Straussed Out

Loren Lomasky from the November 1998 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Strauss is avowedly not a liberal; he may well be this century's most acute critic of liberalism. Although there is much that contemporary liberals would do well to learn from Strauss, his theoretical fortress remains open to storming by the inheritors of Locke and Mill. It is from the perspective of liberalism, albeit one more democratic-egalitarian than libertarian, that Drury launches her assaults against Strauss. Although she lands some accurate shots, the ratio of hits to misses is conspicuously smaller than should be expected from an obviously intelligent and sophisticated critic intimately familiar with her quarry. Why the failure to aim better?

I believe that Drury is undone by the intense animus she holds toward Strauss and all that is associated with him. She is outraged by what he says, what he intimates, and what he disclaims but is really nonetheless thinking. She dislikes his influence on students and their subsequent influence on the body politic. All this she wishes to root out. By comparison, Kenneth Starr is almost cozy in his regard for President Clinton. The result is a marksmanship that is too much that of the cheap shot.

Such anti-Straussian resentment is by no means uncommon in the political science community. It invites a comparison. The only other 20th-century American social thinker similarly effective in gathering a string of devoted disciples and disciples-of-disciples while acquiring an equivalent but opposed bloc of despisers is that other notorious emigré, Ayn Rand. In many respects, of course, the two could not have been more different. Strauss was a scholar of the arcane, Rand a producer of blockbusters; Strauss lived all his life in the academy, Rand was more at home in Hollywood than Harvard; Strauss almost always spoke as the interpretive mouthpiece of other men's texts, while Rand's pronouncements were, without exception, offered as her own authoritative dicta. Perhaps the most important difference is that Strauss's disciples were scholastics-in-training, while Rand was most effective in capturing the allegiances of adolescents who found the world outside of her works impossibly small and tedious for them to reside in. I do not believe that Strauss and Rand ever met, but had they been acquainted each would, I am sure, have held the other in contempt.

Despite that gulf of differences, the one abiding similarity matters more. Like Strauss, Rand could win over not only the rational faculties but also the spiritedness of devotees. Each thinker purveyed a worldview in which emotion as well as intellect was permitted to soar. Philosophy became, for Straussians and Randians alike, a profoundly erotic activity. It is, I believe, this eros rather than the doctrines per se that most alarms critics. Few things are more unnerving than zeal matched to a comprehensive and unsettling view of the way the world works. Christianity in its early, subversive phase generated an ample quantity both of adherents whom only death could separate from their faith and antagonists notably keen to bring about just that separation. Opponents of Strauss and Rand employ means less sanguinary than the cross and Coliseum lions but are no less keen to expunge the intolerable.

The critics' zeal is itself excessive. Yet they have a point. Eros is a jealous passion, pushing away the unlike as ardently as it cleaves to the like. Straussians and Randians are both notorious for their cabals, for scornful rejection of the possibility of actually learning something from those who affirm opposite views, for endlessly repeating mantras that satisfy those within the circle but sound like so much gobbledygook to those outside. And both periodically break off into sub-cults anathematizing and waging internecine war against wayward brethren. (Again, the comparison to early Christianity is revealing.)

Drury is surely correct in this regard: Strauss and the Straussians can be infuriating. Nonetheless, they may have latched onto important insights that are completely invisible to intemperate critics. The same, mutatis mutandis, can be said for Rand and the Randians. Extremes of partisanship one way or the other explain why treatments of either rarely strike the mean between slavish devotion and hectoring denunciation. Leo Strauss and the American Right is, unfortunately, no exception.

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