Leo Strauss and the American Right

Rating:
Summary: Failed Critique borders on the ridiculous
Review: A simply terrible book. Caricature is not a sufficient refutation. Be very careful of any assertions in this book: always follow up the footnotes and compare and contrast the massive difference between what Strauss says and what Drury makes Strauss say. Another strategy employed is that of guilt by association. This book has no redeeming features.

Rating:
Summary: LAUGH OR CRY?
Review: Difficult to know whether to laugh or cry over this rehash of Drury's 1988 pedestrian opus. The image of Newt Gingrich (on the cover) "furtively thumbing through Thoughts on Machiavelli" made me LOL! But the idea of Shadia Drury taking the measure of Strauss's body of work would be like, say, Mortimer Adler having the last word on the thought of Martin Heidegger, except that Mortimer was sincere, and better qualified (RIP). How do books like this get into print?

Rating:
Summary: LAUGH OR CRY?
Review: Difficult to know whether to laugh or cry over this rehash of Drury's 1988 pedestrian opus. The image of Newt Gingrich (on the cover) "furtively thumbing through Thoughts on Machiavelli" made me LOL! But the idea of Shadia Drury taking the measure of Strauss's body of work would be like, say, Mortimer Adler having the last word on the thought of Martin Heidegger, except that Mortimer was sincere, and better qualified (RIP). How do books like this get into print?

Rating:
Summary: Wishing I'd Seen these Reviews Earlier
Review: I bought this book a few years ago and just had a chance to read it cover to cover this week. I notice that of the 5 reviews below, 4 are unfavorable in varying degrees. They are all accurate in direct proportion to their level of criticism. This text is little more than a polemic.

I recently went back over Alan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind (after reading Saul Bellow's wonderful Ravelstein), which was my chief source of Straussian thought other than college texts read over a generation ago. Bloom repeatedly castigated (North) American academics for their doctrinaire orthodoxy and lack of genuine philosophic vision. Ms. Drury's text demonstrates his point much more effectively, although presumably unintentionally. Unlike Strauss, Bloom and others in their school, she is never able to justify or explain her value programming and simply proceeds from the (incorrect) assumption that the reader shares her basic premises which differ from those of the Straussians. Further, the book has a repetitive, sing song prose style that bespeaks a lack of editing. The same sentence form, and in some cases even the same sentence, appears so often as to be remarkable even to the casual reader. This makes for tedious reading.

One thing the Ms. Drury does do, almost to perfection, is to set up a "straw man" argument using an oversimplified or disorted paraphrase of a Straussian or Bloomian thought and then demolishing it in a way that would be impossible if the point were viewed in full context. If that is what you are after, this is a valued resource. Otherwise, don't repeat my mistake.

Rating:
Summary: Wishing I'd Seen these Reviews Earlier
Review: I bought this book a few years ago and just had a chance to read it cover to cover this week. I notice that of the 5 reviews below, 4 are unfavorable in varying degrees. They are all accurate in direct proportion to their level of criticism. This text is little more than a polemic.

I recently went back over Alan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind (after reading Saul Bellow's wonderful Ravelstein), which was my chief source of Straussian thought other than college texts read over a generation ago. Bloom repeatedly castigated (North) American academics for their doctrinaire orthodoxy and lack of genuine philosophic vision. Ms. Drury's text demonstrates his point much more effectively, although presumably unintentionally. Unlike Strauss, Bloom and others in their school, she is never able to justify or explain her value programming and simply proceeds from the (incorrect) assumption that the reader shares her basic premises which differ from those of the Straussians. Further, the book has a repetitive, sing song prose style that bespeaks a lack of editing. The same sentence form, and in some cases even the same sentence, appears so often as to be remarkable even to the casual reader. This makes for tedious reading.

One thing the Ms. Drury does do, almost to perfection, is to set up a "straw man" argument using an oversimplified or disorted paraphrase of a Straussian or Bloomian thought and then demolishing it in a way that would be impossible if the point were viewed in full context. If that is what you are after, this is a valued resource. Otherwise, don't repeat my mistake.

Rating:
Summary: The Atheists in the White House
Review: I have a somewhat different take on this book than the other reviewers. I am struck by the idea that the Straussians neoconservatives, who have seized strategic positions in the U.S. Government and the Republican Party, fundamentally agree with the Secular Humanists about the nature of religion (i.e., that there's no god out there to rapture us away, much less lecture us about right and wrong). They just disagree with the Humanists about the advisability of telling ordinary people the truth, pretending instead that increasingly absurd and delusional christian beliefs like the ones promoted by the Left Behind novels are worthy of respect, as long as christians who hold such fantasies vote Republican. (By contrast, UFO cultists who promote similar scenarios about mass alien abductions are ridiculed.) In other words, Neocons view religion as a useful tool for keeping the rabble in line, including the unsophisticated religious politicians who support their agenda.

I find this crypto-Atheism contemptible, though also complimentary in a back-handed way. Intelligent people in many times and places have arrived at Atheism by following their own inquiries into the nature of reality. Strauss and his followers just add further support to the legitimacy of the Atheist discovery, though their systematic dishonesty about it has led to harmful consequences in the real world. The increasingly Atheistic populations of Western Europe, where even American christians readily visit for vacation, show that advanced societies can function well without religion, empirically falsifying the Straussian prejudice that the sheep need superstitions while their shepherds can handle Atheism.

