Thorstein Veblen's rant à clef

I have been keeping company with Veblen.  He may wince not, but I sure do -- that is, when I'm not laughing out loud at his mordant wit.  His savagely brilliant sarcasm has a bite far worse than its bark.  I would not want to be on the receiving end of such a scathing polemic as he delivers in The Higher Learning in America.*  This has been a fierce, fun read.

Given the new direction I am pursuing for my dissertation, it is especially helpful for me to read Veblen in order to begin to historicize the ideal of the ivory tower  -- the notion of the disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, the community of scholarly inquiry, etc.  That idea is not timeless (none of them are!); it was new to Veblen's time (or so he argued), and he wrote this polemic to contend for it.  Also quite helpful is Veblen's speculation on the place of the American university following the War.  In a remarkable section near the end of his introductory chapter, Veblen suggests that the American university will occupy a "strategic position" with "command" of resources, materiel and personnel in order to defend the way of learning and serve as a "provisional headquarters for the academic community throughout that range of civilized peoples whose goodwill they enjoy" (52-53).  Certainly Veblen is borrowing his metaphor from his times, suggesting that the university will be on a war footing.  Nevertheless, his suggestion of the university as "strategic" points the way, I think, for both William F. Buckley and the Port Huron authors, as well as the cultural combatants of the 1980s and 1990s.  Veblen is staking out the ground of the culture wars right here, in 1918. 

Even in his own time, what Veblen meant by "the higher education learning" -- what he wanted it to mean in the public mind --  was something altogether different than what "the university" had come to signify by the early 20th century in America.  By Veblen's reckoning, the American university combined two different missions within one institutional framework:  undergraduate collegiate instruction and graduate training in scientific research.  "While it is the work of science and scholarship, roughly what is known in American usage as graduate work, that gives the university its rank as a seat of learning and keeps it in countenance as such with laymen and scholars," Veblen writes, "it is the undergraduate school, or college, that still continues to be the larger fact, and that still engages the greater and more immediate attention in university management." (100) His notion of what "the layman" understood a university to signify may not be correct -- which is a big problem for Veblen's argument, as I will explain below.  But his perception of where university administrators lavished their energies and attention is, I think, correct enough. 

The reasons that Veblen gives for what he considers to be this inordinate focus on "the perfunctory work of the undergraduate department" boil down to money and market share -- money from donors, a market share in enrollments and in the "immaterial capital" (106) that in turn attracts donors and enrollments in an ever-expansionistic cycle.  "The motive to this inclusion of an undergraduate department in the newer universities," he writes in his introduction "appears commonly to have been a headlong eagerness to show a complete establishment of the conventionally accepted pattern, and to enroll as many students as possible" (24).  He lays out his case in more detail in a chapter on "The Academic Administration," where he gives the reader university presidents and administrators as "captains of erudition," earnest epigones of the captains of industry who form the donor class that founded or funded the new American universities -- Stanford, University of Chicago and the like.  Of course, Veblen was famously fired from both places, among others (and this is not even counting the places at which he was famously not hired), a bit of personal history to which he alludes only obliquely but which gives his text -- and especially his footnotes -- a great deal of vituperative power. 

When Veblen wants to cite a particularly egregious example of some more general tendency he is describing, he takes to his footnotes and regales the reader with the damning details, names redacted.  This practice, which accounts for much of the fun of the book, turns it into what I have called a rant à clef.  One would have to read this text in tandem with scholarly biographies of Veblen and institutional histories of the various major universities in order to know for sure exactly which scandal Veblen invokes in which footnote. 

