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A faction competing with Kanelos’ included Lonsdale and several of his allies. Their view is difficult to categorize, and no two people described the lines of division the same way. Some framed it as a battle between the conservatives and the libertarians. Others saw it as the classicists versus the tech bros. But one name came up far more often than any other: Leo Strauss.

A German-Jewish emigrant, Strauss spent most of his career at the University of Chicago. An impactful teacher and prolific writer, Strauss criticized modern liberalism for undermining the influence of religion and natural law and advocated a return to teaching the ancient Greeks, who he said had deep insights into human nature and society.

Leo Strauss, seen in New York in 1939. | Monozigote via Wikimedia Commons

Strauss isn’t a household name, but he’s deeply influential on the modern right.

One can draw a straight line from Strauss to his student Allan Bloom, author of the 1987 bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, which sounded an early alarm against identity politics, moral relativism and the decay of the university. From there one can make a direct connection to the prominent conservative intellectual Patrick Deneen, who has argued that liberalism’s emphasis on individual rights degrades authority, community and place. Deneen, who reportedly modeled himself on Bloom, won the American Political Science Association’s Leo Strauss Award in 1995 for best dissertation in political theory. Strauss was also the subject of a symposium at UATX in early January 2026, hosted by Loren Rotner, who received his PhD from Claremont Graduate University — a key institution for fueling what was known as West Coast Straussianism.

Kanelos’ view of the academy emphasized pluralism and the individual’s search for truth. On the other side, the Straussians weren’t quite so agnostic. They had a view of the common good they wanted to assert.

This conflict came to a head for the first time in September 2023 when Rotner, then the assistant provost, and Hillel Ofek, then the vice president of communications, engaged in what was described to me by several people as “a coup attempt.” They were critical of Kanelos’ leadership and believed that UATX had been neither aggressive enough in criticizing the universities with which they were in competition nor establishing UATX’s own identity. Another former staffer, who was granted anonymity out of fear of retaliation, said, “They attempted to persuade the UATX board that everything was heading in the wrong direction.”

The rebellion failed. Ofek and Rotner left UATX. Ofek took a position as director of strategy at Lonsdale Enterprises. Rotner became director of the Cosmos Institute, a nonprofit aimed at using AI for human flourishing. UATX did not make Rotner and Ofek, who have since returned to UATX as associate provost and chief strategy officer respectively, available for interviews or to provide comments.

Kanelos survived. UATX moved forward and began recruiting its first class.

In May, 2024, they hit a bump in the road when Jonathan Yudelman, a recent hire from Arizona State University, confronted a woman in a hijab in a video that went viral. But Yudelman was mostly associated with ASU, rather than UATX. The incident was handled internally and soon blew over. Yudelman remains at the university. UATX did not offer a comment on the episode, and Yudelman did not respond to a request for comment.

On Sept. 2, 2024, UATX opened its doors, presenting a united front to the world. In the morning, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott met with the inaugural class of 92 students at the state capitol. Down the block, in the Capital Ballroom of the Royal Sonesta Hotel, the students donned dark blue robes, signed the University of Austin register and, in return, received a copy of The Odyssey. Kanelos, clad in regalia, delivered a rousing address.

“History is not a story unfolding; it is an epic being written. And its authors are those bold enough to exercise their agency in the pursuit of higher things,” he said. According to Kanelos, UATX was returning to the Platonic ideal — to the “olive grove on the fringes of Athens called the Akademia,” where students came together to ask “fundamental human questions.”

There were other schools in Greece, but Kanelos said Plato’s stood above them all. “What distinguished Plato’s Academy,” he told the students, “was doctrinal pluralism and a variety of intellectual approaches. There were no easy answers. Every discussion branched outward with ever-greater complexity.”

The pluralists had won. At least for the moment.

In a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction turn of events, UATX’s commitment to its founding principles would be tested on the school’s first day of operation by an incident of alleged sexual harassment that would dominate the campus’ freshman year.

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Harvey C. Mansfield is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Government at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

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Leo Strauss Was a Theorist of Counterrevolution

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it’s said that the Chicago philosophy professor Leo Strauss liked to drop his smoking paraphernalia from the table to test whether his doctoral students would pick it up for him. If this doesn’t cast him as the best person, a wider contempt for the masses shines through from his work itself. But Strauss was also one of the cleverest enemies of equality, freedom, and democracy. His critique of liberalism was razor-sharp — and earned him the respect of socialist opponents Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem.

Born 125 years ago in the small town of Kirchhain, near Marburg, Strauss was the son of an Orthodox Jewish merchant family. After studying philosophy in Hamburg, he completed his doctorate under the neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer and then worked at Berlin’s Higher Institute for Jewish Studies until 1932. Driven out of Germany faced with rising Nazism, Strauss became famous as a patron saint of US conservatism who warned his new homeland against the corrosive effect of the German spirit of Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Strauss’s thinking is closely linked to the so-called Conservative Revolution, which also included the legal scholar Carl Schmitt and the philosopher Martin Heidegger, with whom Strauss studied for a time in Marburg. Strauss work is partly an attempt to deal with the fact that this anti-modern current’s key thinkers were rabid antisemites who ideologically prepared fascism and, after Hitler was handed power, justified the persecution of the Jews and even actively enforced it through their academic positions. Strauss sought to transplant the Right’s authoritarian spirit, responsible for white terror, fascism, world war, and the Holocaust, from Germany to the United States. He translated it from Weimar Germany, in which industrial capital, the landowning Junker class, and the military were openly declared enemies of democracy, into a postwar era in which the existing property system was to be protected in the name of “freedom and democracy.”

A Political Philosophy

Strauss understood his thought as “political philosophy.” Heinrich Meier, editor of his complete works in German, sees its “revival . . . after [its] apparent end” as Strauss’s “life’s achievement.” The attribute “political” makes it a subdivision of philosophy. It is, he wrote in “What Is Political Philosophy?” in 1955, “a treatment which both gets to the roots and is comprehensive,” the “quest for knowledge of God, the world, and man — or rather the quest for knowledge of the natures of all things.”

The starting point of “political philosophy” is the realization that “all political action aims at either preservation or change.” The need to preserve something stems from the “wish to prevent a change to the worse,” while the desire to change something stems from the “wish to bring about something better.” However, this also means that “all political action is then guided by some thought of better and worse” and is based on the idea “of the good life, or of the good society.”

The attribute “political” refers to the “the subject matter and the function” of political philosophy. Its subject is “mankind’s great objectives: freedom and government or empire — objectives which are capable of lifting all men beyond their poor selves.” Strauss did not choose the term “poor selves” by chance. It refers to the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s famous remark on life being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” without the all-powerful but protective state, because man is a wolf to man in the state of nature.

Alongside Baruch Spinoza, Hobbes provided the starting point for Strauss’s thinking. His first major monograph, published in Oxford in 1936, was The Political Philosophy of Hobbes. Strauss adopted his negative anthropology from Hobbes, which he also identified as the key to his work. In his conservative vein, Strauss was not concerned with interpreting Hobbes’s view of man — as historical materialists and historians of ideas would — as a theoretical expression of his experiences of civil war. Hobbes’s view finds its mirror image in John Locke, whose theory, emerging in peacetime, drew the opposite conclusions about the state-society relationship. Strauss’s concern is, instead, that Hobbes should not be historicized. His negative anthropology is an expression of a deep sense of the wickedness of man, deemed “the only true and universally valid view.” Anyone who says otherwise, who believes that people are as good or bad as the structures in which they live, is a left-wing nutcase. According to Strauss, Hobbes’s political philosophy was “the first peculiarly modern attempt to give a coherent and exhaustive answer to the question of man’s right life” and “the right order of society.”

Leo Strauss, like Carl Schmitt, was a theorist of the counterrevolution.

Strauss sees Hobbes’s turn to the rationalist, methodological-individualist, ultimately liberal method as the virus that pulled the rug out from under his actual intention — the justification of the authoritarian state, i.e., an objective Strauss shared. This turn, Strauss maintains, also explains why Hobbes argues so systematically and yet contradicts himself in many of his statements. Strauss writes that “the mathematical method and materialistic metaphysics each in its own way contributed to disguise the original motivation-nexus and thus to undermine Hobbes’s political philosophy.”

