This afternoon, I was reading a great study by Martin Jay on the early history of the Frankfurt School. It's at Marxists.org:
http://www.marxists.org/subject/frankfurt-school/jay/ch01.htm
What I found interesting as historical context was the younger generation like Adorno and Marcuse were all about the same age as Leo Strauss, went to the same university system, started their Institute, during Strauss's Zionist writing days. They were all part of the German speaking Jewish intellectuals of Weimar. They all immigrated here to the states. They all wrote against the bourgeois order---Strauss from the extreme right, but all the rest on left.
Martin Jay briefly discusses the Frankfurters from a social, economic, cultural perspective near the end of the first chapter---which is all that is up on the web. He notes their similarities which are very close. They were from well off bourgeois families and had financial support from their parents. The Institute got enough money to build a special building for themselves. While it was associated with the University of Frankfurt, it was not technically part of the university system. So they were well off, well supported, and radical critics. This general class and its liberal culture was the same milieu for Ernst Cassirer.
Strauss was the son of a grain and equipment dealer in a small farm town. He got no financial support from his parents to get through school. He took Judaism seriously at least while he was in Europe.
So, even though I went through LS's biography and learned about the people and places he lived and worked, I still have no concrete explanation for his reactionary political philosophy. About the only way I can understand him is through a psychology of resentiment. He works on some plane that is similar to rightwing working class consciousness, and its totality of desire to not be what it is.
All the Frankfurters Strauss met (and he had met and talked with many) were non-practicing, relatively rich, and deeply secure in their own intellectual capacities. While they were not at home in the world, they were at home in the elite arts in which they were raised. That is, the bourgeois elites of the 19thC. Strauss was not. He never seemed to show the slightest sense of poetry in his thoughts-writing. Whatever you may think of Heidegger, he did seem to have sucked in high German poets as part of his ouvre.
So the another find of the day was Leo Lowenthal:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/lowenthal/1932/literature.htm
It is also only one chapter, On the Sociology of Literature. If you read it, you have to rememeber the literary criticism he was attacking was very dated, late 19thC mid-20thC. Try and make it through, because at the end he has several examples. The only writers I had read were Stendal, Balzac and Zola (because of a great french teacher*). Many of Lowenthal's examples are German. The French Revolution might have been a political failure, but its impact sent off waves of imaginary explosions through out the century in the arts and sciences.
Lowenthal begins by citing Dilthy who also influenced Cassirer and the whole project of attempting to theorize cultural products and production. Cassirer was also influenced by parts of Hegel so it makes it a lot easier to use Cassirer and Marx in ways neither would probably approve. Because the arts are a series of symbolic systems which I think of as a universe of forms, it is already materialized thought through its productions. Nobody can see thought, but everyone can see paintings, film, read poetry, listen to music, and talk. In my theory of everything, that makes the arts (and the immaterial realm of thought that lays beyond them) available to the historical materialism that Guy Robinson writes about.
*I was extremely lucky sometimes, and my first semester at community college, I picked by accident an amazing French 1 teacher. He must have had a second job in theater. This guy could stand-up act out a passage from the classic french writers he introduced us to. Imagine French class was exciting, always a thrill---sure raw entertainment---with the punch of art---as in Moliere's sarcasm, Hugo's raw sentiment, Balzac's grandure, Flaubert's ice, the desparation and engagement of Zola... he did them all for us.
How to teach a language through its modes of sensibility? Later at Berkeley, I got lucky again with a German Literature professor, Bluma Goldstein, who worked similar miracles with Goethe, Lessing, Mann, Kafka, Hesse ... She embodied the German world she taught, deeply poetic, but with an iron heart.
You simply can not get that kind of experience and its depth of understanding out of a computer. You've got to be in the moment and the intense struggle of a great lecture that hovers in the air as a palbable battle between your own ignorance and the consumate skill of the masterpiece that has engaged you down to your soul---even if you have no such thing. It's a great art of its own.
To my teachers,
CG