The philosopher/superman is that rare man who can face the truth: that there is no God; that the universe cares nothing for men or mankind; and that all of human history is nothing more than an insignificant speck in the cosmos, which no sooner began, than it will vanish forever without a trace. There is no morality, no good and evil, and of course any notion of an afterlife is an old wives' tale. Source: Secret Kingdom of Leo Strauss

Nihilism in its moral or ethical sense is a complete rejection of all systems of authority, morality, and social custom. Either through the rejection of previously accepted bases of belief or through extreme relativism or skepticism, the nihilist believes that none of these claims to power are valid, and often that they should be fought against.
On the subject of morality specifically, nihilism concludes that relativism renders the project of normative ethics, and the concepts of good and evil, meaningless - though not necessarily with the intent to follow this with any conclusions about society or authority, as there is no correct form for either social institutions or practical morality.Definition of Nihilism

It is because the truth would destroy society and the philosophers alike if it became known, that Strauss said that Plato and the ancient philosophers, like Strauss himself, wrote in a kind of code, whose true meaning only disclosed itself to the wise. If the vulgar happened on their books, they would find only the familiar salutary myths about the rewards of virtue, the punishment of vice, and the like.

It is the supermen/philosophers who provide the herd with the religious, moral, and other beliefs they require, but which the supermen themselves know to be lies. Nietzsche said that his supermen were "atheistic priests," and Strauss pretends that their lies are "noble lies." But they do not do this out of benevolence, of course; charity and benevolence are mocked by Nietzsche and Strauss as unworthy of gods and godlike men. Rather, the "philosophers" use these falsehoods to shape society in the interest of these "philosophers" themselves.
Now, the philosophers require various sorts of people to serve them, including the "gentlemen," that word which had struck me earlier, when Bloom [student of Strauss] had used it in speaking of Socrates' trial. Rather than the "esoteric," or secret teachings, the future "gentlemen" are indoctrinated in the "exoteric," or public teachings. They are taught to believe in religion, morality, patriotism, and public service, and some go into government. Think of former Education Secretary William Bennett and his Book of Virtues. Of course, along with these traditional virtues, they also believe in the "philosophers" who have taught them all these good things.
Those "gentlemen" who become statesmen, will continue to take the advice of the philosophers. This rule of the philosophers through their front-men in government, is what Strauss calls the "secret kingdom" of the philosophers, a "secret kingdom" which is the life's objective of many of Strauss's esoteric students.

But the great majority of men and women, on the other hand, is so far from ever being able to face the truth, that it virtually belongs to another species. Nietzsche called it the "herd," and also the "slaves." They require the bogeymen of a threatening God and of punishment in the afterlife, and the fiction of moral right and wrong. Without these illusions, they would go mad and run riot, and the social order, any social order, would collapse. And since human nature never changes, according to Strauss, this will always be so.

....there are people, and I am among them, who are unwilling to accept this description and to surrender to an absolute relativism, not because we are authoritarian or reactionary but for definite reasons both theoretical and pragmatic.
The logical position against any claim of relativism to absoluteness is that "absolute relativism" is a self-contradictory term, an impossible combination of words. If one avoids this impossible combination of words, relativism itself becomes relative; therefore an element of absoluteness is not only a possibility but even a necessity, otherwise no assertion at all can be made.
But absolute relativism is also impossible practically. If I am asked to surrender totally to relativism I can say, "But I live! I know what ‘true’ and ‘false’ mean, I do something I can describe as ‘better’ than something else, I venerate something which concerns me ultimately and which for me is holy." The question then is: How can one make such statements if relativism has the last word?
http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter...1628&C=1617

Prof. Strauss and the Neocon takeover
By Jim Silva InformationClearingHouse

02/06/06 "Lompoc Record" -- -- Have you seen the latest blockbuster? Like Star Wars, it's classic good verses evil - a power hungry dictator plotting to seize control of a goodly Republic. The twist is it's for adults. Ones who know reality is stranger than fiction. You guessed it! This epic thriller is actually your life, and it's called “The Fall of the Republic - Sleeping Through the Revolution.” Here's a behind the scenes look:

Bush Jr. came to power surrounding himself with far right “neo-conservatives” that his daddy called “crazies in the basement.”

Who are the crazies? A militant, anti-communist group of mainly Jewish intellectuals who studied the Trotskyite, Machiavellian political philosophy of Prof. Strauss at the University of Chicago. Wolfowitz, Ashcroft, Perle, Abrams, Chalabi, Bennett, Ho, Shulsky, Khalilzad, Schmitt, Kristol, are a few of the invasion architects, intelligence crafters, torture lawyers, Iraq ambassadors and U.S. puppets who studied under Strauss.

Together with Straussian devotees at neocon and pro-Israeli think tanks, they now control all powerful positions in our government.

What do neocons believe and want? They are anti-democratic, authoritarian, and they want power. Straussianism provides the intellectual framework and personal justification for their actions.

Strauss taught that an elite, wise ruling class must rule the unsophisticated masses by telling them noble lies for their own good.

Strauss loved Plato, interpreting his teachings to mean, “... true democracy is an act against nature and must be prevented at all costs.”

He wrote leaders must use religion to control the masses.

“Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed,” Strauss wrote. “Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united - and they can only be united against other people.” Leaders must always provide an enemy.

Straussian teachings spark delusions of grandeur in neocon intellectuals, who imagine themselves as the wise ruling elite, set free of the bonds of honesty and equality.

The Project for a New American Century think tank springs directly from this authoritarian power cult. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Abrams, Libby, Perle, and others signed PNAC documents in 1997 advocating aggressive, militaristic world domination, domination of space, control of cyberspace (they don't want much), permanent bases in the Middle East, and employing troops in constabulatory (police) duties to enforce U.S. world empire, Pax Americana.

Neocon papers are thick with delusional paranoia like the following from Richard Perle, National Security Council: “No stages, this is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq . . . this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war . . . our children will sing great songs about us years from now.”

Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute Fellow, former NSC, State, and Defense Department consultant and influential White House advisor writes, “We can lead by the force of high moral example ... [but] fear is much more reliable, and lasts longer. Once we show that we are capable of dealing out terrible punishment to our enemies, our power will be far greater. “ We are a warlike people and we love war.”

Perle, Wolfowitz, Bolton and others have a long history of calling for “winnable nuclear war.”

Henry Kissinger described the baffled response of established powers in the face of revolutionary challenge. “Lulled by a period of stability which seemed permanent, they find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion of the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing framework. Those who warn against the danger in time are considered alarmists: those who counsel adaptation “are considered balanced and sane.”

This movie will soon be over. Better wake up your congressman.

There's another counter-argument.

Strauss is an idiot.

That's good as far as it goes... Mind if I just qualify it a little by adding the word 'deluded'? Thus expanding your very succinct and eloquent argument to suggest that 'Strauss is a deluded idiot'.
Does that work for you?

Fine by me. "Wanker" works too. I can't figure out why anybody pays these fools any attention to begin with. Their arguments are so obviously flawed in so many ways that responding point by point merely gives them more publicity than they merit.

Dr. Johnson is my favourite white guy. "I refute it thus!"

Straussian teachings spark delusions of grandeur in neocon intellectuals, who imagine themselves as the wise ruling elite, set free of the bonds of honesty and equality.

The Project for a New American Century think tank springs directly from this authoritarian power cult. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Abrams, Libby, Perle, and others signed PNAC documents in 1997 advocating aggressive, militaristic world domination, domination of space, control of cyberspace (they don't want much), permanent bases in the Middle East, and employing troops in constabulatory (police) duties to enforce U.S. world empire, Pax Americana.

I'll buy that, to an extent. But do you really think thugs need a philosophy at all?

"When I hear the word "culture," I reach for my revolver."
-- Hermann Goering

Fine by me. "Wanker" works too. I can't figure out why anybody pays these fools any attention to begin with. Their arguments are so obviously flawed in so many ways that responding point by point merely gives them more publicity than they merit.

Noble lies and perpetual war: Leo Strauss, the neo-cons, and Iraq
informationclearinghouse

Are the ideas of the conservative political philosopher Leo Strauss a shaping influence on the Bush administration’s world outlook? Danny Postel interviews Shadia Drury – a leading scholarly critic of Strauss – and asks her about the connection between Plato’s dialogues, secrets and lies, and the United States-led war in Iraq.

By Danny Postel

10/18/03: (openDemocracy) What was initially an anti-war argument is now a matter of public record. It is widely recognised that the Bush administration was not honest about the reasons it gave for invading Iraq.
Paul Wolfowitz, the influential United States deputy secretary of defense, has acknowledged that the evidence used to justify the war was “murky” and now says that weapons of mass destruction weren’t the crucial issue anyway (see the book by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, Weapons of Mass Deception: the uses of propaganda in Bush’s war on Iraq (2003.)