The critique of Hobbes put forward by the Jewish exile Strauss much resembles the one developed simultaneously by the antisemitic Catholic Carl Schmitt, who, as the “crown jurist of the Third Reich,” had just justified the Nuremberg Race Laws. A year after Strauss, Schmitt argued in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes that the failure of the Hobbesian justification of the absolutist state was owed to his distinction between inner faith (“fides”) and public confession (“confessio”) to the politico-theological statement that “Jesus is the Christ.” According to Schmitt, this was the work of a diabolical Jewish power that had decomposed the Leviathan as a powerful mythical symbol and made it possible for society, with its classes embroiled in civil war, to turn the state into a mechanism for its particular interests and thus destroy it.

Against Modernity

Strauss, like Schmitt, was a theorist of the counterrevolution. They both embodied a “search for a post-liberal order” as Ted V. McAllister put it in his book Revolt Against Modernity,a comparison of Strauss and Eric Voegelin. But if Schmitt’s “political theology” was the conservative movement of thought that revolved around God and the creed as a means of transcendental legitimization of power, “political philosophy” was Strauss’s means of choice in the modern secularized postwar society.

Strauss wished for a world in which people would once again find a natural place in a natural order — assigned to them by their rulers and their philosopher king advisers. He pined for the days when “the gulf separating ‘the wise’ and ‘the vulgar’ was a basic fact of human nature.” The workers, the women, the blacks, the homosexuals, and — God forbid — the transsexuals are a thorn in Strauss’s side. They all want something — and that is troubling, even intolerable.

Strauss cast liberalism and socialism as a break with traditional and legitimate thinking about the right order. He speaks of the “project of modernity” and, in “Three Waves of Modernity,” initially distances himself from conventional definitions that understand it as a “secularized biblical faith,” in which people do not “hope for life in heaven but to establish heaven on earth by purely human means.”

For Strauss, the modern project must be understood as the “rejection of premodern political philosophy.” The latter was still characterized by “a fundamental unity, a physiognomy of its own.” Modern political thought was, instead, a secularization that had ultimately brought many mutually exclusive modernities and thus “arbitrariness and subjectivism” (also of the classes) into the world.

Strauss wished for a world in which people would once again find a natural place in a natural order.

For Strauss, however, the problem of liberalism does not begin with the usual suspect, Hobbes. Rather, Niccolo Machiavelli appears as the culprit. With his radical, ungrounded criticism of Thomas Aquinas, the Italian thinker had put an end to medieval scholasticism with its divine right of kings and the natural order derived from God and, indeed, to thinking about what constitutes a “good order.” He replaced the philosophy of “how men ought to live” with the analysis of “how mean do in fact live.” He replaced the “quest for the best political order” with “a technical problem” of how to take power and hold it. Here again, Strauss docks onto Schmitt and his view of the historical “neutralization and depoliticization” of the state, which had been transformed into a “mechanism” by the classes — the liberal bourgeoisie and the socialist working class.

Machiavelli stands for the rejection of natural right, which had until then justified natural inequality and inequity, in favor of a politics of immorality. Hobbes then introduced “individual right,” which people suddenly asserted against the state. This in turn opened the door for Locke’s liberalism and for socialism as the historic countermovement to the impositions of liberal capitalism. The Rousseau-Kant-Hegel line then finally subjected natural right to history and thus to class struggle. It forms, as McAllister puts it, “the source for the second modern form of government, communism.” Strauss attacks liberalism in this way, only to strike at socialism, which probably most disgusted him, as the supreme form of “mob rule.”

Strauss’s strategic “political philosophy” thus began with a conservative cultural criticism. He notes a decline in thought and refers positively to Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. Strauss’s revolt against modernity is literally reaction and renaissance. He seeks to turn back the wheel of history on liberalism, seeking cues in antiquity and the Middle Ages, where he rediscovers the old “political philosophy,” now in “a state of decay.” It and political science had once been identical, in the sense of an “all-embracing study of human affairs. Today, we find it cut into pieces which behave as if they were parts of a worm.” According to Strauss, the intellectual decline is owed to the modern age and its “political situation” which is “entirely unprecedented.” This latter, he asserts, called “for an unprecedented political science,” which came as the result of “a judicious mating of dialectical materialism and psychoanalysis to be consummated on a bed supplied by logical positivism.”

Critique of Liberalism

Strauss begins his justification of a new elitist, anti-liberal tradition by attacking established science. “The majority of the great political philosophers,” he writes, were “not university professors”. Today’s professors, politicians, and state bureaucrats are characterized by profane “political thought,” whereas the political philosopher is “interested in, or attached to, the truth.” Strauss comes to the rescue of the search for truth before it is extinguished. What impressionable young student would not want to help him?

Strauss opposed both positivism and historicism. Positivism, founded by Karl Popper, was directed against historicism because — not least as the “historical school” in economics — it prevented us from arriving at dehistoricized abstract-mathematical formula sciences, which in their orientation toward the natural sciences and repeatable experiments (with always the same results) could alone lay claim to strict scientific status. Historicism and historical materialism objected that society and its economic basis are rooted in free decisions in given but changeable structures. This means that the naturalization of social science with its abstract assumptions that ignore reality — “homo oeconomicus,” “rational choice,” “transparent markets,” market equilibrium, etc. — can only lead to folly.

Strauss believed that positivism inevitably leads to relativism because “modern Western man no longer knows what he wants . . . no longer believes that he can know what is good and bad, what is right and wrong.” Weberian historicism, in turn, drowns political philosophy in what is at worst a “value-neutral” description of the history of ideas. Both had destroyed political philosophy. The “absolute knowledge of the Why” had been replaced by the “relative knowledge of the How,” because only historically changeable particular perspectives could be seen. To Strauss, Popper’s positivism even ”necessarily transforms itself into [the] historicism” he also fought against.

For Strauss, positivism and historicism are an expression of relativistic rootlessness and aimlessness. For example, it is not possible to obtain “knowledge of ‘group politics’ which deserves to be called scientific if one does not reflect on what genus of political orders is presupposed by the specific ‘group politics’ which one is studying.” The “old political science” still assumed the existence of a “common good” that could be rationally fathomed and that “in its fullness is the good society.” The “new political science” — which, based on the rational individual making rational (market) decisions, who “is by nature the sole judge of what is to his interest,” claims its own exclusive scientific status and declares all other theory to be ideology — is “as impossible” as every other “consistent manifestation of the break with common sense.” Hence why Popper had “to speak sooner or later of such things as the ‘open society,’“ i.e., reintroducing the general interest and the social through the backdoor of methodical individualism. The “open society” is, after all, the “definition of the good society.”

The other kind of liberal self-deception is to “admit the possibility of substantive group interests” but to individualize them, so to speak, in the form of the “rules of the game” (of the market), which would apply equally and therefore fairly to all competing groups. This, too, is a mere reintroduction of the general interest and the common good. Ultimately, Strauss writes, this “’group politics’ approach is a relic of Marxism.” However, the Marxist denial of a common good and general interest is “much more reasonably denied” than in liberalism, insofar as it questions it specifically in relation to “a society consisting of classes,” which is characterized by a “life-and-death struggle, overt or hidden” but generally assumes a “common good in a classless and hence stateless society comprising the whole human race or the surviving part of it.”

Strauss identified the blind spots of liberalism. For Schmitt’s critique of parliamentarianism and the rule of law, this already included the question of deciding between friend and foe and what to do in the state of exception when social order collapses. Schmitt opted for dictatorship, in the presidentialist form of Paul von Hindenburg — “sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception” — and later fascism, in which “the Führer protects the law.” For Strauss, it is political philosophers who enjoy the privilege of coming close to the truth, as “real men,” and who thus have the right to decide right and wrong.

