believe. But these talks Strauss delivered were surprising to me. Even after learning the title of ‘Re-education,’ it was not what I expected at all.” Tarcov thinks for a moment. “It’s really the best kind of detective work—it’s so much more interesting—when somebody says something unexpected.”  Send a letter to the editor.
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Alice B. Tokeview at 9:11 AM on 8/24/2007
Thank you for a very thorough article on the Strauss controversy. Unfortunately, it was not thorough enough. The author ignored the fact that Strauss expressed his own political views in a letter to fellow German-Jewish emigre in 1933. Furthermore this letter has been discussed extensively on the internet: http://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/07/letter_16.html
In the letter, Strauss declares that the excesses of the Nazis ought not be allowed to discredit true right-wing principles, which he defines as "facsist, imperialist and authoritarian." That he held these views is uncontestable; whether he changed his opinion after emigrating to the US is the real question.
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Milla at 1:07 AM on 8/26/2007
Julie, this is a great article. Just to build upon Alice's comment, I think Strauss, like many educated German Jews, held conservative views. So it is not surprising: the Nazis destroyed the openness of a political spectrum by quashing all debate and creating a military state, one that promised jobs to those who swore allegiance to "race and state." In the letter that Alice cites, Strauss is commenting on the loss of a Conservative philosophy to the far-right doctrine of the Third Reich.
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Brian Leiter at 6:18 PM on 8/26/2007
I am misquoted in this article, as I have alerted Ms. Englander. I most certainly did not describe Straussianism as "a pathology of American philosophy departments," since it does not exist in any leading American philosophy department. Strauss was not, contrary to the article's heading, a "professor of philosophy," but a professor of political science, and the Straussian pathology and its attendant cult, which I discussed with Ms. Englander, operates exclusively in some American political science departments. Actual philosophers view Strauss exactly as I and Burnyeat describe.
Strauss may indeed have "many critics who persist in connecting him to all that’s wrong with American policy," but I am not one of them, as I made clear to Ms. Englander. It strikes me as rather silly to attribute the venal criminality of the Bush Administration to a not very good scholar of the history of philosophy. Unfortunately, this article, while informative and interesting, tends to contribute to the misapprehension that Leo Strauss and his acolytes know anything about philosophy or the "philosophical life." The more interesting question is the sociological one of how this particular pseudo-scholarly cult has enjoyed such staying power in U.S. political science departments.
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Julie Englander at 7:02 AM on 8/27/2007
Just a few quick responses:
Brian Leiter’s comment that Straussians generally do not find homes in American philosophy departments, and teach largely in political science departments, is quite right, and I appreciate his clarification.
Also, Alice B. Tokeview is correct to point out the ways in which the letter to Löwith complicates the task of determining Strauss’s political views. Her observation is timely, as this very question of whether Strauss changed his views over time will be the topic of a roundtable at the American Political Science Association annual meeting downtown on Saturday.
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Tom Van Dyke at 4:18 PM on 8/27/2007
Re the 1933 letter to Karl Loewith, it should be recalled that "fascist" was not the dirty word it is in the 21st century. And, in the same way Strauss felt that the postwar de-Nazification of the hearts and minds of the German people would have to won by speaking their own language, so too (after the abject failure of the Weimar democracy), derailing Nazism in 1933 would have used the language of authoritarianism (perhaps resembling, say, a justly governed Roman Empire).
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Alice at 4:42 PM on 8/27/2007
Respectfully, that's a crock, Mr. Van Dyke. By 1933 the word fascist was well-associated with the brutal, anti-parliamentary police state of Mussolini's Italy, rightwing paramilitary groups in Germany besides the Nazis and the emerging authoritarian state in Salazar's Portugal. These were not "justly governed" regimes. But they were precisely what Strauss associated positively with "the principles of the Right."
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Tom Van Dyke at 5:36 PM on 8/27/2007
Strauss was crestfallen at the Weimar democracy's lack of will to protect the Jews. By comparison, the Roman Empire was just.
And you've to poke around a bit about fascism as it understood itself, not your modern understanding of it before you play the crock card. If "Fascist" were the dirty word it is today, they wouldn't have named themselves Fascists, and just gone with Evil Butchering Thug Party.
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Neil in Chicago at 4:41 AM on 8/28/2007
It's not about Strauss' own views, but the views taken away by his students. (Marx was not a Marxist, etc.) And a significant number of the Bushies seem to consider themselves "Straussian". So the question isn't what Strauss thought, but what this malignant clique has decided for themselves that he meant.
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Dan in NY at 8:53 AM on 8/28/2007
Alice is right, fascism was a dirty word back then. Read Trotsky's Fascism: What it is and How to Fight It published in 1931.
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Joseph in Chicago at 3:38 PM on 8/28/2007
Since Stauss used words very carefully, it might help to keep in mind that fascism derives from the Latin fasces, a bundle of rods tied around an axe, which was the Roman symbol for the magistrates' authority. The fasces symbolize strength in unity: it's easy to breadk one rod, but a lot harder to break them all.
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HunterSThompson at 4:14 PM on 8/28/2007
I think the posters here are a little too much in-love with the word Nazi, the joyous unquestioned damnation of the word and calling all Germans Nazis. I BELIEVE - just my own personal belief, not some doctrine that everyone must adhere to or be cast out of my social circle and denied the right to work and vote - that Strauss' public political and philosophical expressions stem from an upbringing in the particular societal mores, etc, that existed in Germany at the time. There is much more to early Zwanzigstes Jahrhundert Deutschland than Hitler and the Nazis. e.i. Proletariat Website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Empire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_20_Plot
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Terry at 4:09 AM on 8/29/2007
"Alice is right, fascism was a dirty word back then. Read Trotsky's Fascism: What it is and How to Fight It published in 1931."
