Reply-To: <philosophicalgourmet at blackwellpublishers.co.uk> From: <Philosophical Gourmet> Subject: Philosophical Gourmet Report Update Emailing Service Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 22:06:21 +0100
PHILOSOPHY IN THE NEWS
The front page of the May 4, 2003 New York Times "Week in Review" section (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/04/weekinreview/04ATLA.html) continues the mainstream media's long-standing fraudulent portrayal of Leo Strauss, and his acolytes like Allan Bloom, Francis Fukuyama, and Harry Jaffa, as serious political philosophers and scholars. The Times calls Strauss a "classicist and political philosopher," not noting that he could not have been appointed in any serious classics or philosophy department because of the poor quality of both his scholarship and philosophical argumentation. As Myles Burnyeat (Oxford University) wrote in one of the best-known and most devastating assessments of Strauss's work by a real scholar of classical philosophy, "surrender of the critical intellect is the price of initiation into the world of Leo Strauss's ideas" (New York Review of Books, May 30, 1985). This assessment is, of course, uncontroversial outside the Straussian coterie (as Burnyeat writes: "Straussians know that the considered judgment of the scholarly non-Straussian world is thatÖStrauss's interpretation of the history of political thoughtÖis a tale full of sound and fury and extraordinary inaccuracies." For further confirmation of the intellectual bankruptcy of Straussianism-as well as for its amusement value--I also recommend the pompous rejoinders to Burnyeat by Straussians like Joseph Cropsey, Harry Jaffa, and Allan Bloom, followed by Burnyeat's demolition of them all, which appeared in the New York Review of October 10, 1985.)
Despite all this, the Times quotes, without critical comment, Harvey Mansfield's assertion that, "The open agenda of Straussians is the reading of the Great Books for their own sake, not for a political purpose." In one sense, of course, this is true: the "open" agenda was the reading of the Greak Books, and as Burnyeat and others have demonstrated, the Straussians were fairly incompetent readers (Burnyeat: "Strauss's interpretation of Plato is wrong from beginning to end"; "Jaffa's understanding of Aristotle is abysmal"). But the "closet" agenda was nakedly political, which perhaps makes Straussianism's sole academic home-select political science departments-fitting.
Indeed, Straussianism has long been one of the two pathologies of "political philosophy" as practiced in U.S. political science departments (the infection has not spread to the U.K. or Australasia); the other, of course, is "postmodernism." This "odd couple" actually has much in common, notwithstanding the unpostmodern commitment of Straussians to "the immutability of moral and social values" (as the Times put it). Straussians and postmodernists produce relatively little competent scholarship; the quality of argumentation (for or against "the immutability of moral and social values") is very low in both Straussian and postmodernist political theory; the political motivations of Straussians and postmodernists are usually transparent; and, perhaps most strikingly, Straussian and postmodernist political philosophy simply can't be found in major philosophy departments. Surely the Times might note the peculiarity of a "movement" of purported political philosophers that is universally shunned by political philosophers (not to mention scholars of classical philosophy).
Philosophers ought to be concerned when their field is misrepresented in the media: why should the public be led to believe that non-philosophers like Strauss and Fukuyama, or failed philosophers like William Bennett, represent our field? (As Burnyeat put it: "There is much talk in Straussian writings about the nature of 'the philosopher' but no sign of any knowledge, from the inside, of what it is to be actively involved in philosophy.")
The Times ought to make clear that, whatever the influence of Strauss among intellectual lightweights and political hacks like Paul Wolfowitz and William Bennett, he is viewed by actual scholars as a politically motivated and unreliable scholar, whose philosophical competence is minimal at best. You can e-mail letters to the editor at: letters at nytimes.com.
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