BobW --------
It's hard to explain what Drury missed because she hit the nail on the head with Strauss in so many other ways. From her Preface:
``In this book, I will examine the ways in which Strauss's followers have applied his ideas to American history and politics. I will show how Strauss's ideas have provided a generation of American scholars and writers with their conception of themselves and of their country. I will show how Strauss's political ideas are intimately linked with the political rise of American neoconservatism...'' (xi, Leo Strauss and the American Right)
I think the first aspect of Strauss Drury missed was an explanation as to why Strauss took the positions he did, and why he re-interpreted historical figures the way that he did. To be fair to Drury, the questions I want answers to are not the questions Drury followed. For example, Strauss essentially re-invented Spinoza, pretty much out of thin air. Why?
Without going into too much detail, I think the key to understanding Strauss is to understand his early work on Judaism and Zionism, hence the importance of Spinoza. Drury didn't approach this aspect of Strauss. I am not sure why, but I can guess. As a non-Jew, I found it's pretty tricky stuff to deal with fairly and with some feeling for accuracy.
So here it goes. I think Strauss was simply an old fashioned man, even as a young man. He was offended by the Jewish left and liberals who dominated German-Jewish politics, the sciences, and most particularly the social sciences in the Weimar era. Think of some of his contemporaries like Hannah Arendt, Eric Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and many, many others. These were very progressive people. They were all Jewish, roughly of the same economic background, and all went through the German university system in post-WWI.
Strauss's conservatism arose from his own psyche and his roots as a small town boy made good, and I think he conceived himself as a patriarch. For example, he remained in the Blau-Weiss, (Jewish boy scout club) into his twenties and wrote articles encouraging the older members to become politically active and form a more conservative minded group within the broad collection contending for dominance under a Zionist banner---which at that point were mostly progressives and leftists---with a scary rightwing, e.g. Vladimir Jabotinsky. What attracted Strauss to Jabotinsky was they both considered themselves raised Jweish, but outsiders divorced from their own traditions. It was something neither of them forgave their families. When Strauss tried to promote the Blau-Weiss, Jabotinsky asked how their rifle practice was progressing. The Blau-Weiss was into nature hikes, folk songs, and learning Hebrew. The question answered itself, i.e. what rifles?
So, moving along, in my view Strauss was writing a politics of a proposed German-Jewish identity, before we had such a term. This backgrounds why Strauss was so attractive to US neoconservatives and the Christian right. If you doubt that the US right is essentially an identity movement, then consider that what to do with illegal immigrants is the hot topic of this cycle. What isn't said, is that Mexicans, Chinese, South Asians and others are not really Americans, that is to say, not an authentic American identity.
This odd ball coalition on the right are attempting to write a politics of an American identity. In their case the central identity is a white male elite who dominate US politics and business. The undercurrent of insecurity, and its fabricated histories, the devotion to Christianity, or maybe Judaism, homolies of a golden age America and so forth in the US are echoed and given some potential philosophical weight by Strauss in his re-examination of a multi-cultural and mixed ethnic origins of western liberalism, and in his re-invention the European history of ideas.
But the deeper question is why was Strauss so obsessed with his insistence that western liberalism as it had evolved from the Enlightenment, the French and American Revolution and their attending intellectual milieu, was a failure and a political disaster that had to be repaired? From the US where Strauss lived, the late 1940s through the 1960s US liberal democracy looked pretty damned successful, despite the US anti-commie purges---purges Strauss whole heartedly approved. But Strauss like Voegelin didn't like the unwashed US masses and were not particularly impressed by our homespun liberalism.
Strauss's argument that the liberalism of Weimar tolerated anti-Semiticism and its chaotic government was the consequent cause of the rise of National Socialism was completely ridiculous. The Weimar government was probably the first German government ever to not be openly anti-semitic. When the Weimar Republic took power, suddenly a whole class of Jewish academics were promoted to professorships from docents and lecturers. The whole scientific community with large numbers of Jewish academics put Germany over the top in math, physics, chemistry, engineering, not to mention the social sciences, psychology, sociology, economics, etc----almost overnight. What is now called the Jewish Renaissance was a direct political consequence of the Weimar government's liberal, quasi-socialist civil service policies in higher education.
