This is great. I am envious of your ability to synthesize and react to these books with so much clarity and intelligence. Adding Strauss to ever-growing to-read pile.
There was discussion on the TL today related to your thoughts on liberalism and personal freedom, about whether the crisis of loneliness and dissolution of communities is essentially a revealed preference (https://twitter.com/kaschuta/status/1704006655644496233). I kind of sympathize, I'm lucky to have close friends but I am also the sort of person who likes to be left alone to read and think and take long walks am not sure I would prefer a time where my neighbors are always barging in Kramer-style, or where a divorce or a new relationship gets you stares from everyone in church. That said I do think there is something to the crisis of meaning that illiberal philosophers point out -- it's why I feel like, even as (I guess) a left-liberal, I find that critiques of society in First Things or Compact or whatever often hit a little harder than the ones in The Atlantic or The New Republic, where it's all because Republicans Bad or an ill-defined "capitalism".
I always think back to The Dispossessed which I think is admirably forthright about the downside of seriously connected human communities -- no one gets left behind, but everyone is forced to live in a world of shifting social alliances and petty feuds, and many of the rules of society are invisible and unspoken instead of codified. Which is better than hunger and poverty but would add a lot of intensity and stress to daily life. So I dunno.
I don't disagree that lots of people want more community than they have. I think there is a bit of a free-rider effect: people want the ability to step out of a community, but for it to keep going on without them, so they can return. But the more people who step out, the less healthy it is. I think of it as being a bit like the humanities nowadays: everyone wants to be a rebel; nobody wants to do the work of saying "Actually a lot of this old stuff is really good", because it's just stodgy and uncool and unfun.
I think people want and need more community, I just don't think restricting personal freedom is the way to go about it. If do think that if the price of community is that you need to _force_ people to be a part of it, then that price is too high. I think it's perfectly possible to find happiness and meaning in a liberal democratic society, and I'm by no means convinced that an illiberal authoritarian one would provide more of those things. I guess the counterargument is that liberal democratic society works to atomize community: that people are financially incentivized to break apart or leave their communities. I remember the haunting opening the Jungle, where the Lithuanian family has a wedding for their community--normally, back home, people would bring gifts to defray the cost of the wedding, but with the anonyminity of the big city, people came and drank and gave nothing). That lack of reciprocity will mean the end of big open-handed weddings.
That's why I think that I am just fundamentally conservative. What we have now isn't great, but I don't know if government action to put us into ethno-national silos, like the Ottoman millets (which seems to be what the First Things and Compact crowd want), wouldn't have all the negatives of modernity (which, for all we know, are inextricable from modern technology and industrialism) without any of the freedom to self-actualize that makes it all worthwhile.
This feels like a bit of the limitation of reading from text, in a way that is actually rather consonant with your reading of Strauss from text, if you know what I mean--which is that what Strauss says in text and the ways in which Strauss has been read by his most avid readers is actually a stress test of the implications of esoteric reading as an idea--meaning that some of his readers have understood him to mean "it's ok to use writing to intentionally hide from outsiders what the interpretative community is actually doing through and within writing". Strauss has almost become a sort of Western conservative doppleganger of taqiyya, the Shi'a Muslim doctrine that it is ok to use deception about membership in a spiritual-philosophical community if acknowledgement of membership would place the acknowledging person in physical or material danger. I think you can argue coherently that this isn't what Strauss means in his text (but reckoning with Strauss the living intellectual might complicate that) but it's definitely what some of his readers have interpreted esoteric reading to advocate--as you note in underlining his popularity with Christian nationalists.
The trigger for that is perhaps the critique of Burke that you highlight--that Strauss wants to find in liberalism an active potential for action that is not revolutionary but is not Burke's acceptance that 'tradition' is changed in ways that can't be articulated fully, that change happens within the mysteriousness of 'traditional society', through organic social connections and lived experience, not by the concerted will of the state or of instrumentally stated goals of parties, movements or groups in civil society. The moment Strauss says "we can deliberately seek some transformations" and yet says "this doesn't have to be stated in public and transparent ways", he's pretty much ringing the dinner bell for everyone who seeks a transformation that they know is unpersuasive to a democratic majority as it stands, and for everyone who thinks that the only reason the democratic public culture is as it is must be that some other esoteric group got to them first and corrupted them.