Rating:
Summary: Good book for liberals who really believe the X-Files
Review: I see Leo Strauss, the Cancer Man, in a dimly-lit room talking with powerful men who would rule the country except that they must contend with the ever-expanding egalitarian aliens that would subject the human race to their whim, but lo! Strauss and his fellows are developing a vacine against the liberal invaders that would allow them to subject their fellow humans to their own evil (conservative) ends. In the meantime, Strauss must cultivate a small horde of followers, which he vaguely refers to as "students," programming them with authoritarian teachings that have since culminated a monstrously inhumane, wicked, and vile policy called "Supply-Side Economics," which produced a blight on humanity no worse than the plagues of Europe and would have wiped away all earthly lovers of equality, except that the superhero race called "Kennedys" were still breeding at a feverish pace. We have somehow survived the smoke from the Cancer Man's lungs, and now have the opportunity to make man whole as never before by learning from the egalitarian aliens that mean us no harm. The truth is with Drury!

Rating:
Summary: The straussians are coming! the straussians are coming!
Review: It is ironic that one of the favorable reviews for this work of intellectual yellow journalism should come fronm a student at Boston College, which includes on its faculty a large number of cunning, evil, right-wing Straussians, bent on global conquest. One can see it now, Gingrich , furtively thumbing through Thoughts on Machiavelli, Dole, Poring through Spinozas critique of religion, and behingd them all, the GOdfather, the sinister Leo Strauss, whose cunning even extended to teaching liberal democrats such as William Galston, Cass Sunstien, and George Aastaplo.Dear God, I have even heard rumors that CATHOLIC PRIESTS are among this devils disciples. Watch out, the Straussians will getcha if you dont watch out.

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding work by Shadia Drury shed light on Leo Strauss.
Review: Shadia Drury has exhibited first-rate scholarship on a figure who has traditionally been hard to pin down. She has captured the thought of Leo Strauss in all of its subtleties in ways that no other scholar has been able to do. Drury has especially done a superb job of explaining Strauss' philosophical elitism in her explanation of his virulent attacks on liberalism, his affinity with Carl Schmitt, his duplicitous division of knowledge between the esoteric and the exoteric, and the cult-like nature of his teaching style. As subtle and enigmatic as Strauss is, his influence on the authoritarian Right in America cannot be underestimated. And she has rightly shown that this influence is not a healthy one. Many of Strauss' supporters have been in the vanguard of the Culture War that the authoritarian Right has unleashed on the United States. Drury deserves to be congratulated for her careful and accurate scholarship on this figure. I highly recommend her book as must reading for all who wish to be informed about the danger to freedom that is coming from the Right.

Rating:
Summary: Postmodern Conservativism
Review: The chief insight offered by Shadia Drury in LEO STRAUSS AND THE AMERICAN RIGHT is that Leo Strauss's political philosophy is a radical variant of conservatism whose assumptions and strategies are at odds with traditional conservatism. While both Straussian and Burkean philosophy appear similar in that they both make the assumption that the only choice is between a beneficent plutocracy and anarchy, the Straussians are unsentimental about the past, rejecting the older conservative view that naturalizes pre-modern hierarchy and the inequalities preserved therein as intrinsic to and representative of mankind. Straussians are instead post-modern activists, who use the past as repository from which to cull whatever elements are necessary to build whatever institutional machine is necessary to regulate lesser mortals. They imagine themselves as an intellectual pastorate who must defend society against the depredations of liberalism -- that socially disruptive idea which insists on equality of opportunity and justice.

According to Drury, Strauss's philosophy accepts the death of God, (unlike traditional conservatism) and then moves positivistically (unlike traditional conservatism) to fill the vacuum with elite group of self-elected philosopher kings. This elite, alive to the nihilism of the liberal ethos and its potentially anarchic consequences, believes it must act forcefully to paper over the hole left by His demise. Their esoteric/exoteric readings of philosophy tell them they must forge from the ashes a seamless, monocultural machine to encourage obedience and staunch chaos. This nationalistic machine must be equipped with a religion (any religion) and a mythic culture based on flag-reverence and knee-jerk patriotism. This is necessary because pluralistic, liberal societies cannot meet the challenge posed by well-organized, culturally cohesive states. Because the mass of men are primitive, credulous, prone to error and evil, the state with the best machine necessarily will win. Straussians, unlike traditional conservatives who see the state as malevolent, justify their activism by insisting that as philosophers they are immune to temptations of power.

According to Drury, a particularly striking strategy of Straussian conservatives is their struggle to identify and mythologize American traditions. She points out that while Burke had the last remnants of feudalism to extol as a naturally just system, American conservatives have been forced to create a ?traditional? America out of whole cloth. To do so, according the Drury, Strauss's followers have invaded history departments across the US where they have been working hard to uncover "tradition" in the beginnings of America ? a difficult task given that America was the first truly modernist state. Nevertheless, these historians, depending upon which ax they are grinding, rewrite American history either to prove that colonial America was feudal, or to prove the Founding Fathers were not Deists and creatures of the (Liberal) Enlightenment, but rather Platonists. Drury notes that like postmodernists on the left, Straussians believe there is no ultimate truth, but that instead there are only discourses of power and that whoever controls the discourse wins. She notes that this is what makes American politics so narrow and so tedious -- the right and the left both operate from the same morally bankrupt premise.

This goes a long way toward explaining the bizarre combination of libertarianism and fundamentalism in neo-conservative thought. Like other dogmas which have been used to support those in power -- Social Darwinism and eugenics come to mind -- neoconservatism is just the latest apologia for the up-to-date reactionary. Notably, its adherents are generally unaware of the contradiction. This does not deter them from defending this instrumental hodgepodge of Ayn Rand "objectivism" and millenarian "revivalism" however. Such a philosophy is, of course, its own best self-satirization.

Well-written, its conclusions careful and amply defended, LEO STRAUSS AND THE AMERICAN RIGHT, is not the ravings of conspiracy theorist. It does not imagine that Straussians have come to run the United States, nor that they form a secret cult which pulls the strings behind the scene. It exposes rather the infiltration of post-modern intellectual cynicism into the once decent, and even honorable, Republican Party.