Leo Strauss and the neoconservative critique of the liberal university: postmodernism, relativism and the culture wars

Abstract

This paper examines the neoconservative critique of the university and particularly the attack on multiculturalism and postmodernism that initiated the culture wars. It seeks to explain these developments by an analysis of the thought of Leo Strauss. The paper begins by providing an introduction to US neoconservatism and latest challenges to it from within signaling its end before reviewing the roles of Allan Bloom and Lynne Cheney in the neoconservative rewriting of history and the humanities which finds its source in Strauss' critique of radical historicism.

Keywords:

• culture wars
• Leo Strauss
• neoconservatism

Notes

1. For Guide to the Michael Harrington papers 1946–1990 and to a brief biography of Harrington see http://dlib.nyu.edu/eadapp/transform?source = tamwag/harrington.xml&style = tamwag/tamwag.xsl.

2. While neoliberalism rests on an ideology of individualism as the most fundamental and unifying premise that emphasises the individual within a free‐market economy and, thereby, defends the notion of the minimal state on moral as well as efficiency grounds, the neoconservative critique of the welfare state aimed at a remoralizing of welfare with greater emphasis on collective (family and community) responsibility and the participation of the voluntary ‘third’ sector and especially the churches, that focused on dependency and tended to pathologize the poor and lead to the ‘feminization of poverty’.

3. See Ian Buruma's review of Podhoretz's World War IV in the New York Review of Books (2007), where Buruma refers to Podhoretz's definition of neoconservatism: ‘He [Podhoretz] talks about “repentant liberals and leftists”, mostly Jewish, who broke ranks with the left and “moved rightward” in the 1970s. “Strictly speaking”, he says, “only those who fitted this description ought to have been called neo‐ (i.e., new) conservatives”’ (p. 20).

4. Robert Locke (2002) writes: ‘As a crude measure of his [Strauss'] importance for those readers who continue to believe that philosophical matters are of no practical importance, consider the following list of his students or students of his students: Justice Clarence Thomas; Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; former Assistant Secretary of State Alan Keyes; former Secretary of Education William Bennett; Weekly Standard editor and former Quayle Chief of Staff William Kristol; Allan Bloom, author of The closing of the American mind; former New York Post editorials editor John Podhoretz; former National Endowment for the Humanities Deputy Chairman John T. Agresto; and, not meaning to class myself with this august company but in the interests of full disclosure, myself’. Locke misses William Kristol who declares himself very much intellectually indebted to Strauss and emphasizes his significance in the culture wars, helping neoconservatives to see the importance of religion to the political life of the nation. Locke also does not mention Lynne Cheney (the second lady of the US and wife of the Vice‐President, who as Chair of the National Endowment of the Humanities took on the role of neoconservative culture warrior against the source of cultural malaise in the US – a relativism that issues from the influence of Nietzsche and postmodernism.

5. ‘Neo‐war’ denotes changed conditions both of war (under globalization) and of the technology of war that minimizes collateral damage (and US military, and civilian deaths in theatres) while maximizing strike capability.

6. Ikui (2001, p. 44) argues that the memory of the Vietnam War in the US has been reprogrammed in three phases: Americanization of the popular image of the war in the 1970s; the rehabilitation of the Vietnam veterans as wounded heroes in the 1980s; and in the late 1980s and early 1990s ‘the justification and official validation of the war as manifest in speeches by Ronald Reagan who called the war a “noble cause” and by George Bush who said “That war cleaves us still. But, friends, that war began in earnest a quarter century ago; and surely the statute of limitations has been reached”’.

7. See the PNAC web site at www.newamericancentury.org/.

8. See the JINSA web site at www.jinsa.org/home/home.html.

9. For a collection of essays that deal directly with multiculturalism see ‘Issues and dilemmas of multicultural education: Theories, policies and practices’, edited by Ana Canen and Michael A. Peters, Policy Futures in Education, 3(4), 2005, especially essays by Susan Searls Giroux, Michael W. Apple and Michael A. Peters, at: www.wwwords.co.uk/pfie/content/pdfs/3/issue3_4.asp#10.

