5/29/2014 The Closing of the Straussian Mind by Mark Lilla | The New York Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/articles/archives/2004/nov/04/the-closing-of-the-straussian-mind/?pagination=false&printpage=true 1/14 The Closing of the Straussian Mind Mark Lilla NOVEMBER 4, 2004 ISSUE The Modern Prince: What Leaders Need to Know Now by Carnes Lord Yale University Press, 275 pp., $26.00 Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire by Anne Norton Yale University Press, 236 pp., $25.00 1. In a previous article I discussed a number of new European studies of the thought of Leo Strauss, the GermanJewish thinker who spent the second half of his life teaching and writing in the United States. Those studies reveal a very “European” Strauss, concerned with Zionism and the Jewish question, the legitimacy of the modern Enlightenment, the rival claims of philosophy and revelation, and most fundamentally the possibility of restoring the Socratic practice of philosophy as a way of life. This Strauss is very little known or understood among the wider public. Instead, his name has been associated in recent decades almost exclusively with the activities of his American disciples, many of whom are deeply involved with Republican and neoconservative politics. This has led to wild speculation about Straussian influence in American government, even the suggestion that Strauss’s “esoteric” method of reading texts might lie behind a duplicitous foreign policy, especially in the recent Iraq war. Most of these charges are patently absurd. What is not absurd, and deserves reflection, is the genuine connection that seems to exist in the United States between Strauss’s selfproclaimed disciples and a highly partisan faction in American public life. If the European interpreters of Strauss’s thought are to be Font Size: A A A 1
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5/29/2014 The Closing of the Straussian Mind by Mark Lilla | The New York Review of Books
The Modern Prince: What Leaders Need to Know Nowby Carnes LordYale University Press, 275 pp., $26.00
Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empireby Anne NortonYale University Press, 236 pp., $25.00
1.In a previous article I discussed a number of new European studies of the thoughtof Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish thinker who spent the second half of his lifeteaching and writing in the United States. Those studies reveal a very “European”Strauss, concerned with Zionism and the Jewish question, the legitimacy of themodern Enlightenment, the rival claims of philosophy and revelation, and mostfundamentally the possibility of restoring the Socratic practice of philosophy as away of life. This Strauss is very little known or understood among the widerpublic. Instead, his name has been associated in recent decades almost exclusivelywith the activities of his American disciples, many of whom are deeply involvedwith Republican and neoconservative politics. This has led to wild speculationabout Straussian influence in American government, even the suggestion thatStrauss’s “esoteric” method of reading texts might lie behind a duplicitous foreignpolicy, especially in the recent Iraq war.
Most of these charges are patently absurd. What is not absurd, and deservesreflection, is the genuine connection that seems to exist in the United Statesbetween Strauss’s self-proclaimed disciples and a highly partisan faction inAmerican public life. If the European interpreters of Strauss’s thought are to be
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certainly with no natural right”? If the latter, doesn’t that mean that modernliberalism has declined into relativism, and isn’t that indistinguishable from thekind of nihilism that gave rise to the political disasters of the twentieth century?“The contemporary rejection of natural right leads to nihilism,” Strauss writes,“nay, it is identical with nihilism.” As a rhetorical device for piquing interest in theapparently antiquarian task of recovering classical philosophy, this introductionsucceeds brilliantly. But it also raises the peculiar thought that such an enterprise iswrapped up with American destiny.
trauss never wrote a single essay about American thought and only a few shorterpieces on “the crisis of our time,” forgettable exercises in WeimarKulturpessimismus that display little feel for American life. After Natural Rightand History he spent most of his time at Chicago teaching courses on importantEuropean figures in the history of philosophy, concentrating mainly on theirpolitical works. Some of his students, though, perhaps inspired by that book,turned to American political thought in earnest, and their influence subsequentlybecame large. For the first two decades of his teaching, Straussianism remained anarrowly academic phenomenon. During the first two decades of his Chicagoperiod, Strauss’s American students were mainly interested in studying old books,in reviving la querelle des anciens et modernes, and adapting an aristocraticunderstanding of the philosophical life to the slightly vulgar American democraticsetting. That had little to do with Socrates but it was roughly consistent withStrauss’s own scholarly activity, the main difference being the missionary zeal andrhetoric of moral uplift that sometimes suffused their writings. There were oddexamples of Strauss’s students getting involved with contemporary politics (onewrote speeches for Barry Goldwater) and it is true that conservatives were drawn tohim because of his skepticism toward modern ideas of progress and his hostility tocommunism. But so were cold war liberals who shared his admiration for Lincolnand wanted to have a clear understanding of liberal democracy’s weaknesses inorder to protect it. Most were probably Democrats in those years and supported thecivil rights movement, but the school remained scholarly, not partisan.
