(NOTE: This is a variant of a piece below. The two pieces diverged so far that I’m leaving both up.)
The Third Breakdown of Rationality
If there are two or more possible compromises, of which the one most favored by player 1 is not the one most favored by player 2; then to choose a sure-thing strategy is to be a sucker that capitulates entirely to the other side.
Nigel Howard, Paradoxes of Rationality, MIT, 1969, p. 181
Always explain to your adversary exactly what’s at stake, because that’s the only way that you can be sure that you understand things better than he does.
Confessions of Zeno, Italo Svevo (de Zoete translation, paraphrased by me), Vintage, 1930/1958, p.89.
You gotta know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, and know when to run
Kenny Rogers
“Shut up!”, he explained.
Ring Larder
Our friends have been explaining things to us ever so kindly during the last few days: “Don’t let the best be the enemy of the good”, “politics is the art of the possible”, “politics is the art of compromise”, and just recently “We must obey he ethic of responsibility”.
Nigel Howard explains a different political principle: don’t be a sucker. Suppose that you’re planning an auction, and someone comes up and offers to save you the bother by giving you a lump sum for the lot. Should you take his offer? After all, it’s money in the hand, and if you go ahead and hold the auction you might not sell anything, or might not get good bids…. just take the offer. Right?
Wrong. If he’s a sharp guy, you’re better off with the auction. Furthermore, if you take his offer he’ll make similar offers every time, except that the offers will be successively worse, since he knows that you think auctions are a nuisance and that you don’t know how much your stuff is really worth.
This isn’t about purism vs. compromise, as many on both sides seem to think. In the end you’re going to get a compromise. This is about fighting for the best compromise.
But playing the game involves risk. In the example I just gave, over a run of auctions you’re going to come out ahead, but now and then it will happen that you would have been better off with the easy deal. If you play, sometimes you lose, but if you don’t play, in the end you lose more.
Democrats don’t want us to play. For at least the last twenty years, Democratic negotiations have been defined from the start as finding the middle, with the progressive positions surrendered even before bargaining begins. And now, one more time, we’re being advised to surrender before the game is played.
This leads to a second question: who are we bargaining with? Well, we’re not bargaining with the Republicans or the conservative Democrats — our representatives are in Congress to do that. We don’t have to figure out how to handle Joe Lieberman or Olympia Snowe or Ben Nelson or any of the other boodlers and rightwingers stinking up Congress. We’re bargaining with our own representatives in Congress, not the other side’s representatives. And in practice this means that we’re bargaining with our representatives in Congress, the Democratic leadership, and Barack Obama (as represented by Rahm Emmanuel).
We obviously shouldn’t take bargaining tips from the people we’re bargaining with. Progressive bargaining with the Democratic Party has been stuck at the “Shut up!” level for a good long time, and Obama has not changed that.
Centrists are always assuring us that they’re really on our side but are continually forced to compromise by the political realities. This is not true, however. Centrists are committed to centrism — some for ideological reasons, some for corrupt reasons, and most for both reasons. Along with the Republicans we are one of their two main adversaries, and we shouldn’t be too sure that they’d side with us at crunch time. Beating us is one of their primary goals.
Democratic pros and Republican demagogues tend to speak of progressives and intellectuals as tiny, effete, inconsequential minorities, but that’s just bullying. Progressives comprise about 15-20% of the population, and their share of the actual voters is bigger than that. College graduates make up 28% of the population and post-graduate degree-holders 10%, and these two demographics are the most likely of all to vote. The Democrats can’t win without intellectuals and progressives, but they don’t want to give us much, and that’s why we are continually having these dog-and-pony-show debates about purism and realism and moral seriousness and the ethic of responsibility and so on.
This post hasn’t really been about the health care debate, but it applies. We should play the game to the end, and make our choices piecemeal as we go along. And remember — anything less than Medicare for all counts as a compromise.