Here's a representative instance of Veblen's passive-aggressive pique.  In his aforementioned chapter on academic administration, Veblen writes of university professors with no job protection, fireable at a whim by the university president. "They have eaten his bread," Veblen says of the professors, "and it is for them to do his bidding....It is needless to remark on what is a fact of common notoriety, that this rule drawn from the conduct of competitive business is commonly applied without substantial abatement in the conduct of academic affairs" (91).  But this needless remark becomes the occasion of a half-page footnote, in which Veblen describes the administrative backlash against faculty who protested the "underhanded dismissal of a scholar of high standing and long service, who had incurred the displeasure of the president then in charge, by overt criticism of the administration."  In this instance, it seems fairly clear that he is describing the firing of Edward Alsworth Ross from Stanford. 

More generally, for many of Veblen's coolly enraged footnotes, it seems like a fifty-fifty shot:  he's either talking about Stanford or University of Chicago.  However, he does allude to other incidents at other schools, public and private, but much of this telling detail is lost on this reader, at any rate.  I bet Julie Reuben knows exactly which incidents he is referring to; her study of the emergence of the American university from (roughly) the end of Reconstruction to the close of the Progressive era -- The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality -- is the indispensable guide to the history of higher education in this period.  However, as far as I can recall, Reuben does not spend any ink specifically discussing Veblen's ideas and ideals of higher education. 

There is a stubborn idealism behind Veblen's most savage critique, an idealism that dates even his most prescient observations.   To be sure, everywhere Veblen looks, he sees the marketplace encroaching on the academy -- universities run as businesses, education commodified and mass-produced under Tayloristic principles for maximum profitability.  All this in 1918.  In good Pragmatic fashion -- a fashion which Veblen, it seems to me, might not be altogether happy to sport, but which marks him nonetheless as exemplifying the style of his age -- Veblen argues that due attention to the "incursion of business principles into the academic community" (95) might be able to hold back the tide of inimical change.  It might still be possible, in Veblen's view, to do something about "the drift of things."  But, as I said, that's not idealism; that's Pragmatism.

Where Veblen's idealism shows itself is his conviction (but a conviction of believing, or of trying to believe?) that society will always place somevalue on what he calls "idle" knowledge -- by which he means knowledge pursued for its own sake, knowledge that has no market value.  Veblen believed that there was something (almost?) timeless about the human quest for knowledge, something that would ultimately preserve it from total absorption by the market -- he believed there was a broad communal conviction "such as will not enduringly tolerate the sordid effects of pursuing an educational policy that looks mainly to the main chance, and unreservedly makes the means of life its chief end.  By virtue of this long-term idealist drift, any seminary of learning that plays fast and loose in this way with the cultural interests entrusted to its keeping loses caste and falls out of the running" (42).  There's the idealism: that persistent Arnoldian notion of "cultural interests" above the sordid business of "the main chance."  Veblen was able to imagine a world in which the very highest reaches of the ivory tower were out of the market's reach -- which marks him off as a son of his own time, but not a seer of ours.

____________

Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum of the Conduct of Universities by Business Men [1918]. Introduction by David Riesman (Stanford: Academic Reprints, 1954).  Page numbers for citations from Veblen's text are given in parentheses in the body of this post.

Earl Shorris and Popular Anti-Straussianism

Earl Shorris

Last week, author and educator Earl Shorris passed away at the age of 75 from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. His New York Times obituary rightly focuses on his creation of the Clemente Course in the Humanities, the program he created in 1995 to bring a broad, liberal arts curriculum to the economically disadvantaged, which earned him a National Humanities Medal in 2000.

But the first thing I thought of when I heard of Shorris's passing was a piece that he wrote for Harper's, published in June, 2004, entitled "Ignoble Liars: Leo Strauss, George Bush, and the Philosophy of Mass Deception" (.pdf available here).  Shorris's piece was one of a series of popular works from the middle of the last decade that sought to blame Leo Strauss and his acolytes for all that had gone wrong during the Bush years.  In May, 2003, Seymour Hersh had argued in The New Yorker that a Straussian cabal was responsible for cooking U.S. intelligence on Iraq to bring about war, a charge echoed that same month by James Atlas in a New York Times op-ed.  This flurry of articles, in turn, inspired the actor Tim Robbins to write Embedded, a play that premiered in L.A. in July, 2003, which dramatized the notion that Leo Strauss was pulling the strings of the Iraq War from beyond the grave.  Shortly after Shorris's article appeared, in the fall of 2004, the documentarian Adam Curtis's The Power of Nightmares premiered on BBC television, arguing that Leo Strauss had not only been the intellectual font of neoconservatism, but had also inspired American policymakers to invent Al Qaeda.

