Invisible Adjunct

Re open agendas and hidden agendas: perhaps Mansfield is alluding to one of the claims for which Strauss is known best to literary scholars -- that authors who feared the consequences of revealing their most trenchant insights couched them in such a way as to be hidden to their potential persecutors, but visible to the sharp reader. See his essay "Persecution and the Art of Writing" in the book of the same name. But what persecution would the Straussians be fearing?

Both of us over at diachronic agency were blogging about this Strauss piece this afternoon, though I at least hadn't noticed the big Chart of Influences.  How utterly silly.  Is Andrew Sullivan a Straussian?  (You could say he's Oakeshottian, which I guess isn't too different.  But still: is he in any recognizable respect trying to show that Strauss or Oakeshott was right about anything?)  Rupert Murdoch?  It's just idiotic.  I took a couple of courses from someone with Straussian connections in grad school too.  I go to faculty meetings with Straussians, co-advise students with Straussians. I could be on the chart (if I had any power!).

In my post I argue that the real problem with Straussians is that they're so out of the mainstream of their fields that they have to be cliquish to survive.  This, not some insidious legacy from Strauss, is what explains their social cohesiveness.

"I could be on the chart (if I had any power!)."

Hey, get yourself on the grid!

I'll agree that Sullivan and Murdoch are a stretch. And there is something evasive and insinuating about the article. Still, I think there's a real issue here: not so much Strauss and the academic Straussians but the use and abuse of Strauss by those outside the academy who invoke his legacy in support of their politics.

I don't think Strauss has any practical advice for politicians. What the Straussians seem to have inherited is conviction that they are right. I would say that nearly all the people cited in the article are better described as "Scoopers" for being disciples of Scoop Jackson. That goes for Wolfowitz and Kristol.

Add me to the list of people who appreciate Persecution and the Art of Writing but have serious reservations about the intellectual filiation implied in that article. I can certainly believe the connection between Bloom and Wolfowitz et al., but I really don't see Leo Strauss being responsible for The Closing of the American Mind, for God's sake. You might as well blame Matthew Arnold (which would also be wrong, but for different reasons).

For what it's worth: I've seen Straussians up close since my undergraduate days, and I would say that there is nothing--nothing--that demonstrates the ineffectuality of the academic left than its refusal to take them seriously. Their influence on the right is profound, and despite their tiny numbers they've used the university as a center of influence in a way that ought to be the envy of anyone on the left.

Of course, "influence" takes many forms. It doesn't have to be a direct intellectual filiation, and with Straussians it isn't. (How could it be, when the whole notion of esoteric discourse repudiates the notion of public-sphere discussion which lefties take rather naively for granted?) This is precisely where left academics suffer from an inexplicable lack of imagination in their conception of "influence."

Okay, so Straussian influence isn't direct intellectual descent. So what? This is the real test of the left's sociological acumen: if it isn't intellectual filiation, then what is the influence, how does it work? How could it be reproduced (for better causes) or, in the case of Straussianism itself, how could it be challenged?

On the left, I've never heard any response to a critique of Straussianism besides scoffing and eyerolling about "conspiracy theories." As one colleague put it to me: "Next you'll be talking about the Trilateral Commission."

Suffice to say that this is an inadquate response when you're dealing with a group of people who have an *explicitly* conspiratorial theory of intellectual history and and explicitly conspiratorial self-conception.

I tried to talk to people about Straussians back in the eighties when Bloom's book came out. Nobody had heard of them. At the time, watching the whole construct of "political correctness" being built up on the coattails of Bloom's book, I was livid that nobody took what would have been a sweet advantage of responding with a satiric expose of Straussian beliefs ("Oh, you think the left comes up with ridiculous stuff? Well, get this: your hero Bloom thinks that all the philosophers in history have written in secret code to which he has the decoder ring! You have to count the sentences to see the secret message!" A Village Voice article along these lines might have given me some sense that the left wasn't completely dead, even if it didn't save the world.)

The ease of documenting Straussian influence now is *exponentially* easier than it was in the eighties, and there's little question in my mind that the overt right-Nietzschean contempt for democracy emanating from Strauss is one influence that has helped to make things like the Patriot Act thinkable as policy. But still, whenever the subject comes up there is nothing but the same old refrain from the left: "Oh come now." I don't look for much change on this score.

