Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire,
by Michael C. Desch
Americans are not intellectual people: we have just re-elected a president
who prides himself on not reading the nation's leading newspapers. And yet,
according to much breathless reporting and a new book by University of
Pennsylvania political theorist Anne Norton, the anti-intellectual Bush
administration is actually in the thrall of a cabal of intellectuals
initiated into the mysteries of a conservative cult by an obscure émigré
political theorist named Leo Strauss. Ironically, a nation of know-nothings
is secretly guided by adherents of an esoteric political tradition rooted in
a grand conversation among philosophers ranging from ancient Greece to
Weimar Germany.
As the number of individuals in prominent government positions with ties to
Strauss and his students has grown, interest in the impact of the late
University of Chicago professor's thought has also increased. Articles have
recently appeared in the New York Review of Books, New Yorker, Harper's, New
York Times, and many other periodicals. Books such as James Mann's The Rise
of the Vulcans and Robert Devigne's Recasting Conservatism have also
explored this subject. Norton's Leo Strauss and the Politics of the American
Empire is thus part of a growing pile of paper.
Though Strauss died in 1973, concern about the influence of his disciples on
American policy did not manifest itself until the Reagan administration.
"Straussianism" was less evident in the first Bush and Clinton
administrations, but Straussians are once again prominent under George W.
Bush. The most well known is Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the
architect of the Iraq War. But others, such as Abram Shulsky, the Director
of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S.
Ambassador to Afghanistan, are also mentioned as conduits of Strauss's
influence. Outside of government, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and
Project for the New American Century executive director Gary Schmitt are
among the public intellectuals tied to Strauss or his students.
Norton's book is both analytical and autobiographical-she studied at the
University of Chicago with Strauss's students and others who would later
become prominent political Straussians. "I would never have thought of
writing about [Straussians]," she begins, "but things changed. Certain of
the people I had known came to power. The nation went to war. Because the
nation is at war, and because the Straussians are prominent among those who
govern, the accounts I had been given are no longer part of a curious
personal history but elements of a common legacy."
One problem with the book is that it is based mostly on her recollections of
things she heard and saw many years ago. The book, therefore, probably
shares many of the evidentiary problems common to "recovered memories" and
gossip. But its most significant weakness is that Norton never separates her
personal experience, both positive and negative, with Straussians in
graduate school from her analysis of Strauss's influence in Washington
today. She remains deeply ambivalent about Strauss and never provides a
clear answer the $64,000 question: how much influence do the teachings of
Strauss really exercise on the Bush administration?
I also studied at Chicago, but after Norton, and my specialty was
international relations, not political theory. I did, however, take a few
courses with prominent Straussians like Joseph Cropsey and Nathan Tarcov.
For three years I was also a junior fellow in Allan Bloom's John M. Olin
Center for the Inquiry Into the Theory and Practice of Democracy, where I
met many other academic Straussians including Leon Kass, Thomas Pangle,
Clifford Orwin, Werner Dannhauser, and Ralph Lerner. Through the Olin
Center, I also became acquainted with such political Straussians as Shulsky,
Kristol, Alan Keyes, Frank Fukuyama, and William Galston. There is much I
admire about academic Straussianism, but my intellectual and policy
proclivities have taken me in a different direction.
Norton's reminiscences evoked a good deal of nostalgia for me. Her portrait
of Cropsey, in particular, brought back fond memories of listening to him
lecture on Plato's Republic with subtle wit and penetrating insight. Her
account of the Straussians' distinct sense of hierarchy and their penchant
for the double entendre also reminded me of the time Bloom called me a
"hard-headed realist." Since I was by then enamored of realists like E.H.
Carr, Hans Morgenthau, and Kenneth Waltz, I might have taken this as an
unqualified compliment. But as Bloom was a student of Friedrich Nietzsche, I
knew that there was also a reminder in his remark that my practical bent may
have led me to ignore more important philosophical issues.
In some places, Norton paints flattering portraits of Strauss and his
academic followers-"The first students of Strauss I knew at Chicago were my
professors Joseph Cropsey and Ralph Lerner. To listen to them read a text
was to go into the garden, into a wilderness, into an ocean and breathe.
They were scandalous, they were daring, they took your breath away with
their honesty. They were precise, disciplined, ascetic, reverent, heretical,
blasphemous, and fearless."
Like Mark Lilla in his two superb essays in the New York Review of Books,
Norton distinguishes between Strauss and his academic followers and the
political Straussians in Washington. The latter, in her account, are
academic failures forced to settle for government jobs, who in their
ignorance have tried to turn Strauss into a contemporary neoconservative.
For this she blames Bloom for vulgarizing Straussianism and making it into
little more than neoconservativism with a better intellectual pedigree.