How do these attempts to argue that Leo Strauss was the power behind the Bush throne hold up almost a decade later?  How does Shorris's piece fare among them?




My provisional answer is to the first question is that these articles, plays, and documentaries explained both too little and too much.  On the one hand, they were part of a much larger tendency to see the Bush Administration--especially post-9/11--as representing a much more radical break with the past than it in fact did.  The too-little-acknowledged continuities have become clearer now that we have had three years during which a Democratic administration has not, in fact, reversed many of the policies that critics found so appalling during the Bush years. Discovering a previously obscure, foreign, reactionary thinker as the secret cause of an administration's actions nicely fit the view of the Bush administration as a radical break from the past.  The focus on Strauss and his followers as the secret power behind the Bush administration tended to produce elaborate explanations for fairly historically common phenomena, like administrations' lying to the public about wars, while providing far too shallow critiques of other phenomena, such as long-standing problems with the national security state that had developed during the Cold War and lived on long after its end.  Stories of the trahison des Straussians also uncomfortably resembled a long tradition of anti-intellectual counter-subversive narratives, the most famous modern examples of which involved Communists during the Cold War.

All that being said, Straussians have played a smaller, but nonetheless important, role in modern American conservatism. The fact that some false conspiracy theories have been constructed about them no more makes them unimportant on the right than the falsity of most anti-Communist conspiracy theories means that Communists weren't important in the Old Left.

In the context of the popular anti-Straussian writings of the Bush years, Shorris's piece is measured and interesting, if nonetheless off-base in many typical ways.  Shorris makes his share of sloppy mistakes, some of them understandable and basically unimportant (e.g. identifying Strauss's hometown as "Kirchheim" rather than "Kirchhain") some of them significant and less defensible (e.g. identifying Grover Norquist as a Straussian).

To his credit, Shorris sets his critique in a world in which Leo Strauss did not invent public dishonesty:

It is safe to say that neither Ronald Reagan nor the Bushes have read Leo Strauss, and certainly no politician needs to be taught how to lie by a professor of philosophy.

Nevertheless, as Shorris notes in a footnote to this statement,

we need not be concerned with proving direct lines of influence. A brief summary of Straussian doctrine suffices to demonstrate its affinity with what one might call the "mind of the regime," whether any particular member of the Bush Administration has read Strauss or not.

But Shorris is sensibly uncomfortable at leaving the matter at merely identifying similarities between the behavior of the administration and (his understanding of) Strauss, so he continues in the main text of his article:

Perhaps William Kristol, while serving as Dan Quayle's chief of staff, tutored the vice president in the finer points of Platonic politics. But it is unlikely. The step from philosophy to action is almost always circuitous, Machiavelli being one of the rare exceptions. Strauss's ideas about ideas took the usual path, picked and poked and punched, mutating here, understood selectively there. At one time, Strauss wrote a sentence in which he opposed preventive war. How disappointed his followers in the Department of Defense would be to read it now in light of the wreckage they have made!  

The career of Strauss's teachings is one of the wonders and the dangers of the book, as the master himself might have said, knowing that the long life of books, unlike newspapers or television, is bound up with history in a process of indirection. The ideas in books somehow manage to wiggle through the morass of individuals and information in large modern societies and become effective. The way is not clear, but the fact of it often gives surcease to the pains of laboring in obscurity.