After 1968, all that changed. The universities imploded, and Straussianism took anew turn. It is difficult for those of us educated on the other side of that culturalchasm to imagine the trauma experienced by some of those teachers wedded to thepre-‘68 American university, however sympathetic to their loss we might be. Theirsense of betrayal is infinite;; they cannot and will not be consoled. Straussians in theuniversities took the student revolts, and all that followed in American society,particularly hard. From Strauss they had learned to see genuine education as a
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necessarily elite enterprise, one difficult to maintain in a leveling, democraticsociety. But thanks to Natural Right and History, they were also prepared to seethe threat of “nihilism” lurking in the interstices of modern life, waiting to bereleased, turning America into Weimar.
This was the premise underlying Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the AmericanMind, and helps to explain why its genuine insights about American youth gotburied in apocalyptic doomsaying. Bloom and several other influential Straussiansspent the Sixties at Cornell, which had a particularly ugly experience with studentviolence, race-baiting, and liberal cowardice in the face of attacks on the university.Buildings were seized, faculty were threatened, the university’s president assaulted.That moment seems to have been a revelation for Bloom, opening his eyes to thefact that “whether it be Nuremberg or Woodstock, the principle is the same” andthat “Enlightenment in America came close to breathing its last during the sixties.”
n the wake of the Sixties, and after Strauss’s death in 1973, one began to see anew, more political catechism developing among certain of his disciples. SomeStraussians remained nonpartisan and to this day devote themselves to teaching oldbooks for their own sake;; many others, traumatized by the changes in Americanuniversities and society, began gravitating toward the circles of neoconservativesthen forming in New York and Washington. The catechism these politicalStraussians began to teach their students is nowhere recorded, and not becausethere is a secret doctrine being passed around by esoteric means. Rather, thecatechism so permeates the way they think about Strauss today, and thereforeabout themselves, that its philosophical and political tenets need not be articulated.It begins with the assumption that the modern liberal West is in crisis, unable todefend itself intellectually against internal and external enemies, who are abetted byhistorical relativism. This crisis obliges us to understand how modern thoughtreached such an impasse, which takes us back to the break with classical thought.There we discover the prudently contrived character of classical philosophy, whichtrained its adepts directly, and statesmen indirectly, about the fundamentalproblems of politics. This practice, it is then suggested, deserves to be recovered,especially in the United States, which was founded self-consciously on the idea ofmodern natural right and therefore still takes it seriously. Such an exercise wouldnot only shore up the American polity, it would contribute to the defense of liberaldemocracy everywhere.
here are several noteworthy features of this catechism. Unlike the new Europeanstudies of Strauss’s thought, which focus on the tension between philosophy and
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American neoconservatism exists in a beltway within the Washington Beltway. Itis a world unto itself, intellectually and socially, sustaining foundations, thinktanks, advocacy groups, magazines, and consulting firms, not to mention people ingovernment who work as advisers, speechwriters, and mid-level bureaucrats. Anumber of books have been written about the movement, none of which quitecaptures its metamorphosis from a loosely connected network of professors andmagazine editors into a well-integrated force shaping American public policy.
The neoconservative impulse was originally a moderating one, arising from a sensethat American liberalism needed a reality check. Great Society programs, it wassaid, were exacerbating problems they were meant to solve, such as poverty andurban blight;; rising taxes were stifling economic prosperity;; middle-class valueswere being vilified, driving voters to the right;; the “Vietnam syndrome” wasparalyzing American foreign policy. Over the past two decades these criticismshave become commonplaces in American politics;; with the election of Bill Clintonit appeared that we were (nearly) all neoconservatives now. Except for theneoconservatives themselves, who in the interim abandoned the moderateliberalism they once championed, for a coarse provincial ideology giving themenormous influence in Washington.