I think T.V. is right. It's another way -- a more alarming way -- of making the point that I tried to make. The problem is that their interpretive method seems so absurd to most of us that we don't know what to do with it but ignore it. My strategy, were I staying at CMC, was going to be to 'pick off' the brightest political philosophy students by being more engaging than my Straussian colleagues (since Jaffa retired they're less charismatic). It probably wouldn't have done much good though, since the gov profs can get students gov-oriented jobs and I can't. I agree that it's a serious problem.

We should all be looking for ways to engage Straussians. My blog mate and I are trying to figure out what's defensible in neoconservatism and what's not. Maybe that's the sort of bridge that we need. Straussianism may be hard to engage, given its esotericism, but neoconservatism is right out there -- and by no means dumb.

I also agree with T.V. I was actually recruited by the Straussians 4 decades ago -- I met Wolfowitz and was good friends with a second-tier Straussian until it became impossible. It was clear then that Bloom was a stand-in and dharma heir for the aging Strauss and that his people were Strauss's people.

The nuance of Strauss's "secret code" reading was that philosophers conceal their real thoughts not primarily from their enemies, but especially from those they depend on for support -- in this case, Americans. (I've seen versions of Strauss's way of reading used by Derrida and also by Whitehead: if an author usually says one thing but says the opposite once, the exception is his real meaning.)

Strauss's thought was ferociously anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, and antagonistic to anything that happened politically after about 1500. Bloom managed to bring the doctrine up to the Enlightenment, though only in its less-egalitarian bourgeois forms.

"True philosophers" were the only locus of human value, and basically transcendant. Everyone else was sort of OK only to the extent that they in some way supported the true philosophers. The philosophers make deals with political protectors who gain legitimacy from their support of philosophers. Philosophers have no obligations to anybody and must needs use deception in controlling others.

The plebian mass is sort of OK as long as it obeys and produces, but can make no claims on the protectors, much less the philosophers. Same for the third world. It's Platonic or Aristotelean. I have never seen anything by a Straussian renouncing that classical heierarchal view.

My summary is not quite fair but not far off the mark.

Many of the people I met made careers at high levels in government (not just Wolfowitz). Against that, the fact that they're passe in academia means relatively little.

"but neoconservatism is right out there -- and by no means dumb."

Yes. The mistake that liberals and progressives too often make it to underestimate both the intellectual force and the intellectual appeal of conservatism.

T.V., I wish you would write that article.

Zizka, your summary may not be fair, but it tends to support the impressions I have formed based on an admittedly limited exposure to Straussianism. I have read very little of Strauss, so don't feel competent to say much. But any encounters I have had with Straussians (and I have had a few) have left me feeling unsettled at best and sometimes even creeped out.

The Adjunct to the Invisible Adjunct asks, "But what persecution would the Straussians be fearing?"
If Atlas is even halfway accurate in his depiction, they have little to fear by way of persecution.

Another person I met way back than showed up in today's news: Abe Shulsky (assopciate of Rumsfeld). URL below -- Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker.

The Jewish angle on the Straussians is usually used against them. However, in fairness, when I met these guys in 1963, the Holocaust was less than twenty years in the past. And within a few years, for example the 1967 war and the 1968 Olympics, the attacks on Israel escalated. From all this (plus anti-Semitism in the black power movement) came a virulent distrust of all nationalistic populism and liberal assurances that "war is obsolete", etc. As with Kissinger (whose lessen from WWII was something like "You have to be ruthless") their practical conclusion was realpolitik.

So now I've been fair. But I still am uncomfortable with the direction they've taken and especially the allies they've made, and to a degree I think that they are too.

The persecution they are liable to is from their friends and supporters who don't realize how anti-democratic they are.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030512fa_fact

I was an undergraduate at Chicago in the late 1960's (I knew neither Wolfowitz nor Shulsky) I was a history major, but I took a few Poli Sci courses. I am fairly certain that Strauss retired from Chicago in 1966 (my freshman year), not '68 as the Times article says. After retirement he went to Claremont and he was so listed in my 1969 edition of Strauss & Cropsey. I do not recall hearing of him being on campus in the late 60's (I remember seeing Hannah Arendt, and talking to Milton Friedman, but I do not remember seeing Leo Strauss).

I have checked the U of C card catalogue entries for Wolfowitz and Shulsky's dissertations. Shulsky's 1966 MA thesis was: "The Platonic critique of sophistic politics: the Protagoras" and his 1972 Ph.D. dissertation was: "The 'Infrastructure' of Aristotle's Politics" These are impeccable Straussian topics. However, Shulsky may have studied with Strauss while he was getting his MA, but he must have written his dissertation under Joseph Cropsey, who was Strauss' colleague for many years and taught his courses after he retired.