*P.S. I am often regarded as advocating anti-intellectualism, but that’s not quite right. I do think that the preponderance of the educated in the Democratic Party has had some negative effects, and I think that intellectuals in politics make far too much of their own superior intelligence. But my main message is an inclusive one. I’m mostly just asking the intelligentsia to realize that they are People too, and inviting them to come on down to join the rest of the dispossessed peasantry. A lot of adjuncts and grad students are already here.
Trollblog 
December 20, 2009 at 9:27 pm
I was most surprised by TPM, I think. I had imagined that Marshall had somewhat better political sense than that.
Someday someone is going to tell Yglesias about Weber and Article 48 of the Weimar constitution, and how if you read Weber’s Politics as a Vocation seriously, he has a lot to answer for. (Oh no, I Godwinned the thread already.) But, you know, I’ve basically given up any hope that someone like Yglesias would ever really understand.
December 20, 2009 at 9:33 pm
I’ve been arguing for awhile now that, given the German political accomplishments during the 20th Century, nobody should pay any attention to German political thinkers. Awhile back I read a debate between Schmitt and Strauss and Benjamin which was basically about Article 48, and I decided that they were all somewhere in the vicious / silly sector. But they’re tremendously influential in the world of today.
December 20, 2009 at 10:22 pm
Is that debate available online? It sounds interesting.
December 20, 2009 at 10:48 pm
It was probably somewhere on Crooked Timber.
I just commented that it astonished me that, when the continental refugees showed up in America from the continent they’d helped ruin, they were received as wise men and looked to for political wisdom. I was thinking especially of Strauss, Schmitt, Benjamin, and Adorno, but Hayek and the Austrian economists too, and maybe the logical positivists…. and so on. After all, something terrible happened in Europe 1914-1945, and some kind of intellectual quarantine, or at least a severe discounting, seemed like a pretty good idea.
But the conclusion drawn after WWII was that the Populists were Nazis.
And me too, because I’m anti-intellectual.
December 21, 2009 at 4:16 am
Couldn’t find the reference in that infamous thread, but check this out:
http://cato1.tripod.com/strauss-bio.htm
This guy is writing a biography of Strauss and shows the deep personal, philosophical, and careerist links between him, Schmitt, and Benjamin before the war. Also appearing, Heidegger, Scholem (the leading 20th century scholar of Jewish mysticism), and Gadamer, among others. Very interesting.
December 22, 2009 at 7:43 pm
There are only fairly tenuous connections between Strauss and Schmitt and (especially) Benjamin. Strauss was in Heidegger’s seminar, which was precisely the epicenter of philosophy at the time. Arendt, Gadamer, Marcuse, Jacob Klein and Levinas were also studying under Heidegger during this period. Satre wanted to study under Heidegger, but couldn’t arrange funding to do so (instead he was avidly reading Heidegger back in Paris and studying under Kojeve).
December 22, 2009 at 9:49 pm
There are two books on the relationship between Strauss and Schmitt, who were correspondents and colleagues, and in those books they engaged certain ideas of Benjamin (on violence). What I know is to be found here:
http://www.idiocentrism.com/agamben.htm and here:
http://www.idiocentrism.com/schmitt.htm
I can’t claim to be an expert on that debate, but I’ve read a lot of Strauss’s stuff, several thngs by or about Schmitt, and the trlrvnt essays by Benjamin, and I came out negatively impressed. I’ve argued with Schmitt experts on the internet and they assure me that I’m an idiot and don’t know anything, but to me that whole discourse seems poisoned.
December 23, 2009 at 3:26 am
Schmitt and Strauss were not colleagues (Strauss never held any university posts in Germany, while Schmitt was a professor at the prestigious Berlin University). Their correspondence and interaction was quite limited compared to Strauss’ vastly longer relationships with Jacob Klein, Kojeve, Scholem and his own students.
It wasn’t just in economics and in political science that the refugees from Germany and Austria had so great an impact. Sociology, psychology, physics, economic history and many others were heavily impacted as well.
