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Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire

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I felt a certain guilty pleasure reading Anne Norton's "Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire." The book is just too much fun - especially the juicy little tidbits of gossip about some of the crazier Straussians.

And, yet, the book has several serious, important points to make.

I myself entitled a review of Strauss's "The City and Man" (posted here on amazon six months before Norton's book was published) as "Strauss vs. the 'Straussians'." My point was that Strauss's own published writings directly and dramatically contradicted the positions and policies espoused by his supposed followers, the "neoconservative" Straussians, who now control the foreign policy of the United States of America.

This is one of the central themes of Norton's book. She distinguishes between Struass's "students" and his "disciples." The "students" were interested in learning what Strauss and his colleagues had to teach and then moving on in their own direction. The "disciples" were part of a bizarre cult.

As a student herself at the University of Chicago, in effect the headquarters of the Straussian movement, Norton had a chance to get to know both "students" and "disciples."

One telling anecdote about the Straussian Allan Bloom, famed author of "The Closing of the American Mind," reveals the internal dynamics of a cult:

"Bloom himself liked to play little games with his puppies [his students]. 'He was tossing pennies down the hall, and his students were scurrying to pick them up off the floor,' my friend Peter Agree told me. `He was laughing.'"

Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind" became an instant manifesto for conservative, traditional values when it was published in 1987. And, yet, Norton explains:

"The defender of youthful innocence, family values, and traditional morality was a homosexual - and not just any homosexual, either. If Bloom's students were to be trusted, Bloom's antics gave new meaning to the term 'transgression.' The rumors of houseboys in sexual servitude, the evident flirtations with students, Bloom's flamboyantly queenly manner made 'The Closing of the American Mind' read as high hypocrisy..." Norton adds that all this was "readily acknowledged" (though not in print) by Bloom's "colleagues, friends, and students."

When I read Bloom's book back in 1988, although I agreed with much of Bloom's cultural criticism, I sensed something was wrong: there was too much enthusiasm for "eros" and too little for the norm of calm, disinterested truth. Indeed, if I understood the book correctly, the only real reason for human society was to produce more people just like... Allan Bloom.

Clearly, I didn't know the half of it.

But the psychological dynamics of cults provides only one piece of the explanation for the neoconservative Straussians who now control American foreign policy.

Perhaps a greater factor is revealed in an anecdote Norton tells of Zalmay Khalilzad, the new Bush Administration ambassador to Iraq:

"When I knew him, he was an Afghani graduate student and a radical. He boasted of the demonstrations he had organized in Beirut, of the fedayin he knew and had worked with, and of his friends who regularly visited Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi. He went to pro-Palestinian meetings. His room had a poster of Nasser..."

But, one happy day, Khalilzad and Norton were invited to a lavish party at the luxury apartment of a professor, Albert Wohlstetter, who had done very nicely for himself monetarily by working for the US defense establishment. The experience, Norton claims, altered Khalilzad's life: Khalilzad was "enthralled by Wohlstetter's party. In the elevator, in the apartment, he kept saying how much it all cost, how expensive it was, how much money Wohlstetter must have." In due course, Wohlstetter helped Khalilzad turn his back on his Third-World radicalism and find a cushy spot in the American establishment.

Anyone who has followed the financial success of the leading neocon Straussians knows that this story is hardly an isolated case: one conservative critic has renamed the famed neoconservative Richard Perle as "Richer Perle," in honor of the lucrative financial shenanigans that forced Perle to surrender his position as chairman of the Defense Policy Board.

Perhaps the most important argument Norton offers is that the neocon "Straussians" (although not Strauss himself) are anti-Semitic bigots. This may seem an odd accusation since many of the Straussians are Jewish. However, Norton points out, not only Jews are Semites: Arabs also are Semites. As she declares:

"From the time I first came to Chicago to the present day, I have seen Arabs and Muslims made the targets of unrestrained persecution, especially among the Straussians. At school, Straussian students told me that Arabs were dirty, they were animals, they were vermin."

She adds that David Frum's and Richard Perle's recent book, "An End to Evil," "has a strange familiarity about it. Scholars familiar with the language of anti-Semitism will find it reminiscent of older, long-dishonored texts. The careful fabrication, the language of blood-libel, the calls for violence in the name of defense, all are present here."