The existence of philosopher kings who show the way, who are “making value judgments,” is crucial in terms of the raison d’etat. Because the unprincipled (liberal) opportunist who always hangs his flag in the wind is not trustworthy, he must end up like Thrasymachus in the first book of Plato’s Republic. Value neutrality is a chimera, not least with Popper, whose falsification method ultimately implies the “depreciation of pre-scientific knowledge,” with the result of either “sterile investigations” or “complicated idiocies” with “irrelevant or misleading results”: “Things which every ten-year-old child of normal intelligence knows” are regarded by Popper “as being in need of scientific proof,” which is “not only not necessary” but “not even possible”.

For Strauss, the critique of liberalism should not lead to more democracy but, on the contrary, to the ‘tyranny of the wise.’

Strauss’s criticism is razor-sharp and at this point compatible with the critique of Popper put forward by Max Horkheimer and then by Theodor W. Adorno. It is also compatible with a materialist theory of ideology, as can be read in Jan Rehmann’s excellent introductory book on the subject.

Strauss’s criticism also politically reflects the power-blind and opportunistic basic tendency of the liberal centrist, who chooses to place himself in the “center.” This latter, as we often see, may distinguish himself from the “extremists” on the Left and Right and declare that “red equals brown,” as the “horseshoe theory” commands, but can never justify what content actually constitutes the “center.” The liberal’s assertion that he stands for “democracy,” writes Strauss, are “mere movement of his lips and tongue, to which nothing corresponds in his heart or mind.” The talk of “democracy” — or today “our values,” being defended in Ukraine, etc. — is nothing more than “an alibi for thoughtlessness and vulgarity,” because those who profess it say “in effect that one does not have to think about the reasons why these things are good.” This liberalism is the path to “conformism and philistinism” in science, society, and politics. Strauss aptly explains that the liberal who claims to be value neutral in Max Weber’s sense, i.e., to have virtually no ideology, has “invisible value judgments.” In science, this ideology can be seen in “allegedly purely descriptive concepts,” for example, when social-scientists “distinguish between democratic and authoritarian habits or types of human beings” while “what they call ‘authoritarian’ is in all cases known to me a caricature of everything of which they, as good democrats of a certain kind, disapprove.” In terms of political philosophy, this means that a society “cannot be defined without reference to its purpose.”

This casts a sharp critical light on the New Cold War advocates of “democracies versus autocracies.” For Strauss, “one cannot clarify the character of a specific democracy . . . or of democracy in general without having a clear understanding of the alternatives to democracy.” By ”remaining within a horizon which is defined by the given political order and its opposite,” scientific political scientists are inclined to leave it at the distinction between democracy and authoritarianism, i.e. they absolutize the given political order.” However, such science then serves the “thoughtless acceptance” and apologetics of the status quo and “one’s own power interests and their enforcement, also internationally.”

Strauss’s ideological critique of liberalism could be used to justify socialist democracy, which sees its purpose in the self-organization, self-liberation, and self-determination of producers in all areas of their lives, including their workplaces, and aligns the organization of the state with these same goals. For Strauss, however, the critique of liberalism should not lead to more democracy but, on the contrary, to the “tyranny of the wise,” i.e., his preferred authoritarianism. This is based on total contempt for the masses and egalitarianism. In fact, he writes, no one can be a good scientist in the sense of political philosophy who sees no reason for “despising people whose horizon is limited to their consumption of food and digestion.” Strauss goes on to defend the power of elites over the masses by actively countering the argument that the ancient Greek philosophers were antidemocratic because of the underdevelopment of the productive forces, which structurally limited education to only a few. Rather, this separation of elite and mass is presented as a value in itself.

Power of Convention

In On Tyranny, from 1948, Xenophon is Strauss’s key witness for the value judgment that “beneficient tyranny or the rule of a tyrant who listens to the counsels of the wise is, as a matter of principle, preferable to the rule of laws,” i.e., a constitutional state, “or to the rule of elected magistrates as such.” Two years later, in Natural Right and History, Strauss argued that there is no “common good” even in the “truth” that the philosopher kings strive for. The commonwealth is “always either a democracy or an oligarchy or a monarchy and so on.” Every form of rule and its laws are those “of a section.” Even democracy, “which claims to be the rule of all,” is at best the “rule of the majority of all adults,” but the majority is “the poor; and the poor are a section, however numerous, which has an interest distinct from the interests of the other sections.”

Strauss denies that the seemingly particular interests of the poor, of the workers — a wage to live on, affordable housing, a life that is also self-determined in the sphere of work and production, etc., in short, in human dignity — are the only ones that can be universalized. He draws the opposite conclusion: if domination is always arbitrary anyway and is based on violence — of the majority over the minority, of a minority over the majority — then no principle of truth or what is right, no common good, applies here either. There is only “conventionalism.” Precisely because there is no natural determination — not even language, citizenship, etc. — where the boundary between inside and outside, friend and foe, runs, any rule is the baseless enforcement of the common interests of a group. Power in the state is not the result of any notion of “justice” but of a “gang of robbers,” understood as a “multitude of human beings” who have “banded together in order to take care of their common interest — over against other human beings, . . . foreigners and slaves.”

With this realistic description of bourgeois rule, Strauss undermines the idea of natural, innate rights, from which immanently derived legitimate rule and Rousseauian popular sovereignty arise. He advocates a nihilism of rights in which conventionally exercised power is legitimate in itself. For Strauss, the critique of Machiavelli and the simultaneous implementation and affirmation of the Machiavellian exercise of power, unrestricted by laws and moral restraints, go hand in hand. He advocates a Nietzschean “will to power” that determines what is true and virtuous. The rule of law, which restricts the arbitrary exercise of power, is replaced by sovereign power, whose legitimacy is derived from itself because there is no longer any external, abstract justification for it. “The best regime” in the sense of classical political philosophy, is not that which appears “most desirable,” but that which is “feasible or . . . possible on earth” because it corresponds to “human nature,” which — according to Strauss’s negative anthropology — is characterized by an inherent striving for dominance. Insofar as it does not build castles in the sky and requires “no miraculous or nonmiraculous change in human nature,” no “abolition or eradication of evil and imperfection” for its realization, the inevitable predatory rule is just. In essence, Strauss is echoing classical nineteenth-century conservative thought, which argued that alternative societal designs of deficient sinners would outrage God and his inner-worldly ordering work.

Strauss’s problem is that not only do opportunists and technocrats quickly lose the trust of the masses in a system of universal suffrage — as we see today — but they are also not so keen on being ruled by tyrants allied to philosopher kings who show only contempt for their “slave morality.” The “citizen king” may be hailed by his subjects — the cynicism king, not so much. Strauss himself acknowledges the “unnatural character of slavery.” It goes “against any man’s grain to be made a slave or to be treated as a slave.”

Strauss was well aware that he was advancing these thoughts in the United States of the 1950s. Like all right-wingers, he hated the social democratization brought about by the New Deal — but also understood its mass appeal. Consequently, his thinking revolved around the question of how the masses can be controlled in a mass democracy.

Like all right-wingers, Strauss hated the social democratization brought about by the New Deal — but also understood its mass appeal.

Strauss the Cynic

Strauss’s thought runs in parallel to the antidemocratic ideas of the economic right: Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, etc. But while the market radicals saw in the Keynesian welfare state the most repugnant form of “mob rule” and assumed that people would never vote for its dismantling and the unleashing of market forces — hence why a temporary dictatorship might be necessary — Strauss’s realist thinking focused on how the political right could turn the slaves into good sheep of the authoritarian “Machtstaat,” executing its power. If rule is always that of a “gang of robbers” that wants to oppress and exploit other parts of society and foreign countries, how can this rule nevertheless be legitimized and stabilized? How can people be dominated without them realizing it or rebelling against it? How do the anti-egalitarian philosopher kings prevent the working masses from condemning the enemies of democracy — because we only know the Athenian democracy and its deep quality from their perspective — to death (Socrates) or driving them into exile (Xenophon)?

Strauss reminds us that “being a tyrant, being called a tyrant and not a king, means having been unable to transform tyranny into kingship,” understood as “rule over willing subjects.” The best tyranny is that able to appear as legitimate kingship, even if it is “essentially rule without laws” based solely with “the will of the ruler.” This then is “tyranny at its best.”