By contrast, Shadia Drury, professor of political theory at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, argues that the use of deception and manipulation in current US policy flow directly from the doctrines of the political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973). His disciples include Paul Wolfowitz and other neo-conservatives who have driven much of the political agenda of the Bush administration.

If Shadia Drury is right, then American policy-makers exercise deception with greater coherence than their British allies in Tony Blair’s 10 Downing Street. In the UK, a public inquiry is currently underway into the death of the biological weapons expert David Kelly. A central theme is also whether the government deceived the public, as a BBC reporter suggested.

The inquiry has documented at least some of the ways the prime minister’s entourage ‘sexed up’ the presentation of intelligence on the Iraqi threat. But few doubt that in terms of their philosophy, if they have one, members of Blair’s staff believe they must be trusted as honest. Any apparent deceptions they may be involved in are for them matters of presentation or ‘spin’: attempts to project an honest gloss when surrounded by a dishonest media.

The deep influence of Leo Strauss’s ideas on the current architects of US foreign policy has been referred to, if sporadically, in the press (hence an insider witticism about the influence of “Leo-cons”). Christopher Hitchens, an ardent advocate of the war, wrote unashamedly in November 2002 (in an article felicitously titled Machiavelli in Mesopotamia) that:

“[p]art of the charm of the regime-change argument (from the point of view of its supporters) is that it depends on premises and objectives that cannot, at least by the administration, be publicly avowed. Since Paul Wolfowitz is from the intellectual school of Leo Strauss – and appears in fictional guise as such in Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein – one may even suppose that he enjoys this arcane and occluded aspect of the debate.”
Perhaps no scholar has done as much to illuminate the Strauss phenomenon as Shadia Drury. For fifteen years she has been shining a heat lamp on the Straussians with such books as The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (1988) and Leo Strauss and the American Right (1997). She is also the author of Alexandre Kojève: the Roots of Postmodern Politics (1994) and Terror and Civilization (forthcoming).
She argues that the central claims of Straussian thought wield a crucial influence on men of power in the contemporary United States. She elaborates her argument in this interview.

A natural order of inequality

Danny Postel: You’ve argued that there is an important connection between the teachings of Leo Strauss and the Bush administration’s selling of the Iraq war. What is that connection?

Shadia Drury: Leo Strauss was a great believer in the efficacy and usefulness of lies in politics. Public support for the Iraq war rested on lies about Iraq posing an imminent threat to the United States – the business about weapons of mass destruction and a fictitious alliance between al-Qaida and the Iraqi regime. Now that the lies have been exposed, Paul Wolfowitz and others in the war party are denying that these were the real reasons for the war.

So what were the real reasons? Reorganising the balance of power in the Middle East in favour of Israel? Expanding American hegemony in the Arab world? Possibly. But these reasons would not have been sufficient in themselves to mobilise American support for the war. And the Straussian cabal in the administration realised that.

Danny Postel: The neo-conservative vision is commonly taken to be about spreading democracy and liberal values globally. And when Strauss is mentioned in the press, he is typically described as a great defender of liberal democracy against totalitarian tyranny. You’ve written, however, that Strauss had a “profound antipathy to both liberalism and democracy.”

Shadia Drury: The idea that Strauss was a great defender of liberal democracy is laughable. I suppose that Strauss’s disciples consider it a noble lie. Yet many in the media have been gullible enough to believe it.

How could an admirer of Plato and Nietzsche be a liberal democrat? The ancient philosophers whom Strauss most cherished believed that the unwashed masses were not fit for either truth or liberty, and that giving them these sublime treasures would be like throwing pearls before swine. In contrast to modern political thinkers, the ancients denied that there is any natural right to liberty. Human beings are born neither free nor equal. The natural human condition, they held, is not one of freedom, but of subordination – and in Strauss’s estimation they were right in thinking so.

Praising the wisdom of the ancients and condemning the folly of the moderns was the whole point of Strauss’s most famous book, Natural Right and History. The cover of the book sports the American Declaration of Independence. But the book is a celebration of nature – not the natural rights of man (as the appearance of the book would lead one to believe) but the natural order of domination and subordination.

The necessity of lies

Danny Postel: What is the relevance of Strauss’s interpretation of Plato’s notion of the noble lie?

Shadia Drury: Strauss rarely spoke in his own name. He wrote as a commentator on the classical texts of political theory. But he was an extremely opinionated and dualistic commentator. The fundamental distinction that pervades and informs all of his work is that between the ancients and the moderns. Strauss divided the history of political thought into two camps: the ancients (like Plato) are wise and wily, whereas the moderns (like Locke and other liberals) are vulgar and foolish. Now, it seems to me eminently fair and reasonable to attribute to Strauss the ideas he attributes to his beloved ancients.

In Plato’s dialogues, everyone assumes that Socrates is Plato’s mouthpiece. But Strauss argues in his book The City and Man (pp. 74-5, 77, 83-4, 97, 100, 111) that Thrasymachus is Plato’s real mouthpiece (on this point, see also M.F. Burnyeat, “Sphinx without a Secret”, New York Review of Books, 30 May 1985 [paid-for only]). So, we must surmise that Strauss shares the insights of the wise Plato (alias Thrasymachus) that justice is merely the interest of the stronger; that those in power make the rules in their own interests and call it justice.

Leo Strauss repeatedly defends the political realism of Thrasymachus and Machiavelli (see, for example, his Natural Right and History, p. 106). This view of the world is clearly manifest in the foreign policy of the current administration in the United States.

A second fundamental belief of Strauss’s ancients has to do with their insistence on the need for secrecy and the necessity of lies. In his book Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss outlines why secrecy is necessary. He argues that the wise must conceal their views for two reasons – to spare the people’s feelings and to protect the elite from possible reprisals.

The people will not be happy to learn that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior, the master over the slave, the husband over the wife, and the wise few over the vulgar many. In On Tyranny, Strauss refers to this natural right as the “tyrannical teaching” of his beloved ancients. It is tyrannical in the classic sense of rule above rule or in the absence of law (p. 70).

Now, the ancients were determined to keep this tyrannical teaching secret because the people are not likely to tolerate the fact that they are intended for subordination; indeed, they may very well turn their resentment against the superior few. Lies are thus necessary to protect the superior few from the persecution of the vulgar many.

The effect of Strauss’s teaching is to convince his acolytes that they are the natural ruling elite and the persecuted few. And it does not take much intelligence for them to surmise that they are in a situation of great danger, especially in a world devoted to the modern ideas of equal rights and freedoms. Now more than ever, the wise few must proceed cautiously and with circumspection. So, they come to the conclusion that they have a moral justification to lie in order to avoid persecution. Strauss goes so far as to say that dissembling and deception – in effect, a culture of lies – is the peculiar justice of the wise.

Strauss justifies his position by an appeal to Plato’s concept of the noble lie. But in truth, Strauss has a very impoverished conception of Plato’s noble lie. Plato thought that the noble lie is a story whose details are fictitious; but at the heart of it is a profound truth.

In the myth of metals, for example, some people have golden souls – meaning that they are more capable of resisting the temptations of power. And these morally trustworthy types are the ones who are most fit to rule. The details are fictitious, but the moral of the story is that not all human beings are morally equal.

In contrast to this reading of Plato, Strauss thinks that the superiority of the ruling philosophers is an intellectual superiority and not a moral one (Natural Right and History, p. 151). For many commentators who (like Karl Popper) have read Plato as a totalitarian, the logical consequence is to doubt that philosophers can be trusted with political power. Those who read him this way invariably reject him. Strauss is the only interpreter who gives a sinister reading to Plato, and then celebrates him.

The dialectic of fear and tyranny

Danny Postel: In the Straussian scheme of things, there are the wise few and the vulgar many. But there is also a third group – the gentlemen. Would you explain how they figure?

Shadia Drury: There are indeed three types of men: the wise, the gentlemen, and the vulgar. The wise are the lovers of the harsh, unadulterated truth. They are capable of looking into the abyss without fear and trembling. They recognise neither God nor moral imperatives. They are devoted above all else to their own pursuit of the “higher” pleasures, which amount to consorting with their “puppies” or young initiates.

The second type, the gentlemen, are lovers of honour and glory. They are the most ingratiating towards the conventions of their society – that is, the illusions of the cave. They are true believers in God, honour, and moral imperatives. They are ready and willing to embark on acts of great courage and self-sacrifice at a moment’s notice.

The third type, the vulgar many, are lovers of wealth and pleasure. They are selfish, slothful, and indolent. They can be inspired to rise above their brutish existence only by fear of impending death or catastrophe.