December 23, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Whether they were colleagues or master and disciple, it struck me that Schmitt and Strauss were unnecessarily friendly. Schmitt did acknowledge Strauss’s critique of something he wrote, which in my opinion makes them colleagues. Strauss advocated fascism in 1932 and when he went into exile he asked Schmitt for an introduction to the French fascist Maurras. Strauss’s other, non-fascist friends tried to warn him against Schmitt.
None of the things I’ve read about Strauss explain the process by which he was transformed from an advocate of fascism in 1932 (it’s in one of the two books) to an Abraham Lincoln democrat, so I’ve deduced that the answer can be found in “Persecution and the Art of Writing”.
I’m well aware of the German / Austrian influence on all areas of American academia. (See here: http://www.idiocentrism.com/austria.htm, and yes, I’m aware that the Dual Monarchy wasn’t really Holy Roman). It’s in the area of political wisdom that I reject the Germans, though the science-worship of the logical positivists also seems inferior to the pragmatist approach it displaced, and in my opinion had terrible long-term effects too. But one thing the German-speaking world, as of 1932, seemed to be entirely lacking in was political wisdom.
During WWII the US was transformed into technocratic managed democracy and the technocrats had no reason to want to leave power afterwards. Historically, the whole American university became anti-popular after WWII, and it has stayed that way. In their different ways Strauss, Hayek, Popper, and Adorno all played a role. Schlesinger, Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, and other indigenous thinkers picked up the ball and ran with it. They were all Democrats, and that’s why populism is Republican now.
Schlesinger and Hofstadter were transitional in a kind of amusing way. The Vietnam was a perfect technocratic war, but they didn’t support it and joined the popular resistance. But by that time popular resistance was impossible. Hofstadter had hoped that the new elite would be intellectuals, but they were experts and he wasn’t an expert. He was a simple peasant petitioning the Czar, just like the rest of us.
Confucius said something like “You can get the common people to go along, but you can’t get them to understand”. That’s the Democratic Party’s basic principle. The Republicans follow Lincoln’s “You can fool all of the people all of the time”, which they’ve adapted very slightly from the original, deleting one letter.
For me the possibility of “populism” hinges on the possibility of communicating with the populace rather than just manipulating them. It may not be possible any more.
Democratic technocracy worked pretty well 1941-1968 and limped along as the junior partner for another 40 years. It strikes me that its run and is about to be replaced with either straight dictatorship or chaos.
The long-term effects of the most recent bipartisan financial crash strikes me as the last nail in the coffin. Technocracy has to succeed in order to be accepted; nobody likes it. This is exactly the kind of thing that we were told never could happen, and it was the proudest social scientists who led us into disaster.
It’s an open question whether the populace is capable of responding. They’ve been in the fleshpots most of their lives. (Note: populists were reformers with a program, and didn’t endorse The People just as they were. They made demands.)
Someone should put together an anthology of people who sneered at Naomi Klein. Lots of mistakes of detail, I’m sure, but on the right track. If you want the underlying Shock Doctrine ideology, it’s a little Strauss and a little Hayek: see “The Road From Mont Pelerin”.
December 23, 2009 at 3:58 pm
“It’s in the area of political wisdom that I reject the Germans, though the science-worship of the logical positivists also seems inferior to the pragmatist approach it displaced, and in my opinion had terrible long-term effects too. But one thing the German-speaking world, as of 1932, seemed to be entirely lacking in was political wisdom.”
Absolutely. And understanding this (to use Strauss’ formulation: to understand why the century’s greatest philosopher Heidegger was a Nazi) was Strauss’ goal. Strauss was in conflict with the new social sciences – he precisely thought that his fellow refugees would eventually harm American politics. Of course, political wisdom is a phrase that would be rejected by modern social science and would be readily acceptable to Strauss.
December 23, 2009 at 4:03 pm
“In their different ways Strauss, Hayek, Popper, and Adorno all played a role.”