But how can this be achieved? Strauss proposes with Simonides, in whom he wants to see an early Machiavellian, that the authoritarian ruler, who cannot hide his exercise of power behind impersonal laws, limits his tasks to “gratifying things (such as the awarding of prizes)” while entrusting to others the punitive actions” and avoiding “openly taking responsibility for punitive action.” The handing out of gifts, awards, permission to enrich oneself, etc. serves — one inevitably thinks of Vladimir Putin’s deal with the Russian oligarchs — “the purpose of keeping the subjects busy with their private concerns rather than with public affairs.”

Above all, however, Strauss seeks to make use of the Enlightenment for the “tyranny of the wise”, which in its dialectic as mastery over nature can be an exit from “self-imposed immaturity,” as Kant had it, while optimizing domination with the help of psychological insights into mass consciousness. Strauss’s focus is on propaganda. As much as Strauss is disturbed by the inwardness and individualization that went hand in hand with the twentieth-century psychologization of society, he recognizes the means of population control that lie dormant in psychoanalysis.

This search for control makes Strauss a cynic in relation to power and its application. While the philosopher kings emerge from Plato’s cave and strive toward the light of knowledge, the democratic masses must be guided in their natural ignorance. The “faith in universal enlightenment,” he writes, has obscured “from a few generations” the “importance of ‘propaganda’” and only now is one becoming aware of the “need for vulgar rhetoric” as the rhetoric for the vulgar.

The mastermind of mass psychology as a technique of power was Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud. He learned the craft of psychological warfare as early as 1917, coining the famous narrative “make the world safe for democracy,” used to persuade a reluctant US population into World War I. Bernays called his work “propaganda,” including in the 1928 book of the same name. Bernays’s methods were used in product advertising by industrial corporations, party and media communication, etc. In the end, propaganda was also applied to the theory itself, as Bernays soon spoke only of “public relations.”

In Propaganda, Bernays openly writes that there exists “an invisible government” in liberal-parliamentarian societies which, through an “unseen mechanism,” directs social processes. According to Bernays, it is “the true ruling power of our country. . . . We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” But that is, in Bernays’s view, precisely the goal, because “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” Of course, “in theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct.” In practice, however, it is impossible to deal with “the abstruse economic, political and ethical data involved in every question” in order to “come to a conclusion about anything.” Hence, “we have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issues so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions.”

Strauss could hardly agree more. He establishes a second cave allegory, which amounts to the rulers having to hide their actual goals. The clandestine nature of the Straussians, later said to be like Freemasons introducing each other into powerful positions — for many also implying the allure of an elite cult — reflected their sense that the masses felt how much they were despised. Hence the Straussians could only act in secret.

Hence also why Strauss distinguished between an “esoteric” and an “exoteric” way of writing: “What is called freedom of thought in a large number of cases amounts to . . . the ability to choose between two or more different views presented by the small minority of people who are public speakers or writers.” If the intellectual whose thinking does not follow the hegemonic ideology wants to preserve his “intellectual independence,” then he must get into the habit of ambiguous esoteric writing. “Persecution,” writes Strauss, “cannot prevent independent thinking,”; it “cannot prevent even public expression of the heterodox truth” as long as the intellectual who thinks against the grain “moves with circumspection” and “is capable of writing between the lines.” The chosen ones — Strauss distinguishes in Nietzschean style between “thoughtless men” who are “careless readers” and “thoughtful men” who are “careful readers” — could decipher the truth. The text, which only reaches the initiated, the intellectual elite, “is addressed, not to all readers, but to trustworthy and intelligent readers only.” It has “all the advantages of private communication without having its greatest disadvantage — that it reaches only the writer’s acquaintances.” Still, “a careful writer of normal intelligence” who knows how to place his political explosives in such a way that they do “not usually occur in the preface or other very conspicuous places” is still “more intelligent than the most intelligent censor” because “the burden of proof rests with the censor.”

We may doubt whether this trust in reason and accountability really applies, and whether authoritarian states really have to provide evidence before getting rid of disagreeable critics. In times when Twitter/X mobs can oust public figures from their positions and university administrations reflexively bow to online pressure, Strauss’s assessment seems wildly optimistic. Moreover, the most tyrannical of all societies would seemingly be the France of the 1970s: How else can the incomprehensible “gibberish” of the “radical chic” philosophers in France be explained? Strauss also clearly warned against always wanting to write and read between the lines, even where this was not necessary. There is “legitimate and illegitimate reading between the lines.”

On the one hand, the exoteric/esoteric distinction is suitable as a method of analyzing texts that were written under persecution, such as the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, who wrote not about “Marxism” but about the “philosophy of praxis” under censorship in Fascist jail. His Marxism is understandable only if we do know the circumstances of its origins. On the other hand, this distinction points to an intellectual attitude that does not seek to abolish the master-servant relationship through the democratization of knowledge but to strengthen it. Here the master — in Strauss’s diction, the philosopher — learns not only to lie to the censor but also to the masses about his own antidemocratic goals and to reveal them “esoterically” only to the philosopher kings. Strauss laments the fact that modernity has lost the acceptance of the “gulf separating ‘the wise’ and ‘the vulgar,’” which until then had been recognized as “a basic fact of human nature” that no “progress of popular education” can make up for because “philosophy, or science, was essentially a privilege of ‘the few.’”

Strauss’s indulgence in the calloused spirit of cultural decline, which has linked the elitist right from Oswald Spengler and Arnold J. Toynbee to Charles Murray, is of course linked to the discontent with democracy in which all people are at least formally equal. This creates the problem of how to say that people are naturally unequal (in value), which is why there is no point in educating the proles, introducing comprehensive schools, free college, etc. — but without them realizing it. How can it be expressed academically that workers, women, black people, and Latinos are considered unequal, irrational, childlike, and simply dumber, which is why they shouldn’t act up like they do, if all these social groups have the right to vote? Strauss was already schooling the US right in the methods of formulating antidemocratic, classist, sexist, and racist ideas through the insistence that “It’s a free country! I’m entitled to my opinion,” while expecting not to be criticized as racist, sexist, and misanthropic by the “politically correct.” One method is to “conceal their opinions from all but philosophers, either by limiting themselves to oral instruction of a carefully selected group of pupils, or by writing about the most important subject by means of ‘brief indication.’”

Leo Strauss and his followers claimed the right to justify mass manipulation and to keep the population in the dark about the attitudes, actions, and goals of those in power.

You might now think, “Let the assholes who despise the ordinary people who built their professorial luxury houses and cars, pick the tobacco leaves and grapevines, clean their apartments, cook and serve the food, deliver the mail and parcels, etc., pursue their passion among themselves.” However, it is not that simple, because contempt does not remain private. It came out of German far-right leader Björn Höcke, for example, when, in an interview with a journalist who asked him about his demagogic way of speaking, he said with a nod and a wink that they both knew that some truths had to be expressed in populist terms so that the proles could also understand them. Only through such propaganda could they bring Höcke to the power to which he lays a natural claim.

As an elite by natural right, Strauss and his followers also claimed the right to justify mass manipulation, to keep the population in the dark about the attitudes, actions, and goals of those in power, instead of contributing to the spiritual liberation of all as critics of power, as the Enlightenment intended. For Strauss, this also includes an instrumental relationship to religion. In 1932, he wrote to one correspondent that he was “not capable of faith” and was thus “looking for a way to live without faith.” However, if atheism or agnosticism are for him an expression of a master morality reminiscent of Richard Dawkins, he also sees the promotion of religiosity as an essential anchor for the stabilization of power and mobilization for the anti-egalitarian right.

Strauss thus combines ancient philosophy with the darkest Nietzscheanism. He was, writes critic Shadia B. Drury, “not a traditional conservative nor a quiet interpreter of old texts, but a representative of a new brand of rabid, radical, nihilistic, and postmodern conservatism.”

Strauss Lives

Strauss retired in 1969. He finally died in October 1973, in Annapolis, Maryland. Just five weeks earlier, the market fundamentalists around Friedman and his “Chicago Boys,” long close to Strauss, had put into practice their conviction that no people could be so stupid as to freely choose the dismantling of the welfare state and the capitalist commodification of education, health, pensions, etc. Their “free market” instead had to enter the world via the detour and the tortures of dictatorship, with Augusto Pinochet’s counterrevolutionary regime in Chile. Strauss, on the other hand, believed that even with universal suffrage, the people, this “big lout,” could be kept under control.

