ME & LEO (via Mike Daley)

A Brush With Leo Strauss (LAURIE FENDRICH, December 12, 2003, Chronicle of Higher Education)

The popular press has lately discovered Leo Strauss (1899-1973), a political philosopher relatively unknown outside the academic world. Strauss's critique of liberal democracy turns out to have greatly influenced not only a number of conservative scholars in political philosophy, but also many powerful figures in the resurgent conservative media (William Kristol, for example) and the current Bush administration (most conspicuously, Paul Wolfowitz). How odd, then, that Strauss, the alleged granddaddy of neoconservatism, would also have touched an abstract painter who is a passionate, voting, liberal Democrat. But he did.

My encounter with Strauss began when I was an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke College in the late 1960s. A semi-square, bookish girl in high school, I arrived on campus only to run smack into the political convulsions of the Vietnam War, the rise of militant civil-rights activism, the beginnings of the "do your own thing" culture, and a smorgasborg of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. An arty sort in spite of my studiousness, I started taking painting and drawing classes right from the start -- not knowing, of course, that silk-screeny Pop Art had just finished rendering those activities irrelevant. My actual major, however, was political science, and I became engrossed with political philosophy. It was while writing a paper on Rousseau that I encountered Strauss's seminal work, Natural Right and History. It shocked me. Like almost every girl back then who wore granny glasses and miniskirts, I had Marx's critique of bourgeois society down cold. But until I read Strauss, I'd never encountered a put-down of modern life channeled from the ancient Greeks.

What most people now think of as the result of historical cause and effect, Strauss saw more in terms of "human nature." This is the most misunderstood part of Strauss's teaching, because the mention of "human nature" triggers in us a reflexive fear of a fixed, probably unfair order, and a gut skepticism. But Strauss used the term to find an alternative to what he understood to be the enervating and misleading attempts by social science to model the political realm of human beings on the mechanistic schema of the natural sciences. Strauss didn't question the validity of science, the way postmodern philosophy does, as just another "social construct" dangerously malleable by the ruling classes. Rather, he thought that human endeavors are guided by distinctly human aspirations, beyond understanding gained from watching animals in the wild or conducting laboratory experiments. In particular, the desire on the part of great men to be great is one of those aspirations. Strauss believed that modern liberalism's horrific failure was demonstrated by the carnage of Verdun and the evil of Hitler, and necessitated a radical solution. For that, he turned back to the ancient Greeks. There he found the language he needed -- "soul," "virtue," "greatness," and yes, that loaded word "regime" -- to fashion his critique of modern liberalism.

My encounter with Strauss continued when, a year or so after graduation and unclear about what I wanted to do with my life, I got a job in academic publishing in a small town near New Haven. I also began to entertain ideas of being a painter, and so I set up a little studio.

A charming personal story undercut by her final paragraph

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 13, 2003 9:07 AM