Good God. You think that an exiled revolutionary communist's take on fascism should be considered the norm in 1931. Pitiable.
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NG at 6:27 AM on 8/29/2007
Who's the fact-checker here? Reagan was shot on 30 March 1981, not 31 March.
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David Tkach at 7:10 AM on 8/29/2007
I commend the author for an excellent, even-handed article. I wish to comment on Mr. Leiter's response above. I think he is wrong to claim that philosophers in general don't take Strauss seriously. Recently, there have been many books on Strauss and contemporary Continental philosophy, certainly not the least of which being Catherine Zuckert's excellent 'Postmodern Platos' on Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Gadamer, and Strauss. There has also recently been one on Strauss and Arendt, and another on Strauss and Levinas. As a philosophy student who takes Strauss seriously but more as a thinker in the Continental tradition, I think the lack of study of Strauss speaks more to the focus and temperament of North American philosophy departments than it does to Strauss's quality as a thinker.
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Doyle R. Quiggle Jr. at 7:29 AM on 8/29/2007
Just how many students of Strauss, how many Straussians, how many Neo-Cons, how many critics of Strauss, have actually read Strauss’s German writings in their original German? It is a minor point, perhaps, but one well worth considering when we try to piece together Strauss’s thinking in the thirties. At the end of the 19nineties, Clemens Kauffmann kicked off a new investigation of Strauss’s thought by, in, and for Germany with his LEO STRAUSS ZUR EINFÜHRUNG. Heinrich Meier’s recent work on Strauss is also very worth reading. Post-Iraq War, however, it is very doubtful, for better or worse, whether Strauss will receive a homecoming revival among German philosophers and political scientists.
An important historical point: Konrad Adenauer was the chancellor who set post-war Germany back on her feet. He certainly spoke the language of pre & post-Nazi Germans. At the same time, however, he was responsible for institutionalising a new constitution, one that had been written exclusively by (and was being enforced, at least implicitly, by the military presence of) the Allied powers in Europe. In this sense, Strauss was both right and wrong about how the de-Nazification of Germany would or would not succeed, a long process, de-Nazification, which is apparently still not quite finished, as suggested by the recent dramatic and rather frightening resurgence of the NPD party.
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Peter Lunacek at 9:14 AM on 8/29/2007
Just a note from Eastern Europe regarding the perception of fascism in Europe in 1930's: I am not a scholar, I just took some lessons of political history on my law school and have some knowledge of this regions history (some of it told by eyewitnesses - my grandparents were born in 1914, 1915, 1916 and 1917 - and lived here through more wars and changes of regimes, than we can possibly concieve). With this background I can assure you, that fascism, authoritarism and a "rule of the iron fist" were viewed as a legitimate alternative to the perceivably corrupt democracy, across the whole social spectrum (the other popular alternative was a notion of rule of proletariat - unfortunately for millions of people - both this experiments had been tested here, but that is another sad story)
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AJR at 9:20 AM on 8/29/2007
I also question Leiter's claim that philosophers don't take Strauss seriously. Stanley Rosen and Seth Benardete were two of Strauss' best students. Both of them went on to fairly distinguished academic careers with numerous scholarly publications and doctoral students of their own. And those two are not alone.
Strauss focused his attention on the dramatic aspects of the Platonic dialogues. Granted, he was not a lone voice, but he and his students deserve a share of the credit for showing the validity of this approach to Plato. Whether this "interpretation of Plato is wrong from beginning to end" is beyond my ability to determine, but it has had an affect on various scholar's assessment of Plato.
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wj at 9:49 AM on 8/29/2007
AJK,
Stanley Rosen and Seth Benardete were, as you note, Strauss' students. And they both had distinguished academic careers. But their slight influence notwithstanding, Leiter is correct to say that the vast majority of philosophy departments in the U.S. do not take Strauss seriously as a reader of Plato, or, for that matter, as a historian of philosophy.
One swallow does not make a spring.
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Russell Seitz at 12:09 PM on 8/29/2007
Known more for his absorption in the abstractions of ancient philosophy than for any personal political ambitions, Strauss could hardly be held responsible for U.S. foreign policy, according to his defenders."
And Plato had nothing to do with Athens invading Syracuse?
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Greg Blankenship at 1:20 PM on 8/29/2007
I think Strauss would have probably agreed with some of Brian Leiter's comments. As I understand him as saying that he did not consider himself a philosopher.
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Kevin J. Bauer at 1:28 PM on 8/29/2007
Any serious discussion of Strauss must focus on the possibility of philosophy with special attention to his understanding of Plato's doctine of Ideas. If the Ideas exist, and I use the term advisedly, then philosophy as a theoretical account of the whole is possible. If the Ideas don't exist, then philosophy is a rhetoric deployed by the "wise" to make life worth living-and the prime example of the noble lie. Another way of looking at it is to ask whether Socrates was telling the truth in the Phaedo or just trying to edify his friends. Also, if philosophy is possible, is there more to the exercise of reason than the liberal, enlightenment model favored by folks such as Shadia Drury or Richard Wolin? Finally, Julie should have spoken to Stanley Rosen or at least referred to his memoir of Strauss-the beginnings of a more extended treatment-that was published in the summer issue of Daedalus
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Mark Bonacquisti at 2:32 PM on 8/29/2007
So, we have to argue about exactly how fascist "fascism" was generally understood to be in 1933? And if Strauss then manages to fall on the "merely" authoritarian side of the line, that is supposed to make it all better?
