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<i>Weekly Standard,</i> "What Hath Strauss Wrought?"
May 25, 2003 - 11:59am -- jim
anonymous kumquat submits:
Some of the Necon media are getting mighty nervous about the recent outing of their main man...
"What Hath Strauss Wrought?"
Peter Berkowitz, Weekly Standard
The New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Boston Globe, among others, have sounded the alarm: The Bush administration, particularly its foreign policy team, is in the grip of a coterie of neoconservative intellectuals who are themselves in the grip of the antidemocratic and illiberal teachings of Leo Strauss, a political philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago in the '50s and '60s and who died in 1973.
On its face, this scenario is wildly implausible. It supposes that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and National Security Adviser Rice, non-Straussians by all accounts, are stooges and dupes. It insinuates that neoconservative intellectuals--Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is at the top of everybody's list--have craftily ascended to positions of power in the federal government from which they aim to implement Strauss's teachings. And it invests Strauss, a student of political philosophy whose life's work consisted in writing learnedly about thinkers from Plato to Heidegger, and sharing his discoveries with students, with almost superhuman powers: Through the force of his ideas, we are told, this scholar and teacher is able, a generation and a half after his death, to command the respect and loyalty--and indeed, to compel the actions--of highly successful and well-placed individuals not only in politics but in the media and the academy.
(Link above will get you full story, if you've got the stomach for it.)
anonymous kumquat submits:
Some of the Necon media are getting mighty nervous about the recent outing of their main man...
"What Hath Strauss Wrought?"
Peter Berkowitz, Weekly Standard
The New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Boston Globe, among others, have sounded the alarm: The Bush administration, particularly its foreign policy team, is in the grip of a coterie of neoconservative intellectuals who are themselves in the grip of the antidemocratic and illiberal teachings of Leo Strauss, a political philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago in the '50s and '60s and who died in 1973.
On its face, this scenario is wildly implausible. It supposes that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and National Security Adviser Rice, non-Straussians by all accounts, are stooges and dupes. It insinuates that neoconservative intellectuals--Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is at the top of everybody's list--have craftily ascended to positions of power in the federal government from which they aim to implement Strauss's teachings. And it invests Strauss, a student of political philosophy whose life's work consisted in writing learnedly about thinkers from Plato to Heidegger, and sharing his discoveries with students, with almost superhuman powers: Through the force of his ideas, we are told, this scholar and teacher is able, a generation and a half after his death, to command the respect and loyalty--and indeed, to compel the actions--of highly successful and well-placed individuals not only in politics but in the media and the academy.
(Link above will get you full story, if you've got the stomach for it.)