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Yes, but it was quick sketch to present the general problem, and then too Strauss is my focus and not the US necons. The underlying issue is how to mount a critique of idealism. It is extremely seductive to march in and start ripping into the ideas themselves. When that is done, then you have already fallen into the same trap---as you indicate. The method is to historize the people and the conditions of their period--agreed. But this is an extremely tricky thing to do. I think you have to do both---take the ideas apart and show how they are linked to the people involved, the period and conditions---and what's wrong with ideas both theoretically and practically speaking.
This isn't an easy thing to do because of the extraordinarily diverse and rich political, economic and social conditions of Weimar.
The central theme for Strauss in Weimar was the position of German Jews and the modern German state. Within his context, it came down to a crisis of identity. The Zionist groups were attacking the liberal solution of assimulation as a non-life---yet the majority of German Jews were voting SDP (social democrat) precisely because the SDP was actively dismantling discrimination in civil service and academia in particular---providing for the very assimulation that the Zionists were attacking. This historical push-pull was the obvious central dynamic for Strauss.
The class dialectics of bourg v. prols wasn't part of the equation because the vast majority of German Jews were not industrial or agricultural proletariat. Hence the estranged position of many German Jews. They could be threatened from below by crude anti-semitic nationalism and religion and from above by a more sophisticated nationalism linked to high flown literary-styled German philosophy. German literature and philosphy were the fundamental cultural sources of forming a national German identity, and in both cases there were plenty of anti-semitic themes to make it almost invitably a factor to contend with. For example within German idealism there were social theories that located Jews as `material' and therefore less suited to ascend the great ladder of thought to reach true idealism, i.e become full professors of philosophy for example)... The consequence of these theories--I don't want to get into this too far---eventually morph into social science race theories and hierarchies of social order, etc, etc...)
For Strauss, the political-theological question was how to form an identity based politics from a minority position (which should sound very familiar to the 60s crowd). On the other hand, there was no political concensus (no national identity) at all in Weimar---since the whole country was torn over the same issue of forming a national identity---a political consensus---within its first republic.
Just to give you a flavor of the problem, in 1925 there were eleven different political parties contending for 493 seats in the Reichstag with the SDP holding 131 and the DVP (national liberal) party with 103. The SDP and DVP couldn't form a majority without the Zentrum (Catholic), DNVP (nationalist), KDP (Communist) or Nazis---all seen as bad choices for SDP. So the result was a series of six coalition (linking SDP and Zentrum) governments in four years 1924-8.
Viewing Weimar (through Strauss) as a crisis of national identity sets up the view of the US 60s-70s when a somewhat similar breakdown of social-cultural cohension took place (or rather the illusion of such a mythical unity was dissolved). Of course the US period lacked the extreme amplification of Weimar's economic collapse. In the US case, the arrival of civil rights and black power movements (along with other minorities and feminism) deeply unhinged the US cultural elite's own sense of identity and ownership. America wasn't America anymore (evidently anybody was included). America was something different (what it had always been---uncovered). The material amplification came in the form of the Vietnam war, the draft, the war's economic sink-hole and of course the military defeat of the US.
The neocon reaction to these pressures was to try and re-constitute a national identity built from various idealistic elements, which included Strauss... and sotto voce provided a racialized identity for clueless straight white guys---while promising the white majority re-entrance to empowerment, centrality of place---blah, blah.... This latter element is difficult to illuduciate because it is intentionally disguised---something along the lines of the early German idealism with its platonic dualism of ideal and material forms---where of course the pure German inhabits the ideal realm while the lesser orders including German Jews inhabit the material realm. In the US neocon mythology as a cultural elite they inhabit such a privilaged and ideal realm and are the purest expression of American ideals (Ken doll clones), while the rest of us mongrel hordes toil way in the mire of facts and material uncertainties.
But I am more interested in the psycho-social process by which Strauss arrived where he did----when many others from virtually the same material circumstances arrived very far to the left of Strauss. Understanding this process is how I identify with this topic, since I don't like Strauss and consider him an enemy. In this story we are all bourgeoisie and there is a fundamental split going on---but it's a split, went it really gets down to it, I don't understand.
Dennis Redmond steps in here:
``But this constructs yet another ahistorical entity -- a mythical beast called "idealism", which recurs in identical forms in history -- rather than concrete ideologies of domination and resistance thereto. One has to look at the actual content, rather than the forms. Adorno's mature work (post-WW II) involves a stinging, relentless critique of Weimar culture, and how it was the anticipation not just of Fascism, but of that stage of monopoly capitalism called the Pax Americana.''
I agree its important to examine the content---but the form is the main problem. Seen from another view, I would say that the forms of idealism themselves render the material world (including society) as an undifferentiated, homogenous and meaningless stuff, such that the content can not transform its vessel or become such a vessel---rather the vessel (form) articulates both the shape and meaning of its material. For example categorizing the content of ideologies as dominate and resistive vessels doesn't escape the same dualistic (and idealistic) trap.
I am not sure how to go about a critique of this problem, except to juxtaposition it to a crude historical empiricism---empiricism broadly understood as a self-regulating process of observation and theory, where whatever narrative theme evolves out doesn't gain much more than a provisional phenomenological status.
``But it's not about understanding for the neocons, it's about control. They want to dominate the world...''
Of course. But I want to destory them and I need to understand them in order to do that. The only way I can figure out how (other than shooting them) is by de-constructing their mythological system with a combination of facts, historical examples, and miscellaneous narratives.
It should go without saything the necons are the suck-up running dog lackies and ideological pimps for the neoliberal capitalist pig hegmon. But gee, don't you think we should dig a little deeper?
Shit. I've got to go to work tomorrow... BTW thanks Dennis for sketching out Adorno---it helped.
CG