[lbo-talk] Re: Welcome to Weimar

Diane Monaco diane.monaco at EMICH.EDU
Fri Jan 30 09:41:47 PST 2004


Curtiss wrote:


>Here's what I take from this:
>
>1. Strauss thinks Schmitt's formulation of the political in
>_The Concept of the Political_ isn't sharp enough...
>
>4. "Welcome to Weimar" means: we're in a transitional stage between
>a society with formal freedoms and tolerance to an authoritarian one
>based on ideological homogeneity and a constant state of war.
>Strauss' more-Schmitt-than-Schmitt concept of the political is
>the theoretical blueprint for this.
>
>Curtiss
>
>-------------
>
>Yup. Stunning isn't? The deeper I go into the mind of Strauss, the
>darker it gets. In case the list doesn't know who Schmitt was... well,
>look him up. There is plenty on him. He was a theology and law
>professor who was appointed to the bench by the Third Reich because of
>his political theology and thorough going anti-Semiticism, the legal
>litmus test of the times. But alas he wasn't quite pure enough so the
>SS denounced him in 1938-9. Whether that meant his appointment was
>rescinded or just that he had to take a lower profile in public I don't
>know. After WWII he reconstructed himself as a Catholic
>theologian. Nice huh?
>
>Chuck Grimes

Curtiss and Chuck,

Weimar as a __transitional stage between a society with formal freedoms and tolerance to an authoritarian one based on ideological homogeneity and a constant state of war__, was how I was reading it as well. The problem I guess I'm having with this understanding of Strauss and the followers we're now dealing with: Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Robertson, etc., is that Nazism, the consequence of the liberal democracy of the Weimar Republic according to the neocons, was also an autocracy based on ideological homogeneity with a constant state of war mentality. In other words, the autocratic, centralized, homogenous structure/system the neocons feel is needed to keep evil forces/indivduals in check, is the exact structure needed by evil forces to effectively and absolutely wreak havoc -- the Nazi Holocaust.

I mean, why did Leo Strauss or Irving Kristol and why do their neocon followers NOT see the homogeneous and centralized autocratic structure/system itself as the problem? The only difference seems to be how one views the autocrat in power. Good? Evil? A centralized and ideologically homogeneous autocratic structure can take either kind of autocrat -- as if we could ever really have an absolute and agreed upon definition of good and evil -- a long way.

But I guess Chuck is right, the more you look into this thinking, the more confused and ludicrous it looks (my words really :))

All best, Diane



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