As I understand it (from taking a course with a Straussian professor many years ago and reading a bunch of articles since then), their basic idea is that there should be an intellectual elite to help those in power. It's secret, since ... you know what happened to Socrates
Jim Devine --------- Hope you don't mind. I am using your post as a pretext to think out loud. Any memories or thoughts about your Straussian professor, what you studied, etc. I'd like to read them. I decided as a matter of principle to ignor this noble lie business. It is essentially a ruse to make ridiculous interpretations of standard works seem credible. Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes were not writing code. They were intense critics of their time and had every reason to hide out from severe pumishment. Once Amsterdam was no longer an open city, Spinoza didn't publish his Ethics and other essays. So that whole end of Strauss is ridiculous pretense. Ignoring the idea of code writing makes the book universe a much more simple place. Take the writer at his or her word. The more interesting phenomenon at least for me is an entirely different issue. How can a discriminated minority spawn reactionaries who enspouse the very ideas that have tried to destroyed them? Where did Condoleezza Rice and Clarence Thomas come from? Strauss was in this category. He advocated a refined nazis-lite and neoclassical (Sparta over Athens) philosophy which is why Hannah Arendt hated him. Strauss set out to mangle and mutilate the humanist-liberal philosophical tradition, i.e the enlightenment. One of Strauss' great intellectual enemies was Isaiah Berlin. I just found out (by wiki) he and Berlin met each other in London I have Justin S. to thank for recomending I read Berlin. Basically Berlin put guys like Strauss into a long tradition of counter-enlightenment reaction. That helped to make Strauss a lot less weird. Anyway, I am trying to figure out Strauss' arrival in NYC straight into the heart of the Jewish radical intellectuals, some of whom later turned into neoconservatives. The London leftist Harold Laski recommended him for a temporary job at the Institute for Social Research in the late 1930s and Strauss moved to the states. His wife and adopted son arrived later. The trouble with this period is Strauss didn't write much except book reviews in the Journal of Social Research. I've read two. One on Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and another on Rousseau. I don't remember the details now, but basically he panned Cassirer's master work. I didn't understand the Rousseau essay. Nobody that I have found so far wrote about Strauss during his NYC days. I can't imagine he liked his time there. The exiled German intellectual community were all politically liberal to left. Judging from Arendt, they were highly social, good conversationalists, with deep reading backgrounds. Really not Strauss' crowd. While Arendt was busy puting together The Origins of Totaliarnism, Strauss wrote something on Xenophon which I haven't read. I tried to read Strauss in the order he wrote his books on the theory that they would relfect his thinking at the time. I got as far as 1930. Strauss had already formed the basis for most of his later thought. This is kind of true of most people. You've pretty much decided which side you are on in most cases by your 30s. After Strauss moved to Chicago in 1948 and got a decent paying job he settled into writing most his books. There is a background issue. Both Strauss and Arendt were educated in the European history of ideas, but back then the field didn't exist in the US academic system. So Strauss was put into the political science dept and Arendt in sociology. The idea that Strauss had to teach in poli sci is a great irony, because he hated the positivist-empirical and historical approach and its methodologies. He thought such ideas led to relativism and shifting value systems which in his view were the root of social evil. Things really hit the fan when Arendt published her notes and thoughts about the Eichmann trial in Jerusalum. Strauss organized a protest against Arendt and tried to get her fired. Luckily it didn't work. This was a kind of forerunner to the Flinklestein v. Dershowitz affair and it covered very similar territory. CG _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