I guess what I am saying is that I think Strauss himself supports the concept of dissimulation and forming conspiracies, but I think that support is pretty up front. Does that make sense? I think you could read Strauss and take away the idea that the USA is fundamentally not a righteous regime and that it needs to be overthrown and for a righteous regime to be installed by force, and I think that's a relatively surface level, straightforward interpretation of Strauss. I am not sure that at least in this book there is that much he held back! And if you are a straussian then it goes without saying that the common people are unable to understand what is good for them, and that there is no point in being honest with them. I'm not sure what Strauss could be hiding that is worse than what's actually in the text
It's the hilarity of saying "dissimulate and form conspiracies, but I'm honestly telling you everything in the text and you should read my text like I'm a normal persuasive writer". Like, this is one of those horrible logic puzzles: "I am a liar who tells lies but who is telling the truth of these three men? Me, the liar, or they, the two who say they tell truth"? And logic answers and says "oh I get it's the liar who says he's lying, what do I win?" and the heart says "oh fuck no, I don't trust that guy."
I agree that this is the logical implication of Strauss's thought. If democracy is not the best form of government (as indeed he thinks it is not), then it's because it's simply not possible to convince the mass of people to choose their own good. And it's certainly possible to read him as saying that a French revolution by our side would be good! I just wonder how much is really under the surface. Vermeule and Deneen seem to be pretty up front about wanting christian nationalism and about eradicating sexual and gender minorities and legislatively oppressing non Christians. Is that what Strauss wanted? It's hard to say! But it's definitely what they want. Strauss probably would've supported a Christian nationalist regime, the only question is if he would support violence to get there. And the answer is...perhaps? Realistically speaking, in the modern world, how much esoteric meaning is there? It seems like people more or less do exactly what they say they will do.
The thing is, Strauss is destroying the entire idea of reading-for-meaning, perhaps without meaning to do that (who can say? for exactly the reasons you underline). The idea is that the text never means what it says, but with authorial agency, as opposed to Derridean/Foucauldian ideas that the reader is in charge and the author is dead. It doesn't seem like Derrida or Foucault are especially democratic, but it is at this exact moment that you can see where they are implicitly and Strauss is not. It's hard to decipher what they say, but they are saying (pretty clearly) that what you see in the text is what it is for you. (This renders the spectacle of a seriously poststructuralist scholar scolding people for misreading rather hilarious, for all that it happens a lot.) Strauss is saying: there's something here that the author means, but you won't get it unless you have the secret decoder ring, and those are only handed out to people who are On Board with the political project.
I mean, no wonder we live in a moment where conspiracy is a prominent narrative: there's a strain of right-wing thought around for decades derived from or in association with Strauss that's been saying: that's the only way to do it, and it's the only reason that ostensibly democratic societies don't agree with us, the people who are correct thinkers.
The interesting discussion beyond that might be to probe all the ways in which quasi-esoteric "communities of interpretation" accept a pseudo-Straussian vision of what they do without that being a rigid doctrinal proposition--there are hundreds of subcultures that conduct conversations in plain sight that also sigh and insist "we can't tell you, it's an internet thing".
Straussians will sometimes get quite upset when you point out that Strauss underpins almost all non-Catholic or libertarian conservative intellectual work today, but it's just inarguable. I go back and forth on how malevolent Strauss himself was-he did always supposedly insist that you shouldn't read him esoterically, but he had to have known that people would, and you can get some pretty evil stuff if you do. Schmitt should probably be getting the "the secret genius underpinning the right today" treatment if he hasn't already, I love your rule of thumb about him in relation to conservative writers.
Why would they be upset! Strauss is a brilliant writer. His work _should_ be influential. I don't think he's malevolent: I think he just pursued truth. He makes a key point somewhere in the book about the difference between intellectuals and philosophers:
"For the politicization of philosophy consists precisely in this, that the difference between intellectuals and philosophers—a difference formerly known as the difference between gentlemen and philosophers, on the one hand, and the difference between sophists or rhetoricians and philosophers, on the other—becomes blurred and finally disappears.."
