{"id":4202,"date":"2003-05-19T11:05:29","date_gmt":"2003-05-19T11:05:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=4202"},"modified":"2003-05-19T11:05:29","modified_gmt":"2003-05-19T11:05:29","slug":"leo-strauss-in-the-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=4202","title":{"rendered":"Leo Strauss in the news"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Leo Strauss and his proteges, the "Straussians,"<\/p>\n

are again in the news.<\/b> Jeet Heer writes in the May 11 Boston Globe<\/i>:<\/p>\n

\n

Odd as this may sound, we live in a world increasingly shaped by Leo<\/p>\n

Strauss, a controversial philosopher who died in 1973. Although generally<\/p>\n

unknown to the wider population, Strauss has been one of the two or<\/p>\n

three most important intellectual influences on the conservative worldview<\/p>\n

now ascendant in George W. Bush’s Washington. Eager to get the lowdown<\/p>\n

on White House thinking, editors at the New York Times and Le Monde<\/p>\n

have had journalists pore over Strauss’s work and trace his disciples’<\/p>\n

affiliations. The New Yorker has even found a contingent of Straussians<\/p>\n

doing intelligence work for the Pentagon .<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the International<\/p>\n

Herald Tribune<\/i><\/a>, William Pfaff calls Strauss "the main intellectual<\/p>\n

influence on the neoconservatives," listing as Straussians: "Deputy<\/p>\n

Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Abram Shulsky of the Pentagon’s Office<\/p>\n

of Special Plans, Richard Perle of the Pentagon advisory board, Elliott<\/p>\n

Abrams of the National Security Council, and the writers Robert Kagan<\/p>\n

and William Kristol."<\/p>\n

In her 1988 book The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss<\/i>, Shadia Drury<\/p>\n

argued that Strauss was not really a cultural conservative committed to<\/p>\n

natural law and transcendent truths; he was actually a nihilist who promoted<\/p>\n

conservatism as a golden lie for the masses. Some of John Gunnell’s articles<\/p>\n

from the 1970s and 1980s had reached similar conclusions. In my 1995 book,<\/p>\n

Nietzsche and the Modern Crisis<\/p>\n

of the Humanities<\/a><\/i>, I sharpened this analysis somewhat by arguing<\/p>\n

that: <\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Nietzsche was a duplicitous or esoteric author, teaching public doctrines\n

    (such as Will to Power and Eternal Return) that he did not believe,<\/p>\n

    because he feared the impact of the nihilistic Truth; and <\/li>\n

  2. Strauss was systematically and profoundly influenced by Nietzsche’s\n

    conclusions and methods of writing. Thus he was a Nietzschean, if anyone<\/p>\n

    deserves that title.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Then, in Something to Hide<\/a><\/i> (1996), I<\/p>\n

    published a comic novel about a conspiratorial group of nihilists\/conservatives,<\/p>\n

    loosely based on Leo Strauss. However, given the level of suspicion that<\/p>\n

    Straussians now provoke in some quarters (e.g., among followers of Lyndon<\/p>\n

    Larouche), I should say that I find the actual Straussians curious and<\/p>\n

    sometimes interesting, but not dangerous or malevolent.<\/p>\n

    Here is the section from my 1995<\/p>\n

    book<\/a> in which I assemble evidence for the hypothesis that Leo Strauss<\/p>\n

    and Allan Bloom were Nietzscheans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Leo Strauss and his proteges, the "Straussians," are again in the news. Jeet Heer writes in the May 11 Boston Globe: 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4202\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}