[Peace-discuss] Leo Strauss

Mon May 12 23:53:53 CDT 2003

[An article in the Boston Globe this weekend discussed the influence of
Leo Strauss on this administration.  --CGE]

The Philosopher

The late Leo Strauss has emerged as the thinker of the moment in
Washington, but his ideas remain mysterious. Was he an ardent opponent of
tyranny, or an apologist for the abuse of power?

By Jeet Heer, 5/11/2003

ODD AS THIS MAY SOUND, we live in a world increasingly shaped by Leo
Strauss, a controversial philosopher who died in 1973. Although generally
unknown to the wider population, Strauss has been one of the two or three
most important intellectual influences on the conservative worldview now
ascendant in George W. Bush's Washington. Eager to get the lowdown on
White House thinking, editors at the New York Times and Le Monde have had
journalists pore over Strauss's work and trace his disciples'
affiliations. The New Yorker has even found a contingent of Straussians
doing intelligence work for the Pentagon.

Yet while the extent of Strauss's influence is wide, his writings are
frequently obscure, and his legacy is hotly disputed by admirers and
critics alike. Certainly, Strauss was no ordinary Republican idea-maker:
Steeped in ancient philosophy, he had dark forebodings about democracy,
religion, technology, and nearly everything else that can claim the
allegiance of the contemporary conservative (or liberal, for that matter).

At first glance, a University of Chicago professor who spent most of his
life pondering old books would seem an unlikely master-thinker for the
policy wonks, career bureaucrats, and pundits who make up Washington's
unelected elite. Strauss held that politics was a central human activity,
but he also believed that ''all practical or political life is inferior to
contemplative life.'' He participated in the battle of ideas not by
issuing political manifestoes or angling for bureaucratic power, but by
writing recondite and difficult books.

A typical Strauss volume is a densely packed commentary on a classic text
like Plato's ''The Laws'' or Machiavelli's ''The Prince,'' festooned with
footnotes drawing on an array of hard-won languages from ancient Greek and
Latin to medieval Arabic. It's often difficult to discern where Strauss's
paraphrases of dead writers leave off and his own views begin-and this has
only deepened the mystery that attaches to his work.

Despite his life of quiet scholarly obscurity, Strauss has exerted a
strong posthumous sway among those who bustle through the corridors of
power. Washington Straussians have included Robert A. Goldwin, who had the
bizarre and unenviable task of organizing weekly seminars in political
theory and practice attended by President Gerald Ford in the mid-1970s;
Carnes Lord, National Security Council advisor in the Reagan
administration; and William Galston, deputy domestic policy adviser in the
first two years of the Clinton administration. Irving Kristol, an
intellectual whose name is virtually synonymous with neoconservatism, has
named Strauss as a major influence, and Straussian writers and ideas
regularly grace the pages of magazines like National Review, Commentary,
and The Weekly Standard, which is edited by Irving's son William Kristol.
The Bush administration's Straussians include the Pentagon officials Paul
Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky, who studied with Strauss at the University of
Chicago, and the bioethics adviser Leon Kass, a colleague at Chicago.

Strauss also claims a large, if rather clubbish, following in the academy,
especially among scholars of political theory and American constitutional
history. And yet even those academics who know Strauss's work best often
sharply disagree about its fundamental meaning. There are East Coast
Straussians, West Coast Straussians, and even some Straussian Democrats.
Clifford Orwin, a professor at the University of Toronto strongly
influenced by Strauss, describes him as a wise teacher who counseled
prudence and moderation. But Shadia Drury, a professor of political
science at the University of Calgary and the author of ''Leo Strauss and
the American Right,'' completely disagrees. For her, Strauss was nothing
less than ''a Jewish Nazi'' whose pretense of American patriotism and
piety hid a cynical and extremist antidemocratic ideology.

Was Leo Strauss a friend of liberal democracy, or an elitist who wanted
society to be ruled by a secretive cabal? An ardent opponent of tyranny,
or an apologist for the abuse of power? An atheist or a pious Jew?

To understand Strauss, we need to look beyond the famous students and
self-styled acolytes and examine the man himself.

Born in 1899 to an Orthodox Jewish family in Germany, Leo Strauss learned
at an early age that religion and philosophy are always vulnerable to the
threat of political persecution. As a young man, Strauss was a liberal
rationalist who nursed the hope, widespread in German Jewish circles, that
assimilation into a liberal democracy would end anti-Semitism. As an
undergraduate at the University of Marburg, his mentor was Hermann Cohen,
a philosopher whose reconciliation of Kant's philosophical ethics and
biblical morality seemed to suggest that there was no contradiction in
being a German Jewish liberal.