10. See my review essay ‘Fukuyama at the Crossroads?’ Social Work and Society 5 (1) at http://www.socwork.net/2007/1/bookreviews/peters. Neoconservativism, a movement, he says, based on four common principles – American ‘benevolent hegemony’, a concern for promoting democracy, skepticism of international law and institutions, and a belief that social engineering leads to unanticipated consequences – insofar as it is to be identified with the Bush administration has made errors of judgment rather than reflections of underlying principles. The Bush regime mischaracterized the threat from radical Islam; it failed to anticipate and understand the global reaction to US ‘benevolent hegemony’ and, finally, it was unrealistic in its assessment of ‘social engineering’ in Iraq and the Middle East. I mention that Fukuyama against Anne Norton, Shadia Drury, and Lyndon LaRouche denies that Strauss had any kind of effect on Bush's foreign policy although he does mention that Wolfowitz was a student of both Strauss and Bloom (though more influenced by Wohlstetter's foreign policy views). According to Lilla on whom Fukuyama draws it was Harry Jaffa and Allan Bloom who politicized Strauss' philosophy.

11. There has been an outpouring of books on Strauss including: Drury (1999, 2005), McAllister (1996), Norton (2004), Pangle (2006), Smith (2006). The now standard critique of Strauss as the enemy of liberal democracy by those on the left has been challenged by some on the right that see him as a friend and enthusiastic supporter of liberal democracy.

12. For example, The Academy on Capitalism and Limited Government Fund has recently been set up at the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Chamapign (http://aclg.uif.uillinois.edu/directors.htm) with Stephen H. Balch, President of the right wing National Association of Scholars, on the Board of Directors.

13. See Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle's (2002) Imagine nation: The American counterculture of the 1960s and '70s which corrects the conservative critique of the counterculture that saw it leaving a legacy of relativism of moral values, individualism, and consumerism. By contrast they argue that the counterculture rejected consumerism and sought to overcome individualism with a new kind of community. They the term ‘counterculture’ ‘falsely reifies what should never properly be construed as a social movement’ and describe it instead as ‘an inherently unstable collection of attitudes, tendencies, postures, gestures, “lifestyles,” visions, hedonistic pleasures, moralisms, negations, and affirmations’ (p. 23). By ‘renewal’ I mean those local elements of feminist, gay, Black, postcolonial, psychoanalytic, and poststructuralist politics that have come to represent the most promising and fertile mix of ideas propelling us into the space of theory.

14. I am thinking not only of Langston Hughes but also James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen and Sterling Brown among others, whose work influenced the Black Arts movement in the 1960s.

15. I am thinking in particular of the members of the Frankfurt school – Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm, Reich and others – who migrated to the US to escape Nazism. Marcuse's (1964) One dimensional man became adopted as an international text for the student movement. It should be remembered that this era was a violent period in US politics – the age of political assassination: J.F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963; and his brother Robert in 1968, the same year as Martin Luther King Jr. Malcolm X had been assassinated in 1965.

16. See Bob Dylan's (2004) wonderfully evocative autobiography Chronicles, Volume 1.

17. The influence of black musical forms on popular culture cannot be overestimated with its origins in ‘slave songs’, spirituals, and the blues that spread in the northern cities as Afro‐Americans got jobs and became consumers of black music in the early 1900s including B.B. King, Lonnie Johnson, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. The soul music of Ruth Brown, Ray Charles, Brook Benton, Sam Cooke, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard predated Presley who for most American's saw ‘white’ but heard ‘black’.

18. I argue that poststructuralism is neither anti‐structuralist nor anti‐Marxist in Poststructuralism, Marxism and neoliberalism: Between theory and politics (2001) and that those anti‐Marxist readings of poststructuralism are both historically misguided given Deleuze’ avowal as a libidinal Marxist, Derrida's Spectres of Marx, Foucault's and Lyotard's proximity to radical movements such as Socialism or Barbarism and personal histories of political activism.

19. See the web site at www.neh.gov/_index.html.

20. See also History, democracy, and citizenship: The debate over history's role in teaching citizenship and patriotism (2004), A report commissioned by the Executive Board of the Organization of American Historians at www.oah.org/reports/tradhist.html#Anchor‐4716.

