The School of Baghdad Norton, Anne
Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire,
09/2004
Book Chapter
We have faced death with Leo Strauss. Now we must face death in another place.
The Platonic political philosophy that Strauss made his life’s work begins for him with al Farabi. Farabi, as Strauss ...called him, was the first of the Platonic political philosophers. Farabi teaches how to write in a time and place hostile to philosophy. In that hostile place, Farabi taught politics and philosophy to his students, and to Strauss.
Strauss took Farabi as his teacher, but he was also kindred and compatriot. Farabi writes that though it is unlikely that all the attributes of the philosopher and
Getting the Natural Right Norton, Anne
Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire,
09/2004
Book Chapter
Natural Right and Historyis said to argue for a return to truth, to a standard common to all and grounded in nature. Perhaps that reading is correct. If so,Natural Right and Historypresents nature as ...the realm of self-evident truths. In most of his writings, Strauss is careful to present nature not as the realm of certainty, of “pure and whole knowledge,” but as the unexplored, uncharted territory of a “pure and whole questioning.” Nature was not the site of certainty, nature was the realm of the unknown, the inchoate, of that which might be known but wasn’t,
Conservatism Abandoned Norton, Anne
Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire,
09/2004
Book Chapter
Straussians are conservative. Why they are conservative remains something of a mystery. Strauss’s work on Plato or Xenophon or other figures in the canon does not lead inevitably to conservatism. ...That Strauss himself was a conservative should matter very little. Hegel recommended monarchy and is still read and admired in liberal democracies. Feminists make use of Nietzsche and Rousseau. Republicans admire the Southern Agrarians. Teachers do not clone, they teach. Great teachers will produce students very unlike themselves. As Nietzsche wrote,
All who climb on their own way
Carry my image, too, into the breaking day.
Once upon a time,
Closing the American Mind Norton, Anne
Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire,
09/2004
Book Chapter
Allan Bloom experienced Cornell as a profound defeat, but he made it the occasion for a later victory. He wrote a book, inspired by his tribulations at Cornell, calledThe Closing of the American ...Mind. The book was that rare thing in academic circles, a popular success and a publishing phenomenon. It climbed to the top of the bestseller lists in 1987 and remained there. In subsequent editions it went on to sell more than a million copies.
Bloom’sClosing of the American Mindannounced the conservative position in the emergent cultural wars. Bloom’s polemic against undergraduate education, rock music,
Ancients and Moderns Norton, Anne
Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire,
09/2004
Book Chapter
Leo Strauss joined Carl Schmitt and Alexandre Kojève in their critiques of liberalism and liberal institutions. He shared their fear of world government. Strauss joined Hannah Arendt in her regard ...for the Greekpolis,in her fears for modernity, and in her conviction that philosophy, especially the philosophy of fifthcentury Athens, could invigorate not only modern philosophy but American democracy. Like most Europeans of a certain age, Strauss had contempt for mass culture, especially in its American form. He placed these critiques of modernity so vigorously before his students that some of the Straussians began to condemn the Moderns, and
Decline into the West Norton, Anne
Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire,
09/2004
Book Chapter
Leo Strauss entered the American academy from a particular place, in a particular time, and in particular company. Among the most important figures in this intellectual company are Martin Heidegger, ...Hannah Arendt, and Carl Schmitt. Arendt and Strauss were of the same place and time, and in many respects (though this will astonish and appall their more zealous adherents) the same intellectual tastes. They emerged from the same intellectual environment. They were German Jews, educated in the German universities of the 1920s and 1930s. The German academy had betrayed them, yet they were very much of it.
For Strauss, for
All Straussians are bound together by a certain regard for the text, by practices of reading, by a net of allusions and references, by stories and practices. The net binds others with them: Talmudic ...scholars and poststructuralists, theorists of many kinds. Some groups among the Straussians may be bound by other secrets, whether these are really secrets or not. Like the supposedly secret manuscript that Cropsey took from his file cabinet to hand to me, some of these supposed secrets may be in extensive circulation.
No one, for example, should be surprised to learn that the students of Strauss hold
Athens and Jerusalem Norton, Anne
Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire,
09/2004
Book Chapter
Strauss’s famous essay “Jerusalem and Athens: Some Preliminary Reflections” marks Athens and Jerusalem, reason and revelation, as the poles whose contending gravitational pulls defined the history of ...political philosophy, the two sources of wisdom, two sites of the virtuous life, always at odds, always pulling against each other. Athens was the site of the polis, the city of philosophy, the wild place of unleashed reason, the city of the agon, in love with the new, the birthplace of democracy. Jerusalem was the city of God, the city of the covenant. In this place, God spoke to the people, chose them,
Who Is Leo Strauss? Norton, Anne
Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire,
09/2004
Book Chapter
Leo Strauss was a political philosopher. He was born a Jew in Germany in 1899 and came to the United States as a refugee in 1938. Strauss found a place in what was called the University in Exile at ...the New School for Social Research. He later taught, for many years, at the University of Chicago. Before he came to the United States he had written on Spinoza, on Maimonides, and on Carl Schmitt’s bookThe Concept of the Political. He later wrote on Xenophon, Plato, al Farabi, Machiavelli, and Aristophanes. He was said to be a timid man, wary
On Tyranny Norton, Anne
Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire,
09/2004
Book Chapter
In the year 2001, in the wake of September 11, the United States government began a war that was not a war. The war was said to be against terror and terrorism. Terror and terrorism in Ireland, Sri ...Lanka, and Kashmir went untouched. The forces of the United States advanced on Afghanistan in pursuit of Osama bin Laden. They never found the man who had launched the attacks of 9/11, though they deposed the regime that had sheltered him. Later a larger force invaded and occupied Iraq, searching perhaps for a link to these attackers, perhaps for weapons of mass