In the 1920s Strauss became increasingly disillusioned with modern
liberalism. Philosophically, he was shaken by his encounters at the
University of Freiburg with Martin Heidegger, the philosopher whose
powerful critique of rationality's delusions seemed to undercut the
guileless liberalism of Kant and Cohen. Politically, the instability of
the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism proved to Strauss that liberals
were also weaklings in practical matters, unable to protect society from
explosions of popular fanaticism. Furthermore, the rise of a new and more
virulent strain of anti-Semitism demonstrated that assimilation had failed
to solve the problems of German Jewry.

These political and philosophical problems fused together in the 1930s,
when the Nazis came to power-and won the applause of Heidegger. By this
point Strauss had left Germany for France, where he was studying medieval
Jewish and Islamic philosophy on a Rockefeller scholarship, but he
continued to view events in his native country with dismay.

Strauss believed that Martin Heidegger possessed the greatest mind of the
20th century. But unlike those Heidegger admirers who excused the
philosopher's flirtation with Nazism as a mere personal failing, Straus
believed it showed that modern philosophy had gone deeply astray. Orwin
explains: ''Strauss's question always was, What was it about modern
thought that could have led Heidegger to make these disastrous practical
misjudgments?''

In Strauss's mature work, he would argue that Plato and Aristotle were
wiser than modern thinkers like Machiavelli and Heidegger. This exultation
of ancient thought wasn't merely a nostalgic celebration of the good old
Greek days. As the political theorist Stephen Holmes observes, Strauss
believed that classical thinkers had grasped a still-vital truth:
Inequality is an ineradicable aspect of the human condition.

For Strauss, the modern liberal project of using the fruits of science and
the institutions of the state to spread happiness to all is intrinsically
futile, self-defeating, and likely to end in terror and tyranny. The best
regime is one in which the leaders govern moderately and prudently,
curbing the passions of the mob while allowing a small philosophical elite
to pursue the contemplative life of the mind.

Such a philosophical elite may discover truths that are not fit for public
consumption. For example, it may find that its city's prosperity derives
ultimately from ''force and fraud,'' or that the gods do not exist. Aware
that Socrates was executed for blasphemy, ancient thinkers realized that
philosophy was dangerous: It had to be kept for the intelligent few rather
than the ignorant many. Therefore ancient philosophers (and their medieval
followers) wrote in code. Using metaphors and cryptic language, they
communicated one message, an ''esoteric'' one, for an elite of wise
readers and another, ''exoteric'' one, for the unsophisticated general
population. For Strauss, the art of concealment and secrecy was among the
greatest legacies of antiquity.

Although Strauss's ideas had been developing for years, they really
coalesced when he moved to London in 1934, and then to the United States
later in the decade. Like many European emigres, he found refuge at New
York's New School of Social Research, where he taught from 1938 to 1948,
and then at the University of Chicago, where he remained until his
retirement in the late `60s. While his teachings and books bewildered
mainstream American social scientists and drew many hostile comments,
students flocked to this odd and beguiling refugee scholar.

Many would go on to become important academics in their own right,
including the philosopher Stanley Rosen (a leading light at Boston
University), the historian Harry Jaffa (who later wrote speeches for Barry
Goldwater), and Allan Bloom, whose 1987 bestseller ''The Closing of the
American Mind'' would-paradoxically-bring Strauss's thought to a mass
audience.

Mindful of the collapse of Weimar Germany's fragile democracy, Strauss was
distrustful of American liberals; he believed they were too weak-minded
and trusting to fight communism. In fact, Strauss believed that the United
States shared certain ills with Soviet communism: Both societies put the
material well-being of the masses ahead of the cultivation of virtues
among an elite. But Strauss also saw America's constitutional government
as the last, best hope for excellence in a modern world besotted with
egalitarianism. Many of his students would go on to champion the US
Constitution-with its separation of powers and its provision for a strong
executive branch-as a political masterpiece that put limits on popular
rule.

Stanley Rosen observes that Strauss's earliest students were often
indifferent to politics and interested mainly in philosophy. Robert
Goldwin became one of the first Straussians to work in practical politics
when he joined the campaign of Charles Percy, a Republican candidate for
the governorship of Illinois, in 1964. As it turned out, this migration of
Straussians into the world of politics helped fill a vacuum in the
Republican party, which, aside from free-market economists like Milton
Friedman, had few well-educated intellectuals to fill policy-making
positions. Once in Washington, Straussian conservatives could carry on
their war against modern liberalism's moral relativism at home and naive
pursuit of detente with the Soviet Union abroad.