Strauss actually wrote a book on economics – a commentary on Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, which pretty much indicates that he was opposed to, (or, at least, had an interest in explicating ancient economics versus modern economics) modern capitalism – the precise opposite of Hayek.
December 23, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Yeah, but Strauss was also opposed to democracy in any real sense. Once you ask why he publsihed “Persecution and the Art of Writing” you get into a real tangle. On the one hand, he doesn’t say he’s opposed to democracy, bur he does tell us that if he were, he wouldn’t tell us. So why did he tell us that. And he says that liberal democracy is the best actually existing system, but that’s faint praise involving no committment to future democracy. And his hermeneutic method tells us that, if he says one thing a hundred times, and the opposite thing once, the single time is what he really means. That’s a fun but insane method.
My take here: http://www.idiocentrism.com/contradictions.htm
Incidentally, Hayek rejected the scientific claims of economics, and probably for that reason was more or less blackballed by the American profession. Mirowski claims that it was Friedman who shanked him.
I have an axe to grind, here as elsewhere. When I was in HS I was in a special summer program for talented and gifted HS students, and I met some of the now-famous political Straussians. I enjoyed it at the time, but as time went on I saw my one friend and several acquaintances become first Straussians and then Reagan Republicans. It was just sad and horrifying to me.
December 23, 2009 at 7:36 pm
“Yeah, but Strauss was also opposed to democracy in any real sense.”
I’m confused how you get to this point. Strauss is never explicit in commenting on current political affairs, but, insofar as his commentary on Xenophon’s On Tyranny indicates, he fairly strongly opposes tyranny. It is true that Strauss seems much less strongly convinced about democracy than the modern philosophers, but his position is no more radical than Aristotle’s, whose recommended regime is a republic with many democratic elements.
The Straussians who became Republicans are fairly horrifying, but there’s no necessity for that to happen. Kalev Pehme, for example, is a sort of socialist Straussian. Strauss sent some of his students to study under Kojeve, who was an unorthodox Marxist.
December 23, 2009 at 8:21 pm
Well, yeah, he’s no more opposed to democracy than Aristotle was, or Plato.
Strauss’s whole scheme of True Philosophers + Guardians + everyone else seems pretty inherently anti-democratic. I didn’t actually think that was controversial; it seems hard-wired in his system. It doesn’t even seem very unusual compared to most othe rpolkitical thinkers, or as far as that goes Hofstadter or Bell. There seems to have been a united effort to keep the democratic forms while as much as other keeping decision-making in neutral, unelected hands, something that has already happened with military policy and economic policy.
December 23, 2009 at 9:14 pm
“Strauss’s whole scheme of True Philosophers + Guardians + everyone else seems pretty inherently anti-democratic.”
1. Are you certain that this is Strauss’ idea?
2. Strauss indicates that he believes true philosophers are extraordinarily rare (there may appear a few, worldwide, per century at best). Thus, even if we do want to be ruled by the true philosopher, it is literally impossible for most regimes in most times and places, for that to occur.
“Well, yeah, he’s no more opposed to democracy than Aristotle was, or Plato.”
Well, Aristotle isn’t that opposed to democracy. It’s the best of the “bad” regimes – tyranny and oligarchy are (much) worse. Polity (or republic) is the best of all regimes – so regimes should aim to be a republic or, failing that, a democracy.
“There seems to have been a united effort to keep the democratic forms while as much as other keeping decision-making in neutral, unelected hands, something that has already happened with military policy and economic policy.”
Strauss does not think very highly of modern economics (if we extrapolate from his commentary on Xenophon’s Oeconomicus and his opposition to Kojeve’s work on the EU). He was also (generally) opposed to the claims of expertise by the new social sciences that a technocracy relies upon.
