Dennis and Chuck dismiss the US and all its works. But that seems a bit eccentric to me. The US is still the most productive country in the world (using such simple metrics as labour productivity, output and so on). Yes, some exciting things are happening in China, India and Brazil, and even in sleepy Europe - but America is still the most important country in the world economy. More than that, it is still one of the places where the most interesting cultural, intellectual, scientific and political innovations come from. Of course there are limitations, but the point is to overcome the limitations, and make the most of the positives, isn't it?
James Heartfield
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I assume the Chuck mention is me CG and not Chuck Munson... A long rift follows.
I don't dismiss the US in the sense of its people, works, creativity, science and left styled political work. It's the governance systems (and economic directions) and political party envelop I want to escape. It is extremely oppressive in the psychological sense---a kind of insane mind war that's going on here. Consider what it's like to be a citizen of a country that is laying waste the earth on a titanic scale and is at wars with about 1.5 billion people labelled Muslim, not to mention everybody who speaks Spanish.
This mental climate has made it almost impossible to think straight, be clear headed, and get back some of that creative spirit. We are fighting the same media-public-mind wars on every issue over and over and over: abortion, evolution, free market theories, immigration, and so on. The right dominants discourse with its total bullshit.
In my appraisal of our cultural production, we've been in decline since at least the 1970s. I try every now and again to figure this out. But I am stumped. About the only explanation that makes sense is the enormous work pressure and need to make money as opposed to work that nobody wants to pay for.
Anyway I have some questions for the English crew. These are for background on Leo Strauss. When he left Germany in about 1928-9 he first moved to Paris. I have a pretty good idea of what the political and intellectual climate was at the time, by having read a lot of Andre Gide and Andre Malraux. Gide kept journals and they contain a lot of cultural and period issues description. Strauss hated Paris. So his next move was to London and then Oxford where he wrote on Hobbes. Michael Oakeshott wrote a good review of his Hobbes book. Strauss liked England, which makes me wonder about England.
I don't trust either MO or LS's judgment on Hobbes. So I need a link or reference that gives the best standard version of opinion on Hobbes, particularly his views on religion. Yes, I am lazy. I don't want to study Hobbes.
So, James give your own views of Hobbes---if you think they are representative of a liberal-left view in UK academic circles. My intuitative take on the little I've been forced to read, Hobbes was a neocon asshole. Strong state to oppress rotten masses.
The other thing I need to know a little about was the intellectual and political climate in London in the 1930s including the general sense of antisemitism at the time. I also need to know what's thought of Harold Laski. Laski arranged for Strauss to make contacts in NYC and get a one semester lectureship at Columbia. I have a general impression from having read about three volumns of George Orwell's press and magazine articles---but I need more. After Columbia for a one year lectureship Strauss got a job at The New School.
I am trying to put together an intellectual biography of Strauss using a combination of Strauss as a political philosopher, and how his ideas are responses to the shifting intellectual and political climates of the places he lived. Hopefully it gives a better picture of him. There is really nothing about him like it. There seems to be only two camps on Strauss. The haters like Shadia Drury who doesn't do him justice and the lovers like Stephen Smith who try to make him a liberal. The truth I think is very sloppy scholarship. It is really a scandle how bad both sides are with their subject.
Once Strauss gets to New York, I have a pretty good list of the dominant intellectuals at the time. Wiki The New York Intellectuals for the list. Many are the parents and grandparents of the current crop of neoconservatives. They move in two directions, one right and one moderate left, which you can see in the comparison between Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. Anti-Stalinism is one thing which all were in a chorus of unity. The real dividing line came after WWII with the rise of McCarthy. Few were willing to denounce this turn and they compromised themselves mightly, including Arendt with her Origins of Totalitarianism. There are undercurrents that I am not sure how to unearth, but they basically follow the high level of antisemitism in the late 30s to mid-50s. As a kid growing up, I could see it because my father was an antisemite. This had to have some impact, but its hard to unravel, except in the sense of an everyday over determination of Jewish identity within an American context. My own view of this milieu is not good. Most with the exception of Arendt were basically gossip columnists of the chattering left variety. A sort of typical American media superficiality.