Like Plato, Strauss believed that the supreme political ideal is the rule of the wise. But the rule of the wise is unattainable in the real world. Now, according to the conventional wisdom, Plato realised this, and settled for the rule of law. But Strauss did not endorse this solution entirely. Nor did he think that it was Plato’s real solution – Strauss pointed to the “nocturnal council” in Plato’s Laws to illustrate his point.

The real Platonic solution as understood by Strauss is the covert rule of the wise (see Strauss’s – The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws). This covert rule is facilitated by the overwhelming stupidity of the gentlemen. The more gullible and unperceptive they are, the easier it is for the wise to control and manipulate them. Supposedly, Xenophon makes that clear to us.

For Strauss, the rule of the wise is not about classic conservative values like order, stability, justice, or respect for authority. The rule of the wise is intended as an antidote to modernity. Modernity is the age in which the vulgar many have triumphed. It is the age in which they have come closest to having exactly what their hearts desire – wealth, pleasure, and endless entertainment. But in getting just what they desire, they have unwittingly been reduced to beasts.

Nowhere is this state of affairs more advanced than in America. And the global reach of American culture threatens to trivialise life and turn it into entertainment. This was as terrifying a spectre for Strauss as it was for Alexandre Kojève and Carl Schmitt.

This is made clear in Strauss’s exchange with Kojève (reprinted in Strauss’s On Tyranny), and in his commentary on Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (reprinted in Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue). Kojève lamented the animalisation of man and Schmitt worried about the trivialisation of life. All three of them were convinced that liberal economics would turn life into entertainment and destroy politics; all three understood politics as a conflict between mutually hostile groups willing to fight each other to the death. In short, they all thought that man’s humanity depended on his willingness to rush naked into battle and headlong to his death. Only perpetual war can overturn the modern project, with its emphasis on self-preservation and “creature comforts.” Life can be politicised once more, and man’s humanity can be restored.

This terrifying vision fits perfectly well with the desire for honour and glory that the neo-conservative gentlemen covet. It also fits very well with the religious sensibilities of gentlemen. The combination of religion and nationalism is the elixir that Strauss advocates as the way to turn natural, relaxed, hedonistic men into devout nationalists willing to fight and die for their God and country.

I never imagined when I wrote my first book on Strauss that the unscrupulous elite that he elevates would ever come so close to political power, nor that the ominous tyranny of the wise would ever come so close to being realised in the political life of a great nation like the United States. But fear is the greatest ally of tyranny.

Danny Postel: You’ve described Strauss as a nihilist.

Shadia Drury: Strauss is a nihilist in the sense that he believes that there is no rational foundation for morality. He is an atheist, and he believes that in the absence of God, morality has no grounding. It’s all about benefiting others and oneself; there is no objective reason for doing so, only rewards and punishments in this life.

But Strauss is not a nihilist if we mean by the term a denial that there is any truth, a belief that everything is interpretation. He does not deny that there is an independent reality. On the contrary, he thinks that independent reality consists in nature and its “order of rank” – the high and the low, the superior and the inferior. Like Nietzsche, he believes that the history of western civilisation has led to the triumph of the inferior, the rabble – something they both lamented profoundly.

Danny Postel: This connection is curious, since Strauss is bedevilled by Nietzsche; and one of Strauss’s most famous students, Allan Bloom, fulminates profusely in his book The Closing of the American Mind against the influence of Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.

Shadia Drury: Strauss’s criticism of the existentialists, especially Heidegger, is that they tried to elicit an ethic out of the abyss. This was the ethic of resoluteness – choose whatever you like and be loyal to it to the death; its content does not matter. But Strauss’s reaction to moral nihilism was different. Nihilistic philosophers, he believes, should reinvent the Judæo-Christian God, but live like pagan gods themselves – taking pleasure in the games they play with each other as well as the games they play on ordinary mortals.

The question of nihilism is complicated, but there is no doubt that Strauss’s reading of Plato entails that the philosophers should return to the cave and manipulate the images (in the form of media, magazines, newspapers). They know full well that the line they espouse is mendacious, but they are convinced that theirs are noble lies.

The intoxication of perpetual war

Danny Postel: You characterise the outlook of the Bush administration as a kind of realism, in the spirit of Thrasymachus and Machiavelli. But isn’t the real divide within the administration (and on the American right more generally) more complex: between foreign policy realists, who are pragmatists, and neo-conservatives, who see themselves as idealists – even moralists – on a mission to topple tyrants, and therefore in a struggle against realism?

Shadia Drury: I think that the neo-conservatives are for the most part genuine in wanting to spread the American commercial model of liberal democracy around the globe. They are convinced that it is the best thing, not just for America, but for the world. Naturally, there is a tension between these “idealists” and the more hard-headed realists within the administration.

I contend that the tensions and conflicts within the current administration reflect the differences between the surface teaching, which is appropriate for gentlemen, and the ‘nocturnal’ or covert teaching, which the philosophers alone are privy to. It is very unlikely for an ideology inspired by a secret teaching to be entirely coherent.

The issue of nationalism is an example of this. The philosophers, wanting to secure the nation against its external enemies as well as its internal decadence, sloth, pleasure, and consumption, encourage a strong patriotic fervour among the honour-loving gentlemen who wield the reins of power. That strong nationalistic spirit consists in the belief that their nation and its values are the best in the world, and that all other cultures and their values are inferior in comparison.

Irving Kristol, the father of neo-conservatism and a Strauss disciple, denounced nationalism in a 1973 essay; but in another essay written in 1983, he declared that the foreign policy of neo-conservatism must reflect its nationalist proclivities. A decade on, in a 1993 essay, he claimed that “religion, nationalism, and economic growth are the pillars of neoconservatism.” (See “The Coming ‘Conservative Century’”, in Neoconservatism: the autobiography of an idea, p. 365.)

In Reflections of a Neoconservative (p. xiii), Kristol wrote that:

“patriotism springs from love of the nation’s past; nationalism arises out of hope for the nation’s future, distinctive greatness…. Neoconservatives believe… that the goals of American foreign policy must go well beyond a narrow, too literal definition of ‘national security’. It is the national interest of a world power, as this is defined by a sense of national destiny … not a myopic national security”.
The same sentiment was echoed by the doyen of contemporary Straussianism, Harry Jaffa, when he said that America is the “Zion that will light up all the world.”
It is easy to see how this sort of thinking can get out of hand, and why hard-headed realists tend to find it naïve if not dangerous.

But Strauss’s worries about America’s global aspirations are entirely different. Like Heidegger, Schmitt, and Kojève, Strauss would be more concerned that America would succeed in this enterprise than that it would fail. In that case, the “last man” would extinguish all hope for humanity (Nietzsche); the “night of the world” would be at hand (Heidegger); the animalisation of man would be complete (Kojève); and the trivialisation of life would be accomplished (Schmitt). That is what the success of America’s global aspirations meant to them.

Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man is a popularisation of this viewpoint. It sees the coming catastrophe of American global power as inevitable, and seeks to make the best of a bad situation. It is far from a celebration of American dominance.

On this perverse view of the world, if America fails to achieve her “national destiny”, and is mired in perpetual war, then all is well. Man’s humanity, defined in terms of struggle to the death, is rescued from extinction. But men like Heidegger, Schmitt, Kojève, and Strauss expect the worst. They expect that the universal spread of the spirit of commerce would soften manners and emasculate man. To my mind, this fascistic glorification of death and violence springs from a profound inability to celebrate life, joy, and the sheer thrill of existence.

To be clear, Strauss was not as hostile to democracy as he was to liberalism. This is because he recognises that the vulgar masses have numbers on their side, and the sheer power of numbers cannot be completely ignored. Whatever can be done to bring the masses along is legitimate. If you can use democracy to turn the masses against their own liberty, this is a great triumph. It is the sort of tactic that neo-conservatives use consistently, and in some cases very successfully.

Among the Straussians

Danny Postel: Finally, I’d like to ask about your interesting reception among the Straussians. Many of them dismiss your interpretation of Strauss and denounce your work in the most adamant terms (“bizarre splenetic”). Yet one scholar, Laurence Lampert, has reprehended his fellow Straussians for this, writing in his Leo Strauss and Nietzsche that your book The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss “contains many fine skeptical readings of Strauss’s texts and acute insights into Strauss’s real intentions.” Harry Jaffa has even made the provocative suggestion that you might be a “closet Straussian” yourself!

Shadia Drury: I have been publicly denounced and privately adored. Following the publication of my book The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss in 1988, letters and gifts poured in from Straussian graduate students and professors all over North America – books, dissertations, tapes of Strauss’s Hillel House lectures in Chicago, transcripts of every course he ever taught at the university, and even a personally crafted Owl of Minerva with a letter declaring me a goddess of wisdom! They were amazed that an outsider could have penetrated the secret teaching. They sent me unpublished material marked with clear instructions not to distribute to “suspicious persons”.