Neoconservatives used to give two cheers for capitalism;; now four or five seemhardly sufficient. They once promoted a hard realism in foreign policy, tocounteract the pacifist idealism they saw among Democrats in the Seventies;; nowthey flirt with an eschatological faith in America’s mission civilisatrice, to befulfilled by military means. They once offered a complex view of bourgeoisculture in its relation to economic and political life;; now they are in the grip of anapocalyptic vision of post-Sixties America that prevents them from contributinganything constructive to our culture. How these eschatological and apocalypticideas about America can exist in the same breast, without some effort atreconciliation, remains a mystery to every outsider who glances at aneoconservative magazine today. They appeal, though, to political Straussians,whose hearts beat arhythmically to both Sousa and Wagner.
raditional American conservatism was anti-intellectual;; neoconservatism iscounter-intellectual. That is the source of its genius and influence. Unliketraditional conservatives who used simply to complain about left-leaning writers,professors, judges, bureaucrats, and journalists, the neoconservatives long agounderstood that the only way to resist a cultural elite is to replace it with another.So they have, by creating their own parallel universe, mainly in Washington but
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with satellites in universities, and by attracting ambitious young people who sharetheir views. Some have edited conservative student newspapers or studied withpolitically engaged Straussians;; others joined the conservative Federalist Society inlaw school. All hope to make the “long march through the institutions.” Theirintellectual life, such as it is, is conceived wholly as the making of strategies forretaking cultural and political territory. That is obviously easier when Republicansare in the ascendancy, but they are not dependent on elections. There are alwaysjobs to be found editing magazines or writing speeches or working forfoundations;; the neoconservative world is, paradoxically, a benevolent welfarestate in which loyal citizens are always cared for.
Neoconservatism began as an intellectual movement. It is now an essential part ofRepublican politics, and therefore American life. But politics demandscompromises and alliances. So it is not unusual in neoconservative Washington tofind yourself at an event with a motley collection of people: older New Yorkintellectuals, professors in exile from politically correct universities, economicvisionaries, Teddy Roosevelt enthusiasts, home-schooling advocates, evangelicalProtestants, Latin-mass Catholics, Likudniks, and personalities from shock radio.Sprinkled among them you are sure to find a young Straussian foundation officerwho did his doctoral dissertation on, say, Lincoln’s speeches but didn’t get tenure.Another couldn’t finish his thesis on the politics of Plato’s Timaeus and nowworks as a defense analyst. Both will patiently explain to you the logicalconnection between ancient philosophy and the latest press release from theAmerican Enterprise Institute. It would take a comic genius, an AmericanAristophanes, to capture the strangeness of this little world.
traussians have indeed become central to that world, but it is mistaken to thinkStrauss’s ideas govern it. On the contrary, what we have witnessed over the pastquarter-century is the slow adaptation of Straussian doctrine to comport withneoconservative Republicanism. A small monument to that endeavor is CarnesLord’s recent book on political leadership, The Modern Prince. Lord is aStraussian who began his career translating and writing about Aristotle, and hiswork in classics is widely respected. He then served on Ronald Reagan’s NationalSecurity Council before becoming an adviser to Vice President Dan Quayle, andhe is now professor of strategy at the Naval War College—an unusual parcours inany liberal democracy but our own.
Lord clearly enjoys politics and administration, and knows much about them. Hisvocabulary may be abstractly Straussian—there is much talk of “regimes,”
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“founding,” “prudence,” “honor,” and “statesmanship”—but most of his concerns
are quite concrete: the decline of parties, the shift of legislative initiative to
bureaucracies and the courts, the challenge of managing intelligence. He is often
wise and occasionally unpredictable when discussing the difficulty of leading
complex modern democracies. But Lord is also worried and angry, and wants his
readers to be, too. What disturbs him is how little room there is for bold leadership
in contemporary America, and he blames this on many things. He blames the
progressive “feminization” of politics (the decline of “manliness” is a Straussian-
neoconservative obsession);; he blames the press and the universities for
diminishing respect for public officials (though he makes no effort to hide his
contempt for former President Bill Clinton);; he even blames the intelligence and
military establishments, which are too cautious by half and constrain the more
assertive foreign policy he clearly would like to see. Contempt for the CIA and the
Pentagon is a central tenet of neoconservative orthodoxy in Washington, as the
entire world has learned, to our chagrin, in the wake of the Iraq war.
The book’s final chapter, whose title, “Exhortation to Preserve Democracy from
the Barbarians,” is drawn from the last chapter of Machiavelli’s The Prince, wouldseem to return us to higher Straussian ground. But no. Machiavelli’s chapter was a
patriotic call to arms demanding the expulsion of foreign invaders from Italy.
Lord’s informs us that “the real problem facing the modern prince is not the
barbarians at the gate;; it is the barbarians within.” These are to be found not only in
the press and universities, they are, in his view, being bred everywhere by “the
multiculturalist mentality” that undergirds our overly lax immigration policies, by
the decay of moral standards, and by the atrophy of America’s “political religion of
constitutionalism,” among much else. All of this is sure to leave Lord’s
neoconservative readers satisfied, but most other Americans stupefied.
