>
>Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
>>You are too flattering to him. In the Straussian precincts of the
>>Cmtee on Social Thought, it is presumed that taxi drivers and
>>businessmen can't think and must be lied to by the Enlightened. I am
>>not making this up. What I am saying is literally true.
>
>Do tell more.
>
Long story. The Chi Comtee on Social Thought was founded asa sort of a home to Leo Strauss, a brilliant, learned, eccentric, and very elitist Jewish emigre thinker whose views were too off-base, and whose personality was too autocratic, to fit in the Dept of Phil. He becamea doyen of right wing thinking based on a ptotodeconstrictionist theory of reading the great texts of political philosophy that he devel9oped. ACcording to this, one reads the texts for the exoteric message, which is the usual view for the ordinary sheep, and for the esoteric view, which is the true message to be found in the silences, elisons, and contradictions. According to Strauss, Maimonides, Hobbes, Rousseau, everyone he wrote on, had the same esoteric message: Plato was right, the philosopher kings must rule the the world through lies. Also, Nietzsche was right, there is no objective value and no God, but we must never ever say this or society will collapse. Thus Strauss wrote books like Natural Right and History, defending an objectivism he thought was a lie.
Strauss' students include, most famously, Allan Bloom, whose Closing of the American Mind is a classic Straussian esoteric text. Also Henry Jaffa at Harvard, various others. The influence of the Straussians on the American right is chronicled in several books by Shadia Drury. I have had Straussian teachers. They are often superb readers of texts, lots of fuin to study with.
jks
>The other day at the Nation's offices, Alterman MC'd a chat with Joan
>Didion. Why a talented and distinguished writer like Didion had to be
>saddled with such an interlocutor is anyone's guess, but it was a sad
>sight. During the proceedings, Alterman made a revealing reference to
>a fantasy of a "better elite." He made it clear that he wrote not for
>a broad audience, or to democratize political discourse, but for a
>small group of the Enlightened. Who aren't Enlightened enough for
>him. But this helps explain his fondness for Lilla.
>
>Doug
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