ALL STRAUSS, ALL THE TIME

A Classicist's Legacy: New Empire Builders (JAMES ATLAS, May 4, 2003, NY Times)

On the basis of his curriculum vitae, [Leo] Strauss would seem an unlikely figurehead of the Bush White House, hardly a hotbed of intellectual inquiry, as detailed in a recent book by a former presidential speechwriter, David Frum. The child of middle-class Orthodox Jews, Strauss converted to Zionism while still in his teens, attended Martin Heidegger's lectures at the University of Freiburg, and eventually crossed paths with some of the most influential European intellectual figures of the prewar period: Walter Benjamin, Alexandre Kojeve, Hans-Georg Gadamer. In 1934, Strauss emigrated to Britain, where he wrote "The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes." Just before the outbreak of World War II, he joined the faculty of the New School for Social Research, a refuge for European intellectuals. His final home was the University of Chicago, where he taught in the political science department for a quarter of a century.

At first glance, Strauss's work seems remote from the heat of contemporary politics. He was more at home in the world of Plato and Aristotle than in debates about the origins of totalitarianism. His major books included "Xenophon's Socratic Discourse," "Thoughts on Machiavelli" and a collection of essays on the ancient Greeks, "The City and Man." But closer scrutiny reveals a mind keenly aware of current events.

Strauss's own experience--he witnessed Russian pogroms as a child and barely escaped the Holocaust--alerted him to the perils of history. "When we were brought face to face with tyranny--with a kind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imagination of the most powerful thinkers of the past--our political science failed to recognize it," Strauss wrote in his classic "On Tyranny." He believed, as he once wrote, that "to make the world safe for the Western democracies, one must make the whole globe democratic, each country in itself as well as the society of nations." There's a reason that some Bush strategists continue to invoke Strauss's name.

The myth of Strauss derives from a single event: the publication of Allan Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind" in 1987. Bloom, who taught with the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, had been a student of Strauss's; his incendiary best seller argued that democracy as practiced by the Greeks represents the highest form of civilization. The free society is the best man has devised. But Bloom's dense and at times inscrutable polemic was not a call to action; it was a celebration of the classics as a civilizing force. "The open agenda of Straussians is the reading of the Great Books for their own sake, not for a political purpose," wrote Harvey Mansfield in The New Republic.

That last bit is the point raised earlier--Bloom's agenda was apparently just life as a glorified college course. Surely Strauss didn't want us to sit around reading while tyranny was on the march.

MORE:
-ESSAY: A Classicist's Legacy: New Empire Builders (JAMES ATLAS, May 4, 2003, NY Times)
-ESSAY: Neoconservatives: They emerged from behind the scenes politically to change American foreign policy. But they've always been there, and Iraq is only one of their goals. (Dick Polman, 5/04/03, Philly Inquirer)
-ESSAY: FROM FRONTIERSMAN TO NEO-CON: An essential guide to the history of US foreign policy by renowned historian: American neo-conservatives are sometimes seen as bringing an altogether new agenda to US foreign policy. In reality an aggressive, expansionist and ideological America goes back almost as far as the nation itself. Nevertheless, the "neo-cons" have combined two different traditions in American thinking with spectacular results, at least in the short term. In the longer run, the new policy may come back to America's disadvantage unless a sounder, more common sense approach prevails. (GODFREY HODGSON, Open Democracy)
-ESSAY: Pope John Paul II as the philosopher of neoconservatism (Lawrence Auster, August 03, 2002, Counter Revolution) Posted by Orrin Judd at May 11, 2003 9:18 PM