I received letters from graduate students in Toronto, Chicago, Duke, Boston College, Claremont, Fordham, and other Straussian centres of “learning.” One of the students compared his experience in reading my work with “a person lost in the wilderness who suddenly happens on a map.” Some were led to abandon their schools in favour of fresher air; but others were delighted to discover what it was they were supposed to believe in order to belong to the charmed circle of future philosophers and initiates.

After my first book on Strauss came out, some of the Straussians in Canada dubbed me the “bitch from Calgary.” Of all the titles I hold, that is the one I cherish most. The hostility toward me was understandable. Nothing is more threatening to Strauss and his acolytes than the truth in general and the truth about Strauss in particular. His admirers are determined to conceal the truth about his ideas.

My intention in writing the book was to express Strauss’s ideas clearly and without obfuscation so that his views could become the subject of philosophical debate and criticism, and not the stuff of feverish conviction. I wanted to smoke the Straussians out of their caves and into the philosophical light of day. But instead of engaging me in philosophical debate, they denied that Strauss stood for any of the ideas I attributed to him.

Laurence Lampert is the only Straussian to declare valiantly that it is time to stop playing games and to admit that Strauss was indeed a Nietzschean thinker – that it is time to stop the denial and start defending Strauss’s ideas.

I suspect that Lampert’s honesty is threatening to those among the Straussians who are interested in philosophy but who seek power. There is no doubt that open and candid debate about Strauss is likely to undermine their prospects in Washington.

Who is Leo Strauss?

Leo Strauss was born in 1899 in the region of Hessen, Germany, the son of a Jewish small businessman. He went to secondary school in Marburg and served as an interpreter in the German army in the first world war. He was awarded a doctorate at Hamburg University in 1921 for a thesis on philosophy that was supervised by Ernst Cassirer.

Strauss’s post-doctoral work involved study of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and in 1930 he published his first book, on Spinoza’s critique of religion; his second, on the 12th century Jewish philosopher Maimonides, was published in 1935. After a research period in London, he published The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes in 1936.

In 1937, he moved to Columbia University, and from 1938 to 1948 taught political science and philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York. During this period he wrote On Tyranny (1948) and Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952).

In 1949, he became professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago, and remained there for twenty years. His works of this period include Natural Right and History (1953), Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), What is Political Philosophy? (1959), The City and Man (1964), Socrates and Aristophanes (1966), and Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968).

Between 1968 and 1973, Strauss taught in colleges in California and Maryland, and completed work on Xenophon’s Socratic discourses and Argument and Action of Plato’s Laws (1975). After his death in October 1973, the essay collection Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (1983) was published.

Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968)

1. Chronology of life and works

French philosopher (1902-1968), born Aleksandr Vladimirovich Kozhevnikov in Russia. Kojève studied in Germany (Heidelberg) where, under the supervision of Karl Jaspers, he completed a thesis (Die religöse Philosophie Wladimir Solowjews, 1931) Vladimir Solovyov, a Russian religious philosopher deeply influenced by Hegel. He later settled in Paris, where he taught at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Ētudes. Taking over from Alexandre Koyré, he taught a seminar on Hegel from 1933 till 1939. Along with Jean Hyppolite, he was responsible for the serious introduction of Hegel into French thought. His lectures exerted a profound influence (both direct and indirect) over many leading French philosophers and intellectuals - amongst them Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Bataille, Althusser, Queneau, Aron, and Breton. Via his friend Leo Strauss, Kojève's thought also exerted influence in America, most especially over Allan Bloom and, later, Francis Fukuyama. His lectures on Hegel were published in 1947 under the title Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, appearing in English as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1969). After the Second World War Kojève worked in the French Ministry of Economic Affairs, until his death in 1968. Here he exercised a profound, mandarin influence over French policy, including a role as one of the leading architects of the EEC and GATT. He continued to write philosophy over these years, including works on the pre-Socratics, Kant, the concept of right, the temporal dimensions of philosophical wisdom, the relationship between Christianity and both Western science and communism, and the development of capitalism. Many of these works were only published posthumously.

2. The Hegelian Context

Hegel's philosophy of history, most especially the historicist philosophy of consciousness developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit, provides the core of Kojève's own work. However, Kojève’s Hegel lectures are not so much an exegesis of Hegel's thought, as a profoundly original reinterpretation. By reading Hegel's philosophy of consciousness through the twin lenses of Marx's materialism and Heidegger’s temporalised ontology of human being (Dasein), Kojève can rightly be said to have initiated 'existential Marxism'. Here I will briefly sketch the most salient dimensions of Hegel's philosophy of history, before proceeding to outline Kojève's own interpretation of it.

Perhaps the core of Hegel's philosophy is the idea that human history is the history of thought as it attempts to understand itself and its relation to its world. History is the history of reason, as it grapples with its own nature and its relation to that with which it is confronted (other beings, nature, the eternal). The historical movement of this reason is one of a sequence of alienations (Entfremdungen) or splits, and the subsequent attempt to reconcile these divisions through a restoration of unity. Thus, for example, Hegel sees the world of the Athenian Greeks as one in which people lived in a harmonious relation to their community and the world about, the basis of this harmony being provided by a pre-reflective commitment to shared customs, conventions and habits of thought and action. With the beginnings of Socratic philosophy, however, division and separation is introduced into thought - customary answers to questions of truth, morality, and reality are brought under suspicion. A questioning 'I' emerges, one that experiences itself as distinct and apart from other beings, from customary rules, and from a natural world that becomes an 'object' for it. This introduces into experience a set of 'dualisms' - between subject and object, man and nature, desire and duty, the human and the divine, the individual and the collectivity. For Hegel, the historical movement of thought is a 'dialectical' process wherein these divisions are put through processes of reconciliation, producing in turn new divisions, which thought in turn attempts to reconcile. Historically, this task of reconciliation has been embodied in many forms - in art, in religion, and in philosophy. Enlightenment philosophy, the philosophy of Hegel's own time, is the latest and most sophisticated attempt to reconcile these divisions through reason alone, to freely find man's place amongst others and the universe as a whole. This, for Hegel, is only to be achieved through the overcoming (Aufhebung) of false divisions, by grasping that underlying apparent schisms (such as that between subject and object) there is a unity, with all elements being manifestations of an Absolute Spirit (Geist). Thus Hegel sees the key to historical reconciliation lying in the rational realisation of underlying unity, a unity that can, in time, come to connect individuals with each other and with the world in which they live. Universal history is the product of reason, leading (potentially) to a reconciled humanity, at one with itself, living according to a shared morality that is the outcome of rational reflection.

3. The Influence of Marx

Hegel's philosophy of universal history furnishes that basic framework of Kojève's philosophical stance. History is a processual movement in which division is subjected to reconciliation, culminating in 'the end of history', its completion in a universal society of mutual recognition and affirmation.

However, Kojève reworks Hegel in number of crucial (and, amongst Hegel scholars, controversial) ways. The first of these may be identified with the influence of Marx, especially the writings of the so-called '1848 manuscripts'. Kojève follows Marx's 'inverted Hegelianism’ by understanding the labour of historical development in broadly 'materialist' terms. The making of history is no longer simply a case of reason at work in the world, but of man's activity as a being who collectively produces his own being. This occurs through the labour of appropriating and transforming his material world in order to satisfy his own needs. Whereas Hegel's idealism gives priority to the forms of consciousness that produce the world as experienced, Kojève follows Marx in tying consciousness to the labour of material production and the satisfaction of human desires thereby. While Hegel recuperates human consciousness into a theological totality (Geist or 'Absolute Spirit'), Kojève secularises human history, seeing it as solely the product of man's self-production. Whereas Hegelian reconciliation is ultimately the reconciliation of man with God (totality or the Absolute), for Kojève the division of man from himself is transcended in humanist terms. If Hegel sees the end of history as the final moment of reconciliation with God or Spirit, Kojève (Like Feurbach and Marx) sees it as the transcendence of an illusion, in which God (man's alienated essence, Wesen) is reclaimed by man. Whereas the Hegelian totality provides a prior set of ontological relations between man and world waiting to be apprehended by a maturing consciousness, Kojève sees human action as the transformative process that produces those ontological relations. While Hegel arguably presents a 'panlogistic' relation between man and nature, unifying the two in the Absolute, Kojève sees a fundamental disjunction between the two domains, providing the conditions for human self-production through man's negating and transforming activities.