The case for shunning self-proclaimed "Straussians" is almost self-proving under such circumstances.
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HunterSThompson at 4:21 PM on 8/29/2007
I haven't finished reading Jung....
Sorry, I thought that was quite fitting for this group, too.
*Hunter takes a Straussian bow
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Fat Man at 4:46 PM on 8/29/2007
Russell Seitz: Plato (428/427 – 348/347 BCE) was about 13 years old when the Athenians attacked Syracuse (415-413 BCE). He most likely bore no responsibility for that adventure.
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Joo Heung Lee at 6:45 PM on 8/29/2007
I wholeheartedly agree with AJR: athough they constitute a minority, there are important philosophers who take Strauss seriously. As a former student of Stanley Rosen, I have first-hand knowledge of this. I believe it is unfair of WJ to say of Strauss's "disciples" that they have had merely a "slight influence." Students of Rosen, Berardete, Cropsey, and a host of others would beg to differ. Furthermore, the fact that Cambridge University Press is devoting a volume to Strauss's PHILOSOPHY attests to his enduring contribution to the love of wisdom. On a personal note, my own political views tend towards the far left, so I have no allegiance to the fascist undertones often--and to some extent justifiably--attributed to Strauss. That notwithstanding, I can still appreciate Strauss as a philosopher--even if he was wrong. This is something Professor Leiter and many others seem unwilling to do.
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JustMe at 6:48 PM on 8/29/2007
How philosophical, extraordinary hairsplitting, and much ado about nothing.
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Non Straussian Hyde Parker at 11:40 PM on 8/29/2007
D Tkatch makes a good point about the bias against Continental philosophy affecting Strauss reception in the US. Also affecting his US reception is another bias: the politically "progressive" bias of most philosophy professors. Leiter shares both of these biases. And he seems to be unaware that Strauss' work on Maimonides and especially on Hobbes is taken quite seriously by scholars, even though it is bound to be used less since it is out-of-date by scholarship standards now. Oakschott certainly respected Strauss's work. Is he also a crackpot?
More generally, it is an obvious fallacy to reason that Strauss must be worthless on the grounds that that professional philosophers don't engage his thought or find his scholarship up to par.
Strauss's ideas are troubling, but the suggestion that he is not a serious thinker shows a shallow conception about what makes a thinker important. to base the assessment of the importance of Strauss on the accuracy of his reading of Plato is quite silly. (Does Leiter want to say Nietzsche is a classicist that can be dismissed since no one in classics departments takes him as a reliable guide to the classics?) Strauss thought about the most fundamental questions one can ask, and he thought about them in a serious and original way. He questioned, in a powerful way, what others took for granted as obvious. That is surely at least partly responsible for his poor reception. But doesn't that also make him something more than a scholar? I won't say it makes him a philosopher since he himself denied that he was one.
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J Cohen at 9:53 AM on 8/30/2007
Sigh.
If only people listened to Brian Leitner. He's right. Strauss is not, was not, a philosopher. He has a cult following among Political "Theorists" in Political Science Department. (Where the more obscurely you write, the better). He has no influence whatsoever in serious Philosophy Departments.
Presses and "scholars" should stop wasting time and resources on Strauss. He was a mediocre scholar at best - a charlatan at worst. Period.
Let it go.
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D Shatner at 11:32 AM on 8/30/2007
The disciplinary point seems to me to be extraordinarily thin. Strauss is not taken seriously, on the whole, in American philosophy departments. This is basically a fact, but one that tells us nothing.
Disciplines have their various cannons, methodologies, political prejudices, sacred cows, and sensitivities. Plato is not taken serious as a dramatist in literature departments. Does this diminish his literary power? And does his being claimed as a 'Philosopher' mean that only people sanctioned by philosophy departments are qualified to comment on him? What about Sophocles and Shakespeare... do they have no philosophical worth because they are relegated solely to classics and literature departments?
Seems to me it's not just 'justified' but necessary for canonical texts to be tackled from within different disciplines. If a historian or a psychologist produces a commentary on Wordsworth that is dismissed by literary scholars as not up to the taste or standards of literature departments, this is not particularly interesting.
Because Strauss commented on a wide range of texts normally colonized by philosophy, history, and classics departments from within his self-professed discipline of political science, this ticks people off but does nothing to assail his credibility. This is like saying Freud is not allowed to write on literature because he's a psychologist. Similarly, Strauss' standing as a 'philosopher' or 'political theorist' in his own right has very little to do with what department (political science) is most interested in him today. To argue this would be to deny Shakespeare's standing as a thinker.
Incidentally I'd be interested to hear what non-Straussians on the right have to say about Strauss. Seems like any criticism of Strauss(ians) coming from the left is at least tainted by--if not wholly founded in--partisanship.
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Dave2 at 1:20 PM on 8/30/2007
"Seems like any criticism of Strauss(ians) coming from the left is at least tainted by--if not wholly founded in--partisanship"
This appears to be a screamingly blatant ad hominem fallacy.
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St. John's College Student at 2:08 PM on 8/30/2007
It's interesting to me that no one has taken up the issue of many Straussians' obsession with the "esoteric". It's possible that the most irritating place this shows itself is at my college (where Strauss taught and studied for several years in the 70s), but I find that hard to believe. It's obvious, of course, that someone like Plato takes careful and detailed reading to understand, but some of the intellectual descendants of Strauss currently teaching at my school take the idea of the esoteric into readings of everyone. For example, many of them have recently been claiming that Aristotle's assertion that "metaphysics should not be studied until one is 42" to mean that his writing of The Metaphysics in his 30s is actually an exercise in the futility of metaphysics which do not include the theory of Forms. Contrived, at best.