Finally, Norton emphasizes that the evils of Straussian neoconsertvatism are not characteristics of true conservatism. Although she is not herself a conservative, in a chapter entitled "Conservatism Abandoned," she brilliantly and sympathetically explains that, while conservatives have differed among themselves on a host of issues, on one key point they stood together: "Conservatives united in the desire for smaller government and on the belief that taxes should - if they existed at all - be very low."

But, thanks to the neocons' exploitation of the 9/11 catastrophe, Norton adds, "All this changed as the twentieth century ended. American conservatism embraced big government with a vengeance." She cites chapter and verse: everything from the petty harassment to which Americans are now subject by the flunkies in the "Transportation Safety Administration" to the violation of basic civil liberties (such as habeas corpus), the huge federal deficit, and the ongoing campaign to conquer the world. The Straussian neocons, Norton concludes, "are not preservers; they are (as they will tell you) revolutionaries."

Yes, indeed.

Anne Norton's book "Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire" isn't a scholarly book on the Straussian movement. Rather, it's a liberal (?), ideological criticism of the Straussians, coupled with a lot of gossip about both Strauss himself and his self-proclaimed disciples.

The book is an easy read, but it also feels disorganized. Still, the gossip is actually quite interesting. Norton's book can therefore be devoured as a kind of dessert after reading Shadia Drury's more scholarly criticisms of Strauss and the Straussians. However, I wouldn't expect to get any deep insights from Norton.

In contrast to Drury, Norton doesn't believe that Strauss had an esoteric message. If you read his books carefully, she argues, it's all in there. Norton seems to regard Strauss as a real conservative. At the same time, her description of both Strauss and the Straussians nevertheless give the impression of a weird and fanatical sect or cult. Apparently, the Straussians made themselves impossible in wide scholarly circles, so impossible that many universities still refuse to hire them!

The most sensational "revelation" in the book is, of course, that Alan Bloom was a hedonistic homosexual. Bloom, one of the leaders of East Coast Straussianism, wrote the bestselling "The Closing of the American Mind", a seemingly conservative attack on political correctness. But apparently, Bloom's personal life was something else again. (Incidentally, this lends credence to Drury's opinion that Bloom was indeed an esoteric nihilist.)

Norton further believes that the Straussians have deviated from the true ideas of Leo Strauss himself. However, she never really proves her point. Didn't Strauss support the Cold War? Wasn't he an anti-modernist and elitist? Couldn't this logically be squared with Neo-Con interventionism and calls for a more autocratic regime? Maybe, maybe not. Norton's book isn't very informative on this point. She does describe the contrast between the Neo-Cons and an older breed of conservatives, but she never explains why Strauss should be seen as one of the latter.

Norton ends by pointing out the irony that Strauss studied al-Farabi, a Muslim philosopher based in Baghdad. He also studied Maimonides, the famous Jewish philosopher who belonged to the court of Saladin, the Muslim leader who eventually defeated the crusaders. The Straussians are hysterically anti-Arab and anti-Muslim, and pretty much organized the Iraqi war, while Strauss himself viewed Muslim and Jewish philosophy as part of the Western heritage he so cherished. That is indeed ironical. Socratic irony, perhaps?

To sum up, I'm not sure whether you can actually learn much from this collection of anecdotes, but as a light afternoon read after the more demanding works of Drury (or Strauss!), it nevertheless deserves a place on any anti-Straussian bookshelf.

The title of this book would have you believe that you are about to read a general book on Strauss' philosophy and how it relates to the current crop of neo-conservative imperialists currently occupying the government's main seats of power. It's no such thing.

What it really is, is an attempt to dissociate Strauss, as well as the author herself, from the neocons, and she does succeed, at least on an emotional level. In that, she borrows the Rovian tactics of selective and chaotic exposition of seemingly unrelated facts. One gets the sense that she is trying to paint a pointillistic picture of the Straussians, rather than rationally exposing them.

Don't get me wrong. It's a pleasant enough read, and for a book written by a political theorist, it's actually uncharacteristically unpretentious. Some reviewers have attacked this aspect of the book: its lack of academic value, because it lacks any formal references and end-notes. But I would argue that it's not the lack of endnotes which destroys the value of this book, but the fact that there's no clear exposition of her goal, and that the book shows no clear strategy to attain that goal.

It's also extremely light as an exposition of Strauss' own thoughts. For an apology, this is a deadly fault. I have not read Strauss in the text; all I knew about the man was second hand. I feel no better informed about him than when I started the book, and that is a shame.