Anne Norton, a professor of political theory at the University of Pennsylvania, is
neither satisfied nor stupefied. In her new book on the political Straussians, the first
of its kind (but surely not the last), she asserts that Lord and his kind promote a
“troubling model of leadership” bordering on authoritarianism. These sorts of
charges have been made before but have more weight in this case because Norton
studied with some Straussians at the University of Chicago and admires many of
their intellectual achievements. She gets many things absolutely right about the
school, such as the value of the close reading it teaches and the intensity of teacher-
pupil relations. “Straussians adore their teachers,” she writes, “they talk about them
like young girls talk about horses and boy bands.” She also sees how those intense
relations can turn sour, harming students intellectually and psychologically. She
punctures the myth of “secret teachings” by Straussians—“it was all done in the
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open”—and admits that academic prejudice against Straussians and conservatives isreal. When Norton writes in an autobiographical vein, she can be charming andfair.
When she turns to the Straussian connection with neoconservative politics, though,her grip becomes unsteady. She is disturbed by the political turn of the Straussiansafter 1968, less because it distorted the aims of an important thinker than because itaided and abetted the ascendancy of the Republican right. Her hostilityoccasionally brings out an Aristophanic wit, as when she remembers “tiny littlemen with rounded shoulders” and “larger, softer men, with soft white hands thatnever held a gun or changed a tire,” delivering speeches on manliness when shewas a student. But it also drives her to repeat slanderous rumors and academicurban legends about certain Straussians, as a way of scoring political points. One’sconfidence in her own political judgment is not enhanced by her rosy assessmentof the academic benefits that rioting Cornell students allegedly brought to theuniversity in the Sixties, nor by her likening Theodore Roosevelt to Osama binLaden as a promoter of misogynist jihad. In the end, Norton cannot decidewhether Strauss was responsible for the neoconservative turn of his school or not,perhaps because she is not entirely sure what neoconservativism is. But whatever itis, she’s against it. That will make her book popular at the faculty club, just asLord’s will be welcomed within the Beltway, but not beyond it.
To turn from Carnes Lord and Anne Norton back to the new European works onLeo Strauss is to breathe an altogether different air. Those studies of his thoughtremind us why he attracted devoted students and readers in the first place, and helpus to measure the distance we have traveled since his death thirty-two years ago.The ironies in this short chapter of American intellectual history are almost toomany to number. Where but in America could a European thinker convinced ofthe elite nature of genuine education find some of his pupils making commoncause with populist politicians? Where but in America could a teacher ofesotericism, concerned about protecting philosophical inquiry from political harm,find his views caricatured in the newspapers and weeklies? And where but inAmerica could an admirer of Socrates, who spoke of his students as “the youngpuppies of his race,” expect to see his students’ students become guardians of anephemeral ideology?
It is a shame that Strauss’s rich intellectual legacy is being squandered through theshort-sightedness, provincialism, and ambition of some of his self-proclaimeddisciples. But American life is hard on all European legacies. Fortunately, hisbooks remain and they can be studied with profit without paying the slightest
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attention to those disciples or their polemical adversaries in the university and thepress. The fact that he is finding new readers abroad who have no connection withthe American school is encouraging, and one can only hope that the new Europeanstudies of his thought will eventually be translated and find an audience here.When the American press was in the middle of its Strauss fever last year a numberof alarmist articles appeared in Europe as well. But there were also a few wise onesdefending Strauss against Americans who would use him for their own politicalends. One of the best was by an Italian scholar of Jewish thought. Her title simplyran: “Hands Off Leo Strauss!”
—This is the second of two articles on Leo Strauss.
“Leo Strauss: The European,” The New York Review, October 21, 2004.
Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Regime (Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).
“Leo Strauss: Becoming Naïve Again,” The American Scholar, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Autumn 1975).
See Gordon S. Wood, “The Fundamentalists and the Constitution,” The New York Review, February 18, 1988.
The best distillation of it can be found in the essay on Strauss by Nathan Tarcov and Thomas L. Pangle, which serves as an
epilogue to History of Political Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, third edition, 1987), the reader first compiled by Strauss
and Joseph Cropsey in the Sixties and still in print.
Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Regime, p. 71.
I helped to edit one of those magazines, The Public Interest, in the early 1980s.
Irene Kajon, “Giù le mani da Leo Strauss,” MicroMega (April 2003). See also Carole Widmaier, “Leo Strauss est-il
néoconservateur? L’épreuve des textes,” Esprit, November 2003.