The Straussian milieu was a closely knit one, where professors and pundits
cultivated their favorite disciples with devotion. As Holmes points out,
Strauss once wrote of ''the love of the mature philosopher for the puppies
of his race, by whom he wants to be loved in return.''

With his teachings about philosophers who write in code and secret
doctrines for the elect, Leo Strauss can seem like a conspiracy buff. In
fact, some of Strauss's followers like Allan Bloom and Willmoore Kendall
do use the word ''conspiracy'' to describe the history of Western thought.
Not surprisingly, conspiracies have flourished around Strauss himself. The
followers of Lyndon H.

LaRouche, the fringe presidential candidate who believes that the world is
being governed by Jewish bankers inspired by a Babylonian cult and that
the Queen of England is a drug dealer, argue that Strauss is the evil
genius behind the Republican Party. More sensible folk, like the New York
Times writer Brent Staples, who earned a doctorate in psychology at
Chicago in the 1980s, have also decried the ''sinister vogue'' of Strauss.

Certainly, Strauss's embrace of obscurity is part of his appeal. When it
comes to religion, the obscurity can get especially thick. Strauss, who
wrote on Jewish issues all his life, held that atheism was not a viable
public philosophy. And yet he often interpreted religious figures in an
impious way. He suggested once that the great medieval Jewish scholar
Maimonides secretly believed that reason and revelation were incompatible
while pretending to reconcile the Bible with philosophy. In his book ''The
Anatomy of Antiliberalism,'' Stephen Holmes maintains that, in Strauss's
view, only philosophers can handle the truth: that nature is indifferent
to human values and needs.

So where did Strauss really stand? ''He was an atheist,'' says Stanley
Rosen flatly. ''They [Straussians] all are. They are epicureans and
atheists.'' (The epicurean comment is perhaps a reference to the late
Allan Bloom, who was legendary for his enjoyment of the high life. After
his death, Bloom's esoteric life as a closeted gay man turned out to be
very different from his outward posture as a proponent of traditional
values.)

While some Straussians dispute the idea that the master was a godless
cynic, it does seem that Strauss wanted a regime where the elite lived by
a code of stoic fortitude while governing over a population that
subscribes to superstitious religious beliefs. ''He agreed with Marx that
religion was the opium of the masses,'' says Shadia Drury. ''But he
believed that the masses need their opium.'' Sociologically, Strauss's
approach would seem to work well for the Republican Party, which has a
grass-roots base of born-again Christians and a much more secular elite
leadership-at least in its foreign-policy wing.

Some traditional and religious conservatives have become deeply wary of
Straussians. ''They certainly believe that religion may be a useful thing
to take in the suckers with,'' notes Thomas Fleming, editor of the
right-wing journal Chronicles. ''Exoteric Straussians are taught to repeat
mantras about democracy, liberty, and republican government which the
inner-circle Straussians don't appear to hold to. One of Allan Bloom's
students told me that Professor Bloom had taught them that Plato was just
an American-style democrat. This is just absurd. Plato taught the rule of
a tiny elite, which is what the Straussians actually believe.''

Clifford Orwin sees nothing objectionable in the alliance between
Strauss-inspired neoconservatives and fundamentalist Christians. ''The
Republican Party, like the Democratic Party, is a big tent in which a
great many people have to coexist who disagree on a great many things,''
notes Orwin. ''There is nothing sinister about that.''

But just how ''sinister'' was Leo Strauss himself? The answer depends on
how a reader approaches his books. If you read Strauss with a
well-disposed spirit, he can be interpreted as a genuine friend of
American liberal democracy. He worked to create an elite that was strong,
sober, and sufficiently free of illusions about the goodness of man to
fight the totalitarian enemies of liberal democracy-be they fascists,
communists, or Islamicist fundamentalists.

But if you read Strauss with a skeptical mind, the way he himself read the
great philosophers, a more disturbing picture takes shape. Strauss, by
this view, emerges as a disguised Machiavelli, a cynical teacher who
encouraged his followers to believe that their intellectual superiority
entitles them to rule over the bulk of humanity by means of duplicity. The
worst thing you can do to Leo Strauss, perhaps, is to read his books with
Straussian eyes.

Jeet Heer is a regular contributor to the National Post of Canada and the
Globe.