Strauss doesn't have a side. He isn't trying to create an ideal state: he is trying to do philosophy. I think his viewpoint, which he is explicit about, is that the ideal state can only come about by accident, when, for some reason or other, a philosopher or group of philosophers is able to take political control of a state. But no philosopher would ever want to seize violently control of a state or impose their will on people, which leads to the following conundrum:
" The political problem consists in reconciling the requirement for wisdom with the requirement for consent. But whereas, from the point of view of egalitarian natural right, consent takes precedence over wisdom, from the point of view of classic natural right, wisdom takes precedence over consent. According to the classics, the best way of meeting these two entirely different requirements—that for wisdom and that for consent or for freedom—would be that a wise legislator frame a code which the citizen body, duly persuaded, freely adopts. That code, which is, as it were, the embodiment of wisdom, must be as little subject to alteration as possible; the rule of law is to take the place of the rule of men, however wise. The administration of the law must be intrusted to a type of man who is most likely to administer it equitably, i.e., in the spirit of the wise legislator, or to “complete” the law according to the requirements of circumstances which the legislator could not have foreseen. The classics held that this type of man is the gentleman. The gentleman is not identical with the wise man. He is the political reflection, or imitation, of the wise man. Gentlemen have this in common with the wise man, that they “look down” on many things which are highly esteemed by the vulgar or that they are experienced in things noble and beautiful."
I think Strauss is in favor of rule by gentlemen, but I don't think he imagines there is a simple way to get from here to there in the United States of America. I think that people like Deneen and Vermeule are animated by Strauss's vision, but I don't think their methods (they more or less advocate for violent overthrow of our government) are a natural outgrowth of Strauss's teachings. If he could remake the country de novo, he certainly wouldn't choose the country we have, but I think he'd be leery of the attempt to remake it by force, whether military or political. It would be just as easy to say that our government is the best that is possible under the current circumstances, and that although it doesn't incentivize human flourishing, it certainly allows it to a much greater degree than others do.
This is great. I am envious of your ability to synthesize and react to these books with so much clarity and intelligence. Adding Strauss to ever-growing to-read pile.
There was discussion on the TL today related to your thoughts on liberalism and personal freedom, about whether the crisis of loneliness and dissolution of communities is essentially a revealed preference (https://twitter.com/kaschuta/status/1704006655644496233). I kind of sympathize, I'm lucky to have close friends but I am also the sort of person who likes to be left alone to read and think and take long walks am not sure I would prefer a time where my neighbors are always barging in Kramer-style, or where a divorce or a new relationship gets you stares from everyone in church. That said I do think there is something to the crisis of meaning that illiberal philosophers point out -- it's why I feel like, even as (I guess) a left-liberal, I find that critiques of society in First Things or Compact or whatever often hit a little harder than the ones in The Atlantic or The New Republic, where it's all because Republicans Bad or an ill-defined "capitalism".
I always think back to The Dispossessed which I think is admirably forthright about the downside of seriously connected human communities -- no one gets left behind, but everyone is forced to live in a world of shifting social alliances and petty feuds, and many of the rules of society are invisible and unspoken instead of codified. Which is better than hunger and poverty but would add a lot of intensity and stress to daily life. So I dunno.
I don't disagree that lots of people want more community than they have. I think there is a bit of a free-rider effect: people want the ability to step out of a community, but for it to keep going on without them, so they can return. But the more people who step out, the less healthy it is. I think of it as being a bit like the humanities nowadays: everyone wants to be a rebel; nobody wants to do the work of saying "Actually a lot of this old stuff is really good", because it's just stodgy and uncool and unfun.
I think people want and need more community, I just don't think restricting personal freedom is the way to go about it. If do think that if the price of community is that you need to _force_ people to be a part of it, then that price is too high. I think it's perfectly possible to find happiness and meaning in a liberal democratic society, and I'm by no means convinced that an illiberal authoritarian one would provide more of those things. I guess the counterargument is that liberal democratic society works to atomize community: that people are financially incentivized to break apart or leave their communities. I remember the haunting opening the Jungle, where the Lithuanian family has a wedding for their community--normally, back home, people would bring gifts to defray the cost of the wedding, but with the anonyminity of the big city, people came and drank and gave nothing). That lack of reciprocity will mean the end of big open-handed weddings.
