Sep 19th, 2004, 09:06 PM
Leo Strauss
It's kind of scary to think about how this guy has influenced the neoconservative movement.
Leo Strauss
Leo Strauss, a refugee from Nazi Germany who arrived in the United States in 1937, was trained in the history of political philosophy, and became one of the foremost conservative émigré scholars. He taught at the University of Chicago.
He was widely known for his argument that the works of ancient philosophers contain deliberately concealed esoteric meanings whose truths can be comprehended only by a very few, and would be misunderstood by the masses. This has come to be known as the hidden meaning thesis. Similar arguments hae been made by Hakim Bey regarding Chinese writings associated with Tongs.
Table of contents
1 Versus democracy
2 Influence on US foreign policy
3 Intelligence and duplicity
4 Politics and deception
5 Integrity versus diplomacy
6 Prudence
7 Influence on Office of Special Plans
8 External Links
Versus democracy
Other elements of the philosophy of Strauss are controversial with ideals that seem to go contrary to democracy. According to an analysis by Jim Lobe for the Inter Press Service News Agency, Strauss believed the world to be a place where policy advisers may have to deceive their own publics and even their rulers in order to protect their countries.
Shadia Drury of the University of Calgary, author of 1999's Leo Strauss and the American Right, says "Strauss was neither a liberal nor a democrat... Perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical (in Strauss's view) because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what's good for them. .. The Weimar Republic (in Germany) was his model of liberal democracy for which he had huge contempt," added Drury. Liberalism in Weimar, in Strauss's view, led ultimately to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews.
According to Drury, Strauss like Plato taught that within societies, "some are fit to lead, and others to be led". But, unlike Plato, who believed that leaders had to be people with such high moral standards that they could resist the temptations of power, Strauss thought that "those who are fit to rule are those who realise there is no morality and that there is only one natural right, the right of the superior to rule over the inferior".
For Strauss, "religion is the glue that holds society together", said Drury, who added that Irving Kristol, among other neo-conservatives, has argued that separating church and state was the biggest mistake made by the founders of the U.S. republic.
"Secular society in their view is the worst possible thing", because it leads to individualism, liberalism and relativism, precisely those traits that might encourage dissent, which in turn could dangerously weaken society's ability to cope with external threats. "You want a crowd that you can manipulate like putty," according to Drury. 2
Influence on US foreign policy
Abram N. Shulsky and Paul Dundes Wolfowitz both received their doctorates under Strauss in 1972. Shulsky's area of expertise was Soviet disinformation techniques. The Straussian movement has many other adherents in and around the George Walker Bush Administration. They include William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, and Stephen Cambone [sic], the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, who is particularly close to Donald Rumsfeld.
Strauss's influence on foreign policy decision making (he never wrote explicitly about the subject himself) is usually discussed in terms of his tendency to view the world as a place where isolated liberal democracies live in constant danger from hostile elements abroad, and face threats that must be confronted vigorously and with strong leadership.
Intelligence and duplicity
How Strauss's views might be applied to the intelligence-gathering process is less immediately obvious. Shulsky explored that question in a 1999 essay, written with Gary Schmitt, entitled "Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)"--in Greek philosophy the term nous denotes the highest form of rationality.
In the essay, Shulsky and Schmitt write that Strauss's "gentleness, his ability to concentrate on detail, his consequent success in looking below the surface and reading between the lines, and his seeming unworldliness . . . may even be said to resemble, however faintly, the George Smiley of John le Carré's novels."
Echoing one of Strauss's major themes, Shulsky and Schmitt criticize America's intelligence community for its failure to appreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with, its susceptibility to social-science notions of proof, and its inability to cope with deliberate concealment. A more limited argument analogous to that of Robert Lucas regarding economics, is that any theory of leaders' behavior, like market behavior, had to assume that the enemy was as sophisticated and capable of self-assessments as any American, as capable of lying, and that it was "naïve" to assume that any question short of "what would we do?" and "why would he tell us that?" could lead to accurate anticipation. They suggested that political philosophy, with its emphasis on the variety of regimes, could provide an "antidote" to the C.I.A.'s failings, and would help in understanding Islamic leaders, "whose intellectual world was so different from our own." How the Western academic view of other cultures would assist in evaluating the Western intelligence agency view, retaining Western bias and losing direct experience in the field, was not addressed by Shulsky and Schmitt. They focused elsewhere:
Politics and deception
Strauss's idea of hidden meaning, Shulsky and Schmitt added, "alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception." In other words, what leaders say, is not what they do - and Niccolo Machiavelli was probably right to emphasize fear over being loved.