Two things are notable about this passage. First, it shows a much subtler understanding of the actual ways that ideas affect society than the sometimes Dan Brownish intellectual conspiracy theories that have been written about the Straussians. Secondly, there's some suggestion that Shorris sees Strauss himself as similar to Prof. Rupert Cadell (Jimmy Stewart) in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, whose Nietzschean ideas are transformed by a student into an act of murder.  In fact, around the time Shorris wrote his Harper's piece, a number of critics of the Straussians, including both Anne Norton and Mark Lilla, began to suggest that Strauss was not a Straussian and that the master should not be blamed for the sins of his acolytes.

Shorris himself, however, is not clear on this point. One of the striking things about his article is the poignancy of his (essentially negative) portrait of Leo Strauss.  Shorris has virtually nothing good to say about Strauss's writings (which he sees as intentionally impossible to decipher and largely dedicated to bad writing for bad writing's sake) or about his political commitments (which he sees as reactionary, hierarchical, and anti-democratic).  Yet he also sees Strauss as an essentially tragic figure, whose politics were almost entirely determined by his intellectual hero Heidegger's embrace of Nazism, and who seemed (somewhat like Stewart's Prof. Cadell) to have had little desire for the powers sought by his followers:

Without question he was a brilliant professor, a frightened man whose ideas, having been battered into hiding by historic events, were eccentric. He had produced some journal articles, delivered the Walgreen Lectures, never to my knowledge appeared in the "public press," made no radio or television appearances, and during his lifetime found but a small group of readers for his books. He died obscure and far from home.

Ultimately, Shorris's take on Strauss's life and ideas is overly reductive, though much of the blame no doubt lies with the format--a seven page magazine article--as well as the unavailability of decent secondary sources about Strauss: although the situation would change drastically over the next five years, at the time Shorris wrote, not a single scholarly biography of Strauss had been published in English, and there were still very few scholarly monographs dedicated to explicating his thought.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about Shorris's article on Strauss is something that goes unstated in it.  Early in the piece, Shorris notes that Strauss

had but one core idea: read old books carefully. It was a stroke of genius, and nothing more invigorating or enlightening could be said about education, but it was not news on a campus run by Robert Maynard Hutchins, one of the inventors of the Great Books curriculum.

What Shorris doesn't mention is that he himself was very much a product of that curriculum.  Shorris attended U of C in the late '40s and early '50s, arriving there as a thirteen year-old (Chicago was known for accepting very young undergraduates) within a year or two of Leo Strauss himself.  Though he left before receiving his degree, Shorris was deeply influenced by his university's commitment to the Great Books, as his creating of the Clemente Course some four decades later attests.  As Tim Lacy has written on this blog, there were many flavors of commitment to the Great Books at Chicago.  And Shorris, like Mortimer Adler, was deeply attached to great books liberalism. As the Clemente Course suggests, Shorris saw the Great Books as documents of democratic empowerment.  But he saw Strauss as attempting to wed these books to a doctrine of elitism and obscurantism.

Shorris's piece ends with a call to resist the "Nietzschean dreams of power" that he saw as regnant, thanks to Strauss, in the Bush administration.  He's largely silent--other than those passing words of praise in that last blockquote, which could incorrectly be read as ironic--on his own abiding commitment to the Great Books.  What is clear is that Shorris saw ideas as mattering and feared not so much a conspiratorial cabal (though his article is not entirely free of loose accusations about who were Straussians in the halls of power) as the potentially catastrophic effects of bad philosophy.  And this, too, was something he shared with Leo Strauss.

On Listening to Leo Strauss

The perfect book or speech obeys in every respect the pure and merciless laws of what has been called logographic necessity.  The perfect speech contains nothing slipshod; it in there are no loose threads; it contains no word that has been picked at random; it is not marred by errors due to faulty memory or to any other kind of carelessness; strong passions and a powerful and fertile imagination are guided with ease by a reason which knows how to use the unexpected gift, which knows how to persuade and which knows how to forbid; it allows of no adornment which is not imposed by the gravity and aloofness of the subject matter; the perfect writer rejects with disdain and with some impatience the demand of vulgar rhetoric that expressions must be varied since change is pleasant. 

-- Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), p. 121

Let me say only this: Don't pay too great attention to that [unintelligible] of mine. What I said about this prehistory of Hegel--Kant and Spinoza--was a deliberately provisional statement to lead up to this new kind of thinking. If you have any difficulty, forget about it. . . .  

Just forget about it. Don't worry too much.  I just tried...And you are not a...you probably have no teaching experience. As a teacher one has to lead up from all parts of the horizon to something. And, uh, one is not always successful at that. That has to be...I mean, teaching can never become a scientifically conductible affair. 

--Leo Strauss, Seminar on Hegel's The Philosophy of History, University of Chicago,

 Winter Quarter 1965, Session 1, January 5, 1965

In my post several weeks ago on Embodiment and Intellectual History, I mentioned the audio recordings of courses taught by Leo Strauss that are now available at the website of the Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago.  Here are a few preliminary thoughts about them...



I

Those of us who study the last century-and-a-quarter or so of history have at least the possibility of hearing the voices of the people about whom we write. Some historical voices are familiar to almost all of us who study the past.  My guess is that the voices of every President going back to FDR are familiar to those who read this blog.  So are the voices of other major political figures of the recent past, such as Martin Luther King, Jr.

Other voices may be less familiar but are readily available...especially in the age of the internet. The voices of poets, for example, have been of interest since the beginning of sound recording. At the click of a mouse, you can hear Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell,   Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, or virtually any other well-known poet of the recent past.

But away from politics and literature, the ability to hear voices from the past is a bit more hit-and-miss. While some of the people about whom I wrote in my first book have voices that are familiar to me--Orson Welles, Franklin Roosevelt, even Frank Capra and Hannah Arendt--I know others only through their literary voices.  My guess is that there are plenty of sound recordings of Erich Fromm, Bruno Bettelheim, Dwight Macdonald, and Clement Greenberg, but if I've heard them, I forget the qualities of their voices.  I don't know if there are any readily available recordings of many of the other, more obscure, figures about whom I wrote, like Calvin B. Hoover, the Duke University economist who was one of the first to use "totalitarian" as a term to link Stalinism and Nazism, and my guess is, if such recordings exist, they'd be harder to come by.

Encountering for the first time the (actual) voice of someone whose literary voice is familiar is always an odd experience, one which we often have with the living as well as the dead. Sometimes the voice is exactly what one expects. Or, at least, it matches one's literary experience. I remember, for example, the first time I heard J.G.A. Pocock give a lecture and being struck by both the oddness of his voice and how perfectly it fit the voice on the page.

More often, at least for me, the voices I hear of those whose words are familiar to me are somewhat different from what I expected. Mind you, I don't usually formulate a precise expectation of someone's voice by reading her prose. But like literary characters whom we meet in novels, we fill in the blanks about real people whom we encounter on the page. And the initial experience of hearing their voices is often like encountering a familiar literary character in a film or stage adaptation.  What we hear is often not what we imagined.

But there is of course a big difference. Especially if we are careful readers, the image of a literary character that we develop from the page has at least as great a claim to authenticity as the adapted versions we see on the screen. To the extent that those screen versions begin to displace the versions we imagined for ourselves, something real is lost.  But the voice we hear in a recording of an historical person is that person's voice...or at least a good deal closer to it than any imagined reconstruction we come up with when reading their prose.

I'm not sure how I imagined that Leo Strauss would sound, but I was surprised when I first encountered his voice, which reminded me in many ways of my Russian grandfather, who was just a few years younger than Strauss and who learned English well after becoming fluent in German and earning a PhD at a German university (at least that's my best explanation of whatever similarity I hear).  But now that I've heard it, Strauss's voice is inseparable in my mind from Leo Strauss, who has become more concretely embodied for me than he was before.