December 23, 2009 at 11:23 pm
I’m a bit baffled by this argument. At times I’ve seriosuly considered that the Straussians are right and that democracy is the best of the bad forms of government (faint praise indeed). He himself said that liberal democracy was the best actually-existing regime (very carefully hedged praise). The philosophers he most admired had a generally low opinion of democracy, and he seems to have though that the modern age (starting about 1500-1600) was a period of political degeneration; doubting the modern age was one of his trademarks.
Bloom revised the story in the sense of accepting a conservative, elitist version of the Enlightenment — probably something like property owner franchise.
I’ve never seen anything more democratic than that — very much not very. I’ve just thought that detaching yourself from egalitarian, populist, and democratic sentiments and prejudices was right at the beginning of the Straussian initiation (granted that he allowed non-democrats to work within instituted democratic regimes.)
What have I missed?
December 24, 2009 at 2:05 am
“I’ve just thought that detaching yourself from egalitarian, populist, and democratic sentiments and prejudices was right at the beginning of the Straussian initiation.”
No, it is only that the philosopher is always skeptical of the justice of his native regime. Thus, in a democracy, the philosopher tries to rethink the basis for the democracy. In an monarchy, the philosopher tries to rethink the basis of monarchy (this is partially what the “mirror of princes” genre is). In an aristocracy, the philosopher tries to rethink the basis of aristocracy (see Xenophon’s works on hunting and horsemanship).
“Bloom revised the story in the sense of accepting a conservative, elitist version of the Enlightenment — probably something like property owner franchise.”
You’re probably thinking more about Jaffa, not Bloom.
December 24, 2009 at 3:00 am
No, it was Bloom. I haven’t read Jaffa. According to Bloom, during the Enlightenment or thereabouts the true philosophers switched from an aristocratic alliance to a bourgeois one. There was nothing about any subsequent switch to a popular alliance.
I’ll have to bow out now until whenever I reread Strauss, which will probably be never. I have to admit that I never saw any trace of democratic sympathy, at any level, when I was reading those books, and various of Strauss’s classical committments made such a sympathy seem impossible to me. He was on the German right wing in 1932 and I don’t remember anyone ever talking about any transformative moment in later years, other than the prudential changes required to live in the US.
My feeling at the moment is that Strauss was the intermediary by which Schmitt’s ideas reached Bush — the unitary executive, the state of exception, the decider, The Enemy, etc. Schmitt seemed to be especially hostile to the idea that the law could or should limit the executive, and Bush picked that one up and ran with it.
I don’t really claim to be an expert on this, though I’ve read a bunch of books, and I don’t really plan to go back to it.
December 24, 2009 at 10:27 am
According to the source I linked above:
1) Strauss wrote a very favorable review of Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political early in his career (1931. He had published only one book, on Spinoza). Schmitt arranged for this to be published in the same journal where he had originally published his essay “The Concept of the Political”. For authors to be placing favorable reviews of their own work in academic journals strikes me as ethically suspect on the purely professional level, but perhaps prewar German standards were different.
2) Strauss gave Schmitt part of his Hobbes book for pre-publication review.
3) “Schmitt provided a professional assessment of Strauss and recommendation for a fellowship to the Rockefeller Foundation for the Social Sciences in Germany. Ernst Cassirer and Julius Guttmann also gave recommendations on Strauss’s behalf, but Strauss places the chief responsibility of receiving the fellowship on Schmitt.”
These strike me as pretty direct professional connections, and also suggest that Strauss was to some degree a Schmitt protege – Schmitt directly advanced his career. The first one, I am sure, would be considered a serious breach of professional ethics today, and I would be surprised if it was not so then, though I don’t know for sure.
December 25, 2009 at 4:54 pm
“Schmitt seemed to be especially hostile to the idea that the law could or should limit the executive”
And Strauss is adamant that both law and justice should limit the executive. It’s true that in an extremely rare incident (when the philosopher himself is the founder of a regime), that law will not apply, because the philosopher knows the whole of justice (therefore, he does not need law). It should be emphasized that Strauss believed this had never happened in human history and would essentially never happen in human history (this is what the medieval Jewish Aristotleans are talking about when they’re talking about the Messiah – the perfect prince or perfect philosopher).