Still, Strauss would also enjoy power, at least indirectly. Just as the “incel” takes refuge in Übermensch philosophy out of his narcissistic inferiority complex, Strauss offers a home to many misanthropes. Nietzsche’s poison is always at work, and Strauss embodies it. Even during his life, a large following developed around him. Some speak of a “cult” due to the cultivated culture of a small, conspiratorial group of the chosen.

A few selected “Straussians” became famous as hawkish neocons, even so-called Leo-Cons. The most important was Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense in the George W. Bush administration. He pushed for a war against Iraq already before 9/11 and, the very next day, tried to persuade National Security Council member Richard Clarke to establish a link between Iraq and the Twin Towers attacks because “it was too sophisticated and complicated an operation . . . for a terrorist group to have pulled off by itself.” When this didn’t work (Clarke later resigned in protest), the Bush administration justified the war by citing alleged weapons of mass destruction that could reach NATO bases in the eastern Mediterranean within forty-five minutes. Wolfowitz later admitted that Secretary of State Colin Powell lied before the UN General Assembly and that the evidence for the weapons was largely fabricated. The actual aim of the war had been another. Around one million people, the vast majority of them civilians, paid for it with their lives.

In Straussian terms, this was a “noble lie” — the kind that is still with us. When Donald Trump and his running mate were called out for spreading lies about Haitian immigrants eating white Americans’ beloved pets, Vance responded, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” The spirit of Strauss is alive.

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libtard

https://crisismagazine.com/author/swalter

Leo Strauss

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Lauded by his ardent followers and largely unnoticed by the majority of fellow political theorists, Leo Strauss (September 20, 1899 - October 18, 1973) produced a body of work derived from his study of the Western classics at odds with much that is considered modern. Typical of his followers is Harry Jaffa, who asserted that Strauss is the most influential teacher of political science since Machiavelli. The irony is that Strauss and contemporary Straussians like Jaffa reject or dismiss the empirical social science that is at the core of contemporary political science. Empirical scientific findings about political behavior require a more complex story about politics than they can accomodate in their political philosophy.

In recent years, this political philosopher has been identified as a key influence behind the rise of the neoconservative movement in the United States. While the overwhelming majority of his disciples--Strauss and contemporary Straussians collect followings of devoted disciples--are ideological conservatives, a few are ideologically moderate or liberal.

Background

Straussians believe that great philosophers come along once a century at best and they are convinced that Leo Strauss was the twentieth century's great philosopher. They derive their belief about the once-a-century appearance of philosophical greatness from the work of Leo Strauss himself. Some observers suspect that the Straussians were simply the victims of very clever self-promotion.

Strauss was born on September 20, 1899 in Kirchhain, Germany, near the university town of Marburg in Hesse, and grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family. He studied philosophy at a variety of German universities, eventually completing his doctorate at the University of Hamburg under Ernst Cassirer. Strauss would come to specialize in the history of political philosophy and refused the title of "political philosopher." In 1932 he left Germany, both to pursue his work and to escape the growing political crisis in his home country. After spending time in both France and England, where he published a book on Hobbes, Strauss arrived in the U.S. in 1937. He would eventually teach at the New School for Social Research (1938-1949), the University of Chicago (1949-1967), Claremont Men's College (now Claremont McKenna College) (1968-1969), and St. John's College in Annapolis, MD (1969-1973).

He was widely known for his argument that the works of Western philosophers can be read at two different levels: an exoteric level easily accessible to all, and an esoteric level that contains the philosophers' real teachings.

Strauss' most accessible work is probably Liberalism: Ancient and Modern, a collection of essays. His major works include Natural Right and History, Persecution and the Art of Writing, and Thoughts on Machiavelli.

Better known students of Strauss include Harry Jaffa (who is said to have written Barry Goldwater's line about extremism in the defense of liberty), Allan Bloom (author of The Closing of the American Mind), Martin Diamond, Walter Berns, Thomas West, and Herbert Storing.

Fact-Value Distinction Rejected

Strauss rejected or dismissed empirical social science and its findings in large part because he had not been trained to employ them and was therefore unable to make contributions to political science using the scientific method and statistical analysis. Like many scholars trained exclusively in the humanities, he was intellectually trapped in making claims for truth solely on the basis of the close reading of text and intuition. His rejection of the fact-value distinction served as cover for this disability. Strauss explained his rejection in terms of bad consequences. He was convinced that the fact-value distinction produces nihilism. In effect, he recommended rejecting an idea not because it was true or false in the sense of being an accurate statement about the world but because he disliked or feared where it might lead in the search for truth. Strauss's rejection is an example of the fallacy called "argument from adverse consequences." See page 212 of Carl Sagan's 1995 book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York: Random House. ISBN 039453512X.

Versus democracy

Other elements of the philosophy of Strauss are controversial because they express ideals contrary to democracy. According to an analysis by Jim Lobe for the Inter Press Service News Agency, Strauss believed the world to be a place where policy advisers may have to deceive their own publics and even their rulers in order to protect their countries.

Shadia Drury of the University of Regina, author of 1999's Leo Strauss and the American Right, says "Strauss was neither a liberal nor a democrat... Perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical (in Strauss's view) because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what's good for them. .. The Weimar Republic (in Germany) was his model of liberal democracy for which he had huge contempt," added Drury. Liberalism in Weimar, in Strauss's view, led ultimately to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews.

According to Drury, Strauss, like Plato, taught that within societies, "some are fit to lead, and others to be led". But, unlike Plato, who believed that leaders had to be people with such high moral standards that they could resist the temptations of power, Strauss thought that "those who are fit to rule are those who realise there is no morality and that there is only one natural right, the right of the superior to rule over the inferior".

For Strauss, "religion is the glue that holds society together", said Drury, who added that Irving Kristol, among other neo-conservatives, has argued that separating church and state was the biggest mistake made by the founders of the U.S. republic.

"Secular society in their view is the worst possible thing", because it leads to individualism, liberalism and relativism, precisely those traits that might encourage dissent, which in turn could dangerously weaken society's ability to cope with external threats. "You want a crowd that you can manipulate like putty," according to Drury. [1]

Influence on US foreign policy

Abram N. Shulsky received his doctorate under Strauss in 1972. Paul Wolfowitz, who was introduced to Straussian ideas while an undergraduate at Cornell, also studied with Strauss (though he received his doctorate under Albert Wohlstetter). Shulsky's area of expertise was Soviet disinformation techniques. The Straussian movement has many other adherents in and around the George Walker Bush Administration. They include William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, and Stephen Cambone [sic], the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, who is particularly close to Donald Rumsfeld.

Strauss's influence on foreign policy decision making (he never wrote explicitly about the subject himself) is usually discussed in terms of his tendency to view the world as a place where isolated liberal democracies live in constant danger from hostile elements abroad, and face threats that must be confronted vigorously and with strong leadership.

Intelligence and duplicity

How Strauss's views might be applied to the intelligence-gathering process is less immediately obvious. Shulsky explored that question in a 1999 essay, written with Gary Schmitt, entitled "Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)"--in Greek philosophy the term nous denotes the highest form of rationality.

In the essay, Shulsky and Schmitt write that Strauss's "gentleness, his ability to concentrate on detail, his consequent success in looking below the surface and reading between the lines, and his seeming unworldliness . . . may even be said to resemble, however faintly, the George Smiley of John le Carré's novels."

Echoing one of Strauss's major themes, Shulsky and Schmitt criticize America's intelligence community for its failure to appreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with, its susceptibility to social-science notions of proof, and its inability to cope with deliberate concealment. A more limited argument analogous to that of Robert Lucas regarding economics, is that any theory of leaders' behavior, like market behavior, had to assume that the enemy was as sophisticated and capable of self-assessments as any American, as capable of lying, and that it was "naïve" to assume that any question short of "what would we do?" and "why would he tell us that?" could lead to accurate anticipation. They suggested that political philosophy, with its emphasis on the variety of regimes, could provide an "antidote" to the C.I.A.'s failings, and would help in understanding Islamic leaders, "whose intellectual world was so different from our own." How the Western academic view of other cultures would assist in evaluating the Western intelligence agency view, retaining Western bias and losing direct experience in the field, was not addressed by Shulsky and Schmitt. They focused elsewhere:

Politics and deception

Strauss's idea of hidden meaning, Shulsky and Schmitt added, "alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception." In other words, what leaders say, is not what they do - and Niccolo Machiavelli was probably right to emphasize fear over being loved.