The damage that this habit of cramming unrealistically systematic and deliberate deception into one's reading of all philosophy is immeasurable, whether Strauss was a fascist, a democrat, a philosopher, a scholar, or what-have-you.
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HerrVonHarmonia at 2:16 PM on 8/30/2007
An interesting take on Strauss that situates him within the "Radical Right" of Oakeshott, Schmitt, and Hayek is Perry Anderson's survey in the London Review of Books, reprinted in his recent book, Spectrum. I don't think that one can deny that during much of the thirties, Strauss was enamored with rightist, organic and communitarian thought. An interesting way, perhaps, of examining this issue would be to reread his notes on Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political. Whether his views changed later is a different and complex question. To fully examine and understand these questions would entail an historical reading, contextualizing Strauss within the post-World War I right in Western Europe (including figures such as Heidegger, Schmitt, Stefan George, Spengler, and Ernst Junger). Domenico Losurdo has provided a beginning in his superb book, Heidegger and the Ideology of War: Community, Death, and the West.
Strauss remains an interesting figure for me as one of a series of thinkers who pursue the question of political theology and its implications in politics for such fundamental concepts as sovereignty. He is most productively read in a tradition that extends back to Spinoza, Hobbes, Rousseau, Schmitt, and more recently Claude Lefort. Mark Lilla's recent essay in the New York Times Magazine explores these issues as well. Heinrich Maier has recently written a book on this topic (n.b. I have not read more than the introductory chapter).As a person of the left, I find Strauss a challenge in much the same way that many on the left (Mouffe, Balakrishnan, Agamben, Negri) have found Schmitt to be a challenge to liberal democratic political thought.
Finally, another interesting avenue of approaching this question might be to examine the dispute between Strauss (and his students) and Wolin, and ironically, Harvey Mansfield Sn., over scientific positivism in political science during the 1960's in the American Political Science Review.
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HerrVonHarmonia at 2:23 PM on 8/30/2007
An interesting take on Strauss that situates him within the "Radical Right" of Oakeshott, Schmitt, and Hayek is Perry Anderson's survey in the London Review of Books, reprinted in his recent book, Spectrum. (Read, too, Anderson's essays on Strauss' student, Francis Fukuyama and his "end of history" thesis and more recently in the Nation, on American at the Crossroads). I don't think that one can deny that during much of the thirties, Strauss was enamored with rightist, organic and communitarian thought. An interesting way, perhaps, of examining this issue would be to reread his notes on Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political. Whether his views changed later is a different and complex question. To fully examine and understand these questions would entail an historical reading, contextualizing Strauss within the post-World War I right in Western Europe (including figures such as Heidegger, Schmitt, Stefan George, Spengler, and Ernst Junger). Domenico Losurdo has provided a beginning in his superb book, Heidegger and the Ideology of War: Community, Death, and the West.
Strauss remains an interesting figure for me as one of a series of thinkers who pursue the question of political theology and its implications in politics for such fundamental concepts as sovereignty. He is most productively read in a tradition that extends back to Spinoza, Hobbes, Rousseau, Schmitt, and more recently Claude Lefort. Mark Lilla's recent essay in the New York Times Magazine explores these issues as well. Heinrich Maier has recently written a book on this topic (n.b. I have not read more than the introductory chapter).As a person of the left, I find Strauss a challenge in much the same way that many on the left (Mouffe, Balakrishnan, Agamben, Negri) have found Schmitt to be a challenge to liberal democratic political thought.
Finally, another interesting avenue of approaching this question might be to examine the dispute between Strauss (and his students) and Wolin, and ironically, Harvey Mansfield Sn., over scientific positivism in political science during the 1960's in the American Political Science Review.
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WC at 5:09 PM on 8/30/2007
Leiter and Cohen have to get over their myopia that the only important writers of philosophy are people who analytic philosophers take seriously (at the moment). There are a lot of smart, well-educated people who find thinkers like Heidegger, Derrida, and Strauss very interesting, insightful, inspiring, etc., and this should warrant being open to them (not to say that smart, well-educated people are always right about these things). An interest in Strauss by someone interested in the history of political thought and political philosophy is no more indefensible (or laughable) than Leiter's estimation that Chomsky is an insightful political thinker (and I'm not a conservative and can't wait for the Bush reign to end).
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Alan in Glencoe at 5:58 PM on 8/30/2007
After reading the lengthy but largely idea-free article, and the torrent of commentary, I wonder which works the author and commentators have actually read by Strauss. The central theme in "Persecution and the Art of Writing" is that a number of religious and political thinkers living under tyrannies felt unable to express their authentic views regarding liberty, for fear of being silenced themselves. Strauss' works on Hobbes, his "Spinoza's Critique of Religion" and work on Maimonides (especially his Preface to the Shlomo Pines translation of "Guide for the Perplexed") show Strauss to be anything but authoritarian. As for whether he was (or considered himself to be) a "philosopher" or political theorist or historian of ideas (my own assessment), the discussion is itself wholly irrelevant. Strauss saw himself simply in the business of calling attention to aspects of ancient, medieval and modern political and religious ideas that he felt were overlooked by other commentators. By the way, Ms. Englander's article would have been far more useful, and interesting, if she had actually cited some of Strauss' own thoughts, directly from the sources, than write a "he said, she said" piece of secondary commentary, far removed from the sources themselves.