II

As I wrote in my post on embodiment, Strauss's recorded seminars are of particular interest because of the esteem in which his students held him as a teacher.  Richard G. Stevens's claim that Strauss was "the greatest classroom teacher in the history of Western civilization" is only the most extravagant of countless celebrations of his pedagogical charisma.

As the Strauss Center's webpage notes, for years, transcripts of these recordings were passed around among a select group of Strauss's students and his students' students, always with the admonition "Recipients are emphatically requested not to seek to increase the circulation of the transcription."

The preciousness, care, and even secrecy with which these transcripts were treated reflect Strauss's peculiar notions about the relationship of oral philosophical teaching to written philosophical works. The former can be much more frank than the latter, as they are addressed to a select audience and are not available to the vulgar.*

One of the things most immediately striking about the recordings of Strauss's seminars is how different they are from his writings. Not so much in content--I have yet to encounter any "secret teachings" in my listening--as in tone.  The two passages I quote above--the first in writing about writing, the second on tape about oral teaching--capture at least part of the theoretical aspect of this difference.  The second comes from Strauss's answer to a student's question about Strauss's very condensed discussion of Kant, Spinoza, and Jacobi with which Strauss had begun his introductory meeting of his seminar on Hegel's Philosophy of History.  In this quotation, Strauss puts forward a vision of classroom teaching that is utterly different from his notion of philosophical writing, which is, in turn, nicely captured in the quotation above it from his Thoughts on Machiavelli.  Strauss's method of reading philosophy entails assuming that serious philosophers are simply incapable of making errors...so any apparent error in a philosophical text (or at least in a pre-modern philosophical text) is an indication of some sort of esoteric teaching.  But clearly Strauss understands the task of oral instruction differently.  I suspect I am not alone, among those who find Straussian (written) hermeneutics hard to swallow, in finding Strauss's humility about the provisional nature of teaching refreshing.

And indeed the feeling of Strauss's seminar lectures (and these are very much lectures) is utterly different from the feelings of his writings.  Strauss's written work is dense, allusive, and often elusive.  Although followers of Strauss deeply value these written for, among other things, their style, many non-Straussians find them exquisitely dull.  "It is a general observation," Strauss writes in his essay "How to Study Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise" from Persecution and the Art of Writing, "that people write as they read."**  And Leo Strauss certainly treated the writings of other philosophers as esoteric puzzle palaces.

His lectures, on the other hand, seem different.  They are much more typical of good lectures in their approach than his books are typical of good books. Strauss emphasizes and reemphasizes important points. He incorporates examples from current events to illustrate his points. He interacts with his students in a way that indicates both that he takes them seriously, but that he knows exactly where he wants to lead them (his pedagogical persona is, unsurprisingly, old-fashioned in this regard).  While they certainly do not move me to agree that he was the greatest teacher since Plato, Strauss's pedagogical charisma is clear in them.

III

Now broadly available, the lectures provide an excellent new (to the rest of us) way to get a sense of Leo Strauss's approach to political philosophy. Take, for example, the Introduction to Political Philosophy that Strauss offered at the U of C during the Winter Quarter of 1965.  Like most of the courses for which recordings are available, this one is incomplete; only nine of the sixteen sessions are preserved on tape. As far as I can tell, the recordings represent nine of the first ten class meetings, with the last five meetings missing (the recordings are numbered one to nine, but there appears to be a lecture skipped in the midst of them).

For those unversed in Strauss, the arrangement of material might seem odd. Strauss begins his opening lecture by noting that political philosophy, in the classical sense, seems utterly impossible today.  He then spends the next six, hour-and-a-half-long sessions elaborating the reasons for this sense of impossibility. All of the first two lectures and the beginning of the third concern Auguste Comte and positivism.  The rest of Lecture Three, all of Lecture Four, and the beginning of Lecture Five concern the notion of value-free social science...and its inadequacy in Strauss's view.  The remainder of Lecture Five and all of Lecture Six concern historicism.