That's why I think that I am just fundamentally conservative. What we have now isn't great, but I don't know if government action to put us into ethno-national silos, like the Ottoman millets (which seems to be what the First Things and Compact crowd want), wouldn't have all the negatives of modernity (which, for all we know, are inextricable from modern technology and industrialism) without any of the freedom to self-actualize that makes it all worthwhile.
This feels like a bit of the limitation of reading from text, in a way that is actually rather consonant with your reading of Strauss from text, if you know what I mean--which is that what Strauss says in text and the ways in which Strauss has been read by his most avid readers is actually a stress test of the implications of esoteric reading as an idea--meaning that some of his readers have understood him to mean "it's ok to use writing to intentionally hide from outsiders what the interpretative community is actually doing through and within writing". Strauss has almost become a sort of Western conservative doppleganger of taqiyya, the Shi'a Muslim doctrine that it is ok to use deception about membership in a spiritual-philosophical community if acknowledgement of membership would place the acknowledging person in physical or material danger. I think you can argue coherently that this isn't what Strauss means in his text (but reckoning with Strauss the living intellectual might complicate that) but it's definitely what some of his readers have interpreted esoteric reading to advocate--as you note in underlining his popularity with Christian nationalists.
The trigger for that is perhaps the critique of Burke that you highlight--that Strauss wants to find in liberalism an active potential for action that is not revolutionary but is not Burke's acceptance that 'tradition' is changed in ways that can't be articulated fully, that change happens within the mysteriousness of 'traditional society', through organic social connections and lived experience, not by the concerted will of the state or of instrumentally stated goals of parties, movements or groups in civil society. The moment Strauss says "we can deliberately seek some transformations" and yet says "this doesn't have to be stated in public and transparent ways", he's pretty much ringing the dinner bell for everyone who seeks a transformation that they know is unpersuasive to a democratic majority as it stands, and for everyone who thinks that the only reason the democratic public culture is as it is must be that some other esoteric group got to them first and corrupted them.
I guess what I am saying is that I think Strauss himself supports the concept of dissimulation and forming conspiracies, but I think that support is pretty up front. Does that make sense? I think you could read Strauss and take away the idea that the USA is fundamentally not a righteous regime and that it needs to be overthrown and for a righteous regime to be installed by force, and I think that's a relatively surface level, straightforward interpretation of Strauss. I am not sure that at least in this book there is that much he held back! And if you are a straussian then it goes without saying that the common people are unable to understand what is good for them, and that there is no point in being honest with them. I'm not sure what Strauss could be hiding that is worse than what's actually in the text
It's the hilarity of saying "dissimulate and form conspiracies, but I'm honestly telling you everything in the text and you should read my text like I'm a normal persuasive writer". Like, this is one of those horrible logic puzzles: "I am a liar who tells lies but who is telling the truth of these three men? Me, the liar, or they, the two who say they tell truth"? And logic answers and says "oh I get it's the liar who says he's lying, what do I win?" and the heart says "oh fuck no, I don't trust that guy."
I agree that this is the logical implication of Strauss's thought. If democracy is not the best form of government (as indeed he thinks it is not), then it's because it's simply not possible to convince the mass of people to choose their own good. And it's certainly possible to read him as saying that a French revolution by our side would be good! I just wonder how much is really under the surface. Vermeule and Deneen seem to be pretty up front about wanting christian nationalism and about eradicating sexual and gender minorities and legislatively oppressing non Christians. Is that what Strauss wanted? It's hard to say! But it's definitely what they want. Strauss probably would've supported a Christian nationalist regime, the only question is if he would support violence to get there. And the answer is...perhaps? Realistically speaking, in the modern world, how much esoteric meaning is there? It seems like people more or less do exactly what they say they will do.