Perhaps the conceptual key to Kojève's understanding of universal history is desire. Desire functions as the engine of history - it is man's pursuit in realisation of his desires that drives the struggles between men. Desire is the permanent and universal feature of human existence, and when transformed into action it is the basis of all historical agency. The desire for 'recognition' (Anerkennung), the validation of human worth and the satisfaction of needs, propels the struggles and processes that make for historical progression. History moves through a series of determinate configurations, culminating in the end of history, a state in which a common and universal humanity is finally realised. This would entail 'the formation of a society...in which the strictly particular, personal, individual value of each is recognised as such'. Hence individual values and needs would converge upon a common settlement in which a shared human nature (comprising the desires and inclinations that define humanity as such) would find its satisfaction.

How and why is this realisation of mutuality and equality to come about? Kojève follows Hegel's famous presentation of the 'master-slave’ dialectic in order to deduce the necessary overcoming of inequality, division and subordination. The relation of 'master' and ‘slave’ is one in which the satisfaction of a dominant group's or class’ needs (the 'masters’) is met through the subordination of others (the 'slaves' or ‘bondsmen’). The ‘slave’ exists only to affirm the superiority and humanity of the 'master', and to furnish the 'master's’ needs by surrendering up his labour. However, this relation is doomed to failure, for two fundamental reasons. Firstly, the 'master' desires the recognition and affirmation of his full humanity and value, and uses the subordinated 'slave' for that end. This means that the 'master', perversely, is dependent upon the ‘slave’, thus inverting the relation of domination. Moreover, this forced relation of recognition remains thoroughly incomplete, since the 'slave' is not in a position to grant affirmation freely, but is compelled to do so due to his subordination. Affirmation or recognition that is not freely given counts for nothing. As Kojève puts it:

The relation between Master and Slave...is not recognition properly so-called...The Master is not the only one to consider himself Master. The Slave, also, considers him as such. Hence, he is recognized in his human reality and dignity. But this recognition is one-sided, for he does not recognize in turn the Slave's human reality and dignity. Hence, he is recognized by someone whom he does not recognize. And this is what is insufficient - what is tragic - in his situation...For he can be satisfied only by recognition from one whom he recognizes as worthy of recognizing him.

This establishes the constitutive need for mutual recognition and formal equality, if recognition of value is to be established. It is only when there is mutuality and recognition of all, that the recognition of any one becomes fully possible.

Secondly, for Kojève (as for Marx) it is the labouring 'slave' who is the key to historical progress. It is the ‘slave’ who works, and consequently it is he and not the 'master' who exercises his ‘negativity’ in transforming the world in line with human wants and desires. So, on the material level, the slave possesses the key to his own liberation, namely his active mastery of nature. Moreover, the 'master' has no desire to transform the world, whereas the 'slave', unsatisfied with his condition, imagines and attempts to realise a world of freedom in which his value will finally be recognised and his own desires satisfied. The slave's ideological struggle is to overcome his own fear of death and take-up struggle against the 'master', demanding the recognition of his value and freedom. The coincidence of material and ideological conditions of liberation were already made manifest, for Kojève, by the revolutions of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries; these struggles set the conditions for the completion of history in the form of universal society.

4. The Influence of Heidegger

If Marx furnishes one central resource for Kojève's rereading of Hegel, Heidegger provides the other. From Heidegger, Kojève takes the insight that humankind is distinguished from nature through its distinctive ontological self-relation. Man's being is conditioned by its radically temporal character, its understanding of its being in time, with finitude or death as its ultimate horizon. Kojève's ontology is, pace Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein in Being & Time, first and foremost experiential and existential. By bringing together Hegel with Heidegger, Kojève attempts to radically historicise existentialism, while simultaneously giving Hegelian historicity a radically existential twist, wherein man's existential freedom defines his being. Freedom is understood as the ontological relation of 'negativity', the incompleteness of human being, its constitutive ‘lack’. It is precisely because of this lack of a fully constituted being that man experiences (or, more properly is nothing other than) desire. The negativity of being, manifest as desire, makes possible man's self-making, the process of 'becoming'. This position can be see to draw inspiration from Heidegger's critique of the transcendental preoccupations of Western thought, which he claims set reified, metaphysically assured figurations of Being over and above the processes of Becoming (wherein the 'Being of Beings', das Sein des Seieinden, is variously revealed within the horizon of temporality). The disavowal of such metaphysically anchored and ultimately timeless configurations of human being frees man from determinism and 'throws' him into his existential freedom. In Kojève's thinking, man’s struggle is to exercise this freedom in order to produce a world in which his desires are satisfied, in the course of which he comes to accept his own freedom, ridding himself of the illusions of religion and superstition, 'heroically' claiming his own finitude or mortality.

We can see, then, how Kojève attempts to synthesise Hegel, Marx and Heidegger. From Hegel he takes the notion of a universal historical process within which reconciliation unfolds through an intersubjective dialectic, resulting in unity. From Marx he takes a secularised, de-theologised, and productivist philosophical anthropology, one that places the transformative activity of a desiring being centre stage in the historical process. From Heidegger, he takes the existentialist interpretation of human being as free, negative, and radically temporal. Pulling three together, he presents a vision of human history in which man grasps his freedom to produce himself and his world in pursuit of his desires, and in doing so drives history toward its end (understood both as culmination or exhaustion, and its goal or completion).

5. The End of History and the Last Man

Kojève's vision of the culmination of history has, in recent years, exercised a renewed influence, not least in light of the collapse of Soviet communism and its satellite states. If we examine the vision of completion that Kojève held-out, we can see precisely why the advocates (or apologists) of a post-Cold War global capitalist order have drawn such inspiration from Kojève's thesis.

For Kojève, historical reconciliation will culminate in the equal recognition of all individuals. This recognition will remove the rationale for war and struggle, and so will usher-in peace. In this way, history, politically speaking, culminates in a universal (global) order which is without classes or distinctions - in Hegelian terms, there are no longer any 'masters' and ‘slaves’, only free human beings who mutually recognise and affirm each others' freedom. This political moment takes the form of law, which confers universal recognition upon all individuals, thereby satisfying the particular individual's desire to be affirmed as an equal amongst others.

Simultaneously, the progression of man's productive capacities, his ability to take nature and transform it in order to satisfy his own needs and desires, will result in prosperity and freedom from such want. For Kojève, the economic culmination of human productive capacities finds its apotheosis not in communism, but in capitalism. Like Marx, Kojève believed that capitalism had unleashed productive forces, generating heretofore unimagined wealth. Moreover, like Marx he believed that the expansion of capitalism was an homogenising force, producing a globalising cultural standard that laid waste to local attachments, traditions and boundaries, replacing them with bourgeoisie values. Kojève departs from Marxism (and its variants such as Leninism) by rejecting the notion that capitalism contained inherent contradictions that would inevitably bring about its demise and supercession by communism. Marx thought that the immiseration of workers under 19th century capitalism would worsen as the pressure of market competition would lead to ever-more brutal extraction of surplus from workers' labour, in attempt to offset the falling rate of profit. This would result in the pauperisation of the proletariat, and capitalism's inability to avoid such crisis would necessitate the overthrow of its relations by a proletariat raised up to class consciousness under the conditions of its immiseration. Kojève, in contrast, believed that 20th century capitalism had found a way out of these contradictions, finding ways to yoke the market system to a redistributive arrangement that managed to spread the wealth it produced. Far from becoming increasingly impoverished, the working class was coming to enjoy unprecedented prosperity. This is why Kojève, as early as 1948, was proclaiming the United States as the economic model for the 'post-historical' world, the most efficient and successful in conquering nature in order to provide for human material needs. Hence he asserted, long before the final collapse of the Soviet empire, that the Cold War would end in the triumph of the capitalist West, achieved through economic rather than military means.

The end of history would also usher-in other distinctive forms. Philosophically, it would end in absolute knowledge displacing ideology. Artistically, the reconciled consciousness would express itself through abstract art - while pictorial and representational art captured cultural specifics, these specifics would have been effaced, leaving abstract aesthetic forms as the embodiment of universal and homogeneous consciousness.

However, Kojève's disposition to the culmination of universal history is radically ambivalent. On the one hand, he follows Marx by seeing in idyllic terms the post-historical world, one of universal freedom, emancipation from war and want, leaving space for "art, love, play, etc., etc., etc.,; in short, everything that makes Man happy". However, Kojève is simultaneously beset by pessimism. In his philosophical anthropology, man is defined by his negating activity, by his struggle to overcome himself and nature through struggle and contestation. This is the ontological definition of man, his raison d'etre. Yet the end of history marks the end of this struggle, thereby exhausting man of the activity which has defined his essence. The end of history ushers-in the 'death of man'; paradoxically, man is robbed of the definitional core of his existence precisely at the moment of his triumph. Post-historical man will no longer be 'man' as we understand him, but will be 'reanimalized', such that the end of history marks the ‘definitive annihilation of Man properly so-called'.