21. See the web sites at www.goacta.org/about_acta/mission.html and http://iwf.org/about_iwf/board_of_directors.asp.

22. In 2000 when ABC's Cokie Roberts brought up the subject of Cheney's lesbian daughter Mary, Lynne Cheney lied about her orientation even although Mary had come out many years earlier. Her 1981 novel Sisters that featured a lesbian love affair became the object of denial, lying and counter‐attack after Wolf Blitzer raised the issue on his CNN show in late October 2006. The episode and full transcript can be viewed at http://thinkprogress.org/2006/10/27/lynne‐cheney‐cnn/.

23. See, for example, the furor that accompanied the publication of Martin Bernal's (1987) Black Athena. See ‘The Black Athena debate’ at www.worldagesarchive.com/Individual%20Web%20Pages/BlackAthena.html.

24. See for example Diane Ravitch's (2003) The language police and Nigel Rees (1993) The politically correct phrasebook. By contrast, see Ellen Messer‐Davidow (1993) and P. Lauter (1995).

25. Derrida writes ‘Signature Event Context’ for a conference on ‘Communication’ held in Montreal in 1971. The essay appears in an English translation by Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman in the serial Glyph, volume 1 in 1977 and subsequently in another translation by Alan Bass in Derrida's (1982) Margins of philosophy. Searle responds in an essay entitled ‘Reiterating the differences: A reply to Derrida’ in Glyph 2, 1977. Derrida's reply to Searle entitled ‘Limited Inc abc…’ (also originally published in Glyph 2) appears alongside Derrida's ‘Afterword: Toward an ethic of discussion’ in Limited Inc (Derrida, 1988), a collection which incorporates all Derrida's pieces and a summary of Searle's article (as Searle declined to have his essay included). See also Searle's (1983) review of Jonathon Culler's On deconstruction: Theory and criticism after structuralism to which Derrida refers in his ‘Afterword’ as an article of ‘unbridled resentment’. Derrida talks of the ethical and political dimensions of Searle's behaviour.

26. Plato's discussion in the Theatetus is the source of what as known as the ‘justified true belief’ account of knowledge that is till the dominant account in epistemology: For A to know that p (where p is a proposition) (1) A must believe that p; (2) p must be true; and, (3) there must be reasons (justification) for believing that p. The Theatetus is also the source of the standard knock‐down argument against Protagorean relativism that argues it is a self‐refuting doctrine. Today it is normal to make the distinction between descriptive (about concepts) and normative (about truth) relativism and also to employ a scheme (x is relative to y) that enables an understanding of frameworks where what is relative (the dependent variable – concepts, beliefs, perception, ethics, epistemology, truth) is connected to what its relative to (the independent variable – language, culture, historical period). Such a schema leads us to make clear distinctions between kinds of relativism. Much contemporary relativism proceeds from considerations of the relativism of conceptual frameworks that include worldview Weltanschauung) and categorial scheme, forms of life (Wittgenstein), lifeworld (Lebenswelt), absolute presuppositions (Collingwood), paradigms (Kuhn), epistemes (Foucault), world versions (Goodman) (see Swoyer, 2003).

27. For a good introduction to Strauss' life and work see www.straussian.net/. For a list of his courses given at the University of Chicago see www.straussian.net/strausscourses.html.

28. Compare this to Heidegger's (1976) the notorious Der Spiegel interview where he says: ‘Philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. That is not only true of philosophy but of all merely human thought and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and poetizing, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god in the time of foundering; for in the face of the god who is absent, we founder’.

29. Strauss (1953) begins Natural right and history by asking whether or not the US still believed in the self‐evident truths articulated in the Declaration of Independence, or whether it had abandoned the ancient faith in which it was conceived and founded. See also Strauss (1989b) where he attacks historicism: the contemporary view that ‘all philosophizing essentially belongs to a “historical world”, “culture”, “civilization”, “Weltanscaung”’ (p. 102).

30. See Georges Bataille's (1992, orig. 1948) On Nietzsche and Henri Lefebrve's (1939) Nietzsche who struggled to set Nietzsche free from the clutches of Nazism. See also Heidegger's (1991a, b) Nietzsche based on lectures dating from 1939. On the new Nietzsche see Allison (2000) and see Duncan Large's ‘French Nietzsche’ webpage at www.swan.ac.uk/german/large/frennieb.htm#Foucault. See also Deleuze (1983), Derrida (1979), Irigaray (1991), Kofman (1993), Foucault (1986, 1990). For an account of Strauss as an esoteric Nietzschean see Levine (1995). For Strauss as a Heiddegerian see Luc Ferry (1990). For accounts of Nietzsche and Heidegger in relation to education see Peters, Marshall and Smeyers (2001) and Peters (2002b).