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Peter at 6:49 PM on 8/30/2007
As I see it, Leiter, besides correcting misrepresentations of his view, made a handful of factual claims, like (1) Straussianism does not exist in any leading American philosophy department, (2) Strauss was not a "professor of philosophy," but of political science, and (3) that philosophers generally share something like his and Burneat's view of Strauss. He also made some fairly strident value judgments about Straussians, but I wnat to put those to the side.
In reading the responses, I notice that no one provides any evidence that contradicts any of the factual claims. The closest anyone gets is the reference to Bernadete and Rosen. But Berndate was a classics professor, and Rosen seems to have taught at Pennsylvania State and Boston University, neither of which I gather is a "leading" American department.
So it looks like the factual claims are true after all. Does that mean Strauss is a bad philosopher and a bad historian of philosophy? Maybe. If someone can give examples of philosophers in "leading American departments" or even of European philosophers who have a favorable opinion of Strauss, that would help. "Smart, educated" people believe all kinds of things, as history shows. It would be particularly good to know if there are any 'smart, educated' people who are educated in philosophy who want to vouch for Strauss's value as an historian of philosophical ideas. Maybe there are. But the failure to respond to Leiter's factual claims with any facts makes this reader suspicious.
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Johannes Climacus at 6:02 AM on 8/31/2007
A few points from someone who knows nothing about "philosophy or the philosophical life" as opposed to the learned Mr. Leiter.
1) Philosophy has little to do with its current representation in American Philosophy departments
2) Within said departments there is hardly any type of consensus or shared vocabulary that would allow one to distinguish who is doing philosophy proper.
3) Mr. Leiter is a mascot and a careerist hack who has not yet grasped that philosophy is not mediated by the academy.
4) Scratch a professional philosopher and you will find an invalid- who defames life because it makes him feel better (My apologies to Nietzsche)
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Alice at 7:24 AM on 8/31/2007
Alan: One perhaps ought not read Strauss's pre-emigration work on Spinoza, Hobbes, Maimonides (and Schmitt, for that matter) through the spin that he and his followers put on it after he came to the states. (Your posting mixes pre- and post-emigration writings together.) An independent reading of the interwar works shows Strauss to be very much an authoritarian: He's enthusiastically searching for a non-rational and anti-enlightenment form of authority. Strauss was not pursuing a sober solution to Weimar Germany's political problems, his work itself was part of the problem; it was part of a widescale rightwing intellectual undermining of the legitimacy of that liberal democracy.
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whet at 12:20 PM on 8/31/2007
Re NG: Thanks for the catch; we've corrected the date of the assassination attempt.
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student at 12:37 PM on 8/31/2007
The thinker's merits cannot be adjudicated by appealing to a consensus within the professional guild of philosophers. And besides, no such consensus exists in reality, whatever the results of the latest Gourmet Report might suggest. For a refined meditation on Strauss by a fine contemporary philosopher, see Part Three of Robert Pippin's book Idealism as Modernism. Pippin may not win high esteem in the cult of academic philosophy, but he is as attuned as anyone to the exigencies of "the philosophical life." He is also widely recognized as a careful historian of philosophy, was a student of Stanley Rosen, and teaches here in the Dept. of Philosophy (and Committee on Social Thought) at the University of Chicago, Strauss' own latter-day purlieu.
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Jon at 3:34 PM on 8/31/2007
Why is it that Strauss' defenders tend to be his own students, or their students in turn? Kind of an in-bred selection there, no?
I'd find such defenses more credible if they were more independent and didn't seem so self-interested.
I'm sure that, once they've got their PhD, they'd rather believe they're standing on the shoulders of a giant, rather than a midget. An Einstein, not an Archimedes Plutonium.
As such, I'm not sure I'd trust Strauss' intellectual progeny for a cold-eyed evaluation of his work and legacy.
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Athenian Stranger at 4:11 PM on 8/31/2007
One should read Strauss on Plato's Laws and then try to explain his approval of the Nocturnal Council and the general drift. He took Plato seriously -we should extend the courtesy to him.
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Jon at 7:09 PM on 8/31/2007
"He took Plato seriously -we should extend the courtesy to him."
Sure, but first let's wait a couple thousand years and see if what he wrote has survived, or if it was tossed on scrap heap as twaddle.
Okay, I'll be generous, we'll wait just a couple of hundred years.
Strauss didn't discover Plato, wasn't the first to see the value in what Plato said, and wasn't the first person who took Plato seriously. Strauss got to Plato after a couple of thousand years of other people thinking Plato was worth taking seriously.
Right now, the people who think Strauss is worth taking seriously tend to be the cult of ex-Trots who had him as a professor, and their students in turn.
Maybe Strauss will last 2,000 years like Plato. Or maybe his work will be like Freudian psychoanalysis - a joke within 100 years.
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student at 3:59 AM on 9/1/2007
I assume that the last commentator's remark about Freud is itself a joke; in any case it clearly merits being taken as one. So does the idea of comparing Strauss to Plato, though I don't think this was the penultimate commentator's intention. Pippin, whom I mentioned above, was not a student of Strauss, at least not in the sense of having studied at Strauss' home institution. (And Rosen, who was Pippin's teacher, was and is a very serious philosopher, neither a Straussian disciple nor a proselytizer.) Pippin takes Strauss' work seriously, but he is certainly not Strauss' or anyone else's follower, nor is he a "defender" (whatever that would mean). I suspect that anyone who has something serious to say in response to Strauss, friendly or unfriendly, will spend more time reading his books and less time fussing over third-hand refractions picked up from popular online articles.