6. Kojève's Influence

The influence of Kojève's thought has been profound, both within France and beyond. It is possible to trace many connections within French philosophy that owe varying degrees of debt to Kojève, given that his distinctive reinterpretation of Hegel was key for the French reception of Hegel's thought. However, there are also a number of important philosophers for whom Kojève's Hegelianism provided direct insights that were taken-up and in-turn used to found distinctive philosophical positions.

Firstly, we must note the importance of Kojève's Hegelianism for Sartre's philosophical development. It is a matter of on-going contention whether or not Sartre personally attended the Hegel seminars of the 1930s. However, it can reasonably be claimed that Kojève's existential and Marxian reading of the Phenomenology was equally important as Heidegger's Being & Time for the position presented in Sartre's Being & Nothingness. Central to Sartre’s account is a thoroughly Kojèveian philosophical anthropology, one which finds man's essence in his freedom as pure negative activity, existentially separating the human for-itself (pour-soi) from the natural world of reified Being (en-soi). Sartre's account of the 'master-slave' dialectic follows Kojève’s in its existential reworking, albeit without the optimism that finds a possibility of reconciliation in this intersubjective struggle (for Sartre, the dialectic is doomed to repeat a struggle for domination in which each party attempts to claim its own freedom via the mortification of the other's Being). Moreover, Sartre's subsequent attempts to reconcile historical materialism with existentialism owe more than a passing debt to Kojève's original formulation of an 'existential Marxist' position.

Another eminent thinker for whom Kojève proved decisive was Jacques Lacan. Lacan's account of psycho-social formation was developed through a synthesis of Freud and structuralism, read through Kojève's ontologised version of the 'master-slave' dialectic. For Lacan, following Kojève, human subjectivity is defined first and foremost by desire. It is the experience of lack, the twin of the experience of desire, that provides the ontological condition of subject formation; it is only through the lack-desire dyad that a being comes into the awareness of its own separation from the world in which it is, at first, thoroughly immersed. Moreover, Lacan's account of the childhood development of self-consciousness, captured through his analysis of the 'mirror-stage', replays the intersubjective mediation of consciousness that Kojève presented to his French students (Lacan amongst them) in the Hegel lectures.

Kojève also profoundly influenced the likes of Georges Bataille and Raymond Queneau, both through the lectures they attended, and through the friendships he maintained with them for many years after. Queneau is often associated with Andre Breton and the surrealists (with whom he broke in 1929), but his novels present a vision of the world that is profoundly indebted to Kojève. Many of his most famous books depict life at the end of history; there is no more historical movement, progress or transformation to come, and his characters live in a kind of 'eternal present' attending to the activities of everyday enjoyment. History recurs as something that can only be enjoyed as a tourist attraction, or as a reverie of the past, viewed from the vantage point of its demise. Bataille (anthropologist, philosopher and pornographer, a doyen of recent postmodern aestheticism and anti-rationalism) was perhaps the most powerful articulator of Kojève's pessimism in the face of the 'death of man'. The victory of reason was, for Bataille, a curse; its inevitable triumph in the unstoppable march of modernity brought with it homogeneity, order, and disenchantment. The triumph of reason as history meant the twilight and death of man, as the excessive and destructive power of negativity was displaced by harmonious, reciprocal equilibrium. Bataille's response, a liberatory struggle against these forces through the evocation of perverse desires, madness, and anguish, takes Kojève's prognosis at its word, and stages a heroic resistance against the tide of historical forces.

The influence of Kojève outside France has probably been most pronounced in the United States. His ideas achieved a new salience and exposure with the publication of Francis Fukayama's The End of History and the Last Man (1992), in the wake of the Cold War. Fukayama was a student of Allan Bloom's, who in turn was a 'disciple' of the 'esoteric' émigré political philosopher Leo Strauss. It was Strauss who introduced a generation of his students to Kojève's thought, and in Bloom’s case, arranged for him to study with Kojève in Paris in the 1960s. The book, an international bestseller, presents nothing less than a triumphal vindication of Kojève's supposedly prescient thesis that history has found its end in the global triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy. With the final demise of Soviet Marxism, and the global hegemony of capitalism, we have finally reached the end of history. There are no more battles to be fought, no more experiments in social engineering to be attempted; the world has arrived at a homogenised state in which the combination of capitalism and liberal democracy will reign supreme, and all other cultural and ideological systems will be consigned irretrievably to the past. Fukayama follows Kojève in tying the triumph of capitalism to the satisfaction of material human needs. Moreover, he sees it as the primary mechanism for the provision of recognition and value. Consumerism and the commodity form, for Fukayama, present the means by which recognition is mediated. Humans desire to be valued by others, and the means of appropriating that valuation is the appropriation of the things that others themselves value; hence lifestyle and fashion become the mechanisms of mutual esteem in a post-historical world governed by the logic of capitalist individualism.

The problem with neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them.

Ronald Reagan was ridiculed by sophisticated people on the American left and in Europe for labeling the Soviet Union and its allies an "evil empire" and for challenging Mikhail Gorbachev not just to reform his system but also to "tear down this wall."

contrary to much of the nonsense written about him [Strauss] by people like Anne Norton and Shadia Drury, was a serious reader of philosophical texts who did not express opinions on contemporary politics or policy issues.

Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.

"The End of History," in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism.

people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States.

Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.

The misjudgment was based in part on the massive failure of the American intelligence community to correctly assess the state of Iraq's W.M.D. programs before the war.

But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle."

The world today lacks effective international institutions that can confer legitimacy on collective action;

The worst legacy that could come from the Iraq war would be an anti-neoconservative backlash that coupled a sharp turn toward isolation with a cynical realist policy aligning the United States with friendly authoritarians.

Good governance, which involves not just democracy but also the rule of law and economic development, is critical to a host of outcomes we desire, from alleviating poverty to dealing with pandemics to controlling violent conflicts.
If we are serious about the good governance agenda, we have to shift our focus to the reform, reorganization and proper financing of those institutions of the United States government that actually promote democracy, development and the rule of law around the world, organizations like the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the National Endowment for Democracy and the like.

The owing class and the class of proletarians represent the same human self-estrangement. But the first class feels comfortable and assured in this self- estrangement, and in it possesses the appearance of a human existence; the second feels destroyed in estrangement, in it perceives the impotence and the actuality of an inhuman existence. To use an expression of Hegel’s it (self-estrangement) is indignation in depravity over this depravity…

…It is my firm belief that the world-spirit of our times has given the command to advance. Such a command is obeyed: this essence strides on irresistibly through thick and thin like an armored, closed-ranked phalanx, its movement as imperceptible as the sun’s. Countless light troops for and against it flank it around about, most of them without the least idea of what it is all about, and get nothing out of it but cracks on the head as from an invisible hand. All humbug stalling tactics and phony windbaggery cannot help an iota. You can, so to speak, reach the shoestrings of the colossus and on them smear a bit of shoe-polish or dirt, but you can never untie them, much less take off the divine shoes….
Letters To and From Hegel, edited J. Hoffmeister, Vol. 2, p. 272.

Fukuyama's "Defection"
Catfight Among the Conservatives
By ROGER MORRIS
Counterpoint.org
April 3, 2006

It was in 1927, amid the rise of Fascism and the fatal political decay of post-World War I Europe, that French sociologist and historian Julian Benda wrote his classic anti-polemical polemic, La Trahison des Clercs. Benda's mournful intent was to abhor among fellow thinkers the abandonment of rational, disinterested inquiry for self-promoting resort to ideology and politics. Over remorseless decades of hot and cold war that followed, The Treason of the Intellectuals was often a casualty of the scourge it deplored. One of those works far more cited than actually read, it was gladly unlimbered by conservatives to bombard dissenting artists, academics or journalists with the withering "treason" of its title.

With Francis Fukuyama's slight regret at the ongoing foreign policy debacle of his old neoconservative cohorts in the Bush Administration, the Benda anathema seems come full circle, right on right -though with a vivid sense of the betrayal and cost not only in the craven partisanship of intellectuals, but in the false pretense of intellect to begin with.

Fukuyama brings his critique as a celebrity ideologue of the neoconservative moment he now thinks misused and spent in the colossal blunder of the war on Iraq. Delivered as the Castle Lectures at Yale in 2005, this small book thus has the apparent aura of defection, even civil war, in Washington's ruling clan. Fukuyama's 1989 The End of History and The Last Man became a best-selling paean of post-cold war capitalist triumphalism, declaring the finish of any real contest between systems. The irrepressible, inevitable worldwide urge toward consumerist modernization, he proclaimed, would lead eventually but just as ineluctably to political "democracy" and "free-market economics" on the end-of-century U.S. model. The author is quite right that read carefully-as tracts like this almost never are, of course, by zealots they confirm-his more academic, evolutionary, proto-Marxist delineation in The End was "misinterpreted" by his friends in the Bush regime, who took what he terms a "Leninist" view that history could and should be pushed along in settings such as Iraq by dialectical forces the likes of the Third Marine Division or Halliburton. Still, Fukuyama's earlier confident pronouncements-game over, we win-were catechism of the neoconservative self-congratulation and sense of inevitability feeding the hubris of US policy after 9/11, making all the sharper the sting-and irony-of what he says now.