Robert Pippin, the chairman of the Committee on Social Thought at Chicago and a critic of Strauss, says that "Strauss believed that good statesmen have powers of judgment and must rely on an inner circle. The person who whispers in the ear of the King is more important than the King. If you have that talent, what you do or say in public cannot be held accountable in the same way."

This does appear to be the attitude of Paul Wolfowitz, whose admission that the claim that weapons of mass destruction were in Iraq was advanced to the UN "for bureaucratic reasons within the US government" was in part responsible for extreme pressure coming to bear on Tony Blair, who in Wolfowitz's view would simply have been a dupe, as one who sincerely believed in this claim. And, unlike Bush, justified it explicitly to a House that had not only the power but the obligation to refuse if they thought it unwise. For more see feature article on weapons of mass deception.

Integrity versus diplomacy

Another Strauss critic, Stephen Holmes, a law professor at New York University, put the Straussians' position this way: "They believe that your enemy is deceiving you, and you have to pretend to agree, but secretly you follow your own views." In effect, there is no integrity to diplomacy whatsoever - states engage in discussion only to deceive, and "the enemy" is defined not by the situation, but known in advance, and not amenable to change.

Holmes added, "The whole story is complicated by Strauss's idea--actually Plato's--that philosophers need to tell noble lies not only to the people at large but also to powerful politicians." In a liberal democracy it is complicated further still by the fact that consent of the governed is a basic requirement for legitimacy of any major decision. As Dennis Kucinich pointed out in 2003, shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when the debate among such politicians relies on false intelligence, whether the highest official is aware of this or not, such consent is obtained only by deception. The only alternate position is that one elects in effect a dictator with the power not only to act in accord with law, and make law, but also control the media and debate by feeding it with arbitrary and constructed stories.

Prudence

One of Strauss's staunchest defenders, Joseph Cropsey, professor emeritus of political science at Chicago, about the use of Strauss's views in the area of policymaking, says that common sense alone suggested that a certain amount of deception is essential in government. "That people in government have to be discreet in what they say publicly is so obvious--'If I tell you the truth I can't but help the enemy.'" But there is nothing in Strauss's work, he added, that "favors preëmptive action. What it favors is prudence and sound judgement. If you could have got rid of Hitler in the nineteen-thirties, who's not going to be in favor of that? You don't need Strauss to reach that conclusion." This of course begs the question of "who is Hitler?" That is, how is one to identify one's enemy's behavior as Hitler-like or likely to lead to genocide or worse? Plato's ontology implies that Hitler is himself an ideal form of a dictator, and that one justifies invasion anywhere by explicit comparison to Hitler. This of course is a highly subjective "pitch".

Regarding the U.S. invasion of Iraq, some former intelligence officials believe that Shulsky and his superiors were captives of their own convictions, and were merely deceiving themselves. Vincent Cannistraro, the former chief of counter-terrorism operations and analysis at the C.I.A., worked with Shulsky at a Washington think tank after his retirement. He said, "Abe is very gentle and slow to anger, with a sense of irony. But his politics were typical for his group--the Straussian view." This view would seem to have become official policy, specifically at the Office of Special Plans.

Influence on Office of Special Plans

According to his May 15, 2003, article Judeo-Christian Decadence. At the Fount of Power, Al Cronkrite writes regarding the Office of Special Plans:

"At the root of this effective manipulation of power is the teaching of a man named Leo Strauss (1899-1973). Leo Strauss was a brilliant German Jew who after studying in Europe on a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, became a highly paid professor at the University of Chicago. According to Robert Locke, who studied under Professor Strauss, he was an atheist and the purveyor of an esoteric philosophy which was critical of liberalism but supported Machiavellian deception and a ruling elite.

"Robert Locke lists among Strauss's students or those influenced by his students: Justice Clarence Thomas; Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Dundes Wolfowitz; former Assistant Secretary of State Alan Keyes; former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett; Weekly Standard editor and former Dan Quayle Chief of Staff William Kristol; Allan Bloom, former New York Post editorials editor John Podhoretz; and former National Endowment for the Humanities Deputy Chairman John T. Agresto."

Affiliations

John T. Agresto, former National Endowment for the Humanities Deputy Chairman
William J. Bennett former Secretary of Education
William Kristol Weekly Standard editor and former Dan Quayle Chief of Staff
Walter Berns, Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute; Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University; former Strauss student
Allan Bloom, University of Chicago professor; author, The Closing of the American Mind; former Strauss student
Robert H. Bork, Supreme Court nominee
Robert Eden, Professor, Hillsdale College; former Strauss student
Thomas N. Engeman, former Strauss student, Loyola University of Chicago professor
Robert K. Faulkner, former Strauss student, Boston College professor
Hillel Fradkin
Mary Ann Glendon, Professor, Harvard Law School; former Strauss student
Alan Keyes former Assistant Secretary of State
William Kristol
John Podhoretz, former New York Post editorials editor
Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court Justice
Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary

External Links

Tom Barry, A Philosophy of Intelligence. Leo Strauss and Intelligence Strategy, RightWeb Analysis, February 12, 2004.
Straussian.net.

References

This article uses material from the SourceWatch article "Leo Strauss". Unless this article is re-written from scratch it must include this citation (See SourceWatch:Copyrights).

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Leo Strauss

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Leo Strauss, a "refugee from Nazi Germany who arrived in the United States in 1937, was trained in the history of political philosophy, and became one of the foremost conservative émigré scholars." He taught at the University of Chicago. [1]

"He was widely known for his argument that the works of ancient philosophers contain deliberately concealed esoteric meanings whose truths can be comprehended only by a very few, and would be misunderstood by the masses. This has come to be known as the 'hidden meaning' thesis," Seymour M. Hersh wrote May 12, 2003, in The New Yorker. Similar arguments have been made by Hakim Bey regarding Chinese writings associated with Tongs.

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Versus Democracy

According to a 2003 analysis by Jim Lobe for the Inter Press Service, Strauss believed the world to be a place where policy advisers may have to deceive their own publics and even their rulers in order to protect their countries.

Shadia B. Drury of the University of Calgary, author of 1999's Leo Strauss and the American Right [ISBN 0312217838], says "Strauss was neither a liberal nor a democrat... Perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical (in Strauss's view) because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what's good for them. .. The Weimar Republic (in Germany) was his model of liberal democracy for which he had huge contempt," added Drury. Liberalism in Weimar, in Strauss's view, led ultimately to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews. [2]

According to Drury, Strauss like Plato taught that within societies, "some are fit to lead, and others to be led". But, unlike Plato, who believed that leaders had to be people with such high moral standards that they could resist the temptations of power, Strauss thought that "those who are fit to rule are those who realise there is no morality and that there is only one natural right, the right of the superior to rule over the inferior". [3]

Influence on U.S. foreign policy

Abram N. Shulsky received his doctorate under Strauss in 1972. Shulsky's area of expertise was Soviet disinformation techniques. "The Straussian movement has many other adherents in and around the George W. Bush Administration. They include William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, and Stephen A. Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, who is particularly close to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld," according to Hersh. "Strauss's influence on foreign policy decision making (he never wrote explicitly about the subject himself) is usually discussed in terms of his tendency to view the world as a place where isolated liberal democracies live in constant danger from hostile elements abroad, and face threats that must be confronted vigorously and with strong leadership."

Intelligence and Duplicity

"How Strauss's views might be applied to the intelligence-gathering procedure is less immediately obvious. Shulsky explored that question in a 1999 essay, written with Gary Schmitt, entitled 'Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)'--in Greek philosophy the term nous denotes the highest form of rationality," Hersh wrote.