December 25, 2009 at 4:57 pm
“According to Bloom, during the Enlightenment or thereabouts the true philosophers switched from an aristocratic alliance to a bourgeois one.”
I don’t think it’s plausible to argue that Bloom is wrong here – this is an accurate depiction of reality. Now, SHOULD philosophers join in an alliance with the popular? That’s an entirely different question.
December 25, 2009 at 5:19 pm
“Strauss wrote a very favorable review of Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political early in his career”
Except that, in Howse’s (in my opinion, correct) analysis is that the review criticizes Schmitt in ways Schmitt didn’t grasp. The fact that Strauss emphasizes that the nature of man is eternal is in direct conflict with Schmitt’s ideas (i.e. for Strauss, all people share the same nature – and thus ultimately all people could be friends), for Schmitt, the main distinction is the enemy (i.e. your enemy has a different nature than you do).
“He was on the German right wing in 1932”
There’s very little evidence on what his opinions were. (There are three letters to Schmitt, but letters of this kind are hard to interpret.) What we can say is that Strauss’ closest lifelong intellectual companions were probably Scholem (a sort of socialist whose brother was a Communist member of Parliament) and Kojeve (an unorthodox Marxist / Hegelian).
December 25, 2009 at 6:03 pm
I call foul. The Schmitt letters do not seem hard to interpret, unless Strauss was being purely opportunistic. I can’t cite chapter and verse from here, but somewhere in the sources I cited Strauss affirms the need for fascism and the need for a deep critique of liberalism (something I can agree withm but it seems odd in the context of 1932 Germany which had different problems which strike me as more pressing), and asked for an introduction to Maurras. These seem pretty unambiguous. He also needed to be warned more than once that Schmitt was bad news.
I read a fair amount of Strauss a couple of decades ago, which doesn’t make me an expert at all but does mean that I’m not just repeating scuttlebutt. It was interesting to me and I took it seriously, but I always considered it to be an unfriendly challenge to democratic and egalitarian principles and I took it seriously as such.
The separation of true philosophers as transcendant and disinterested, derived from the allegory of the cave, strikes me as especially problematic. By this he elevates the authors he specializes in to superhuman status, and by extension makes himself into their prophet. I don’t really believe in disinterested truth and would not credit any of Strauss’s heroes with disinterestedness, regardless of their other strengths.
.
December 25, 2009 at 9:35 pm
Burritoboy, if Strauss was being critical of Schmitt in ways the latter could not perceive, they must have been ways that would elude most of the intended audience as well. So Strauss wrote an overtly favorable review of a book and got his career furthered as a result. He even got a Rockefeller grant as a result of Schmitt’s sponsorship at a time he really needed it. But some analysis holds that the review was covertly critical, and, of course, Strauss is famous for occult meanings. Which can be very convenient for plausible deniability. Even assuming this covert meaning is correct, it means Strauss praised Schmitt publicly – perhaps for self-serving reasons and certainly with self-serving results – even though this did not reflect his actual opinion, which he expressed in a masked manner. That strikes me as worse than endorsing Schmitt sincerely. And it does not change the fact that Schmitt furthered Strauss career.
In light of all that, your earlier comment:
“Schmitt and Strauss were not colleagues (Strauss never held any university posts in Germany, while Schmitt was a professor at the prestigious Berlin University). Their correspondence and interaction was quite limited compared to Strauss’ vastly longer relationships with Jacob Klein, Kojeve, Scholem and his own students.”
seems a bit off-the-mark. Of course, Strauss separated from Schmitt during the Nazi period; he was Jewish, he didn’t have the option of becoming a Nazi nor of being tolerated by them. So his relationships with Scholem and the rest had the potential to last longer because real world politics did not interfere. At a pivotal point in his career, though, Schmitt seems to have been quite important factor, and a close enough friend and trusted enough peer to receive pre-publication drafts of his work.