America at the Crossroads begins with a useful summary of the political-cultural origins of neoconservatism, which in the perversities of its current reign has been subject to demonologies and conspiracy theories that mistake its indigenous depth, and so do rescue no service. As one of the converts, Fukuyama reverently retraces the genealogy back to the old disenchanted Trotskyites of the late 1930s, through the academic fount of the wistful classicist Leo Strauss with his ever lesser, more strident students, and on to the battles of nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter, Russophobe Paul Nitze, political plungers like Senator Henry Jackson, and assorted others against policies of détente symbolized by Henry Kissinger and his own posterity. It is all a valuable reminder of how much our present predicament owes to such recent, swiftly forgotten history. We are still paying the price of the passions and occupational opportunities of the cold war, and of the bitter, betrayed-lover disillusionment that angrily equated the Soviet monstrosity with social democracy, begetting blind, blanket rejection of the liberal state and authentic internationalism in favor of rationalizing (and being handsomely employed by) the chauvinism, free-flowing corruption and fierce corporate oligarchy now in power on the Potomac. Fukuyama does not call it by name, of course, but era to era, as the intellectual gentry decays, it is unmistakably a sequence of fugitive Reaction and Reactionaries. Benda would understand.

Not to say this book is disingenuous. The author is obviously a gifted man, an endowed-chair Johns Hopkins professor accomplished as an amateur photographer and craftsman of classical furniture, his blurbs tell us, as well as skilled in the smooth generality that exudes authority. With that he coolly ticks off the Bush blunders in Iraq as if a saddened but still barely tolerant teacher correcting an exam. The Administration misread and oversold the threat, misjudged the international reaction to its unilateralism, and succumbed to violating the base neoconservative skepticism of "social engineering" in its presumption to plant a functioning democracy in the wake of robotically planned invasion and wildly unplanned occupation. It all traced, Fukuyama laments, to the regrettable if not quite explained "mindsets" of the neoconservatives who dominated decision-making. The remedy is what he calls with similar vagueness and no small pretense "Realistic Wilsonianism." His new old prescription is a duly chastened neoconservative worldview with less ready resort to militarism or nation-building, more reliance on fresh "overlapping" international institutions (not to be confused with the motley, still deplorable beast of the United Nations), but no real sense of how this transparently unoriginal, unspecified confection would work, much less serve to cope with the political, economic or environmental crises breaking over America and the world.

The substantive void, in fact, once Fukuyama has stated the obvious about failure in Iraq, is plain. For all hype as a communiqué from the ardent, now-divided heart of neoconservatism, there is often less in this essay, as Tallulah Bankhead would say, than meets the eye. The critique of the Iraq War is banal, almost cursory after years of analysis by Administration critics in the US and abroad, and by now hardly novel in a growing chant of conservative dissent. Fukuyama's rendition of Islamic terrorism and the political-cultural phenomenon of postmodern jihad amounts to a simplistic morality play of modernity versus barbarism, good against evil, untroubled by any of the richly layered and tragic history of the Arab world since the late Ottoman Empire, including the deep anti-colonial impulse as well as sectarian atavism in the heritage and seeding of al-Qaeda. Much of the story, as we should know, is of the West in its own cold war jihad, overtly or covertly, directly or by proxy, not just modernizing and patronizing but often manipulating and brutalizing societies in painful transition. Despite his brief tenure in the Reagan regime State Department, Fukuyama seems one of those academics on whose rarified world of conferences and conflations the CIA or MI6 never intrude.

Nor can be bring himself to admit, along with his friends' folly in Mesopotamia, the glaring fraud and forfeit of the globalism he made his reputation revering and still exalts, a world of evidence notwithstanding. Measures were taken "prematurely," as the author delicately describes the IMF, WTO and corporate plundering that has brought such economic and environmental havoc to so much of the planet. The resulting political turmoil, of course, mocks the "end of history" with a rising tide of popular and even neo-socialist reassertion, forces to which Fukuyama in his own unexamined "mindset" seems oblivious.

"With regard to regime change," he declares at another point, "only Afghanistan among recent cases resembles Germany and Japan in the thoroughness with which it has rejected the political order in place before the US intervention." Written any time in the past year or more, as Canadians will know from their own experience in the Hindu Kush, that sentence leaves one aghast. It is as if the Taliban backed by Pakistan in its old double game did not control much of the countryside beyond Kabul, Western overseer Hamid Karzai did not survive only behind a wall of mercenary bodyguards, the old drug mafias did not rule with utter impunity, and on and on. The intellectual shallowness is systemic. In this ostensible treatise about a more realistic American foreign policy, what we are missing is any deeper reality of the world, or of American policy.

"It is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies," wrote John Steinbeck on discovering as a war correspondent in 1944 the stratified separate worlds of public image and political reality. One of the morals of Fukuyama's slender work, as of most foreign policy books, is the contrast between those strata, the politely discussed and the never-acknowledged, history admitted and history hidden. Thus the unmentionables in this version of "the neoconservative legacy."

Readers will have to look elsewhere for the Washington realities beneath the pretensions of people and ersatz ideology. What an intellectual devolution there was from the founding priests of the 30s-50s, serious thinkers like Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell, to the acolyte staff bureaucrats and lawyers, figures like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, and others, who succeeded to power. How anti-intellectual their crackpot belligerence appealing to the culture's worse fears and provincialism. How they rode to decisive office on the tyranny of money in American politics and ultimately the vulnerability of an extraordinarily uninformed, susceptible President in George W. Bush. Noses ever pressed to the window, what a wanna-be establishment they were and are, and how tightly and hungrily they held together in or out of power-"basically just Bill Kristol and a fax machine," Fukuyama describes the relentless propagandizing that always surpassed substance, yet was effective enough in the substantive wasteland of thinking about America's post-cold war foreign policy. Credentialed without intellect, savagely partisan without sensibility, what they thought needed knowing of the world they cherry-picked (much as they slanted intelligence on Iraq) from ethnocentric, colony-nostalgic academics of kindred views.

The problem, of course, is that history's shattering verdict came in. We know from the Kremlin archives, the streets of Baghdad, and so much more just how unrelievedly ignorant they were. No pikers these, our turn-of-the-century neoconservatives have been wrong about everything of consequence they elbowed and brazened to judge, from the Soviet Union to Iraq, from democracy as panacea to capitalism as hypocrisy, from the lessons of Vietnam to the meaning of 9/11, and not least the tragedy of an Israel whose ultimate descent to colonial oppression many of them aided as a veritable sixth column of divided loyalty. Over it all was the requisite machismo, the obliviousness to human costs Fukuyama can allude to only in euphemisms like "rolling the dice." "The enthusiasm of sedentary, effete men (and women) for bloodshed they never see, bits of body they never have to retch over, stacked morgues they will never have to visit, searching for a loved one" John Pilger calls it more honestly. "Their role to enforce parallel worlds of unspoken truth and public lies"

It is a "legacy" for which Fukuyama is now at pains, understandably, to deny paternity, though the DNA is rather unmistakable. It is scarcely the neoconservatives' fault alone. The New York Times' resident reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, in her own qualifying ignorance necessarily clinging to the obligatory shallows, thought America at the Crossroads "astute and shrewdly reasoned tough-minded and edifying." Yes, well.

And of course there are no Democratic Party counterparts of Professor Fukuyama to dig any deeper, that policy-intellectual wasteland being a thoroughly bipartisan landscape.

The best that may be said of this book is that it just may make a little easier the Great Debate on foreign policy America still desperately needs in the wake of 9/11-though it is far less important in that respect, and thus is getting far more attention, than the recent study on the pernicious power of the pro-Israel lobby by Fukuyama's more scholarly fellow academics, Chicago's John Mearsheimer and Harvard's Stephen Walt.

Meanwhile, Fukuyama and his misguided colleagues will have to cope with their considerable shares in the common disaster. America at a crossroads? For everybody's sake, one hopes. Still the end of history? Please. The real war against the treason of the clerks is just beginning.

Roger Morris, an award-winning historian and investigative journalist who served on the National Security Council Staff under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, has just completed Shadows of the Eagle, a history of American policy and covert interventions in the Middle East and South Asia, to be published early next year by Alfred Knopf. Morris is the author of Partners in Power: the Clintons and Their America and with Sally Denton The Money and the Power: the Making of Las Vegas. He may be reached at RPMBook@Gmail.com.