Strauss thus spends more than the first third of his class meticulously describing three of his major bêtes noires: positivism, the fact-value distinction, and historicism. All of this, again, is by way of explaining why political philosophy seems impossible in 1965.

Finally, in Lecture Seven, Strauss begins to tackle the history of political philosophy, which, Strauss argues, unlike political philosophy itself, is still seen as necessary.  He begins discussing the history of political philosophy by way of another great Straussian trope, the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. This then leads to a discussion of Hobbes and Rousseau, who represent what Strauss sees as the first and second waves of modernity.*** 

Lecture Eight continues to describe the ways in which modern political philosophy departs from classical political philosophy, which Strauss has still not discussed at any length. At various times, Kant, Descartes, Hegel, and Nietzsche, the last the representative figure from Strauss's third wave of modernity, come into the discussion.  The lecture concludes with the thought that, unlike modern political thought, which locates itself outside the realm of everyday politics, classical political philosophy "has its stand within the political sphere."

In Lecture Nine, Strauss finally works his way to classical political philosophy and a discussion of Aristotle's Politics.

Strauss's extraordinarily long journey to the subject at hand in these lectures seems to instantiate his notion  (in his written works) of modernity's constituting a second cave from which we must crawl merely to find ourselves in the "natural" cave described by Plato.  The lectures also provide a concrete answer to what is sometimes seen as a core paradox of Strauss's work: the fact that this implacable foe of historicism appears to have devoted his career to explicating the history of political philosophy.  As Strauss explains in exhaustive detail in the early lectures, given that political philosophy seems impossible today, while the history of political philosophy seems not only possible but necessary, that history must be our path back to political philosophy itself.

I'm not sure that I would have gotten all of this out of these lectures had I not first read much Strauss, and much about Strauss. And from the point of view of intellectual history, the status of these seminars is complicated: they are both public and private documents, depending on how one looks at them. But they are a fascinating resource.
______________________________________
* For more on this issue, see Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), esp. Chapter 2.  This is also not to say that Strauss is being entirely frank in his seminars. But he is certainly addressing a more select audience.

** Persecution and the Art of Writing, 144.

*** Strauss does not talk of the three waves in this lecture, but the idea structures his discussion of modern political philosophy here in many ways.

Will "Straussianism" Become Like "Deconstruction" in Popular Discourse?

 Begging for a Straussian Reading of Some Kind?

Yesterday, Tim Lacy called my attention to this piece by Matt Yglesias in which he analyzes a recent piece by New York Times columnist David Brooks.

"David Brooks’ column 'The Thing Itself' is just begging for a Straussian reading of some kind," Yglesias begins.  Even as a student of popular anti-Straussianism, I was initially at something of a loss to see what Yglesias was talking about.

Brooks's column is--or perhaps one should say in deference to Yglesias "appears to be"--a celebration of outgoing Port Authority head Chris Ward and his, at least according to Brooks, extremely practical approach to rebuilding at Ground Zero.  Brooks then uses Ward's practicality-over-symbolism as a positive contrast to a variety of issues that Brooks argues have been dominated by "culture war" purism, e.g. the politics of gun ownership and Obama's Green Tech initiative.*

But according to Yglesias, this isn't really what the column is about.


Pointing out that the column's title phrase (repeated in its body) is a translation of Kant's Ding an sich, which is "unknowable and inexpressible," Yglesias suggests that the column is thus really arguing something quite different:

The basic topic of the column is perfectly plausible here. A call for people to be more practical. But why link that idea specifically to Kant’s phrase, and then use it to call for us to do something that Kant says is impossible? I get a distinct air of Leo Strauss and the University of Chicago around this. Brooks is winking at those of us in the know to signal to us that there’s a deeper meaning afoot. The esoteric argument, I think, is that people necessarily engage with mass politics on a symbolic and expressive level rather than a practical way (voting isn’t very practical) so our endeavors are doomed to failure.

