On a sunny Wednesday last November, 16 students sat around a University of Chicago seminar table with two unpublished typescripts in front of them. The students were taking a course on the philosopher Leo Strauss, and “politics and policy” was the day’s topic. “In some ways it was easy to select the readings for this subject,” announced Nathan Tarcov, a professor of political science, “because Strauss wrote almost nothing about practical politics. I had to scrounge to find much of anything.”
To many who studied with Strauss at the University of Chicago in the 60s, or who studied later with Strauss’s former students, the accusations were puzzling at best and offensive at worst. In 2006, “motivated by a deep sense of gratitude to him as our teacher and, we must say, by a bit of righteous indignation at the injustice being done to him,” Notre Dame political science professors Catherine and Michael Zuckert published The Truth About Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy. Two other correctives appeared last year as well: Leo Strauss: An Introduction to his Thought and Intellectual Legacy, by Thomas Pangle of the University of Texas, and Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism by Yale’s Steven Smith. The Zuckert and Smith books were published by the University of Chicago Press.
The following year Strauss became an American citizen and began a professorship at the New School for Social Research in New York. In 1949, wooed by president Robert Maynard Hutchins, he moved to Hyde Park to teach political philosophy at the University of Chicago. He labored to redress what he saw as the failings of modernity, the popular social theory that through science and enlightenment a perfect society was possible. Strauss considered such thinking naive if not outright dangerous. Social science, he felt, was obsessed with measuring, predicting, and classifying, with “facts” but not “values.” A political scientist, he argued, might study tyranny backward and forward but not call it a bad thing. How could students taught not to judge recognize tyranny and fascism for the dangers they were and guard against them? “Science,” he proclaimed, “cannot teach wisdom.”
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This can be a difficult notion to swallow, Strauss acknowledged. “Every decent modern reader is bound to be shocked by the mere suggestion that a great man might have deliberately deceived the large majority of his readers,” he wrote. “And yet, as a liberal theologian once remarked, these imitators of the resourceful Odysseus were perhaps merely more sincere than we when they called ‘lying nobly’ what we would call ‘considering one’s social responsibilities.’”
In 1988, one of Strauss’s most vociferous critics published an entire book on the debate over Strauss. Shadia Drury, professor of philosophy and political science at the University of Regina in Canada, wrote in The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss that she had once been dismissive of Strauss’s scholarship and, like Burnyeat, “perplexed as to how such rubbish could have been published.” But once she began to see Strauss as not a mere scholar but also a philosopher in his own right, she became fascinated by him–and alarmed. She set out to expose Strauss’s thought for the dark, perverse, nihilistic philosophy that she understood it to be. “Strauss believes that men must be kept in the darkness of the cave,” she wrote, “for nothing is to be gained by liberating them from their chains.”
In his 2003 New Yorker article, Seymour Hersh traced Paul Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky’s delusions of grandeur and own “noble lies” to Strauss and the University of Chicago, where both men “received their doctorates under Strauss in 1972.” In fact, Strauss had left the U. of C. four years earlier. Wolfowitz took some courses with Strauss, but he wrote his dissertation on mathematical models and nuclear proliferation under the guidance of Albert Wohlstetter. Shulsky did claim Strauss as an influence, as in the 1999 essay “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous),” written with Gary Schmitt. With a wink at students of Greek philosophy, Shulsky and Schmitt wrote that just as social scientists often could not see the forest for the trees–Strauss’s case against them–so was the American intelligence community blind to “big picture” issues and threats to national security.
