>
> Surely there is *something* to be said -- in an essay promoting a book
> purporting to examine the relation of 20th century tyranny and
> intellectuals -- about at least *one* American thinker? I guess not if
> you conveniently define tyranny to begin and end with communism and
> European fascism.
>
> Lilla's total silence about the degree to which American intellectual
> culture justified the many American imperialist ventures in the first
> part of the century -- the Philippines and Haiti, say -- and Vietnam
> in the second part is simply deafening. While I suspect he might duck
> out of this criticism by making some cutesy point about the difference
> between European and American intellectuals, or between intellectuals
> and technocrats, that's a really unsatisfying move which begs the
> larger question.
>
With Straussians and their ilk, I think you have to reverse the principle that one should never attribute to conscious intention what can be just as easily attributed to stupidity; the silence you note (and Strauss is always pointing out what Plato, Xenophon, etc., *didn't* say) is deliberate. In order to stay a philosopher within a city, some things about that city can't be mentioned in public. Lilla finds himself in the US, so...
> Employing the Straussian gnostic hermeneutic -- which was already old
> when Origen stole it from Philo -- one can finally say this of Lilla:
> he protesteth too much!
I think Bloom in _Closing_ did too. For guys (and they are all guys, are they not?) who are supposed to keep secrets, they do a shitty job of it.
To put it crudely (and as I non-Straussian, I couldn't be expected to do it any other way), if the intention behind Strauss' own *practice* (yet another example of a non Marxist taking the last Thesis on Feuerbach more seriously than Marxists, BTW) of cozying up to elites and teaching them their Bizarro World version of Plato was to restrain their tyrannical impulses, his inheritors have degenerated into a self-perpetuating cult. -- Curtiss