Carrol
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Chuck Grimes Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2012 7:55 PM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: [lbo-talk] Shorris on Strauss
After learning who Earl Shorris was, from a blog by Louis Proyect, I found an essay Shorris wrote on Leo Strauss.
http://www.embeddedlive.com/pdfs/Harpers.pdf
``I have been told many times that any attempt to write seriously about Leo Strauss for other than an academic publication is a fool's errand. Since I am accustomed to running such errands, I read the late professor's hooks, two books and countless articles about his books, and set out to say what he
had said and how it had gained such influence over the current political regime. I failed at this, not once but several times: too abstract, too rabbinical, too long, too short, too difficult, who cares? It was easy enough to find popular articles about Strauss. They all made much the same case: all neoconservatives are Straussians. But they did not attempt to say whether all Straussians were neoconservatives. In fact, they did not appear to know what Leo Strauss had said about the philosophers or what his disciples had made of his work. The New York Times got the names of some Straussians in government right, but not the names of the institutions where
he taught and the dates and other such arcana. Don't blame them, at least not for their ignorance of Strauss's work. Leo Strauss is more difficult to read than almost anyone, including Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Joyce at his
most involuted and eloquent. The reason for the difficulty grows out of Strauss's intent: he believed in what you and I would call bad writing. He buttered it with the word esoteric, but bad is the right word, unless you prefer lousy.''
Then today I found a critique of the Shorris essay which is here:
http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/2012/06/earl-shorris-and-popular -anti.html
``How do these attempts to argue that Leo Strauss was the power behind the Bush throne hold up almost a decade later? How does Shorris's piece fare among them?
My provisional answer is to the first question is that these articles, plays, and documentaries explained both too little and too much. On the one
hand, they were part of a much larger tendency to see the Bush Administration--especially post-9/11--as representing a much more radical break with the past than it in fact did. The too-little-acknowledged continuities have become clearer now that we have had three years during which a Democratic administration has not, in fact, reversed many of the policies that critics found so appalling during the Bush years. Discovering a previously obscure, foreign, reactionary thinker as the secret cause of an
administration's actions nicely fit the view of the Bush administration as a
radical break from the past. The focus on Strauss and his followers as the secret power behind the Bush administration tended to produce elaborate explanations for fairly historically common phenomena, like administrations'
lying to the public about wars, while providing far too shallow critiques of
other phenomena, such as long-standing problems with the national security state that had developed during the Cold War and lived on long after its end. Stories of the trahison des Straussians also uncomfortably resembled a
long tradition of anti-intellectual counter-subversive narratives, the most famous modern examples of which involved Communists during the Cold War.''
I laughed at the idea Strauss wrote badly on purpose. I listened to one lecture posted on the web somewhere. It was on what was wrong with Hegel and
his ideas about history. It was an excellent lecture, even if I disagreed with just about every passage. Strauss was an excellent teacher, provided you really prepared for the lectures.
So what does that have to do with his bad writing style. What makes his work
so bad and muddy was probably due (at least in the early years) to the way he wrote. He sat down with a book by Hobbes for example and worked on various passages like theological scholar. If you hadn't studied one of referenced texts, you would be completely lost by the commentary. So too with Strauss. I finally found some passages in Hobbes that corresponded to what Strauss had written and suddenly the light dawned. Strauss was either a
bad scholar, because he completely misrepresented what Hobbes had wrote, or Strauss was putting words in Hobbes' mouth. This essay on Hobbes was in Strauss's Spinoza's Critique of Religion published in German in 1929. It wasn't translated into English until 1965. He also misrepresented Spinoza but I really couldn't quite catch LS on that one.
What Strauss was doing was re-interpreting a series of political philosophy works. The goal was to bring down the Enlightenment and the standard political science account of the US founding documents and writings of the founding fathers. His account of natural law became a tool to undermine the implicit social contract based on the constitution and constitutional law.
Strauss was an intellectual enemy toward western democracies. Under his interpretation of natural law, the strong belong in power in order to protect the weak---something that Earl Shorris points out. This idea obviously denies common sense and just about every form of experience I can think of. It is an Old Testament idea that wise, good, and strong men rule and protect family, tribe, and country.
The spead of Strauss' ideas I think comes from law schools where there must be a cotery of neoconservative professors and high level lawyers like John Yoo. As a matter of homework in running the executive branch, the legal beagles are usually consulted on various policy fronts. So that must be the interface between nasty political philosophy, changes in executive power power, and the horrific bullshit coming from the WH and executive branch and
much of the Supreme Court.
I don't believe in conspiracy theories, so I had to figure out some way to explain what has happened to this country, hence the sketch above. What backs it up is the spread of neoclassical economics and its domination on US
economic, social and political policy.
Hayek and Strauss, what a marriage in hell. But I can see why it works. Together they flatter the power elite and make them even richer at the same time. Well, until the rest of society crumbles.
CG
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