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Abe at 3:30 PM on 9/1/2007
It is curious not only that we are told that we should dismiss Strauss because ‘serious’ philosophers do not read or credit him, or because he is a dangerous thinker whose thought is pernicious to liberal democracy, but that both arguments are so often made at once by the same people. But of course, similar accusations have been directed simultaneously against more intellectuals than one could think to name. The charge that Strauss is a bad scholar is difficult to sustain at least with respect to the period of modern political philosophy with which I am most familiar. Strauss’s writings on Machiavelli, Hobbes and Rousseau may have their controversial elements, but it would be perverse to claim, given the bibliographical literature, that they have not been provocative and influential. In the case of Rousseau, Strauss’s reading has shaped significantly the contemporary reception of this author in the U.S. With respect to the claim that Strauss is not a ‘philosopher’, it seems to me that a more productive discussion would engage the terms in which Strauss presents his own project in his major texts. Whatever philosophy may prove to be, Strauss’s focus in texts such as Natural Right and History and his book on Xenophon could be characterized as as much moral as political philosophy narrowly construed. Moreover, it is precisely because Strauss treats the questions of right and justice ‘philosophically’ - i.e., as questions – that his writings are so distinct from those of most academic political scientists, who address procedural questions from within the consensus around liberal constitutional democracy. Now, regarding the merit of Strauss’s treatment of moral topics, it seems fair to me to claim, based on the reading of his works rather than newspaper gossip, that Strauss (returning to Plato, etc.) does open up the question as to the extent to which liberal democracy is capable of realizing moral ideals. And it also seems fair to accuse Strauss of abstraction and obscurantism in his discussion of these questions, although here his method of working through issues via the reading of canonical texts is very familiar for readers of European philosophers. But to claim that Strauss is strictly speaking an ‘enemy of democracy’ fails both to take the measure of the skeptical, reflexive and exploratory character of his thought and writing, and furthermore, of his attempt to respond to the challenge of ‘modern’ political thought which begins for Strauss with Machiavelli and culminates in diverse ways in Nietzsche, Schmitt, Heidegger etc. For me, the interest of Strauss and the reason to bother with him lies in his engagement with this tradition, and his attempt to provide a critique of it that is distinct from the mainstream drawing on Locke, Montesquieu and Kant.
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Alice at 9:31 AM on 9/2/2007
Abe, please take note: No one on this thread has "dismissed" Strauss or suggested not reading him because he was an intellectual enemy of liberal democracy in the interwar period. I, for one, merely requested more honesty about this fact from Englander and from Strauss’s devotees. Furthermore, I take no position on his post-emigration views of liberal democracy, ambiguous though they are. In sum, no one on this post who criticized Strauss's Weimar endorsements of fascism, both implicit and explicit, suggested his thought was dismissible on such grounds. Your conflation of these criticisms with those of the "professional philosophers" is illegitimate.
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MP at 9:58 AM on 9/2/2007
I love seeing have-bit academics criticizing someone who actually gets some press. This is the very reason I would never go into the academy--the self-righteous know-it-allness of people like Leiter et al.
They are a blight on the academy. He doesn't defend his opinion on Strauss with any facts except disparaging comments. Where is the actual academic debate?
The critics of Strauss in this article come off as PC, shrill, and a tad bit conspiratorial.
The fact that we are even having this debate means that Leo Strauss has had more impact than any of the scholars mentioned in this article. The academics and professors quoted may soothe themselves with their excellent "scholarly" work, but the fact is, Leo Strauss has had more impact than they ever will. Watching academics so clearly drool in jealousy is an unwelcome sight.
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Gabriel Conroy at 1:03 PM on 9/2/2007
I never got much out of Strauss' writings, though not for lack of trying. But I do remember with gratitude what his students at Chicago did for me: I was freed from the oppressive historicist night that had covered almost all of academia. For the first time, I began reading books with the intention of learning something from them. It was as if scales had been lifted from my eyes. I saw the old books as new, as living, as unmistakably relevant.
Do actually read the essay "Persecution and the Art of Writing" some time. Merely as a work of scholarship, it is one of the most well documented, carefully reasoned essays I have ever encountered.
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Peter at 2:00 PM on 9/2/2007
I suppose it was predictable that the request for factual evidence would be met with ad hominem sniping and childish insults. I do appreciate the reference to Professor Pippin's work which I will look up.
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JS at 5:48 PM on 9/2/2007
Does Mr. Leiter have anything more to offer than ad hominem spew? Just reading Strauss’ correspondence with the brilliant Karl Loewith is enough to make clear that we are dealing with a first rate thinker. Yes he flirted with radical conservative ideas, as did much of the German mandarin class of his day. To say that Strauss knew nothing of philosophy or the philosophical life is ludicrous. My sympathy goes out to any of Leiter’s students.
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number13 at 6:31 PM on 9/2/2007
Bottom line: Strauss taught students not to trust existing scholarship, and therefore to read for themselves. If you are lazy, you will never understand anything. A gourmet without a palate is only a gourmet in name.
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Gabriel Conroy at 8:41 PM on 9/2/2007
Peter, I don't think anyone disputes the facts you list. They just aren't very telling.
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Friend at 10:05 PM on 9/2/2007
Brian Leiter seems to have a lot of unhealthy resentment penned up inside. Poor guy :(
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A political "theorist" at 1:36 PM on 9/3/2007
I'm not a Straussian, although my quibbles with Strauss and his followers differ from those of others who have weighed in, here. That aside, the experience of a Strauss student is instructive on the major precocupations of this thread: Was Strauss a philosopher? and Are Strauss's students prominent in prominent American university departments of philosophy?