Schmitt's essay was published in Kenneth L. Deutsch and John A. Murley, editors, "Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Regime", Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999. Paper. ISBN 0847686922.

"In the essay, Shulsky and Schmitt write that Strauss's 'gentleness, his ability to concentrate on detail, his consequent success in looking below the surface and reading between the lines, and his seeming unworldliness . . . may even be said to resemble, however faintly, the George Smiley of John le Carré's novels," Hersh said.

"Echoing one of Strauss's major themes, Shulsky and Schmitt criticize America's intelligence community for its failure to appreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with, its susceptibility to social-science notions of proof, and its inability to cope with deliberate concealment," Hersh wrote.

Politics and deception

"Strauss's idea of hidden meaning, Shulsky and Schmitt added, 'alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception.' In other words, what leaders say, is not what they do - and Niccolò Machiavelli was probably right to emphasize fear over being loved," Hersh wrote.

Robert B. Pippin, "the chairman of the Committee on Social Thought at Chicago and a critic of Strauss, says that 'Strauss believed that good statesmen have powers of judgment and must rely on an inner circle. The person who whispers in the ear of the King is more important than the King. If you have that talent, what you do or say in public cannot be held accountable in the same way," Hersh wrote.

Integrity versus diplomacy

Another Strauss critic, Stephen Holmes, the Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, "put the Straussian's position this way: 'They believe that your enemy is deceiving you, and you have to pretend to agree, but secretly you follow your own views,'" Hersh wrote. "Holmes added, 'The whole story is complicated by Strauss's idea--actually Plato's--that philosophers need to tell noble lies not only to the people at large but also to powerful politicians.'"

See Stephen Holmes, "The Anatomy of Antiliberalism," Harvard University Press (Reprint 1996), Paper, ISBN 0674031857.

Prudence

One of Strauss's staunchest defenders, Joseph Cropsey, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Chicago, "about the use of Strauss's views in the area of policymaking," told Hersh "that common sense alone suggested that a certain amount of deception is essential in government. 'That people in government have to be discreet in what they say publicly is so obvious--'If I tell you the truth I can't but help the enemy.' But there is nothing in Strauss's work, he added, that 'favors preëmptive action. What it favors is prudence and sound judgement."

Regarding the U.S. invasion of Iraq, "[s]ome former intelligence officials believe that Shulsky and his superiors were captives of their own convictions, and were merely deceiving themselves. Vincent Cannistraro, the former chief of counter-terrorism operations and analysis at the C.I.A., worked with Shulsky at a Washington think tank after his retirement. He said, 'Abe is very gentle and slow to anger, with a sense of irony. But his politics were typical for his group--the Straussian view'," Hersh reported.

Influence on Office of Special Plans

According to his May 15, 2003, article Judeo-Christian Decadence. At the Fount of Power, Al Cronkrite writes regarding the Office of Special Plans:

"Robert Locke lists among Strauss's students or those influenced by his students: Justice Clarence Thomas; Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Dundes Wolfowitz; former Assistant Secretary of State Alan Keyes; former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett; Weekly Standard editor and former J. Danforth Quayle Chief of Staff William Kristol; Allan Bloom, former New York Post editorials editor John Podhoretz; and former National Endowment for the Humanities Deputy Chairman John T. Agresto."

Published Works

Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, editors. "History of Political Philosophy". 3d edition. University of Chicago Press. 1963, 1972, 1987. ISBN 0226777103.
Leo Strauss,. "Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy". With a Foreword by Joseph Cropsey. With an Introduction by Thomas L. Pangle. University of Chicago Press. 1983. Paper. ISBN 0226777006.

Related SourceWatch Resources

External links

Shadia Drury

Dr. Shadia Drury has written on *Straussians* and *Neocons*

Photos

Profiles

Leo Strauss in the Wikipedia.
Leo Strauss in the dKosopedia. Reflects material taken from the SW article above under GNU Free Documentation License 1.2.
Leo Strauss Comprehensive Bibliography of Leo Strauss, straussian.net.

1992

Robert B. Pippin, "The Modern World of Leo Strauss," Political Theory, vol.20, no.3 (1992).

1996

Stephen Holmes, "Truths for Philosophers Alone?", Times Literary Supplement, 1-7 December 1989; reprinted in Stephen Holmes, "The Anatomy of Antiliberalism" (1996).

1997

Gregory Bruce Smith, "Leo Strauss and the Straussians: An Anti-democratic Cult?", PS: Political Science & Politics Vol. 30 No. 2 (June 1997).

2004

Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., 3-part series: "The Children of Satan" "The 'Ignoble Liars' Behind Bush's No-Exit War" (June 2003); "The Beast-Men" (January 2004); and "The Sexual Congress for Cultural Fascism" (June 2004). Links posted on the Vote for Lyndon LaRouche in 2004 website.
Tom Barry, "A Philosophy of Intelligence. Leo Strauss and Intelligence Strategy," Right Web, February 12, 2004; also published in Asia Times, February 19, 2004.
Nicholas Xenos, "Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror," Logos Journal, Spring 2004.
Shadia B. Drury, "Leo Strauss and the Grand Inquisitor," Free Inquiry Magazine / Council for Secular Humanism, Volume 24 Number 4 (June/July 2004).
Jim Lobe, "Attacking Neo-Cons From the Right," AntiWar.com, August 5, 2004.
Shadia Drury, "Leo Strauss and the neoconservatives," Evatt Foundation, September 11, 2004.
Thomas J. DiLorenzo, "The Ivy League Dissects the Neocon Cabal," LewRockwell.com, September 28, 2004.

2005

Matthew Rothschild, Interview with Shadia Drury, author of "The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss," The Progressive, 2005: "We discuss the thoughts of this father of neoconservatism, and the sway that neoconservatism has on the Bush Administration."
Jim Lobe, "Losing Feith," Inter Press Service, January 27, 2005.
Franklin Foer, "Intelligence Design," The National Review, November 14, 2005.
Francis A. Boyle, "Neo-Cons, Fundies, Feddies, and Con-Artists," Global Research, December 17, 2005.

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Gang of 5 review:

The first thing that marks out Easton's book as a winner is the care she takes, as the literary theorists would say, to foreground her characters. Right off the bat, she launches into a discussion of the influence that German emigre Leo Strauss, one of the greatest political theorists of the past century, exercised on Irving Kristol and, by extension, William. Though Easton might have noted that Strauss himself was not particularly interested in contemporary politics, many of his influential disciples were. The Cliff's Notes version of Straussianism would go something like this: Ancient philosophers, from Plato to Aquinas, had to write simultaneously in both an exoteric and esoteric code because their thoughts were too dangerous to communicate openly to the vulgar masses. Only Straussians could crack this code and understand the ancients as they wished to be understood, namely, that virtue was the highest good and that this truth could only be comprehended by an intellectual aristocracy. The Straussian bugbear is Machiavelli; he took the ideals of the ancient city down-market by lowering man's sights; the Enlightenment was the final blow because it emphasized egalitarianism and social engineering rather than virtue.

This truth rang as powerfully for Kristol fils as pere, says Easton. At Harvard, Kristol was indoctrinated into Straussianism by government professor Harvey Mansfield. The profoundly conservative, anti-modern message of Strauss seemed radical to Kristol and others. "To young men questioning the egalitarianism of the Left," writes Easton, "the insights of the philosophers they studied offered fortitude, making the case that the leveling of society would lead to a worship of mediocrity." There was more: "The notion that truth could be dangerous, or at the very least politically unacceptable, also rang true to students who had witnessed rising leftist orthodoxy on college campuses." Kristol wanted to become the adviser to powerful political figures; as Strauss himself wrote, "The political philosopher who has reached his goal is the teacher of legislators ... the umpire par excellence."

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1316/is_9_32/ai_65160620/

For decades prior to that conflict, one of our most prominent scholars and public intellectuals had been historian Charles Beard, whose influential writings had heavily focused on the harmful role of various elite conspiracies in shaping American policy for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many, with his examples ranging from the earliest history of the United States down to the nation’s entry into WWI. Obviously, researchers never claimed that all major historical events had hidden causes, but it was widely accepted that some of them did, and attempting to investigate those possibilities was deemed a perfectly acceptable academic enterprise.