The thing is, Strauss is destroying the entire idea of reading-for-meaning, perhaps without meaning to do that (who can say? for exactly the reasons you underline). The idea is that the text never means what it says, but with authorial agency, as opposed to Derridean/Foucauldian ideas that the reader is in charge and the author is dead. It doesn't seem like Derrida or Foucault are especially democratic, but it is at this exact moment that you can see where they are implicitly and Strauss is not. It's hard to decipher what they say, but they are saying (pretty clearly) that what you see in the text is what it is for you. (This renders the spectacle of a seriously poststructuralist scholar scolding people for misreading rather hilarious, for all that it happens a lot.) Strauss is saying: there's something here that the author means, but you won't get it unless you have the secret decoder ring, and those are only handed out to people who are On Board with the political project.
I mean, no wonder we live in a moment where conspiracy is a prominent narrative: there's a strain of right-wing thought around for decades derived from or in association with Strauss that's been saying: that's the only way to do it, and it's the only reason that ostensibly democratic societies don't agree with us, the people who are correct thinkers.
The interesting discussion beyond that might be to probe all the ways in which quasi-esoteric "communities of interpretation" accept a pseudo-Straussian vision of what they do without that being a rigid doctrinal proposition--there are hundreds of subcultures that conduct conversations in plain sight that also sigh and insist "we can't tell you, it's an internet thing".
Straussians will sometimes get quite upset when you point out that Strauss underpins almost all non-Catholic or libertarian conservative intellectual work today, but it's just inarguable. I go back and forth on how malevolent Strauss himself was-he did always supposedly insist that you shouldn't read him esoterically, but he had to have known that people would, and you can get some pretty evil stuff if you do. Schmitt should probably be getting the "the secret genius underpinning the right today" treatment if he hasn't already, I love your rule of thumb about him in relation to conservative writers.
Why would they be upset! Strauss is a brilliant writer. His work _should_ be influential. I don't think he's malevolent: I think he just pursued truth. He makes a key point somewhere in the book about the difference between intellectuals and philosophers:
"For the politicization of philosophy consists precisely in this, that the difference between intellectuals and philosophers—a difference formerly known as the difference between gentlemen and philosophers, on the one hand, and the difference between sophists or rhetoricians and philosophers, on the other—becomes blurred and finally disappears.."
Strauss doesn't have a side. He isn't trying to create an ideal state: he is trying to do philosophy. I think his viewpoint, which he is explicit about, is that the ideal state can only come about by accident, when, for some reason or other, a philosopher or group of philosophers is able to take political control of a state. But no philosopher would ever want to seize violently control of a state or impose their will on people, which leads to the following conundrum:
" The political problem consists in reconciling the requirement for wisdom with the requirement for consent. But whereas, from the point of view of egalitarian natural right, consent takes precedence over wisdom, from the point of view of classic natural right, wisdom takes precedence over consent. According to the classics, the best way of meeting these two entirely different requirements—that for wisdom and that for consent or for freedom—would be that a wise legislator frame a code which the citizen body, duly persuaded, freely adopts. That code, which is, as it were, the embodiment of wisdom, must be as little subject to alteration as possible; the rule of law is to take the place of the rule of men, however wise. The administration of the law must be intrusted to a type of man who is most likely to administer it equitably, i.e., in the spirit of the wise legislator, or to “complete” the law according to the requirements of circumstances which the legislator could not have foreseen. The classics held that this type of man is the gentleman. The gentleman is not identical with the wise man. He is the political reflection, or imitation, of the wise man. Gentlemen have this in common with the wise man, that they “look down” on many things which are highly esteemed by the vulgar or that they are experienced in things noble and beautiful."
I think Strauss is in favor of rule by gentlemen, but I don't think he imagines there is a simple way to get from here to there in the United States of America. I think that people like Deneen and Vermeule are animated by Strauss's vision, but I don't think their methods (they more or less advocate for violent overthrow of our government) are a natural outgrowth of Strauss's teachings. If he could remake the country de novo, he certainly wouldn't choose the country we have, but I think he'd be leery of the attempt to remake it by force, whether military or political. It would be just as easy to say that our government is the best that is possible under the current circumstances, and that although it doesn't incentivize human flourishing, it certainly allows it to a much greater degree than others do.