I mean, it's interesting because everyone is usually looking for something to tell us that the path we're on is the correct one. one way truth is grounded in standpoint theories is to make the claim that, due to the position you have in the world (as if social life is one large 3d map in which you stand), where your standpoint - the more marginalized it is away from the position of power, is the one that's most likely to be closest to Truth.
and from this position, we have the praxis version of standpoint theory, where your activity *in* this world gets you closest to Truth.
but then, what activity is the "right" activity, the activity closest to truth - which, as I see it, is often at the crux of these disputes over whether someone is engaged in activist work or policy wonkery. IOW, these theories have suggested that pracitical political activity in the world is the path to Truth, the way to revolutionizing the world to bring about the "good" society. What's the young marx quote about philosophers, "heretofore philosophers have interpreted the world..."?
so, the rightwingers fantasize themselves as revolutionizing the world as well, engaged in practical political struggle against the forces of ... whatever the fuck it is that they are afraid of ...
what's the difference?
if i'm remembering correctly, these straussian types believe there is no truth, correct? whoever wins has the truth and so the only thing that matters is struggle, the constant struggle to attain, assert, and maintain domination over a world in which everyone who isn't in power is an enemy bent on taking power away from you, bent on winning.
anyway, just rambling
At 10:33 PM 7/3/2012, Carrol Cox wrote:
>I left out Marx. He first became a revolutionary (his father had been an
>anti-Prussian activist); then because he was a revolutionary he became a
>young Hegelian; then it gets complicated. But people look for ideas &
>theories when their practice indicates the need for them. Theorists (or most
>of the important ones) become theorists after they have failed to find a
>theory out their to explain their practice to them. So they do it for
>themselves.
>
>Carrol
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
>On Behalf Of Carrol Cox
>Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2012 9:13 PM
>To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Shorris on Strauss
>
>I don't know about the writing, but the dismissal of Strauss's political
>importance in the U.S. is right on. He had nothing to do with the Bush
>policies -- the villains were Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush,
>Clinton, & their military and foreign-policy advisors. The last 10 years
>would have been exactly the same had Strauss never been born.
>
>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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