Good luck, Chuck! Michael
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Thanks for the kind thoughts...but it wasn't dos. It was freebsd, or unix.
I have paper back up on the most important stuff. The only project that I really regret loosing was a first chapter on Leo Strauss from last year. But nobody I read it to was interested, so I had more or less abandoned the effort. I have the Strauss chapter and the background in a large notebook. Leo joins all the other writing crap I could never sustain the effort to finish.
Once Hersh's stories on Abu Ghraib hit the news last April, much of the point and my own motivation to write about Strauss was erased.
It is now an empirical fact that no amount of political spin or propaganda can erase. Abu Ghraib is the final solution to the Iraqi problem, and the final solution to all the rest of the world that isn't American. The answer to the Arab question. The answer to the Islamic question. It is the answer to the question, where does Leo Strauss's political philosophy lead us? One picture from Abu Ghraib was worth all the reading and writing I had done. It erased the entire point in an instant.
In a few paragraphs summary then..
I was going to analyze Strauss's background with the early Zionists, and his break with them over their secularism, of all things. They were not Jewish enough for Strauss! He turns to the revival movement under Cohen of a moral philosophy of Judaism carried on by Julius Guttmann. Strauss ultimately rejected the rationalism of Cohen and Guttmann in their embrace of the Enlightenment as seen through Moses Mendelssohn. Strauss traced Jacobi and Mendelssohn back to Spinoza, and he of course rejected Spinoza. Then he examined Uriel de Costa, and moves back to Maimonides. Always backward, always looking for some moral absolute that is neither divine or secular and yet somehow sacred. Something like a political philosophy of law that must be believed as absolute, but without God to back it up. Moses without Sinai.
It was an odd journey that followed both the rational and the irrational, philosophical and religious themes in a mix of thought where Strauss tried to understand Jacobi's critique of Kant in his own PhD thesis. He finally turned to Carl Schmitt (German Catholic adaptation to Nazism), because of the correspondence between the absolute ideal of a `people' and its embodiment as a `nation.' This is the philosophical link between the more extreme Zionists like Jabotinsky and the more liberal Nazis like Schmitt. The link depends on the belief in an essentialism, geist, or spirit embodied by a singular people. It follows from the agreement that one could not be both German and Jewish---the one thing they agreed on. (How could geist as an abstraction embody the particularities of one people as opposed to all people? Never mind.)
In one of the more Machiavellian twists I have ever read about, Strauss asked for and got letters from Ernest Cassirer his thesis advisor by then Rector at the University of Hamburg, Carl Schmitt chief legal counsel to the National Socialist party, and Julius Guttman director of the Jewish Studies Institute in Berlin who had sponsored his book on Spinoza. They all recommend him for a Rockefeller foundation fellowship to study Rousseau's papers in Paris! He gets the fellowship and moves to Paris not more than a few months before the disastrous Hindenburg appointment of Hitler as Chancellor, the Reichstagg fire, and the election frauds that give the Nazis a majority in the National Assembly in January 1933.
So Leo skips town.
I was reading the background on Schmitt, following the more detailed political events of late 1932, and trying to figure out how Strauss could twist his own mind around all this duplicity while he was reading Rousseau. Well, forget Rousseau. He was obviously too sincere for Strauss. Strauss was already planning to extend his fellowship and move to London and study the more lovable Hobbes.
At just about that point, Seymour Hersh's expose appeared in the New Yorker and CBS did their tv report. When I saw the now famous photo of the guy on the box, I thought that's it. There is no more. Abu Ghraib was a postcard from Goya in hell. All the high neocon chatter at the Pentagon, the Weekly Standard, the American Enterprise Institute, and DC cocktail parties about the triumph of American liberal democracy ended with Abu Ghraib.
It was simply no longer necessary to convict Leo for crimes against liberal humanist thought. It was as if he had done himself.
What's more interesting is the story of unravelling Strauss only to discover the end leads to the headlines. It's the kind of story I love. It all takes place in the mind, as a kind of absurd reflection.
If it were a film, I would have whoever was playing Hannah Arendt, finish her cigarette, sit back on the couch with a gin and tonic in hand and smile. ``So you found out that Leo was a shit. Well, my dear, it was certainly not news to any of us.''
C