Edward Rothstein: Democracy's Best Friend or Antidemocratic Elitist?
Could any tyrant have plotted a more patient, thorough and ruthless path to power? Leo Strauss, the political philosopher who died in 1973, might have seemed just a harmless German-Jewish émigré, teaching Plato and Machiavelli at the University of Chicago. But according to recent critics, he was actually preparing an intellectual putsch, which would take place 30 years after his death and culminate in the war in Iraq.
His students and followers, these critics say, learned their lessons well and like good soldiers began a long march through a variety of institutions, seeking control. They maneuvered into foundations, institutes and departments of state and war. Then they began their shadow rule, leading the nation into foolhardy war. Presumably, their mentor gazes down from the heavens (or upward from the other place), beaming with satisfaction.
I exaggerate slightly, but this really is a theory that has taken shape in recent years in newspaper reports, magazine articles and books. Strauss has been characterized as an antidemocratic ultraconservative: the shadowy intellectual figure behind some of the men who planned the Iraq war. He has been called a cynical teacher who encouraged his students to believe in their right to rule humanity, a patron saint of neoconservatives, a believer in the use of "noble lies" to manipulate the masses. And he has been linked (with variable accuracy) to, among others, Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense; and Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory group to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.
In 2004, Strauss's face demonically loomed over Tim Robbins's agitprop antiwar play "Embedded," at the Public Theater in New York, as he was hailed with brutish chants. Books like "Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire" (Yale) by Anne Norton have relished telling of his baleful influence.
Into this fray, Steven B. Smith, a political scientist at Yale University, has now stepped, with an important collection of essays that offers an elegantly argued scrutiny of Strauss's work, examining his views of Spinoza and Judaism, Heidegger and Machiavelli, tyranny and idealism. Mr. Smith's book, "Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism" (University of Chicago Press), argues that Strauss, far from being a conservative, was a "friend of liberal democracy — one of the best friends democracy has ever had." Moreover, despite the assertions of his critics, Strauss "saw politics neither from the Right nor from the Left but from above." (Another book, "The Truth About Leo Strauss," by Catherine and Michael Zuckert, to be published by the University of Chicago Press in September, also mounts a defense of Strauss.)...
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His students and followers, these critics say, learned their lessons well and like good soldiers began a long march through a variety of institutions, seeking control. They maneuvered into foundations, institutes and departments of state and war. Then they began their shadow rule, leading the nation into foolhardy war. Presumably, their mentor gazes down from the heavens (or upward from the other place), beaming with satisfaction.
I exaggerate slightly, but this really is a theory that has taken shape in recent years in newspaper reports, magazine articles and books. Strauss has been characterized as an antidemocratic ultraconservative: the shadowy intellectual figure behind some of the men who planned the Iraq war. He has been called a cynical teacher who encouraged his students to believe in their right to rule humanity, a patron saint of neoconservatives, a believer in the use of "noble lies" to manipulate the masses. And he has been linked (with variable accuracy) to, among others, Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense; and Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory group to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.
In 2004, Strauss's face demonically loomed over Tim Robbins's agitprop antiwar play "Embedded," at the Public Theater in New York, as he was hailed with brutish chants. Books like "Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire" (Yale) by Anne Norton have relished telling of his baleful influence.
Into this fray, Steven B. Smith, a political scientist at Yale University, has now stepped, with an important collection of essays that offers an elegantly argued scrutiny of Strauss's work, examining his views of Spinoza and Judaism, Heidegger and Machiavelli, tyranny and idealism. Mr. Smith's book, "Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism" (University of Chicago Press), argues that Strauss, far from being a conservative, was a "friend of liberal democracy — one of the best friends democracy has ever had." Moreover, despite the assertions of his critics, Strauss "saw politics neither from the Right nor from the Left but from above." (Another book, "The Truth About Leo Strauss," by Catherine and Michael Zuckert, to be published by the University of Chicago Press in September, also mounts a defense of Strauss.)...