Robert Pippin, the chairman of the Committee on Social Thought at Chicago and a critic of Strauss, says that "Strauss believed that good statesmen have powers of judgment and must rely on an inner circle. The person who whispers in the ear of the King is more important than the King. If you have that talent, what you do or say in public cannot be held accountable in the same way."
This does appear to be the attitude of Paul Wolfowitz, whose admission that the claim that weapons of mass destruction were in Iraq was advanced to the UN "for bureaucratic reasons within the US government" was in part responsible for extreme pressure coming to bear on Anthony Blair, who in Wolfowitz's view would simply have been a dupe, as one who sincerely believed in this claim. And, unlike Bush, justified it explicitly to a House that had not only the power but the obligation to refuse if they thought it unwise. For more see feature article on weapons of mass deception.
Integrity versus diplomacy
Another Strauss critic, Stephen Holmes, a law professor at New York University, put the Straussians' position this way: "They believe that your enemy is deceiving you, and you have to pretend to agree, but secretly you follow your own views." In effect, there is no integrity to diplomacy whatsoever - states engage in discussion only to deceive, and "the enemy" is defined not by the situation, but known in advance, and not amenable to change.
Holmes added, "The whole story is complicated by Strauss's idea--actually Plato's--that philosophers need to tell noble lies not only to the people at large but also to powerful politicians." In a liberal democracy it is complicated further still by the fact that consent of the governed is a basic requirement for legitimacy of any major decision. As Dennis Kucinich pointed out in 2003, shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when the debate among such politicians relies on false intelligence, whether the highest official is aware of this or not, such consent is obtained only by deception. The only alternate position is that one elects in effect a dictator with the power not only to act in accord with law, and make law, but also control the media and debate by feeding it with arbitrary and constructed stories.
Prudence
One of Strauss's staunchest defenders, Joseph Cropsey, professor emeritus of political science at Chicago, about the use of Strauss's views in the area of policymaking, says that common sense alone suggested that a certain amount of deception is essential in government. "That people in government have to be discreet in what they say publicly is so obvious--'If I tell you the truth I can't but help the enemy.'" But there is nothing in Strauss's work, he added, that "favors preëmptive action. What it favors is prudence and sound judgement. If you could have got rid of Hitler in the nineteen-thirties, who's not going to be in favor of that? You don't need Strauss to reach that conclusion." This of course begs the question of "who is Hitler?" That is, how is one to identify one's enemy's behavior as Hitler-like or likely to lead to genocide or worse? Plato's ontology implies that Hitler is himself an ideal form of a dictator, and that one justifies invasion anywhere by explicit comparison to Hitler. This of course is a highly subjective "pitch".
Regarding the U.S. invasion of Iraq, some former intelligence officials believe that Shulsky and his superiors were captives of their own convictions, and were merely deceiving themselves. Vincent Cannistraro, the former chief of counter-terrorism operations and analysis at the C.I.A., worked with Shulsky at a Washington think tank after his retirement. He said, "Abe is very gentle and slow to anger, with a sense of irony. But his politics were typical for his group--the Straussian view." This view would seem to have become official policy, specifically at the Office of Special Plans.
Influence on Office of Special Plans
According to his May 15, 2003, article Judeo-Christian Decadence. At the Fount of Power, Al Cronkrite writes regarding the Office of Special Plans:
"At the root of this effective manipulation of power is the teaching of a man named Leo Strauss (1899-1973). Leo Strauss was a brilliant German Jew who after studying in Europe on a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, became a highly paid professor at the University of Chicago. According to Robert Locke, who studied under Professor Strauss, he was an atheist and the purveyor of an esoteric philosophy which was critical of liberalism but supported Machiavellian deception and a ruling elite.
"Robert Locke lists among Strauss's students or those influenced by his students: Justice Clarence Thomas; Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Dundes Wolfowitz; former Assistant Secretary of State Alan Keyes; former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett; Weekly Standard editor and former J. Danforth Quayle Chief of Staff William Kristol; Allan Bloom, former New York Post editorials editor John Podhoretz; and former National Endowment for the Humanities Deputy Chairman John T. Agresto."
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External Links
Tom Barry, A Philosophy of Intelligence. Leo Strauss and Intelligence Strategy, RightWeb Analysis, February 12, 2004.
Tony Papert "The Secret Kingdom of Leo Strauss," April 18,2003. [1]
Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. "The Children of Satan: The 'Ignoble Liars' Behind Bush's No-Exit War," June 2003. "Children of Satan 2: The Beast-Men," January 2004. "Children of Satan 3: The Sexual Congress for Cultural Fascism" June 2004. [2]
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