Posted on 05/25/2003 6:27:16 PM PDT by quidnunc
The New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Boston Globe, among others, have sounded the alarm: The Bush administration, particularly its foreign policy team, is in the grip of a coterie of neoconservative intellectuals who are themselves in the grip of the antidemocratic and illiberal teachings of Leo Strauss, a political philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago in the '50s and '60s and who died in 1973.
On its face, this scenario is wildly implausible. It supposes that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and National Security Adviser Rice, non-Straussians by all accounts, are stooges and dupes. It insinuates that neoconservative intellectuals — Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is at the top of everybody's list — have craftily ascended to positions of power in the federal government from which they aim to implement Strauss's teachings. And it invests Strauss, a student of political philosophy whose life's work consisted in writing learnedly about thinkers from Plato to Heidegger, and sharing his discoveries with students, with almost superhuman powers: Through the force of his ideas, we are told, this scholar and teacher is able, a generation and a half after his death, to command the respect and loyalty — and indeed, to compel the actions — of highly successful and well-placed individuals not only in politics but in the media and the academy.
Despite its wild implausibility, the scenario is in one important respect true. And that has to do with the influence of Leo Strauss on a generation of neoconservative thinkers, some of whom are active in our politics (and some of whom can even be found writing in these pages).
Judging from the recent hubbub, which restates an accusation that has gained much currency in the academy, that influence is nefarious. Strauss is said to be an elitist who scorned democracy. He is attacked as an atheist who encouraged his students to see through the falseness of religion, while manipulating it to discipline and mollify the masses. And the realization of his ideas, we are warned, requires his followers to establish by force of arms a foreign empire for America.
These accusations, similar versions of which are often leveled at neoconservatives, are nonsense, and in parts vicious nonsense. Yet the ideas that the accusations pervert are those of Strauss, and when those ideas are restored to their true shape they can be seen as articulating core neoconservative convictions.
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(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
Judging from the recent hubbub, which restates an accusation that has gained much currency in the academy, that influence is nefarious. Strauss is said to be an elitist who scorned democracy. He is attacked as an atheist who encouraged his students to see through the falseness of religion, while manipulating it to discipline and mollify the masses. And the realization of his ideas, we are warned, requires his followers to establish by force of arms a foreign empire for America.
These accusations, similar versions of which are often leveled at neoconservatives, are nonsense, and in parts vicious nonsense. …
Crankery, sheer crankery!
They built on low but solid ground!
He would never have defended the "Weekly Spectator" but he may have done so for the Weekly Standard.
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