What the book does, and does very well, is convey the lack of respect Norton feels for some of Strauss' followers. But she fails in showing how they interpreted (distorted) Strauss' ideas, which I have to conclude was her original idea (see point above). Her attacks on the neocons, although I personally agree with her on that point, left me wanting; I hoped for more solid argumentation.

She makes another point, and it's probably the most solidly argued of the whole book, in the chapter titled "Conservatism Abandoned"; unfortunately she simply did not have the courage to explicitely state her conclusion: that neo-conservatism owes more to Benito Mussolini than it does to Leo Strauss. She should have had the courage to use the correct term: Fascism. She alludes to it, making it very clear what she means, but never actually uses either the name of Mussolini or the name of his political theory.

In that same vein, I was disappointed to see her completely avoid the subject of "Useful Myths" which has (rightly or wrongly, remember that I admit never having read Strauss himself) been associated with Strauss and the Straussians, and which illustrates the influence of Goebbels on the neocons. This is an important subject, and still don't know how much of it is Stauss' own doing, and how much came from other source, including the Nazis.

A very mixed text, indeed.

Not quite a critique of Strauss himself - that's for another book, perhaps, Anne Norton's brilliant "Leo Strauss and the Politics Of America Empire" is an exposé of the Straussians' (Wolfowitz, Kristol, Kagan etc) corruption of Strauss's philosophies which led to the grotesquely unamerican Project For The New American Century.

Professor Norton was herself a Straussian student and knows her subject well. It is a damning indictment of the whole Bush administration's philosophical and intellectual underpinning. Not least, Norton shows how, far from being arch-Conservatives, the PNAC Gang have junked every single principle that marked American patrician conservatism as an honorable, if often questionable, strand of American life. There are great chapters on Israel, on Classical Democracy, on Fundamentalism in terms of how they connect with the NeoCon doctrine.

Nor does Ms Norton flinch from comparisons with the anti-Liberal theologies of Sayyid Qutb, also forged in post-war America but now the seeds of Islamofascism in the Middle East. The world is now being run by dangerous intellectuals who can hardly believe their luck that they are being heard outside the Academy.

Leo Strauss and the Politics of the American Empire is many things: an academic memoir, a liberal polemic, a scholarly study. But the author, Anne Norton, never takes charge with any of these themes and eventually relies on innuendo and gossip to make her argument that the neocons are Straussians.

But wait: Is there even an argument there? As far as I can tell, not really. Norton tells us that Paul Wolfowitz took two grad school class with Strauss, former White House bioethicist Leon Kass is morally conservative... and well, that's about it. Any attempt to link the neocons as Straussians and that Strauss' ideas are specifically influencing American foreign policy is glossed over. (Iraq and al-Quada are rarely mentioned.) It is simply assumed, which makes one wonder why Professor Norton decided to write this book.

So then what does she spend 200+ pages writing about? Well we learn Allan Bloom was a homosexual, Straussians love Dr. Strangelove, and Professor Thomas Pangle does not properly cite French post-structuralists in his endnotes. Norton spends a full 5 pages outing Prof. Pangle for not citing Derrida in his book on Abraham and Isaac. "Pangle's concealment is a major one." Huh? No it isn't. It has nothing to do with Strauss or American policies - even remotely. Academic squabbling like this is everywhere; after reading this book you get the sense that what certain coteries of professors "read" has greater influence on the world than the American military.

It should come as no surprise then that the corollary to these sloppy ideas is literary carelessness. The prose is paradoxically remedial and pretentious. (Norton opens one chapter, "The academy is a curious place. Time moves more slowly and more swiftly there. Time moves more slowly because more time is visible." This goes on forever.) Among the weak jokes and split infinitives ("His leaving the academy for the government had, therefore, an element of altruism about it") there are even some typos.

To be fair, there are some interesting insights about Strauss and political theory-- particularly when contrasting Strauss with Sayyid Qutb or refuting the liberal state's "moral nihilism." But they are too disjointed or irrelevant to save this book. I have to say I expected a lot more from Prof. Norton.