Weimar's chaos and its fragile coalitions did not cause the reaction. The republic's weakness availed the reactions the opportunity to take over. But in my opinion that weakness has been vastly over rated. After all, most of Europe was in similar straits. France under Leon Blum was no model of stability. The difference was that the rise of the Nazis to power was essentially engineered by sections of the old Wilhemian aristocratic military system together with German corporations, and the most reactionary elements of the petite bourgeoisie. It was no accident these were also the power centers for anti-Semiticism---in England, France, Germany, and Italy. In other words almost the same socio-economic elements in the US who put the rightwing and the necons into power here, had parallels in Germany of the 1930s, as well as the rest of western Europe. And most telling (IMHO) was that a perceived national identity was open to question in all these countries. You can see all these countries attempts to establish their deep historical roots in bizarre competitions in sports like mountaineering, all across the academic spectrum especially in the hard sciences, but also in competing digs in the Middle East looking for `European man', repleat with race studies, skull measurements, you name it.
While Drury recognizes the elite nature of Strauss's political philosophy, and definitely understands we are talking about an elevated few who are the patriarchical masters of the political universe, in short a cabal, what she doesn't quite see is the core psychological or social nature of what the cabal is---and most telling of all how such a cabal is linked to the National Socialists. The other part she doesn't see is how the traditional religious patriarchies in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, a patriarchy of elders as rulers, is found in Strauss and very neatly ties in with the rise of new religious orders around the world.
The one thing that Strauss and Schmitt (Catholic theologian and legal counsel to the Third Reich) agreed on was that the nation has to be a single people, in which there are only volk like us. All others are enemies. The point here is not anti-Semiticism, but identity, identity itself as a collective essence. There were no German Jews, only Germans and Jews, different people, different communities, different identities, hence different nations.
These identity movements were mirror images of each other. This is exactly what Arendt meant when she said Zionism was Germany's gift to the Jews. That is to say in modern terminology, the politics of identity.
Nazism and its popular front was all about a unique historical German identity that had been suppressed by the homogenization of French and English Enlightenment liberalism. The true genius of the German people had been suppressed for centuries, first by the Romans, a Latin civilization, then later by the French and English, also Latin imperial powers. Germany was trapped between the decadent, effete French and English in the west and the horrid barbarians, the nameless hordes of Slavic and other degenerate races in the East, all the while crippled internally by a rat warren of Jews.
But Germany was German, not Latin, certainly never Slavic or Semitic. The true German spirit could now be fully realized without all this foreign and internal alien interference. The National Socialist sales job was that German language, German architecture, German customs, German faces, German archetypes of all sorts would be free at last to carry on their own inner essence and its developmental trajectory into the world and into history itself. And their propagandists could cite almost every German giant from Durer and Goethe, to Hegel and Nietzsche to back them up.
Now it doesn't take a lot of imagination to see why Strauss's political philosophy of a purified identity, whose most salient features could only be understood and embraced by the patriarchy of an elightened and well educated elite few, has found deep roots in the US rightwing polity of an insecure white male minority under threat from the dark hooded hordes from within and from without.
This stuff is really, really nasty and it is utterly tragic and stupid. There is probably no country left in the world that isn't a multicultural plurality that has no business claiming all its people under the same name. And yet almost everywhere, each country is still trying to make believe it is one people, when the truth is they are not.
Look at the French tonight. Although the news doesn't say so, it is mostly likely North Africans, Sub-Saharan Africans and Muslims from all over who are battling against Sarkozy. Little wonder this jerk has so much in common with our jerk. What a great detente. French and Americans together at last, shooting immigrants.
No more cheese eating surrender monkeys. No moniseur. These Frogs are crushing unions, shooting immigrants and talking tough right to work laws, just like us Mericans. Goodbye Freedom Fries. So all you Galois sucking, Chardonnay swelling liberals and commie symps better get right or else.
CG
If that got a little blurred in the end, I blame the fourth martinis of the evening. Sorry it was so late.