Last semester, I started reading Leo Strauss when I was writing a paper on Heidegger, and to this day I’m trying to figure out what Strauss had to do with neoconservatives. I bring it up because someone recently told me that in one of the metro stations here in Paris after Bush was re-elected someone spray-painted “Stop the Straussians.”
When I read Strauss, I see much of what he was saying as being opposite of what I would imagine a neo-con to assert. His views on education and philosophy just don’t seem that incredibly conservative.
Am I missing something along the lines of what is written in “Persecution and the Art of Writing.” Am I misreading what’s written between the lines?
Or, is it the fact that neo-cons don’t read between the lines? that they took literally Strauss’s intentional self-contradictions?
I don’t know that I’m smart enough to read Strauss, but I’m interested in understanding the link.
While it would be unwise to give Leo Strauss too much importance, he WAS very influential among a certain segment of conservatives, and has been for some time.
And you’re right- that IS odd in some ways, because Strauss’ philosophy is not a traditionally conservative one, not at all.
One of the leading Straussians was Allan Bloom, who had a huge (and completely unexpected) best seller with “The Closing of the American Mind.” Now I suspect most people who bought it didn’t really read it, or read just the chapters on rock & roll (Bloom hated it) and cultural relativism (he thought it was stupid to condemn Western civilization for considering itself superior to all othgers, since EVERY civilization in history has thought itself superior to all others). Those folks assumed he was a traditional conservative and moralist; hence, conservative critics almost always praised the book, and liberals panned it with as much venom as they could muster.
As one of the few who read it all the way through (not easy- much of it was a real snoozer!), I can tell you both sides got Bloom (and Strauss) all wrong. The moronic William Greider of Rolling Stone said at the time that Bloom was an ally of Jerry Falwell. Ha! Bloom was a gay, Jewish atheist who had NO regard for Christianity or traditional morality. But Greider, like many equally wrong-head conservatives, assumed a guy who hated rock music & cultural relativism must be a Moral Majoritarian!
Strauss believed that almost all the great philosophers of history, from Socrates to Heidegger, believed pretty much the same things (that God doesn’t exist, that man must make his own moral codes), but had to hide their messages due to persecution. But, he said, these great minds filled their work with little clues that showed what they REALLY believed. So, for example, if you find Rene Descartes’ “proof” of the existence of God rather weak, well, that’s because Descartes WANTED brilliant folks like Strauss to see through his phony proof, and infer what he was really saying.
Does that sound like something William F. Buckley or Jerry Falwell would buy into?
In the June 2004 issue of Harper’s, Earl Shorris published an article: “Ignoble Liars: Leo Strauss, George Bush, and the Philosophy of Mass Deception.” Text at http://www.lacosapizza.com/shorris.html. His thesis is that the worldview of the neocons is heavily influenced by the philosophy of Leo Strauss (1899-1973), who taught at the University of Chicago in the '50s and ‘60s. Strauss’s thesis is that all great philosophical texts contain “hidden meanings.” Philosophers and intellectuals cannot and should not write clearly enough say what they really mean – cannot because it is too dangerous (Strauss was a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, which experience influenced his thinking all his life), and should not because true wisdom is the proper province of an elite. Strauss was also an aristocratic elitist and a natural-law theorist. From Shorris’ article:
On this issue, I don’t have to ask the Master. I’ve been reading the leading conservative magazines since I was in high school, so I’ve long been familiar with the name Leo Strauss and with the concept of neoconservatism.
Which is more than the liberals babbling about the threat posed by “neocons” and “Straussians” can say.
First of all, there are practically no neoconservatives in the Bush administration ,and there were never more than a few (like the much maligned Paul Wolfowitz) in the first place. Almost all the leading neoconservatives, from William Kristol on down, were John McCain supporters (why? Because neoconservatives tend to be concerned with foreign policy, first and foremost, and candidate Bush showed almost no interest in foreign policy) and as such, they were almost all shut out of the Bush administration.
Second, Leo Strauss had little or nothing to say about American foreign policy.
Third, Strauss’s most devoted followers were never the neoconservatives of the Commentary/Weekly Standard set.
So, was Strauss a weird guy who taught some odd concepts? In my opinion, definitely. But do his theories and his followers carry any real weight or wield any real power in the current White House? Nope. And neither do many genuine neoconservatives.
My feeling is, most of the people using “neocon” as a perjorative have no clue what “neoconservative” means. And people usually just look silly when they use big words without knowing what they mean.
All I know is, any definition of “neocon” that includes Dick Cheney is a pretty stupid definition.
And then you’ve got people like Mick Jagger singing about neocons, and suggesting they’re bad Christians (when a London School of Economics alumnus should know practically all the leading neoconservatives are Jews, and secular ones).
For isnoramuses (ignorami?) on the Left, “Neocon” apparently means nothing more or less than “conservatives I REALLY don’t like.”
Why? Cheney might not have any credentials in neocon-oriented think-tanks, but if, in his official duties he acts exactly as PNAC would like him to act, shouldn’t he be considered an honorary neocon?
