Heh. LaRoucheites who confronted Bennett at a UCLA appearance with R. "World War 4, " Woolsey, relate that Bennett claims to have never read Strauss. <URL: http://www.larouchepub.com/pr/site_packages/2003/leo_strauss/3015secret_kingdom_ap_.html
> (The Pangle alluded to below, Thomas Pangle, if memory serves, has had one of his books blurbed by renegade Eugene Genovese.)
The Secret Kingdom of Leo Strauss by Tony Papert
> ...'Without Fear and Without Hope'
By far the best book on Strauss is Shadia Drury's 1988 The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss. It may be that part of its excellence is related to her awareness that there is a sense in which no woman could be a Straussian. In fact, Strauss said that no woman could be a philosopher. But, for many of the bright young boys, or men, their purpose for studying with Strauss was to become "philosophers."
Illustrative of Strauss's method is Shadia Drury's report of a debate between two long-time leading Straussians—Thomas Pangle and Harry Jaffa—which ran in the Claremont Review from Fall 1984, through Summer 1985, and continued in National Review on Nov. 20 and 29, 1985. Pangle had implied that for Socrates (i.e., for Strauss), moral virtue had no application to the really intelligent man, the philosopher. Moral virtue only existed in popular opinion, where it served the purpose of controlling the unintelligent majority. Elsewhere in the debate, Pangle implied that for Strauss, philosophy had disproved religious faith. As the fight continued, Pangle said that Strauss had characterized America's distinctiveness as "modern," which for the Straussians is one of their worst terms of abuse.
Harry Jaffa found "Pangle's interpretation completely foreign to his own understanding of his teacher and friend of 30 years," in Shadia Drury's summary. "Jaffa observes that such a vision of Strauss is Nietzschean, and he denounces Pangle for having perverted the legacy of Leo Strauss." [Drury 1988, page 182]
How is this contradiction possible? As Drury says, "Strauss taught students such as Jaffa and Pangle different things." [Drury 1988, page 188] The esoteric, or supposedly secret teaching which was inculcated into Pangle, Bloom, Werner Dannhauser, and many others, including, reportedly, Bloom's protégé Paul Wolfowitz, was indeed pure Nietzsche. In fact, the version which Pangle represented in that 1984-85 debate, as outrageous as it may have seemed to Jaffa, was greatly watered down. From Nietzsche to Leo Strauss, only the names have been changed, as they say. To begin with, what Nietzsche called the "superman," or the "next man," Strauss calls the "philosopher."
The philosopher/superman is that rare man who can face the truth: that there is no God; that the universe cares nothing for men or mankind; and that all of human history is nothing more than an insignificant speck in the cosmos, which no sooner began, than it will vanish forever without a trace. There is no morality, no good and evil, and of course any notion of an afterlife is an old wives' tale.
In a eulogy for a colleague, Strauss said, "I think he died as a philosopher. Without fear, but also without hope."
But the great majority of men and women, on the other hand, is so far from ever being able to face the truth, that it it virtually belongs to another species. Nietzsche called it the "herd," and also the "slaves." They require the bogeymen of a threatening God and of punishment in the afterlife, and the fiction of moral right and wrong. Without these illusions, they would go mad and run riot, and the social order, any social order, would collapse. And since human nature never changes, according to Strauss, this will always be so. <SNIP>
<URL: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/643kabms.asp
>
Bill Bennett's Gambling "Problem" The author of "The Book of Virtues" is a high roller. Does it matter? Should we care? by Jonathan V. Last 05/02/2003 9:12:00 PM
On Sat, 3 May 2003 19:34:00 -0400, Steven Kelman <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
-- Michael Pugliese
"Without knowing that we knew nothing, we went on talking without listening to each other. Sometimes we flattered and praised each other, understanding that we would be flattered and praised in return. Other times we abused and shouted at each other, as if we were in a madhouse." -Tolstoy