Straussism: The Philosophy Directing The Age Of Tyranny
By Jan Allen
Informationclearinghouse.com

05/22/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- Straussism is the philosophy of the obscure University Of Chicago philosophy instructor Leo Strauss.

The students of Leo Strauss left the University in search of political power; these took root in the Republican party, formed neo-conservatism and became known as Neocons

Straussism calls for tyranny -- rule from those above.
The purpose of this document is to present the principles of Straussism as a rosetta stone http://tinyurl.com/qo7yc to give one the knowledge to decipher and translate the rhetoric and behavior of the George Bush neocon administration into some degree of coherent meaning.

Introduction:
1) A Straussian: a disciple of the philosopher Leo Strauss.

2) Leo Struass (1899-1973) was a student of philosophy in Germany and watched the Weimar Republic dissolve into chaos and then into tyranny. As a Jew, he was forced to flee Germany and he eventually ended up at the University of Chicago, where he developed a cult following from some the brightest students. For Strauss, the demise of the Weimar Republic represented a repudiation of liberal democracy. Liberalism, to Strauss, equals relativism, which necessarily leads to nihilism. Strauss longed to return to a previous, pre-liberal, pre-bourgeois era of blood and guts, of imperial domination, of authoritarian rule, of pure fascism.

These views resonated with Straussian disciples such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, William Kristol and Harry Jaffa. They took these ideas out of the classroom and translated them into actual political doctrine: the neoconservative manifesto of the Project for a New American Century. Straussian principles would be implemented on a global scale, and 9/11 provided the perfect pretext. Paul Wolfowitz, who attended Strauss's lectures on Plato, became the architect of the Iraq War, using hyped intelligence concerning WMD's as the "noble lie".

As a young man in Germany, Leo Strauss became infatuated with a beautiful and brilliant Jewish scholar, Hannah Arendt, whose impact on American political thought will probably be seen by future historians as greater than any other of the Weimar emigres. Hannah Arendt spurned Strauss's advances and did not conceal her contempt for his ideas. Arendt died in 1975, but the importance of her work is just beginning to be appreciated. Her brilliant analysis, The Origins of Totalitarianism, remains the standard today, and her categories can help us understand the erosion of democracy since 9/11. Her concept of the "banality of evil" which she developed in Eichmann in Jerusalem is useful in understanding how ordinary individuals can plan and carry out acts of inhumanity.

Strauss and Arendt represent the two poles of the ideological struggle that began in the Weimar Republic and which continues even today in America. http://tinyurl.com/ocj7s

3) So, what is Neo-conservatism (what is its relationship to Straussism and how is it related to tyranny), and how does it propose to change the world in accordance with Straussian political philosophy? 'Neo' comes from the Greek neos, which means new. And, what's neo about neo-conservatism? Well, for one thing, the old conservatism relied on tradition and history; it was cautious, slow and moderate; it went with the flow. But under the influence of Leo Strauss, the new conservatism is intoxicated with nature. The new conservatism is not slow or cautious, but active, aggressive, and reactionary in the literal sense of the term. Inspired by Strauss's hatred for liberal modernity, its goal is to turn back the clock on the liberal revolution and its achievements. http://tinyurl.com/of2p4


Twenty Two Characteristics Of Straussism

1) The Few Must Rule The Many
John Locke and the American founding fathers held “the natural law tradition” which holds that man possesses natural rights to life, liberty, and property and that the state is always and everywhere the greatest threat to these God-given rights. To the founders, this meant that government should be "bound by the chains" of the Constitution, to paraphrase Jefferson. If men were angels, there would be no need for government, Madison wrote in defense of the Constitution. But men are not angels, Madison continued, which is why government power must always be limited.

Leo Strauss rejected this view of natural rights in favor of Plato’s “philosopher-king” model of government; the “philosopher kings” exercise the “rule of the wise”

Straussians assign dignity to the few.

The superiority of the “ruling philosophers” is an intellectual superiority and not a moral one.


2) Virtue Is Defined By The Elite: It Is That Which Is “For The Public Good”
The elite few are to have unlimited state power who use it to pursue “virtue” with virtue being, their own vision of "the public good."

Moral virtue had no application to the really intelligent man, the philosopher. Moral virtue only existed in popular opinion, where it served the purpose of controlling the unintelligent majority.


3) The Strong Must Rule The Weak
Strauss taught: “The strong must rule the weak”; this was presented quite well in Jim Lobe's article 'The Strong Must Rule The Weak' http://tinyurl.com/qtlnn


4) Only One Natural Right: The Right To Rule Over The Vulgar Many
Those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior.

The people will not be happy to learn that there is only one natural right—the right of the superior to rule over the inferior, the master over the slave, the husband over the wife, and the wise few over the vulgar many.

For the Straussian, the people of the United States are the “vulgar many,” chumps, dupes, and ciphers to be manipulated, poked, and prodded in the direction of the “Long War,” a new Hundred Years’ War, as spelled out by Rumsfeld’s latest Quadrennial Defense Review. “A policy of perpetual war against a threatening enemy is the best way to ward off political decay. And if the enemy cannot be found, then it must be invented.”

Human beings are born neither free nor equal. The natural human condition, is not one of freedom, but of subordination.

Strauss divided the history of political thought into two camps: the ancients (like Plato) are wise and wily, whereas the moderns (like Locke and other liberals) are vulgar and foolish.


5) Justice Is Merely The Interest Of The Stronger
Strauss shares the insights of the wise Plato that justice is merely the interest of the stronger; that those in power make the rules in their own interests and call it justice.


6) “The Rule Of The Wise” is unquestionable, absolute, authoritarian, undemocratic and covert
The rule of the wise is not to be questioned: one is not to raise questions about classic values such as justice or constitutional principles; hence the rule of the wise must be unquestioned.

The rule of the wise is to be absolute, authoritarian and undemocratic: The rule of the wise cannot involve any consideration of the unwise: Leo Strauss said: “It would be equally absurd to hamper the free flow of wisdom by consideration of the unwise wishes of the unwise; hence the wise rulers ought not to be responsible to the unwise subjects;" the rule of the wise must be absolute and authoritarian; majority-democracy would result in the subjection of what is by nature higher to that which is lower. Strauss’ reading of Plato comes down to this: a majority-democracy is an act against nature and must be prevented at all costs. Under the Straussian autocratic system, dissent is not only dangerous, it is seditious.

This rule of the wise must be covert; and this principle is facilitated by the overwhelming stupidity of the gentlemen. The more gullible and unperceptive they are, the easier it is for the wise to control and manipulate them.


7) The Three Classes: The Wise-Few, The Vulgar-Many And The Gentlemen
The wise are the lovers of the harsh, unadulterated truth. They are capable of looking into the abyss without fear and trembling. They recognize neither God nor moral imperatives. They are devoted above all else to their own pursuit of the “higher” pleasures, which amount to consorting with their “puppies” or young initiates.

The vulgar many, are lovers of wealth and pleasure. They are selfish, slothful, and indolent. They can be inspired to rise above their brutish existence only by fear of impending death or catastrophe.

The gentlemen, are lovers of honor and glory. They are the most ingratiating towards the conventions of their society, that is, the illusions of the cave. They are true believers in God, honor, and moral imperatives. They are ready and willing to embark on acts of great courage and self-sacrifice at a moment’s notice.


8 ) The State Is Omnipotent: It Manifests Militaristic Nationalism.
Strauss believed that human aggression could only be restrained by a powerful, nationalistic state. He believed that such an omnipotent state can only be maintained if there is an external threat, "even if one has to be manufactured." This is why Straussians believe in perpetual war and is another reason why they have formed a cult around "the church of Lincoln," whom they hold up as "the greatest statesman in history." Lincoln manufactured many "threats," including the truly bizarre notion that representative government would perish from the earth if the Southern states were permitted to secede peacefully. In reality, peaceful secession would have been a victory for self-government, keeping in mind that neither Lincoln nor Congress ever said that they were launching an invasion for any reason having to do with liberating the slaves.

Strauss taught that war – any war – will restore our “moral seriousness”, "clear away the fog of unthinking relativism," enable us to see evil, restore virtue, heroism, valor, and a sense of sacrifice, allow us to die for our comrades, country and faith, avoid the "hazards of civilization," make us more thoughtful, force us to "consider our loyalties," make men "decisive", and "place greatness within the reach of ordinary men."

“Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed," he once wrote. "Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united – and they can only be united against other people."

The only way a political order can be stable and not deteriorate in hedonistic pleasure is if it is united by an external threat.

Wealth, freedom, and prosperity make people soft, pampered, and depraved. War is an antidote to moral decadence and depravity. Thus war is held to be redemptive



9) Perpetual War Is Necessary
Perpetual War not perpe