Straussed out - philosopher, intellectual and political scientist Leo Strauss

Reason, Nov, 1998 by Loren E. Lomasky

Strauss garnered a remarkable popularity among the best and brightest students passing through the University of Chicago, his refuge after fleeing tempest-tossed Europe. As Shadia B. Drury reports in Leo Strauss and the American Right, he supervised over 100 doctoral dissertations of students attracted by his rejection of the democratic, leveling tendencies of the age and his affirmation that the ideas of the intellectuals matter tremendously - indeed, that nothing else matters as much. Such pandering to young people's taste for elitism is one of the counts of the indictment handed down in Drury's book. There is some justice to the charge - like the philosophers about whom he lectured, Strauss too was an adept handler of students' souls - but Drury's is a rendition of the siren's song that leaves out the music.

Unlike so many contemporary undergraduates, those who found their way to Strauss's classrooms were nominally literate, but what he taught them was to read. It was not so much the doctrines extracted from the classical texts that appealed to students. Rather, it was the dazzling process of identifying nuances of word and structure that could enable one to pry open previously locked intellectual doors, indeed that allowed one to see them as doors rather than as one continuously impermeable wall. Strauss was an interpretive virtuoso, and it was the virtuosity that drew students to him, not merely some vulgar confirmation of their self-serving prejudices. Unlike most academic stars, Strauss rarely pronounced in his own name; instead he allowed the texts to be heard in their own voice. Nowhere else did they sing so sweetly, with such eloquent purity. One can legitimately argue that the Strauss-orchestrated songs were more seductive than sensible, but that is not Drury's tack. Rather, what she puts forth to validate her critical credentials is earnest tone deafness.

In other respects too this book is misleading. Both its title and a dust jacket that pairs photos of Clarence Thomas and Newt Gingrich with one of Strauss suggest a preoccupation with the Straussian roots of the Republican Party's radical right. That, though, is a relatively minor component of the critique. Thomas and Gingrich receive only passing mention in the text. Strauss's seminal contributions to the thought of Harry Jaffa, Allan Bloom, and Willmoore Kendall are instructively spelled out in some detail, but these are at best peripheral players in any debates currently roiling Capitol Hill. With her discussion of Irving Kristol and neoconservatism Drury is on surer ground, but nowhere does she acknowledge that, for better or worse, the neocons are significantly outnumbered on the American right by traditional conservatives and even by classical liberals.

This rather sensationalistic slant is, I suspect, less a strategy for selling more copies than an attempt to differentiate this volume from Drury's 1988 book, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss. In that earlier volume she deconstructs Strauss's claim to be a champion of tradition against modernity, finding him instead a somewhat coarse Nietzschean. That attack is continued here, as Drury accuses Strauss of equating contemporary America's plight with the degeneracy of Weimar Germany, points to manifold affinities between Strauss and existentialist-cum-Nazi-apologist Heidegger, argues that Strauss's seemingly reverential treatment of Jewish theological texts in actuality is meant to undermine the foundations of religious belief, and charges that the so-called secret of the philosophers is: Everything is permitted.