I took a History of Political Theory from Joe Cropsey in 1970, it was one of the most important and most exciting intellectual events in my life. Although, I am quite sure that I do not accept the fundamental epistemological basis of Strauss' system as Cropsey taught it.

Wolfowitz, by way of contrast wrote: "Nuclear proliferation in the Middle East : the politics and economics of proposals for nuclear desalting" Wolfowitz, IIRC was a student of Albert Wohlsteter. His thesis has a distinctly un-Strausian title. Real Straussians never did current events in class. And the late 60's was not an era that was not conscious of current events.

I am fairly certain that Hersh is wrong. Even more he is feeding a dangerous meme that should be stamped out. Please read The Neoconservative-Conspiracy Theory: Pure Myth, By Robert J. Lieber, The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 2, 2003.

Over the past generation humanities and social sciences academics have dug themselves a very deep hole that has filled up with an enormous amount of slop. The fact is that for every Straussian there are 35 multi-cultural trans-gendered post-colonial queer theorists. and the average age of the former is 67 and the later 34.

Leo Strauss stood for a couple of things. One of them was his political theory and epistemology. It is, as somebody above said, hard to stomach. It is not my cup of tea and I believe myself to be a very thoroughgoing conservative. More importantly, he advocated a close and careful reading of the classics on their own terms. And that is something that I believe is of immense and eternal value. If we are ever to drain the academic swamp, we will need to recover that.

"The Adjunct to the Invisible Adjunct asks, 'But what persecution would the Straussians be fearing?'

If Atlas is even halfway accurate in his depiction, they have little to fear by way of persecution."

I think you are both wrong on this. I have witnessed first-hand an excellent man denied tenure because of his "Straussian" leanings. As some of the comments here indicate, there is a belief that Straussians are deeply anti-liberal, which is not very welcome in a university setting. I still remember the words of one of those who worked to defeat that man's tenure: "We can tolerate anything but intolerance."

The Straussians I have known have either been deeply committed to the American liberal institution (such as Jaffa, mentioned in an earlier post) or at least accept liberal institutions as a reasonable compromise, as de Toqueville seemed to do. It is hard to see how anyone can reject as outlandish the suggestion that democracy has a tendency to reward mediocrity. It may not be true, but there is evidence enough to make the argument plausible. If you are fundamentally concerned with virtue, i.e., excellence, liberal institutions need explaining and defending in a manner beyond the usual cheerleading about freedom and equality.

Nor do I find it a remarkable claim to suggest that politics depends on there being truths that are not fully enunciated. Plato's Noble Lie is an extreme form, but what I said in the previous paragraph counts too. What American politician could publicly admit to believing that democracy encourages mediocrity? Straussians bring these open secrets out for inspection, which liberals may or may not object to, but they also affirm the need to keep them as open secrets, i.e., something to be talked about in an academic setting but not beyond that, which most liberals find offensive.

As far as I can tell, every political ideology, including all of the various stripes of liberalism, contain truths that would not meet with full public approval. That says something about the ideologies, but it also says something about the public. Is it really so perverse to admit to this?

P.S. Congrats to Invisible Adjunct for your Instalanche. You aren't so invisible anymore!

Robert Schwartz and Eddie Thomas,
You each raise interesting -- and challenging -- points. No time to address any of this at the moment, but I will definitely be back in the next day or two.

T.V.

"...back in the eighties when Bloom's book came out...I was livid that nobody took what would have been a sweet advantage of responding with a satiric expose of Straussian beliefs ("Oh, you think the left comes up with ridiculous stuff? Well, get this: your hero Bloom thinks that all the philosophers in history have written in secret code to which he has the decoder ring! You have to count the sentences to see the secret message!" A Village Voice article along these lines might have given me some sense that the left wasn't completely dead, even if it didn't save the world."

Some time ago (maybe even in the 80s) I read an article in the New York Review of Books that said exactly that.

This "Straussian" idea, that meanings are deliberately hidden but that properly trained people can pry them out is hardly limited to Straussians. For example, there is a good deal of feminist literary criticism that says most all works by women are about male oppression, just hidden.

zizka said:

"Many of the people I met made careers at high levels in government (not just Wolfowitz). Against that, the fact that they're passe in academia means relatively little."

I don't have great familiarity with Strauss per se, but this seems to be the tack that a lot of his scions took. Direct your influence at the political elites and not at the academic elites, because that is the path to influence and power.