31. Peter Levine (1995) examining the centrality of Nietzsche to understanding the contemporary crisis of the humanities suggests that Strauss began as a historicist, moved to nihilism, before coming closest to revealing the true nature of his ideas in his 1961 essay ‘Relativism’: ‘Here he [Strauss] denounces liberals and positivists for claiming to accept relativism, while inconsistently treating tolerance and objectivity, respectively, as absolute standards. Nietzsche – in contrast to these well‐meaning but intellectually dishonest versions of ‘the last man’ – is ‘the philosopher of relativism: the first thinker who faced the problem of relativism in its full extent and pointed to the way in which relativism can be overcome’. Immediately Strauss adds, ‘Relativism came to Nietzsche's attention in the form of historicism …’ He argues that for Nietzsche, history ‘teaches a truth that is deadly’. This ‘truth’ is that the norms of each culture are thoroughly arbitrary; but people must nevertheless believe in the transcendent value of these norms, ‘which limit their horizon and thus enable them to have character and style’. Historical research reveals the contingency of all values, and thereby paralyzes us. The Romantic response – ‘that one fabricates a myth’ – is ‘patently impossible for men of intellectual probity’. The ‘true solution’ is not Romanticism but Nietzschean philosophy, which reveals, first of all, that historical research is as contingent as everything else: ‘Objective history suffices for destroying the delusion of the objective validity of any principles of thought and action; [but] it does not suffice for opening up a genuine understanding of history…’. Any such understanding is a chimera; and with the very distinction between truth and lie removed, space is opened up for a ‘new project – the revaluation of all values. … It is in this way that Nietzsche may be said to have transformed the deadly truth of relativism into the most life‐giving truth …’

32. See the admirably clear essay by Mujeeb R. Khan (n.d.) for a clear account of the Strauss critique of historicism and the role that Strauss–Kojève engagement played in Strauss' development. Khan's article reinforces how close Strauss is to both Nietzsche and Heidegger (with fundamental differences) against both Lampert (1996) and Drury (1994).

33. Nicholas Xenos (2004) examining ‘The real Leo Strauss’ recently defended by his daughter in an article with that title, turns his attention to letter as yet untranslated that Strauss writes to Karl Löwith in May 1933, ‘Just because Germany has turned to the right and has expelled us [i.e., Jews] it simply does not follow that the principles of the right are therefore to be rejected. To the contrary, only on the basis of principles of the right – fascist, authoritarian, imperial [emphasis in original] – is it possible in a dignified manner, without the ridiculous and pitiful appeal to “the inalienable rights of man” to protest against the mean nonentity’ [i.e., the Nazi party]. Xenos concludes: ‘What all of this suggests is that in the 1930s Strauss was not an anti‐liberal in the sense in which we commonly mean “anti‐liberal” today, but an anti‐democrat in a fundamental sense, a true reactionary. Strauss was somebody who wanted to go back to a previous, pre‐liberal, pre‐bourgeois era of blood and guts, of imperial domination, of authoritarian rule, of pure fascism (www.logosjournal.com/xenos.htm).

34. See the excellent extended review ‘Sphinx without a Secret’ by the Cambridge philosopher, Myles Burnyeat, of Strauss' Studies in Platonic political philosophy who argues convincingly that Strauss' interpretation is wrong from beginning to end. He writes: ‘Let us be clear that if Strauss's interpretation of Plato is wrong, the entire edifice falls to dust. If Plato is the radical Utopian that ordinary scholarship believes him to be, there is no such thing as the unanimous conservatism of “the classics”; no such disaster as the loss of ancient wisdom through Machiavelli and Hobbes; no such person as “the philosopher” to tell “the gentlemen” to observe “the limits of politics”’. Instead, the ‘larger horizons behind and beyond’ modern thought open onto a debate about the nature and practicability of a just society.

35. I use this term deliberately to refer both to the host of issues that fall under ‘intellectual property’ and to the book of that title by Kapitkze and Peters (2007).