However, Beard was a strong opponent of American entry into the Second World War,and he was marginalized in the years that followed, even prior to his death in 1948. Many younger public intellectuals of a similar bent also suffered the same fate, or were even purged from respectability and denied any access to the mainstream media. At the same time, the totally contrary perspectives of two European political philosophers, Karl Popper and Leo Strauss, gradually gained ascendancy in American intellectual circles, and their ideas became dominant in public life.

Popper, the more widely influential, presented broad, largely theoretical objections to the very possibility of important conspiracies ever existing, suggesting that these would be implausibly difficult to implement given the fallibility of human agents; what might appear a conspiracy actually amounted to individual actors pursuing their narrow aims. Even more importantly, he regarded “conspiratorial beliefs” as an extremely dangerous social malady, a major contributing factor to the rise of Nazism and other deadly totalitarian ideologies. His own background as an individual of Jewish ancestry who had fled Austria in 1937 surely contributed to the depth of his feelings on these philosophical matters.

Meanwhile, Strauss, a founding figure in modern neo-conservative thought, was equally harsh in his attacks upon conspiracy analysis, but for polar-opposite reasons. In his mind, elite conspiracies were absolutely necessary and beneficial, a crucial social defense against anarchy or totalitarianism, but their effectiveness obviously depended upon keeping them hidden from the prying eyes of the ignorant masses. His main problem with “conspiracy theories” was not that they were always false, but they might often be true, and therefore their spread was potentially disruptive to the smooth functioning of society. So as a matter of self-defense, elites needed to actively suppress or otherwise undercut the unauthorized investigation of suspected conspiracies.

Even for most educated Americans, theorists such as Beard, Popper, and Strauss are probably no more than vague names mentioned in textbooks, and that was certainly true in my own case. But while the influence of Beard seems to have largely disappeared in elite circles, the same is hardly true of his rivals. Popper probably ranks as one of the founders of modern liberal thought, with an individual as politically influential as left-liberal financier George Soros claiming to be his intellectual disciple. Meanwhile, the neo-conservative thinkers who have totally dominated the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement for the last couple of decades often proudly trace their ideas back to Strauss.

So, through a mixture of Popperian and Straussian thinking, the traditional American tendency to regard elite conspiracies as a real but harmful aspect of our society was gradually stigmatized as either paranoid or politically dangerous, laying the conditions for its exclusion from respectable discourse.

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https://www.counterpunch.org/2003/08/01/the-university-of-chicago-is-a-moral-cesspool/

It is now a matter of public record that immediately after the terrible tragedy of September 11, 2001, U.S. Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld and his pro-Israeli “Neoconservative” Deputy Paul Wolfowitzbegan to plot, plan, scheme and conspire to wage a war of aggression against Iraq by manipulating the tragic events of September 11th in order to provide a pretext for doing so. Of course Iraq had nothing at all to do with September 11th or supporting Al-Qaeda . But that made no difference to Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the numerous other pro-Israeli Neo-cons in the Bush Jr. administration.

These pro-Israeli Neo-cons had been schooled in the Machiavellian/Nietzschean theories of Professor Leo Strauss, who taught political philosophy at the University of Chicago in their Department of Political Science. The best expose of Strauss’s pernicious theories on law, politics, government, for elitism, and against democracy can be found in two scholarly books by the Canadian Professor Shadia B. Drury: The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (1988); Leo Strauss and the American Right (1999). I entered the University of Chicago in September of 1968 shortly after Strauss had retired. But I was trained in Chicago’s Political Science Department by Strauss’s foremost protege, co-author, and literary executor Joseph Cropsey. Based upon my personal experience as an alumnus of Chicago’s Political Science Department (A.B., 1971, in Political Science), I concur completely with Professor Drury’s devastating critique of Strauss. I also agree with her penetrating analysis of the degradation of the American political process by Chicago’s Straussian cabal.

Chicago routinely trained me and numerous other students to become ruthless and unprincipled Machiavellians. That is precisely why so many neophyte Neo-con students gravitated towards the University of Chicago or towards Chicago Alumni at other universities. The University of Chicago became the “brains” behind the Bush Jr. Empire and his Ashcroft Police State. Attorney General John Ashcroft received his law degree from the University of Chicago in 1967. Many of his “lawyers” at the Department of Injustice are members of the right-wing, racist, bigoted, reactionary, and totalitarian Federalist Society (aka “Feddies”), which originated in part at the University of Chicago.

Although miseducated at Yale and Harvard Business School, the “Ivies” proved to be too liberal for Bush Jr. and his fundamentalist Christian supporters, whose pointman and spearcarrier in the Bush Jr. administration was Ashcroft, a Fundiehimself. The Neo-cons and the Fundies contracted an “unholy alliance” in support of Bush Jr. across the board. For their own different reasons, both groups also worked hand-in-hand to support Israel’s genocidal Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, an internationally acknowledged war criminal. Strange bedfellows indeed.

According to his own public estimate and boast before the American Enterprise Institute, President Bush Jr. hired about 20 Straussians to occupy key positions in his administration, many holding offices where they could push American foreign policy in favor of Israel and against its chosen enemies such as Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the Palestinians.

It was the Chicago Straussian cabal of pro-Israeli Neo-cons who set up a separate “intelligence” unit within the Pentagon that was responsible for manufacturing many of the bald-faced lies, deceptions, half-truths, and outright propaganda that the Bush Jr. administration then disseminated to the lap-dog U.S. news media in order to generate public support for a war of aggression against Iraq for the benefit of Israel and in order to steal Iraq’s oil. To paraphrase something Machiavelli once advised his Prince in Chapter XVIII of that book: Those who want to deceive will always find those willing to be deceived. As I can attest from my personal experience as an alumnus of the University of Chicago Department of Political Science, the Bible of Chicago’s pro-Israeli Neo-con Straussian cabal is Machiavelli’s The Prince.

As for the University of Chicago overall, its Bible is Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Of course Bloom was another protege of Strauss, as well as a mentor to Wolfowitz. In his latest novel Ravelstein (2000) Saul Bellow, formerly on the University of Chicago Faculty, outed his self-styled friend Bloom as a hedonist, pederast, and most promiscuous homosexual who died of AIDS. All this was common knowledge at the University of Chicago, where Bloom is still worshipped and his elitist screed against American higher-education still revered. In Ravelstein Wolfowitz appeared as Bloom’s protege Philip Gorman, and Strauss as Bloom’s mentor and guru Professor Davarr. Strauss/Davarr is really the eminence grise of the novel. With friends like Bellow, Bloom did not need enemies.

Just recently the University of Chicago officially celebrated its Bush Jr. Straussian cabal, highlighting Wolfowitz Ph.D. ’72, Ahmad Chalabi, Ph.D. ’69, Abram Shulsky, A.M. ’68, Ph.D. ’72, Zalmay Khalilzad, Ph.D. ’79, together with faculty members Bellow, X ’39 and Bloom, A.B. ’49, A.M. ’53, Ph.D. ’55. According to the June 2003 University of Chicago Magazine, Bloom’s book “helped popularize Straussian ideals of democracy.” It is correct to assert that Bloom’s rant helped to popularize Straussian “ideas,” but they were blatantly anti-democratic, Machiavellian, Nietzschean, and elitist to begin with. Only the University of Chicago would have the unmitigated Orwellian gall to publicly claim that Strauss and Bloom cared one whit about democracy, let alone comprehended the “ideals of democracy.”

Does anyone seriously believe that the Chicago/Strauss/Bloom product Wolfowitz cares one whit about democracy in Iraq? Or the Bush Jr. administration itself, after having stolen the 2000 presidential election from the American People in Florida and before the Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court, some of whom were Feddies? Do not send your children to the University of Chicago where they will grow up to become warmongers like Wolfowitz or totalitarians like Ashcroft! Chicago is an intellectual and moral cesspool.

Francis A. Boyle, Professor of Law, University of Illinois, is author of Foundations of World Order, Duke University Press, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, and Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, by Clarity Press. He can be reached at: FBOYLE@LAW.UIUC.EDU

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