I have a few days off work and have tried to resurrect what I conceitedly think of as The Strauss Project---which amounts to about twenty five measly pages of breathless semi-stream of conscious historical background putting Strauss in Weimar, Judaism, Zionism, Philosophy, and the German academic tradition. Strauss in situ. The point is to lock the motherfuck down into his historical moment, exactly because he would hate it, completely dispute such a view provided any insight, and rail in all manner of ways against such a project. Everything I've learned about his period (which conincides with my own father) and the position Strauss inhabited, has provided profound insights into why he took the political positions he did. Boys and girls, doing your history lesson works. Whether I ever get to writing or even can write about all this---hell reading and thinking is about all I have time for.
I've been struggling forever to get a point of view on Strauss, get some firm ground from which to essentially destroy his pretense to speak on democracy or the modern political world with any authority at all. I intuitively loath him, but it is very difficult to pin down exactly why he pisses me off. He reminds me of almost everything I dislike and want to change. Mostly it is an attitude that issues from almost everywhere these days that those in power are in their proper position in relation to the rest of us. That we have to sit here and eat their ideological crap and like it, because they know best. Strauss just exudes this elitist attitude in almost every word he writes. And he almost always writes against the historical figures often credited with producing the very ideas we could use to make this country more democratic, more enlightened, more tolerant and more livable. Turning this loathing into an extended rational essay is a very difficult problem for me.
I don't have the intellectual and philosophical background and training to really write what I want, which is to bury him deeper than Hitler's bones. That is to incinerate him in an the incandescent light of the radical American perspective. This latter tradition is something I have convinced myself exists since my nose first smell tear gas and I heard the sound of billy clubs cracking skulls. Strauss is its intellectual enemy, pure and simple. He stands for every university administrator who ever called the cops in the name of free speech and law and order on me. He stands for every professor who taught authoritarian snobbism was the most valued intellectual position of all---paid to do so in a public university and in a mass democracy at that. Screw you guys.
But just being an enemy is not enough. We are talking big league stuff (where I don't belong), the grand themes of the history of ideas, the history of philosophy, the history of societies that have grabbled with how get rid of their elites and tyrants, and rule themselves, the stuff that made Marx such a luminary.
A straight forward Marxist critique of Strauss is not enough. Strauss was the product of the petite bourgeoisie. He wrote a political philosophy (ideological superstructure) for the ruling elite in an Enlightenment inspired state, and he give this ideological tract the cache of classical liberal thought. EOF. Not good enough. Not nearly. And certainly not critical enough to discredit Strauss within the very bourgeois democracy where he has been resurrected by righwing ideologues to justify all manner of tyrantical atrocities against the better grain and better history of this country.
In any event, I think I have finally found something I can really use. It is a book of letters between Strauss and Eric Voegelin. Faith and Political Philosophy, The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934-1964, trans & eds, Emberley P., Cooper B., Penn State Press, 1993, 368p. Unfortunately most of the volumn is taken up with apolgistic babble and essays by various contributors, along with Strauss and Voegelin essays found elsewhere. Canadians should recognize the editors and translators names. My guess (in complete ignorance) is these guys are at the forefront of blasting whatever modest gains the Canadians have managed to install to promote social justice, liberal governance, and other suspect reforms.
Here is the hint I found on a program on how to proceed against Strauss:
``The existence of man in political society is historical existence; and a theory of politics, if it penetrates to principle, must at the same time be a theory of history. The following lectures on the central problem of the theory of politics, on representation, will, therefore, carry the inquiry beyond a description of the conventionally so-called representative institutions into the nature of representation as a form by which a political society gains existence for action in history. Moreover, the analysis will not stop at this point but will proceed to an exploration of the symbols by which political societies interpret themselves as representatives of a transcendent truth. And the manifold of such symbols, finally, will not form a flat catalogue but prove amenable to theoretization as an intelligible succession of phrases in a historical process. An inquiry concerning representation, if its theoretical implications are unfolded consistently, will in fact become a philosophy of history.''
(Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, Uni Chicago Press, 1952, p1.)
Well, I think I will forego transcendent truth and any philosophy of history, except the most obvious. History is what the conquerors say it is. So it stands to reason, the subjects of these conquests have different stories to tell. The same general principle which doesn't transcend anything applies to the history of ideas, where only the elite contribute. As a result most of the political philosophy in that history amounts to a vast defense of the elite and essentially secures its position in that history, and parenthetically in the world. The more important problem though is that this apparently irrelevant history is in fact the repository of our own ideas on the nature of the state, our civil rights, and how to combat our oppressors.
