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Wow. What I don't know always comes out to bite me in the ass. This is a great story.
I'll take the point. Strauss wasn't alone or even uncharacteristic in the nastiness of infights in literary, scientic, and academic circles.
However, my point was that unlike the story about Popper which highlights some of the hypocrisy of liberalism, the story about Strauss was not hypocritical. It was typical. Strauss considered keeping the intellectual arena clean of liberal rif-raf, a moral virtue. A sort of intellectual manliness. It follows from his fascination with Plato and Nietzsche and the warrior cult.
Anyway, I started On the Open Society, and got bored with it. I will go back to it for its opening discussions of the ancient Greeks, and its developmental trace of ideas that culuminate in the here and now. But that's a major project and involves the argument between my generation and my fathers, and addresses why even the liberals hated 1960s.
In Strauss's letters to Voegelin, they discuss their objections to Popper's appointment. Those discussions claim that Popper's reading and interpretations of Plato are wrong and stupid. (See Faith and Political Philosophy) They don't spell out what was wrong specifically. They just agree that nobody who sees Plato that way, should ever get to spread that interpretation around. This was absurd, Popper read Greek just as well as Strauss and Voegelin, as far as I know.
So when I got Open Society and started on it, there was what I would characterize as the standard liberal interpretation of Plato. In sum, Plato was not a friend of liberal democracy, and that the pursuit of idealism and absolutes lead to the tragic mistakes of Germany and Russia. The usual cold war stuff.
The big deal, I think was this. Strauss and Voegelin were both deeply embedded in the idealist project. They hated the messy, contentious, sloppy sort of back and forth thinking they were surrounded by, in their stupid American students. They was intellectuals. And, they was against Popper as an advocate for this kind of very messy and diverse society...
I never quite finished developing the thoughts on this particular thread. But interestingly, Voegelin and Strauss had a falling out. The minute I opened Voegelin's The New Science of Politics, I saw why. Christ. Voegelin is a great writer, even if I disagree with him in the conclusions. And what an irony. Voegelin follows Plato's idea of cyclic decline away from the ideal and a return to it. That was exactly where Popper started. So what the hell was going on against Popper? I never really found out. Here is Voegelin's opening paragraph:
``The exitence of man in political society is historical existence; and a theory of politics, if it penetrates to principles, must at the same be a theory of history. The following lectures on the central problem of a theory of politics, on representation, will, therefore carry the inquiry beyond a description of the conventionally so-called representative institutions into the nature of represntation as the form by which a political society gains existence for action in history...''
Do you see it? It is the historical line from Plato to Hegel. V goes on:
``To pursue a theoretical problem to the point where the principles of politics meet with the principles of a philosophy of history is not customary today...''
Eric old boy, you sure got that right.
Anyway, thanks for the story. I'd like to hear others, particularly about Popper's buddies Hayek and Gombrich. Andie N once said, ``Of course they knew each other...'' I had to laugh. Okay, but how the hell was I supposed to know in advance of discovering it...
CG