Richard Hofstadter had made the argument in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1962-ish) that there was no longer an alignment between the two disciplines, and that JFK's "best and brightest" was a temporary anomaly. The post-Goldwater Republican party made a great nest for those academics who wanted to circumvent prevailing intellectual ideology. Does Irving Kristol count as a neo-Straussian? He seems to have gotten on the same gravy train as Wolfowitz long beforehand. And now Kristol's son William edits a PNAC standard bearer funded by Rupert Murdoch.

The Allan Bloom contingent threw plenty of darts at universities in the 80's/90's by tarring them with the "political correctness" stigma over and over, but the more recent developments of Scalian and Hayekian academic bootcamps seems to be their first concerted attempt to take over academic curricula. It seems undeniable that the political and academic efforts are two tentacles from the same neo-con octopus, and the prioritization of politics over academia seems to have paid off, unfortunately.

Question to TV: how would the left take the Straussians seriously? By running Green party candidates for New York governor?

Denial of tenure for "leanings" is a common thing in the academic world, even in hard-science fields. Sheldon Wolin believes that the Straussian old-boy network froze out his students. It can't be counted as persecution.

I remember, in the 1963-1968 period (after which I lost touch) the intense loyalty and devotion of the people I knew as Straussians, and who I believe called themselves such. By then Bloom was taking over the mantle, but no one called himself a Bloomian. Calling something a conspiracy theory doesn't prove anything. Many of the people I met have showed up in influential positions, not just Wolfowitz and Shulsky.

I've read half a dozen books by various of the school and couldn't find any evidence of any but a tactical support for democracy (faute de mieux). The horror of populism is intense, though this also means that Straussians would have great trouble affiliating with any mass movement, even right wing.

I'd love to ask a Straussian to gloss "Of the people, by the people, and for the people". That would be a tough task for anyone, but the Straussians' problem would be that they know what they think about the saying, but can't tell anyone.

"Denial of tenure for "leanings" is a common thing in the academic world, even in hard-science fields. Sheldon Wolin believes that the Straussian old-boy network froze out his students. It can't be counted as persecution."

I'm not sure what freezing out students means, but it doesn't sound quite as serious as tenure denial. Nor is tenure denial tantamount to persecution. It does mean, however, that someone might have reason to think that it would be imprudent to be too forthright about their "Straussian" views, which is all that I was speaking to.

"I've read half a dozen books by various of the school and couldn't find any evidence of any but a tactical support for democracy (faute de mieux). The horror of populism is intense, though this also means that Straussians would have great trouble affiliating with any mass movement, even right wing."

Straussians are hardly alone in not being populists, nor in thinking that democracy is not the cure for every political ill. (The paternalism of the left is evidence enough.) I think you'll need to look elsewhere to understand what makes people anxious about them.

Strauss, more than Bloom, endorsed what he called "the American regime," that is, the republican constitutional order, which is not the same as the populist, issue-driven, headless-chicken posturing mislabeled democracy today.

A good example of a practical Straussian was Seth Cropsey's son who served as, I believe, Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration. Straussian policymakers tend to be skeptical patriots and therefore never had trouble defending or practicing policies such as nuclear deterrence.

Wolfowitz, as a Wohlstetter student, only fits that mold from the outside. Wohlstetter, who, like Peter Drucker, was born a subject of his imperial and royal majesty Franz Josef, was a strategist. He never, to my knowledge, bothered with political philosophy and had probably barely heard of Strauss.

Wohlstetter had a decisive influence on my own strategic thinking in the early 1980s, when I read his articles demonstrating how much stronger the Soviet Union was in nuclear missiles than the United States.

Strauss began his career as a Jewish academic in the last years of the Weimar Republic and, of course, left after Hitler came to power. He knew all about the weakness of democracy that doesn't rest on solid foundations. It is much too easy to describe him or his followers as anti-democrats. Anti-populists and elitists, yes. I remember a sentence in one of Strauss' articles, I think it's from "Liberalism Ancient and Modern," in which he speaks of the immense learning of the literate even a century before his time. One of his examples he gave of such immensely learned men, compared to whom he, Strauss, was an ignoramus and a dilettante, was Karl Marx! And I am sure Strauss meant that, even though he thought Marx entirely wrong (but wrong for important reasons, just like Machiavelli).

And I see no philosophical continuity between Straussians and neoconservatives. They may support similar policies, but neoconservatives don't and can't share the Straussians' tragic sense of life (which is the core position of "Closing of the American Mind").

Straussians bring a breath of pluralism to an otherwise strongly left-liberal consensus in the social sciences. That, to my mind, is good. As for their political influence, they don't have it as Straussians, but as patriots.