A book I always recommend to those getting into Strauss is Robert Howse's Leo Strauss: Man of Peace. Howse is the (exceedingly) rare Strauss aficionado who comes from the Bernie Sanders left. While his book over-liberalizes Strauss, in my view, it remains a superb corrective and insightful intellectual history. Howse is particularly good--indeed, irreplaceable--in the distinction he draws between Strauss and Schmitt, and, hence, between the philosophic and the warlike lives.
Pippin is a less impressive writerly personality than Rosen (who was his PhD advisor) but he's more precise and he helped launch a sort of avant-garde neo-Hegelianism that started in the 1990s and for my money is the most interesting thing that's happened in anglophone philosophy for a long time.
Pippin basically accepts the Straussian "three waves of modernity" thesis but argues that the second wave, the Rousseau/Hegel strand that gave rise to the aspiration to autonomy, is defensible against the third Nietzsche/Heidegger/Schmitt wave that attacks the possibility of autonomy. Whereas Strauss accepts the third wave critique of autonomy but tries to escape nihilism via a return to antiquity. I think that the most interesting and politically sound appropriations of Strauss go in Pippin's direction (Claude Lefort and Marcel Gauchet in France, and the Cambridge School historians downstream of Istvan Hont.)
Hey Paul Franz - sometime shortly before the pandemic, did you by chance go to a dinner party at Howse’s appartment after Cliff Orwin gave an invited talk at NYU? I remember meeting an interesting poetry guy there who was doing a dissertation on Lawrence (and also maybe Yates or Cyril Connolly?) and regretting not getting his contact information. Was that you? If so I’ll send you a DM, we should get coffee if you are in NYC or New Haven.
A most memorable evening. Our host making his sudden exit for Paris. Clad in black, he might have repelled to ground level, like a cat burglar. Though his being rather a rotund man makes this unlikely.
Just noticed your note on The Destruction of Reason, it isn't GL at its best but you are spot-on about its similarity to Natural Right and History. The Marxist historian Gopal Balakrishnan (now rightly disgraced for sexual harassment but that's another story) used to say that you could substitute passages from one book to the other without the reader noticing.
I have the Verso edition, and the lengthy introductory essay is amusingly kinder to Natural Right and History than The Origins of Totalitarianism, which it describes as “tendentious” (I understand from conversation with Marxist that there is a long-standing grievance with Arendt on this point)
Perry Anderson (the Verso guru) is well read enough to appreciate Strauss, and the notion of totalitarianism sets Marxists’ hair on fire for equating Bolsheviks and Nazis
Anderson has a really extraordinary long essay / short book on Fukuyama that’s heavy on Kojeve (he has the perverse ability to write 90 page essays that are actually concise: anyone else would turn them into 300 page books). For my money it is the best piece of Marxist writing from the 90s, among other things it opened my eyes to the fairly obvious fact that Fukuyama is a major thinker, comparable to Rawls and easily the most important public intellectual to emerge from the Strauss school (*not* Bloom or Jaffa). Anderson-on-Fukuyama was also evidently what inspired Adam Tooze to write his Wages of Destruction / The Deluge / Crashed trilogy, if that stuff interests you.
Totally agree. One of the things I like about Rosen’s late life reminiscences of Strauss is that he points out that Strauss’s answer to the hard questions of modernity was essentially to dodge them altogether and run back to the Greeks and their medieval interpreters, and I’m inclined to agree with him that that just isn’t a viable solution. It’s a shame because I think Strauss had fascinating things to say about how we live and the relationship between narrative and truth, but because he wrote them the way he did you’re never entirely sure whether you’re building on sand or bedrock.
...hmm I don't know if I quite agree here. I certainly agree that the practical project of "educating the gentlemen" produced what you could politely call mixed results (along with, to be fair, generations of solid and sometimes excellent scholarship) in both its Bloom and its Jaffa versions.
But Strauss's problem as a theorist is that he wanted to refute or at least imagine an alternative to Heidegger, for entirely honorable reasons. Unfortunately he failed, but so has everybody else: Pippin's wonderful recent book on Heidegger and German Idealism is a striking admission of defeat. We simply haven't gotten past Heidegger. Strauss has interesting gestures in the direction of: what would an alternative to Heidegger have to be?
Strauss channeling Heidegger in a useful direction motivates us to ask the question: what if modern interpretations of premodern thinkers and specifically Plato and the partisans of revealed religion are just wrong? Somebody like Jóhann Árnason has taken this impulse in a useful direction to try to understand Asian religion in its own terms, and Strauss (evidently inspired by medieval Islamic writers) is obviously right that Heidegger simply ignored the fact that Platonic dialogues are dramas. But does he have a real alternative to Heidegger's depressing conclusions? Does Rosen?
Fascinating post! Looking forward to your discussion of the cave-below-the-cave, since Plato’s central myth has been on my mind a lot lately. I grok that what the “unenlightened” mind perceives of the world are akin to shadows on the cave wall. But how can we ever be sure that we have exited the cave, rather than been lured deeper into it?
A book I always recommend to those getting into Strauss is Robert Howse's Leo Strauss: Man of Peace. Howse is the (exceedingly) rare Strauss aficionado who comes from the Bernie Sanders left. While his book over-liberalizes Strauss, in my view, it remains a superb corrective and insightful intellectual history. Howse is particularly good--indeed, irreplaceable--in the distinction he draws between Strauss and Schmitt, and, hence, between the philosophic and the warlike lives.