The power elite justify their right to rule not just through their wealth and position but also through ideas or ideologies borrowed from that historical repository. Call it the canon of state. So there is a certain importance to fighting against and creating alternatives to those kinds of ideas. It is a symbolic fight, but we are also ruled by the symbols and ideas we embrace, that is how we understand the world and our position in it. And when we imagine or attempt to construct alternative institutions to those that oppress us, we don't want to make the same mistakes. In other words we don't want to just build the same old conceptual boxes. One way to insure that we don't is to understand the ideas, the general political principles that provided the theoretical armatures that oppressed us in the first place---and then proceed to make up some of our own through whatever anarchistic avenues we choose. I don't give a damned whether what I discover in my world is sanctioned by anybody in the history of ideas. Do you?
In any event, what makes Voegelin interesting to me, is that he seems to have read everything Strauss read and much more, in ways that Strauss was completely incapable of understanding. So, Voegelin then stands as something like a potential critic of Strauss, but from a much stronger and internal position than the current wave of rants. Anyway Voegelin is good enough at this point. I am not under any illusion about Voegelin's politics. He is essentially a nazis, just like Strauss, only better at it. But not quite as good as Heidegger. I haven't read Voegelin yet, but I already have some intellectual ammunition waiting in my understanding of Cassirer who promoted a much more radical and relativistic view.
So, for anyone interested, try this correspondence. It is fascinating and perhaps without knowing it links Strauss to the very traditions and ideas he rails against. What emerges in the arguments in these letters is far more critical of Strauss (than he imagined or) than any of the contemporary arguments put out against Strauss.
Bottom line. Strauss was by comparison to Voegelin ridiculous and essentially offered very weak arguments to Voegelin's more penetrating discussions on the same problems and topics.
One interesting thing I found was that Strauss was involved in an academic nastiness (1950) to keep Karl Popper from getting a position at University of Chicago. In an inital letter Strauss asked Voegelin what he though about Popper's work. Voegelin went ballastic with a long and detailed vitrol. Strauss then showed Voegelin's letter to one of the faculty on the hiring committee or a member with influence over the committee. Then Strauss writes Voegelin:
``In confidence I would like to tell you that I showed your letter to my friend Kurt Riezler, who was thereby encouraged to throw his not inconsiderable influence into the balance against Popper's probable appoinment here. You thereby helped to prevent a scandal''.
By the way, Riezler was another of the damned nazis imports. He might have been the guy who pushed to get Strauss hired. Who knows. Well, even worse, ``Riezler in his youth was the secretary of Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, German Chancellor at the start of World War I.''
Jesus fucking Christ (I just found that quote on the web). For the record, Hollweg was appointed by the KaIser as a replacement for Bismark who had evidently gone soft on democracy (feature that)--in order to put the German economy (Hollweg was minister of interior, i.e industrial and economic development) onto a total war footing. German industrial production was running at 15% growth...highest in the world. Hollweg tried to negociate an arms race treaty with the British---mostly for economic reasons. The German navy was eating most of the German imperial budget with a spend til you drop plan. Oh, yeah, real democrat old Kurt, peace loving surrender monkey if I ever heard one. We were fucking crawling in these god damned ex-patriot Prussians motherfuckers in the 50s and 60s---and they were my teachers?
Meanwhile back in academia, Strauss and Voegelin loathed Popper, a good omen, viscerally hated him, and especially despised the idea of an Open Society, i.e. The Open Society and Its Enemies--dread, another must read. This gave me a real clue. Popper was contemporary of Strauss, also Jewish, also raised in the same academic tradition, left Austria because of the Nazis, etc, etc.
Important to me (and provides a profound insight) is Feyerabend studied under Popper and also went against him, but from the opposite direction, the extraordinarily democratic and free position---there is no method. Feyerabend was a Lieutenant in German Army, got critically wounded and cribbled on the Eastern Front fighting the Russians by doing traffic patro, and was the furthest thing from a Nazis I ever met. Well, of course I would say that. He was my philosophy professor at Berkeley and gave me an A. Unfortunately, he gave everbody A's, since he didn't believe in grading. On the downside, he inspired me, that I could be a critical thinker. There was nothing to it at all, just guts, and immunity to derision.