Why would an argument of the sort that Yglesias suggests Brooks is making have to be presented esoterically? How does it in any way contradict the explicit message of the piece?  Far from challenging the conventional wisdom of our day, the idea that mass politics is inherently irrational and militates against practical solutions is practically a dogma of our nation's punditocracy.  And it certainly doesn't contradict Brooks's explicit praise for the practicality of an appointed official.

But there's a more basic problem here.  David Brooks isn't a Straussian.  Indeed, before I saw this piece, I would have told you that, in an era in which practically everyone on the right has gotten called a Straussian by somebody at one time or another, Brooks had the relatively rare distinction of never being so labelled. After all, Brooks seems more interested in the nonexistent salad bar at Applebee's than in the "timeless questions" that Straussians concern themselves with.  Even when Brooks considered questions of human nature in his latest book, The Social Animal, he turned to (poorly understood and popularized) neuroscience, rather than to Socratic philosophy, to explain it.

But then I discovered that Yglesias, at least, has been calling Brooks a Straussian for years.  The 2005 Brooks column Yglesias focuses on in this earlier piece is even less "Straussian" than  the one about Chris Ward. Written on the eve of President George W. Bush's first Supreme Court appointment, Brooks starts by calling on Dubya to look for a "philosophical powerhouse," then suggests Michael McConnell, whom Brooks praises for having a less strict understanding of the separation of church and state.  Yglesias correctly points out that the column's first argument--that Presidents should appoint smart people to the court--is not its most important, which is that the separation of church and state should be eased.  But burying the lede as Brooks does here is hardly an example of esotericism, let alone Straussianism.

As far as I can tell, the case that Brooks is a Straussian is based on guilt by extremely vague association. He is Jewish. He's arguably a neoconservative.  He went to the University of Chicago.

However, Brooks majored in history. And, as readers of this blog are well aware, there's nothing remotely Straussian about the History Department at Chicago...or for that matter about most departments at Chicago beyond Political Science and the Committee on Social Thought (even they include plenty of non-Straussians alongside their Straussians).

And what makes this column "Straussian"? It has a reference to a German philosophical concept that would likely go over the heads of many readers.  It disparages democratic politics. And it does so in a way that doesn't emphasize that argument.

But, like the earlier Brooks column that Yglesias called Straussian, this column's argument is not an instance of esotericism in the Straussian (or for that matter any other) sense. Brooks disparages politics entirely openly in the piece. Chris Ward, whom he praises, notably didn't get his job via election; he was appointed, first by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to another post, and then by Governor David Paterson, to his current one.  Brooks does like to sugarcoat his often quite conservative arguments in moderate-sounding rhetoric. But, again, that's not esotericism.

There are a number of pretty simple lessons here: Not all neoconservatives are Straussians.  Not all graduates of the University of Chicago are Straussians.  Not all elitists are Straussians. People besides Straussians sometimes make references to highfalutin' German philosophical concepts.  People besides Straussians try to tailor their arguments for their audience...and there are many ways to do so that do not involve esotericism. And people besides Straussians sometimes harbor anti-democratic political views.

But I also wonder whether we are beginning to see the term "Straussian" take a rhetorical journey similar to that which "deconstruction" took in the last quarter of the twentieth century. "Deconstruction" began life as a technical term coined by Jacques Derrida to describe his method of reading a text. It then entered popular language as a pejorative to describe any abstruse form of textual analysis. And then the pejorative connotation began to fall away.  Today people often say "deconstruct" when they really mean nothing more than "analyze carefully."
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* This argument really is classic Brooks.  Immediately after making a pseudo-moderate, pox-on-both-houses argument about the essentially dead issue of gun control, Brooks hauls out a standard, right-wing Republican talkingpoint about a very live issue:  "President Obama’s Green Tech initiative has become a policy disaster — not only at Solyndra but at one program after another — because its champions ignored basic practical considerations. They were befogged by their own visions of purity and virtue."