Here is a letter to Karl Lowith in 1933. It gives you a picture of who Strauss was as a man:
http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=41077
The Nazis are the wrong parallel, even though that was his German milieu. Think Il Duce instead, a firm Roman hand, like Julius Ceasar. That was his idea of good governance? Where did he get it? Two basic sources. The first comes from his concept of Judaism and Zionism---classic patriarchies. For example Moses was not a liberal. In other words the Old Testament. This was why Schlomo Sand was so good to read. It also helps to study the Israelis and the militarization of their society under increasingly authoritarian command structures. The other source comes from the ancient Roman and Greek writers who are living in these authoritarian regimes.
Always in the back of your mind, you have to remember the ancient polis was composed of the well to do, sitting on top of a slave society and landed peasantry. And it was this concept that formed the basis of the US constitution and republican government until the white yeoman class started to have a public voice about the time of Andrew Jackson. The horror was the Indian wars, the slave acts and states rights---that's the American answer.
Strauss never bothered himself with these details of class structure, economic conditions, and the actual historical facts of life. He lived in an ideological realm where theory ruled.
I finally figured out that Strauss was part of a tradition in political philosophy, which Isaah Berlin tried to characterize as the counter-enlightenment. I think Berlin was wrong about what constituted the counter-enlightenment, and I'd love to hear what others have to say. I follow the Cassirer path, which extracted the relativistic view from these counter-enlightenment thinkers and turned it into a new basis for liberalism. But this isn't where Berlin went. He blamed the relativism on the counter-enlightenment and made it into the problem rather than the solution to the liberal dilemma. He in effect turned himself into a cold war liberal. I'd like to hear about that general topic too. This weird problem goes to the heart of the US experience and the supposedly weak spine concept of multiculturalism.
In my view the relativistic tradition of multiple value structures gives anthropology and other social sciences a wonder tool for understanding the diverse worldviews of various cultures and their rough or operational equivalence. Cassirer started with Giambattista Vico. Berlin was focusrd on de Maistre.
This strange conflict over relativism goes to the center of the competition between Germany and France for continental dominance after the French Revolution---believe it or not. The Germans carry a giant grudge match with the French from roughly Napoleon to WWI. The historical currents are really amazing to read. What they reflect is the on-going battle for the dominance over Europe proper against the English global hegemon---in the ideological realm.
After Hobbes, Strauss writes for The Journal of Social Research. I need some idea of what this journal represented. Most of Strauss's contributions are book reviews or short essays, most of which are as usual unintelligiably ambiguous. He closes the 1940s with a book on Xenophon, called On Tyranny. I really need help here. Read the wiki on Xenophon to see what the problem is. Was Xenophon a contribution to modern liberalism or not?
``The author, often called in English the "Old Oligarch", detests the democracy of Athens and the poorer classes, but he argues that the Periclean institutions are well designed for their deplorable purposes. Leo Strauss has argued that this work is in fact by Xenophon, whose ironic posing he believes has been utterly missed by contemporary scholarship. ''
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophon
You see the problem?
Strauss really begins to shine during the 1950s and re-interprets US liberalism into its neoconservative version. This gets to the period I know about directly. Remember both the civil rights and anti-war movements main battles were fought against liberals and the bone headed Stalinist left of the period. At the theory level how do you rescue Marx from Stalin, which became the central issue with hopes going to Cuba mosty.
There is a very interesting intellectual-cultural mystery I would like to solve. Most of the Frankfurt school got to New York and left for LA. Why? Why did most of the left Weimar culture wing go to LA, including Brecht BTW. It wasn't just Adorno. The list was long. There is the simple answer, Hollywood, writing jobs, etc. Was that all there was to it? The McCarthy era was devote to getting rid of these people. Even so, they left a thin residue, a kind of echo or memory in my mind. I never know what it was, until many years later...
CG