The stated reasons that Voegelin gave against Popper were essentially trivial: that Popper didn't know what he was talking about, that he borrowed Bergson without understanding, that he had a misinformed reading of Plato, that he mis-translated Hegel (a virtual impossibility since they were all fluent in German) and other sorts of compliants. The compliants amounted to what a professor might make about a graduate student thesis he didn't like---but against which he wouldn't bother or might in fact not be able to mount a serious critique. In other words a whiner.
What is mysterious to me is Voegelin. After obvious personal reasons for Voegelin's obsequience toward Strauss who started off as his editor at the New School of Social Research's political journal, why bother to persist in this friendship in letters? Only one answer really. They both hated the US dominated modern world, our disorderly mass society of dim wits, the horrible materialism of the masses and other elitist fare. Basically, they shared the culture shock of the German academic elite to the post-WWII US---my breeding ground, in all its sorted and sprawling squaller, intellectual voids, and indulgences in simple pleasures (sex, drugs, rock n'roll---now add, rap, video games and the internet). They hated Dah Masses, as they say in Chicago.
It is certainly long passed due that Dah Masses talk back.
>From the Dah Masses point of view, these guys are intellectual snots
of the authoritarian law and order variety and use their biggest words
to make fancy sounding excuses to elimenate the few liberities and
moral lassitude Dah Masses still enjoy.
Their idea of a perfect republic is a slave plantation done up in fake Greek architecture. They sit on the big porch, fanning themselves, drinking mint julips and perfect their refined rhetoric to support the Dread Scott decision in the name of state's rights. All their talk against the abolitionists comes down to snobbery. It is simply poor manners Sir, to talk of abolishing that fine, old venerable institution. Why it's been with us since ancient times.
In concrete reality Strauss, Voegelin, Riezler, this whole school of political philosophy, sees political institutions as the means to perfect the social order. They are stuck in their youthful horror at the wild and wooly Weimar, and blame Weimar for the rise of National Socialism. It never occurred to them their own political reaction, a demand for law and order was the very concrete source of support, the very political force that brought about National Socialism and virtually insured it would come to dominant their countries. If there had been no National Socialist party, Strauss, Voegelin, Riezler and others would have invented a political party that would have been nearly like at, minus the antisemiticism. (I leave the implicit referrence to Zionism as an exercise.)
After escaping to this country, the reactionary wing of German exiles have nothing to say about constructing institutions that insure equality, liberity and justice, let alone social justice for all. They had nothing to say, simply because they've never lived in such a place, and had no idea that one of the consequences of such a life was exactly the careless disorder and a sloppy mess that surrounded them. Here the elites are often less sophisticated than whole swaths of the masses and the disinfranchised, concepts like class break down, there is no official language, there is practically no history or any sense of national tradition, common customs come from all over the world, there is no coherent sense of national identity, and on and on.
However, I'd like to remind our German regiment now in their graves that this mess of ours also produced mostly by accident and disorder, great writers, great artists, great scientists, and just great people who made vast contributions to the human project (see the UN Charter on Human Rights for example) and did not forget where they came from---the disorderly and oppressed masses.
On the other hand, the great high and mighty ordering principles these exiles esponsed and would have us adopt, managed to ruin an entire nation and destory most of Europe in the process. As these great ordering principles have been adopted here by our own uncultured power elite in reaction to a hauntingly parallel development of US 1960s to Weimar, well sure enough, now we are managing to ruin ourselves and threaten to take half the earth with us. And then too, there are always the crazy Arabia desert tribes and the damned Persians to worry about.
As a final note of profound mis-understanding of history, our honorable German regiment based both their elitism and their call to order on the ideas in Plato and Aristotle. What they didn't seem to see in these works was a remarkably similar historical position to their own. Of course they saw such a parallel, they just didn't it read it quite the way they should have. Plato and Aristotle came at the end of the great creative age of Greece, not the beginning. Plato and Aristotle didn't found their world, but another. In fact the world they treasured was founded in social, political and economic chaos, mysticism, untempered speculation in money and thought, occasional mob rule, clashing factions, and stunning reversals and defeats in war. In other words, the Feyerabend principle, anything goes and the corollary, anybody can do it. That's were Feyerabend got the idea---from studying the pre-Socratics. Pre-Socratics, get it? Before Socrates. The later call to order and method for the mind, the society, and the world would indeed be taken up by Plato's elites, and the very creative modes of thought and life of free inquiry Plato thought were based on well ordered principles by an educated elite, such principles, such a systems, such elites would in fact destroy the society he knew. The same call to order that killed the putative Athenian republic would go on to build a military empire and conquer as much of the ancient world as it could.
So, here we are, and its de ja vu all over again.
CG