[Peace-discuss] Leo Strauss

[David Green]

At the meeting on Sunday, Lisa referred to an
interesting article in the NY Times Week in Review
about the powerful followers of philsopher Leo Strauss
(it can still be accessed at nytimes.com). But this
article, by James Atlas, was pretty soft on Strauss's
orienntation towards Machiavellianism and deception.
In an article in the New Yorker, which can be found at
commondreams.org, Seymour Hersh does a much better job
of elaborating on the most relevant (and scary)
aspects of Strauss's philosophy and its application.
An excerpt follows:

_______________________

Shulsky’s work has deep theoretical underpinnings. In
his academic and think-tank writings, Shulsky, the son
of a newspaperman—his father, Sam, wrote a nationally
syndicated business column—has long been a critic of
the American intelligence community. During the Cold
War, his area of expertise was Soviet disinformation
techniques. Like Wolfowitz, he was a student of Leo
Strauss’s, at the University of Chicago. Both men
received their doctorates under Strauss in 1972.
Strauss, a refugee from Nazi Germany who arrived in
the United States in 1937, was trained in the history
of political philosophy, and became one of the
foremost conservative émigré scholars. He was widely
known for his argument that the works of ancient
philosophers contain deliberately concealed esoteric
meanings whose truths can be comprehended only by a
very few, and would be misunderstood by the masses.
The Straussian movement has many adherents in and
around the Bush Administration. In addition to
Wolfowitz, they include William Kristol, the editor of
the Weekly Standard, and Stephen Cambone, the
Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, who is
particularly close to Rumsfeld. Strauss’s influence on
foreign-policy decision-making (he never wrote
explicitly about the subject himself) is usually
discussed in terms of his tendency to view the world
as a place where isolated liberal democracies live in
constant danger from hostile elements abroad, and face
threats that must be confronted vigorously and with
strong leadership. 

How Strauss’s views might be applied to the
intelligence-gathering process is less immediately
obvious. As it happens, Shulsky himself explored that
question in a 1999 essay, written with Gary Schmitt,
entitled “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence
(By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)”—in Greek philosophy
the term nous denotes the highest form of rationality.
In the essay, Shulsky and Schmitt write that Strauss’s
“gentleness, his ability to concentrate on detail, his
consequent success in looking below the surface and
reading between the lines, and his seeming
unworldliness . . . may even be said to resemble,
however faintly, the George Smiley of John le Carré’s
novels.” Echoing one of Strauss’s major themes,
Shulsky and Schmitt criticize America’s intelligence
community for its failure to appreciate the
duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with, its
susceptibility to social-science notions of proof, and
its inability to cope with deliberate concealment. 

The agency’s analysts, Shulsky and Schmitt argue,
“were generally reluctant throughout the Cold War to
believe that they could be deceived about any critical
question by the Soviet Union or other Communist
states. History has shown this view to have been
extremely naïve.” They suggested that political
philosophy, with its emphasis on the variety of
regimes, could provide an “antidote” to the C.I.A.’s
failings, and would help in understanding Islamic
leaders, “whose intellectual world was so different
from our own.” 

Strauss’s idea of hidden meaning, Shulsky and Schmitt
added, “alerts one to the possibility that political
life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it
suggests that deception is the norm in political life,
and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of
establishing a politics that can dispense with it is
the exception.” 

Robert Pippin, the chairman of the Committee on Social
Thought at Chicago and a critic of Strauss, told me,
“Strauss believed that good statesmen have powers of
judgment and must rely on an inner circle. The person
who whispers in the ear of the King is more important
than the King. If you have that talent, what you do or
say in public cannot be held accountable in the same
way.” Another Strauss critic, Stephen Holmes, a law
professor at New York University, put the Straussians’
position this way: “They believe that your enemy is
deceiving you, and you have to pretend to agree, but
secretly you follow your own views.” Holmes added,
“The whole story is complicated by Strauss’s
idea—actually Plato’s—that philosophers need to tell
noble lies not only to the people at large but also to
powerful politicians.” 

When I asked one of Strauss’s staunchest defenders,
Joseph Cropsey, professor emeritus of political
science at Chicago, about the use of Strauss’s views
in the area of policymaking, he told me that common
sense alone suggested that a certain amount of
deception is essential in government. “That people in
government have to be discreet in what they say
publicly is so obvious—‘If I tell you the truth I
can’t but help the enemy.’” But there is nothing in
Strauss’s work, he added, that “favors preëmptive
action. What it favors is prudence and sound judgment.
If you could have got rid of Hitler in the
nineteen-thirties, who’s not going to be in favor of
that? You don’t need Strauss to reach that
conclusion.” 

Some former intelligence officials believe that
Shulsky and his superiors were captives of their own
convictions, and were merely deceiving themselves.
Vincent Cannistraro, the former chief of
counter-terrorism operations and analysis at the
C.I.A., worked with Shulsky at a Washington think tank
after his retirement. He said, “Abe is very gentle and
slow to anger, with a sense of irony. But his politics
were typical for his group—the Straussian view.” The
group’s members, Cannistraro said, “reinforce each
other because they’re the only friends they have, and
they all work together. This has been going on since
the nineteen-eighties, but they’ve never been able to
coalesce as they have now. September 11th gave them
the opportunity, and now they’re in heaven. They
believe the intelligence is there. They want to
believe it. It has to be there.” 


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com