Thomas Pangle, a Strauss student, was initially denied, then offered tenure, in a controversy at Yale University in the late 1970s. The controversy surrounding Pangle served to highlight just how wide and deep is the animus toward Strauss and his students. Pangle was offered tenure at the University of Toronto -- not a U.S. school, but enjoying some prominence among North American universities -- where he pursued research in political philosophy, er, political theory. Pangle moved to UT Austin in 2004 over his concerns about the U of Toronto's mandatory retirement policy, but not before the U of T and Harvard made counter-offers to UT Austin's.
On the question of whether or not Strauss was a fascist or authoritarian before WWII, let me remind about the internecine warfare between Marxists -- Leninists, Stalinists, and Trotskyites -- and . . . fascists of the Spanish, Italian, and German Nazi varieties. Liberal democracy was seriously discredited by recent historical and contemporary events. Liberal democracy was the common enemy of these. The dispute was only settled by, first, WWII and by the Cold War. The dispute with liberal democracy continues, though with new disputants. And, the internecine warfare continues -- among the varieties of advocates of liberal democracy: neocons, social democrats, classical republicans, et al.
On the Plato question, Strauss and his students are helpful in asking political "theorists" to consider whether or not western constitutionalism is the product of Greek thought or something else. Is "liberal democracy" Plato's republic? Discuss . . .
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teak heller at 11:41 PM on 9/3/2007
Brian Leiter's singular lack of curiousity, let alone manners, coupled with his angry, intemperate off-the-cuff dismissals led me to google him. I found this (below), leading me to conclude that apparently this is just the way he generally treats people.
http://academicthug.powerblogs.com/
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Observer at 9:50 AM on 9/4/2007
Uh, the author of that blog is nuts:
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/10/keith_burgessja_1.html
Talk about ad hominem attacks!!!
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Francesco Caruso at 11:00 AM on 9/9/2007
Thanks for the very refreshing debate on this topic. But please allow me a footnote on the hypothesis that some prominent politicians and public administrators have been influenced by Strauss' theses: do we really believe that these people ever 'read' something? or, to put it in other words, how could we assume that people with such a noncurance even for grammar in the way they speak spent some time in reading the dense, lenghty, somewhat repetitive Straussian prose (I am thinking for example to the essays on Machiavelli)? Thanks for the space offered for comments.
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AC at 9:54 PM on 10/15/2007
I feel I must comment on Prof. Brian Leiter's arrogant (and ignorant) remarks. It is unfortunate that Leiter feels he must take an anglophiliac, pretentious position just because he is deluding himself that Leo Strauss and his followers knew nothing about philosophy. It is shameful and embarassing to read such closed-minded snobbery from a modern professor of philosophy.
Yes Mr. Leiter, Myles Burnyeat had issues with Prof. Strauss. These issues are, unfortunately, not very air-tight, and by invoking his name every time you discuss Strauss you just seem like a follower and a fool.
It is also unfortunate that the "academic thug" website is run by equally arrogant neoconservatives.
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Philosopher at 8:47 AM on 10/18/2007
Brian Leiter's little secret: he is a Nietzsche "scholar" who cannot even read German. It's shocking that such an ignorant person can become a professor of philosophy, and then set himself up as an authority on all philosophy.
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Elias at 6:29 AM on 11/2/2007
Neil from Chicago is absolutely correct. It is the group of pseudointellectual elitists who misunderstood and misinterpreted Leo Strauss' thoughts in order to serve their sinister aims. Hence, today we naively attach the misnomer "Straussian" to the Bushy neocons.
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Philosophy student at 5:42 PM on 12/17/2007
It's shocking how vicious and dishonest the Straussians become just because Leiter expresses contempt for their hero. He is not alone among philosophers in feeling that way.
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Just Somebody at 5:54 PM on 12/19/2007
Dr. Leiter's claim that nobody in any leading Philosophy department takes Strauss seriously is pretty much accurate. His value judgment, as was mentioned before, was a value judgment.
It's astounding how many people cry out "ad hominem" and start accusing people of being fallacious when nobody is arguing. Dr. Leiter was not using his comment to proclaim that he disagreed with Strauss, he was saying that he didn't think he was any good.
Certainly there's little consensus within the academy as to what stance on this or that philosophical issue is correct, but that's a totally separate issue. That philosophers will agree that some professor of another discipline ain't a philosopher and ain't worth valuable time one could spend reading/arguing with someone who knows about philosophy, isn't so surprising.
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Jimbob at 6:09 PM on 1/13/2008
Leiter could learn one thing from Strauss: learn from history, specifically the history of academic feuds and judgments, and of how very often academics have been so utterly self-absorbed with their own particular cliques that they fail to notice the really serious thinkers. It is quite true that leading Anglo-American philosophy departments do not take Strauss seriously; it is also quite true that no leading Anglo-American philosophy department took Heidegger or Derrida seriously for decades, and none of them takes Lieter seriously (he is a non-entity, an conformist who seems to pooh-poohs Strauss because Burnyeat declared that what Strauss said was different from what was being said in Oxbridge common rooms, which seems only to imply that Straussian opinion is not speakable by anyone who wants an Oxbridge job). On the other hand, leading departments did take very, very seriously (say) Ayer or Nozick, both of whom are as all-but-forgotten as the generations of now-out-of-print Harvard and Oxbridge philosophers that were oh so important when the still-in-print Strauss was active in their midst. So, really, lets be honest: with the exception of Anglo-American philosophy departments, no one takes Anglo-American philosphy departments all that seriously, and their judments have been unreliable and simply don't matter for anyone but careerists and conformists. There is no scholarly or philosophical argument supporting the opinion that Strauss ought not be considered a real scholar or philosopher. And the likes of Burnyeat and Lieter are very, very unlikely to provide such an argument: they don't have to because in their conformist academy it isn't necessary for reputation or advancement. Let them scorn their way to retirement and thier rightful place beside Ayer or Nozick in the bargin sections of the second hand books shops.
