Joanna -----------
There is a kind of equivalent to this not reading but lots of opinion on something in art history and criticism by people who don't know how to make art. They get their phd without picking up a bush where they have to make something.
I reconfronted this problem the minute I read Shadia Dury's take down of LS. I had to read LS which turned out to be his opinion of what a long list of other philosophers had written. So then I had to read them and see what LS was doing. He had read them alright, but he had written mostly bad interpretations, making their original arguments into straw men. I finally got him in a direct contradiction in Hobbes, Leviathan Thank god LS had footnoted similar passages in De Cive. Well so I didn't have to go through the whole tedious Hobbes.
Bad scholarship or a lie, I couldn't tell. When LS turned to Calvin, I stopped. I am not going to read and analyze Calvin, period, unless somebody pays me. And I was only working on LS's first book on Spinzoa----another fascinating character in an intensely interesting time and place, Amsterdam 1660s. Strauss hated him on some twisted principle I could never figure out. But this gave me a lot of insights into the current push pull battle with Israel and US Jews, and the enlightenment principle of freedom of speech for intellectuals like Kushner.
Nobody I know could understand why I found LS fascinating and he was such a rightwing pig anyhow... It was the fun of doing scholarship, like I had never done in school against an intellectual enemy. Catch him out. LS had footnoted his own passage, which directly contradicted what Hobbes and written when you track back to the source. There's is a reward somehow in that.
CG