In other places, Norton implicates Strauss more directly in the political
agenda of his Washington epigones. First, she suggests that Strauss's
adherence to "natural right"-the notion that justice should be based on
nature rather than convention-led him to argue that because we are not all
equally endowed with the same intellectual faculties, only select elites
were fit to rule. Second, given the corrosive effect of this
anti-egalitarian truth, Norton suggests that Strauss took his discovery that
the great philosophers concealed their dangerous truths in their writings
and recommended that policymakers do the same in speaking to us. Finally,
Norton draws a line from Strauss's conclusion that war and struggle are
necessary to bring out the best in man from his reading of Nietzsche and
Carl Schmitt, to the neoconservatives' enthusiasm for establishing an
American empire.
Writing in this vein, Norton sounds like Strauss critics such as Shadia
Drury, who cast him as the Professor Moriarity of the neoconservative
network. Proponents of this view point to two sets of links between Strauss's
thought and the neoconservative agenda. Certain current or former government
officials either studied with Strauss himself (Shulsky and Wolfowitz) or
with Strauss's students (Fukuyama and Kristol) and share a set of
conservative premises. These include anti-communism; skepticism about the
efficacy of international institutions; a preoccupation with the concept of
the "political" as producing unending conflict; an endorsement of "natural
right" as the foundation for domestic institutions; the belief that
"virtue," as well as self-interest, matters in political life; a repugnance
toward the relativism in modern liberal society; a marked skepticism about
the potential for the physical and social sciences to fundamentally
ameliorate the human condition; a pronounced anti-egalitarian stance; and a
deep wariness about utopian political projects. Another potential area of
common ground between Strauss and the modern neoconservative movement was
his interest in the relationship between Judaism and modern liberalism and
particularly his endorsement of Zionism.
However, the relationship between academic Straussianism and neoconservatism
is much more complicated. There is no doubt that Strauss embraced some
conservative political positions and preferred Goldwater and Nixon to
Kennedy and McGovern. But while Strauss may have been conservative in his
practical politics, he was a philosophical radical. As he put it:
"Philosophy is the attempt to replace opinion by knowledge; but opinion is
the element of the city, hence philosophy is subversive, hence the
philosopher must write in such a way that he will improve rather than
subvert the city."
For Strauss, Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger were the two great philosophers
of late modernity. The fact that both were directly or indirectly linked to
National Socialism must have made him acutely aware that mixing
philosophical radicalism and practical politics can lead to disaster. Not
surprisingly, Strauss concluded that prudence dictates that one choose
between the life of philosophy (his choice) and sustained political
engagement.
In contrast, the political Straussians, who have now become largely
indistinguishable from neoconservatives, are radicals, clearly lacking the
prudence that Strauss advocated in practical politics. Political Straussians
and their neoconservative allies argue that the spread of democracy is a
panacea for many of America's global problems. But the intellectual
justification for such a policy could hardly have been Strauss, who was a
critic of modern liberalism and democracy. Strauss maintained that political
regimes encompass more than just their formal institutions but also depend
upon the habits, mores, and customs of a society. It is hard to imagine that
he would be sanguine about the prospects for the promotion of democracy in
countries lacking these prerequisites. Indeed, Strauss's view ought to lead
to caution, rather than enthusiasm, for making regime-change the cornerstone
of U.S. foreign policy. To find philosophical support for such a policy, one
has to look to liberal thinkers such as Kant or Montesquieu. As Lilla
argues, what has happened since 1973 was not a Straussian takeover of
neoconservatism but rather a hijacking of Strauss's thought or at least the
kidnapping of some of his less astute students.
Moreover, there are reasons political Straussians would have become
neoconservatives aside from exposure to Strauss's thought. Some, like
Wolfowitz, came from family backgrounds similar to those of non-Straussian
neoconservatives. Wolfowitz's father was a committed Zionist, as are many
neoconservatives, and both father and son were at Cornell during the
tumultuous sixties, when many Americans found other elements of the
neoconservative agenda attractive. Though Wolfowitz did his graduate work at
Chicago when Strauss was there, and even took a few classes with him, Mann
and Norton both report that defense intellectual Albert Wohlstetter
exercised a much greater influence over him. It was Wohlstetter who
connected Wolfowitz with the emerging neoconservative policy network in
Washington, D.C. in the early 1970s, where he would forge alliances with
Richard Perle and Fred Iklé. In other words, many political Straussians
could easily have become neoconservatives even if Strauss had never escaped
Germany in the early 1930s.
Political theorist Paul Gottfried suggests that there is no difference
between intellectual Straussianism and neoconservatism, a view Norton
sometimes seems to echo. She focuses on Francis Fukuyama, author of the most
influential political Straussian tract The End of History, who has also long
been identified with neoconservatism. But this view that Straussianism
inevitably leads to neoconservatism cannot explain Fukuyama's recent break
with the neoconservative consensus on the Iraq War and Bush's foreign policy
generally.
None of this is to suggest that those of us who are appalled by the
neoconservative agenda will find Strauss fully congenial, but rather that he
should not be dismissed as just a proto-neoconservative. Unfortunately,
Norton's book might lead many readers to do just that.
.
|