Thank you! I've been meaning to read that, and some of the other non-right Straussians at some point.
Glad you liked the Rosen stuff! Since you did, you might also be interested in Robert Pippin's take on the Strauss-Kojève debate: https://uchicago.app.box.com/s/yuu9s8gcafc5gprbcyj7t5m26fk2wcod
Pippin is a less impressive writerly personality than Rosen (who was his PhD advisor) but he's more precise and he helped launch a sort of avant-garde neo-Hegelianism that started in the 1990s and for my money is the most interesting thing that's happened in anglophone philosophy for a long time.
Pippin basically accepts the Straussian "three waves of modernity" thesis but argues that the second wave, the Rousseau/Hegel strand that gave rise to the aspiration to autonomy, is defensible against the third Nietzsche/Heidegger/Schmitt wave that attacks the possibility of autonomy. Whereas Strauss accepts the third wave critique of autonomy but tries to escape nihilism via a return to antiquity. I think that the most interesting and politically sound appropriations of Strauss go in Pippin's direction (Claude Lefort and Marcel Gauchet in France, and the Cambridge School historians downstream of Istvan Hont.)
Pippin also, of course, has an interesting relation to Michael Fried & co.
Hey Paul Franz - sometime shortly before the pandemic, did you by chance go to a dinner party at Howse’s appartment after Cliff Orwin gave an invited talk at NYU? I remember meeting an interesting poetry guy there who was doing a dissertation on Lawrence (and also maybe Yates or Cyril Connolly?) and regretting not getting his contact information. Was that you? If so I’ll send you a DM, we should get coffee if you are in NYC or New Haven.
A most memorable evening. Our host making his sudden exit for Paris. Clad in black, he might have repelled to ground level, like a cat burglar. Though his being rather a rotund man makes this unlikely.
I have sent DM.
Just noticed your note on The Destruction of Reason, it isn't GL at its best but you are spot-on about its similarity to Natural Right and History. The Marxist historian Gopal Balakrishnan (now rightly disgraced for sexual harassment but that's another story) used to say that you could substitute passages from one book to the other without the reader noticing.
I have the Verso edition, and the lengthy introductory essay is amusingly kinder to Natural Right and History than The Origins of Totalitarianism, which it describes as “tendentious” (I understand from conversation with Marxist that there is a long-standing grievance with Arendt on this point)
Perry Anderson (the Verso guru) is well read enough to appreciate Strauss, and the notion of totalitarianism sets Marxists’ hair on fire for equating Bolsheviks and Nazis
Yeah, that was what I was told. Re: verso I also presumed that it might be adjacent to their publishing translations of some of Kojève’s works.
Anderson has a really extraordinary long essay / short book on Fukuyama that’s heavy on Kojeve (he has the perverse ability to write 90 page essays that are actually concise: anyone else would turn them into 300 page books). For my money it is the best piece of Marxist writing from the 90s, among other things it opened my eyes to the fairly obvious fact that Fukuyama is a major thinker, comparable to Rawls and easily the most important public intellectual to emerge from the Strauss school (*not* Bloom or Jaffa). Anderson-on-Fukuyama was also evidently what inspired Adam Tooze to write his Wages of Destruction / The Deluge / Crashed trilogy, if that stuff interests you.
Totally agree. One of the things I like about Rosen’s late life reminiscences of Strauss is that he points out that Strauss’s answer to the hard questions of modernity was essentially to dodge them altogether and run back to the Greeks and their medieval interpreters, and I’m inclined to agree with him that that just isn’t a viable solution. It’s a shame because I think Strauss had fascinating things to say about how we live and the relationship between narrative and truth, but because he wrote them the way he did you’re never entirely sure whether you’re building on sand or bedrock.
...hmm I don't know if I quite agree here. I certainly agree that the practical project of "educating the gentlemen" produced what you could politely call mixed results (along with, to be fair, generations of solid and sometimes excellent scholarship) in both its Bloom and its Jaffa versions.
But Strauss's problem as a theorist is that he wanted to refute or at least imagine an alternative to Heidegger, for entirely honorable reasons. Unfortunately he failed, but so has everybody else: Pippin's wonderful recent book on Heidegger and German Idealism is a striking admission of defeat. We simply haven't gotten past Heidegger. Strauss has interesting gestures in the direction of: what would an alternative to Heidegger have to be?
Strauss channeling Heidegger in a useful direction motivates us to ask the question: what if modern interpretations of premodern thinkers and specifically Plato and the partisans of revealed religion are just wrong? Somebody like Jóhann Árnason has taken this impulse in a useful direction to try to understand Asian religion in its own terms, and Strauss (evidently inspired by medieval Islamic writers) is obviously right that Heidegger simply ignored the fact that Platonic dialogues are dramas. But does he have a real alternative to Heidegger's depressing conclusions? Does Rosen?
Fascinating post! Looking forward to your discussion of the cave-below-the-cave, since Plato’s central myth has been on my mind a lot lately. I grok that what the “unenlightened” mind perceives of the world are akin to shadows on the cave wall. But how can we ever be sure that we have exited the cave, rather than been lured deeper into it?
I’m not sure either! It’s an important question!