Joanna
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I am glad others have enjoyed Sands. He was a real find for me.
What makes Sand (and Kovel) important to me, is he unlocked Leo Strauss---who I am almost sure he never heard of. The link is that Strauss wrote and worked on the Zionist theories of state back in the 1920s, Weimar. Sands or others should realize that the first german republic was philosophically analyzed by several different groups on the right and left, the Frankfurters, Arendt, Heidegger, Mann, Kojeve, as well as Schmitt ... the whole intelligenstia of the period. Zionism was only one part of this incrediable history. The central issue was the nature of the modern nation state. How do you creat such a thing, when it arrives as an imposed condition?
I've never understood Strauss's inner motivations. Why would he write the way he did? His concepts of democracy, state, political philosophy are so undemocratic, so against the multi-cultural sensibility that evolved from post-WWII, that it put him out of time---and that same sense of being out of time has permeated the US political establishment and its insane policies in the Middle East, its ridiculous immigration policies, the whole ambiguous blurring of separation between church and state ... etc.
Strauss also worked on the `Invention of the Jewish People', deliberately re-constructing a political-philosophical history of ideas. He traced backward from Herman Cohen to Mendelsshon to Spinoza to Maimonides... Christ the minute I heard that title, I recognized what Strauss was doing for most of the 1920s. Strauss didn't know it was an invention. He thought he was unearthing, or as Foucault would say, doing the archeology of Jewish intellectual history.
Truth is, its both/and, not either/or. The main problem was that Strauss dug out the right-wing version, following a sense of European conservatism heading towards Hobbes and eventually back to Plato. This was over against the liberal to enlightened and more radical side. You can write a liberal trace, which is what Arendt did. You can trace either if you want. In the intellectual currents of my generation, we went for the Reds against these stodgy old authoritarian fucks---but it has turned out they won. That's what the neocons are, the reaction. Why did they win? Because an authoritarian styled state is favored by its power elite.
It has been a great little private adventure---this last week or so. Strauss had turned into a mystery novel. Who the fuck was Leo Strauss? Now I think I have an answer----a complicated answer, but a much better answer than I had before. There are all sorts of deep psychological and sociological themes going on. Strauss was twenty in 1920. He was inventing himself as a Jewish intellectual of the right, while Zionism was inventing the modern Jew from its historical-religious reminent, just as Germany was inventing itself as a modern republic. And wow did some of those projects go bad.
The old Bad Subjects list comes to mind, the personal and the political, re-enscribed as a history project....
CG