December 25, 2009 at 10:47 pm
As I remember, Strauss’s review was critical of Schmitt, but in a way that Schmitt found useful — a friendly or constructive criticism. As I recall it had to do with Schmitt’s reliance on Hobbes, which Strauss objected to because Hobbessian arguments could also leasd in a liberal direction. I also suspect that this was because Hobbes / Schmitt regarded government as a necessary evil whereas Strauss regarded the state as a positive good.
December 27, 2009 at 6:30 pm
“The separation of true philosophers as transcendant and disinterested, derived from the allegory of the cave, strikes me as especially problematic.”
Of course it’s problematic! Maimonides says it’s problematic! Plato says it’s problematic!
December 27, 2009 at 6:51 pm
Oh, come on.
I meant problematic, first, in the sense of unreal and mystified, and second (in terms of this discussion) problematic in the sense of undemocratic. There are no such true philosophers and organizing your thought around their supposed existence is misleading.
December 27, 2009 at 7:22 pm
“The Schmitt letters do not seem hard to interprete”
The philosophical letter seems to me to be one of the hardest genres to interprete.
December 27, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Sure, but asking for an introduction to Maurras, or declaring the need for fascist thinking seem unambiguous.
I’ve always found Strauss’s works interesting and challenging, and I actually sympathized with Bloom on identity politics and existentialist leftism, but I still think that the burden of proof is on anyone who tries to interpret Strauss as Democratic or even democracy-neutral.
Remember, the context of all this for me is the takeover of the Democratic Party by technocratic conservative-wannabes between 1938 and 1946. (Especially Bell, Hofstadter, asd Schlesinger). I’m very doubtful about the democratic character of systems as heavily anti-majoritarian, and with as many layers of representative intermediaries, as ours. We’re at the point now where populist protest seems required, but the Democratic Party refuses / is incapable of making such a protest and is leaving that to the Republicans, who are both more self-righteous and less scrupulous.
Is there any evidence that Strauss would ever support “going to the people”?
December 27, 2009 at 10:04 pm
“Is there any evidence that Strauss would ever support “going to the people”?”
What does “going to the people” actually mean? If you mean that leading politicians would utilize rhetoric in order to gain the backing of the populous, we should remember where we began – that Strauss (agreeing with classical philosophy) emphasizes rhetoric, whereas all of modern philosophy heavily (and strongly) de-emphasizes rhetoric in favor of economics or other social sciences. I’m not very fond of Jaffa’s politics, but his work on Lincoln’s rhetoric is truly excellent, in my opinion. And Lincoln can certainly be viewed as a man “of the people” – he was born in a very poor family and had very little formal education of any kind (and he certainly gained a lot of popular votes). (We shouldn’t ignore that Lincoln was quite wary of corporate capitalism.)
I don’t see any formal difficulty with a potential “Straussian” study of FDR’s rhetoric, or of the rhetoric of many other similar figures.
If you mean rather that Strauss would oppose the organization of mass parties (as opposed to analyzing the speech or actions of a single elite leader), there are numerous instances of philosophers he admires analyzing such things (Maimonides trying to build popular support for science, Machiavelli’s advice on how to organize an army best suited for a republic, Xenophon’s policy advice to the Athenians, Aristotle’s work in comparative law and comparative politics, Ptolemy of Lucca’s dissection of how a monarch should organize the monarchy to resemble a republic, Tocqueville’s structural/sociological study of America and many other such things.)
December 27, 2009 at 11:50 pm
None of those examples strike me as terribly relevant. I give you credit for persistence, but I’m uncertain as to your motives. Are you trying to produce a democratic Straussianism? Are you worried that I’m going to seize power and begin an anti-Straussian pogrom? (They’re very low on my list, if that’s your concern.)
December 28, 2009 at 5:45 pm
“Are you trying to produce a democratic Straussianism?”
