>Shadia Drury: I have been publicly denounced and
>privately adored. Following the publication of my book
>The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss in 1988, letters
>and gifts poured in from Straussian graduate students
>and professors all over North America – books,
>dissertations, tapes of Strauss’s Hillel House
>lectures in Chicago, transcripts of every course he
>ever taught at the university, and even a personally
>crafted Owl of Minerva with a letter declaring me a
>goddess of wisdom! They were amazed that an outsider
>could have penetrated the secret teaching. They sent
>me unpublished material marked with clear instructions
>not to distribute to “suspicious persons.”"
>
>http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-3-77-1542.jsp
>
Wonerful interview, and thanks for posting it. One thing I've never seen
pointed out are the odd similarities in the appeal of Strauss and Ayn
Rand. Both appeal to those who see themselves as being smarter than
others, and offer what seems to be an easy means to gaining power over
those unfit, miserable clods-- and it's a method that satisfies certain
kinds of resentment over _not_ having power. With Rand, it's being a
clever capitalist. With Strauss, it's the swaying of the public mind
with well-crafted lies.
I'd love to see a robust dissection of this appeal, since it turns up in so many places. There's Charles Murray's notions of a "cognitive elite," and the same kind of appeal operates behind most of his work. It turns up in science fiction in a _big_ way-- the siblings of Ender Wiggin who wind up running world politics through Usenet flamewars, Pohl and Kornbluth's _The Marching Morons_, the mercenary wisdom (i.e., mercenaries are wise) in Jerry Pournelle's works... There's even a whiff of it in some "critiques of power," because one gets the sense that many critics dearly wish they _had_ the power they critique in others, and perhaps even feel that they really deserve it. (This is sort of why conspiracy theories find such fertile ground among the extreme right.)