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Defending Leo Strauss: Athens on the Midway

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http://nationalinterest.org/feature/athe...?page=show

EXCERPT: [Philosopher] Leo Strauss is often depicted as a sinister neocon guru whose ideas led directly to endless wars in the Middle East. Robert Howse’s worthy, academic 'Leo Strauss: Man of Peace' correctly argues that this is bunk.

[...] The caricature of Strauss as neocon impresario has even achieved a certain resonance in the wider culture. In Jonathan Franzen’s acclaimed novel Freedom, written in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, an impressionable college student finds himself at a Thanksgiving table with “the founder and luminary president of a think tank devoted to advocating the unilateral exercise of American military supremacy to make the world freer and safer.” The creepy blowhard tells the young man that “we have to learn to be comfortable with stretching some facts. Our modern media are very blurry shadows on the wall, and the philosopher has to be prepared to manipulate these shadows in the service of a greater truth.”

The first thing to say about such fantasies is prophylactic: don’t believe a word of them. Not because there aren’t Straussian neocons (Wolfowitz and William Kristol are the most prominent) or because there isn’t some degree of overlap in the characteristic obsessions of the two groups (the sixties weren’t as groovy as everyone thinks, moral relativism is both dangerous and incoherent, the West has grown complacent, military virtue is neither a joke nor a scandal, and so on).

The real problem is that Straussianism and neoconservatism are distinct frames of mind, with idiosyncratic histories of their own. The Venn diagram of their relationship is interesting less for the area of intersection than for the obvious examples of non-Straussian neocons (Norman Podhoretz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle, David Frum, Max Boot) and the considerable group of thinkers whose ideas have been shaped by Strauss but who reject the neoconservative credo (Francis Fukuyama, Mark Lilla, William Galston, Steven Smith, Nathan Tarcov) or seem largely indifferent to it (the vast majority of Straussian academics, busy going about their scholarly work).

For those intent on influence tracing, there is, too, the obvious problem of establishing some connection between Straussian thought and the actual development of major policies. In Howse’s book, whose focus is setting the record straight about Strauss himself rather than showing the real-world impact of his ideas, we find this typical summary of the indictment with respect to the George W. Bush administration’s “Iraq adventure”:

"It got going with a New Yorker piece by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, who claimed that Strauss had taught the art of tyrannical rule, deception in politics, and the merits of a bellicose foreign policy to Paul Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of Defense and a leading advocate and planner of the Iraq intervention. James Atlas, writing in the New York Times, asserted that Strauss endorsed 'the natural right of the stronger.' In a book published by Yale University Press . . . Anne Norton wrote that Strauss and his disciples were 'proponents of war without limits.'"

[...] WHAT [...] makes [the real] Strauss so compelling? What explains the allure of Straussian teachers and teaching? Many of the same things, I suspect, that have made Strauss and the Straussians so inviting a target for their critics inside and outside the academy. There is, among Straussians, the sense of initiation into an elite, an elect few whose distinction lies in seeing what others fail to see, in knowing truths that others lack the courage to confront. Among the graduate students in political theory in my own day, Straussian and non-Straussian alike, the imposing doorstop-size History of Political Philosophy that Strauss edited with Joseph Cropsey was popularly referred to by combining the color of its cover with the authority of its pretensions: it was, simply, the Purple Bible.

That all of this amounts to some flavor of cultural conservatism is obvious, but it is hard to detect in it a particular conservative politics. In my own experience of the “cult,” such as it is, dogmatism is considered gauche, intellectually and politically shallow. There are Straussians, but there is no telling, even at this late date, what Straussianism might be. The books of Strauss and of my own teacher, Harvey Mansfield, are tough going, so even from a straightforward careerist point of view, graduate students of a Straussian bent must struggle to figure out how to distill and reformulate the ideas of the teachers whom they wish to please and follow.

[...] Straussians are certainly excluded and disdained in much of the academy, but the sentiments are mutual. Dismissing colleagues or thinkers as benighted or politically correct becomes a ready excuse not to engage with them, inducing a certain lazy complacency in thought. And there is, finally, something jarring, especially in today’s academy, about the insistent, sometimes intentionally provocative delight that Straussians take in holding out the possibility that Plato or Machiavelli or Nietzsche might be not just interesting but, in some way, right—while at the same time hesitating to acknowledge what modernity has achieved by “lowering its sights” (another Straussian term of art) from the noble to the merely humane. This is not a program calculated to make nice with today’s fashionable advocates of “inclusiveness” (a notion that Strauss would have treated with contempt).

For me, at any rate, what continues to fascinate about the Straussian “cult” is the combination of such pretentious, high-minded universalism with an appreciation for the real work of political life, for the accommodation of interests and prejudices without losing sight of grander aims and possibilities. As Strauss wrote, in a much-repeated line, “Moderation will protect us against the twin dangers of visionary expectations from politics and unmanly contempt for politics.” Howse cites this Straussian motto in his own admirable effort to save Strauss from his more intemperate critics....
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