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Alice at 11:48 AM on 2/11/2008
Nicholas Xenos's book on Strauss and the Neocons just came out with Routledge. Since he started the web debate over the '33 letter where Strauss professes "fascist, authoritarian and imperial" principles, he should have been interviewed by Ms. Englander for this article.
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Steve McDevitt at 11:46 AM on 2/16/2008
With regard to Mr. Leitner's observation that Leo Strauss is not studied much in philosophy departments nor taken seriously, I offer a quote from Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil: "It took a century for Greece to find out who this garden god Epicurus had been. - Did it find out?" The book is still being written. Perhaps this controversy over his legacy is the best thing to ever happen to him and his writings. There certainly is a good deal of ink being spilled about him. Maybe Mr. Leitner should get in on the action and make some money off of it instead of appearing as a curmudgeon.
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Alice at 10:01 AM on 4/17/2008
Further reflections on Strauss's profession of "fascsist, authoritarian and imperial" principles in 1933 at:
turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2008/02/habakkuk-on-str.html
When will Ms. Englander follow up her article with a feature on the 1933 Strauss-Loewith letter?
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HunterSThompson at 6:39 PM on 4/17/2008
Nattering naybobs of negativity! How is each and every individual of a society going to know and understand EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING? We are a republic for good reason! There is no perfect government - we have no choice but to trust those in power - imagine explaining every aspect of every precise and well-learned decision you make in your highly skilled and sought after cubicle of the Division of Labor - now imagine explaining it to people that know nothing about your field... and then to people that will never understand anything about your field. Let us put Strauss into his proper context: What do you the reader think of the Federal Reserve Bank Board of Governers today? Three weeks ago? Six months ago? And thanks to Walrus for the Lord Keynes notion, koo-koo-kachoo... (channeling Strauss while whistling theBeatles and benzadrine)
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Alice at 7:41 AM on 4/18/2008
This is a pretty lame defense, Dr. Thompson. Strauss and Straussians spent the entire postwar era accusing intellectuals to the left of center of fostering nihilism, relativism and authoritarianism. This letter from 1933, accompanied with the behavior of Straussians in Republican administrations, turns this accusatory finger back at them. They should answer the charges without recourse to excuses plainly reminiscent of those they ridiculed Stalin- or Mao-apologists for employing.
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HunterSThompson at 1:26 PM on 4/18/2008
Alice: I think you need to re-read the post, perhaps with an open mind. From your posts, you seem to read a lot and know nothing - please prove me wrong. Are you attacking Strauss the man, Strauss' works, perceived Straussism, the possible bastardization of Strauss' works, the defense and clarification of Strauss, or the 'republican apology'? This IS a long article on a difficult and diverse subject - I have enjoyed every post, thank you - what conclusions? Strauss should be defended. Strauss' works are being used in a manner of which he may not have intended. Some humans will use anything for leverage in getting what they think they want. There exists an ongoing controversy in the subjects and explanations of Strauss' works.
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HunterSThompson at 1:38 PM on 4/18/2008
Alice: please re-read the post, perhaps with an open mind. From your posts, you seem to read a lot and know little - prove me wrong. Are you attacking Strauss the man, Strauss' works, perceived Straussism, the possible bastardization of Strauss' works, the defense and clarification of Strauss, or the 'republican apology'? This IS a long article on a difficult and diverse subject - I have enjoyed every post, thank you - what conclusions? Strauss should be defended. Strauss' works are being used in a manner of which he may not have intended. Some humans will use anything for leverage in getting what they think they want. There exists an ongoing controversy in the subjects and explanations of Strauss' works.
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Alice at 4:27 PM on 4/18/2008
My point, dear Dr. Gonzo, is that Englander's piece was not "difficult and diverse" enough; that is, it never even broached the existence of the 1933 letter.
Now that Straussians have been forced to confront it they resort to the kind of "contextualizing" of unpleasant political utterances and actions that they identified as "relativism" in others. Liberal Democracy needed staunch supporters in 1933--Strauss was less than that; he was a staunch opponent.
In this vein, see Scott Horton's undressing of Harvey C. Mansfield's recent whitewash of the Strauss '33 letter:
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/01/hbc-90002212
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LeBlanc at 4:53 PM on 4/18/2008
When I realized (whatever day that was, and of course, with Strauss' help)that I do not have to genuflect before the altar of History in order to understand anything about myself, I felt truly liberated. It was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. I can spend a profitable and pleasant afternoon conversing with my friends Aristotle, Spinoza, and Rousseau because they had living thoughts that immediately impact my life. That the world has changed and is changing from the time of Plato is immaterial to our conversation. And what, precisely, are we to learn from History anyway, that humans have the capacity for extreme cruelty and injustice? One could make up short stories that tell the same tale.
I occasionally hear people say, "those who do not read/learn/know history are doomed to repeat it." The phrase seems to suggest that if enough people could o