There is always the problem of the relationship between the philosopher and the city: the philosopher sees the flaws in the city (because all actually existing political regimes are flawed). Thus, the philosopher cannot be in the same relationship to the regime as a citizen or statesman would be – the philosopher can, at best, be a friend or guide to any regime.
Every existing regime will therefore simply be on a continuum of bad to better regimes. Sometimes the regime is so bad that the philosopher cannot be a friend to it (i.e, the worst of the tyrannical regimes). In most times, even if the regime is notably worse than other potential regimes, the philosopher can hope (or at least attempt) to guide the regime to be better (for example, this is what the mirror of princes genre does). But in no instance (except for the extraordinarily unlikely possibility of a regime ruled by philosophers), can the philosopher say an actually existing regime is simply best (best without qualifiers). This is why you see Strauss saying he is a friend of democracy and that is the best of current regimes – that is all any philosopher can say (and is considerably more positive than what can be said about the huge majority of regimes).
“Are you worried that I’m going to seize power and begin an anti-Straussian pogrom?”
You seizing power would be an excellent thing, though not particularly democratic.
December 28, 2009 at 6:08 pm
Well, I’ll have to think about this. I do understand Strauss’s view of the relationship between the philosopher and the city, and his at-best conditional support for any actual regime. I remain convinced that the nearest real-world actualization of the ideal Straussian society would be more authoritarian, less democratic, and more hierarchal than ours. And the actually-existing Straussians I’ve know or known of have not appealed to me.
December 28, 2009 at 8:36 pm
“I remain convinced that the nearest real-world actualization of the ideal Straussian society would be more authoritarian, less democratic, and more hierarchal than ours.”
Since the ideal society (the rule of the philosopher) is extremely unlikely (and may be impossible), the ideal city is primarily of interest as a mental construct between philosophers (which is precisely what Plato’s Republic and More’s Utopia are – dialogues between potential philosophers and philosophers).
December 28, 2009 at 10:24 pm
Sure, but what I said was “nearest real-world actualization”, not ideal city.
December 29, 2009 at 3:16 pm
“I remain convinced that the nearest real-world actualization of the ideal Straussian society would be more authoritarian, less democratic, and more hierarchal than ours.”
Well, since Strauss generally does not speak in his own voice (almost all of his works are commentaries on other writers), I would say it’s difficult to say what, in the current environment, his politics look like in a practical sense.
I think the problem with saying that “Straussian” politics might be less liberal, is that we’re dealing with multiple senses of liberal. I personally would argue that the modern social-contract state is not necessarily more liberal in all senses or less authoritarian in all senses than the city-states of medieval Europe, for instance. The fact is that the modern social contract state is extremely uniform in construction – it’s structure of a comparatively large land area and large comparative populations, a small representative assembly, capitalism, advanced bureaucracy and technocracy is simply repeated endlessly all over the world. It’s relatively clear to me that very little variation on the above is tolerated within modern liberalism – when some states wanted to make the small adjustment of socialism, this was presented as the worst and most horrible of all possible revolutions (whereas in classical philosophy a wide array of economic arrangements are considered plausible, including Plato’s and More’s communism).
Let’s remember that many city-states had representative assemblies of 100, 200 or even 400 members – for populations of adult males that were generally 10,000-50,000 (i.e. one representative per 100 adult males). Some of the representative bodies were randomly selected from the entire male citizenry. Let’s remember that, even though these classical and medieval republics were extremely unstable, that this very instability allowed for a great amount of experimentation and diversity. They could change forms of government rapidly and had an incredible diversity of laws.
You and I have very little political power in a social-contract democracy (due to their vast sizes and small elected legislatures), whereas we might well have been randomly selected for the city-state’s assembly, or occupied other offices (many offices had terms of one year and previous holders of the office were banned from holding it again). Even if we didn’t, we would likely have close friends who did. It’s unclear to me that this is a less democratic situation than the social-contract states.