Anne Norton's book, "Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire" is an interesting and well written commentary on a school of political theory (philosophy) that greatly influenced conservative political thinkers and public officials in each of the administrations since Ronald Reagan (but primarily the Republicans). Unfortunately, it is the most intellectually dishonest book I have ever read! As two reader reviews point out, there is not a single footnote in the entire text. The reason this is such a serious flaw is that it makes quoting out of context easy to do and difficult to challenge.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am not a student of Strauss, his students, nor am I a Straussian. But I am a friend of one of the authors that Norton quotes and misrepresents, Carnes Lord. On page 137 she says, "There are, Lord tells us, no small number of leftists, `lunatic and sinister' professors, and not all of them are visible." She then uses the phrase, "lunatic and sinister" again (on the same page), implying that Lord advocates monitoring professorial opinion (by the state). What Carnes Lord actually says in a discussion of American university education on page 139 of his book, "The Modern Prince," is, "The alternately lunatic and sinister pursuit of the agenda of political correctness that pervades contemporary university life in America raises fundamental issues, including ones of legal due process." One does not have to agree with Lord to recognize Norton's dishonest attempt to use Lord's words taken out of context to vilify a position with which she disagrees but which he did not espouse.
If one of my undergraduate students were to do what Norton has done, that student would fail the assignment. If it were done by one of my graduate students, I would argue for that individual's termination as a student in the program. What, then, are we to say about such behavior by a tenured Associate Professor in one of the nation's premier universities? Read the book (but get it from the library) to see the sad, polemical, and academically dishonest state of some modern American political theory.

Norton's book is a an attempt to trace the influence of Strauss and Straussianism in the U.S. Academy and in the imperialist politics that govern the new U.S. interventionism abroad. It is a refreshing, immensely readable account of the legacy that Leo Strauss's thought and work has had over the course of the past 40-50 years. Unlike other commentators, Norton does not diabolicize Strauss, yet nonetheless points to the aspects of his thought that opened it up to the conservative and neo-conservative embrace. She demonstrates how Strauss's thought (and other conservative thinkers) have been instrumentalized and transformed by the neoconservative revolution and its hegemonic project.

I have been interested in Leo Strauss ever since I heard of the neoconservatives. I was intrigued by what appeared to be a new movement within the right (in contradistinction to a long fissiparousness on the left). I found it hard to believe any American politicians or bureaucrats could have a patron philosophy professor, much less an emigre jew who taught at the University of Chicago as well as Cornell. There is even a connection to Allan Bloom, who's book motivated policies during the Reagen era and was a student of Strauss. Bloom died a few years ago and Saul Bellow wrote the book Ravelstein about him and their friendship (also a great book, Bloom sounds like a nutty guy).

This book reads a bit better than Closing of the American Mind which I found virtually unreadable (admittedly, I am no scholar but I couldn't even begin to undertand how this could have shaped policy). Norton's book reveals a virtually unbelieveable conspiracy. She speaks of "Truth Squads" (intellectual goon squads) at Chicago that bullied nonStraussian professors. It sounds absurd and yet it resulted in a suicide by a professor. She also mentions an incestous nepotism by Staussians. How can that be in the academic world where tenure is so difficult to attain yet she mentions that some professors are afraid of hiring a Staussian for this very reason.

The book got a good mention in the New York Review of Books (that's how I originally found it) and the neocons need no introduction (just check out the Economist). I am still not sure how this justifies a foray into Iraq, but if you are curious about this political movement on the right or if you just can't believe American politicians in this century have a guiding philosophy you should check out this book.

I felt somewhat dirty reading this book, as if it was a personal screed written by a jilted lover, so anxiously expecting some sort of reciprocation and getting...nothing. Anne Norton has written an hysterical, emotive, bizarre book that spends the majority of the text asserting that the Straussians were bad, cliquish people who neglected her while she was studying at the University of Chicago.

For a book that is supposedly a "take down of neocon foreign policy" (as one reviewer put it), she is noticeably lacking in documentations for her claims. She has instead written a book consisting of (in the words of James Costopolous, professor of Political Theory at Vassar) "gossipy tidbits, innuendo, ad hominem attacks, unattributed quotes, anecdotes, insults, crude psychologizing and the like. The sloppiness of its argumentation is reflected in the way the book is written: it is riddled with embarrassing typos, grammatical blunders, and syntactical lapses."

The main claims of her book are supported only through this sort of anti-intellectual "arguments". It is a book I would expect from a New York Post columnist writing on some drugged out debutante, not a professor of political theory writing about a serious (and much maligned) political philosopher.

This is a wonderful book, written with eloquence and honesty. Although the book says more about Straussians than it does about Strauss, it does make clear how much the current breed of neoconservatives have grossly distorted his philosophy. I was particularly pleased by the discussion of Allan Bloom. So many of my progressive friends found his book "The Closing of the American Mind" praiseworthy that I wondered if I had missed something of value in his book.

Professor Norton is to be praised for this classic work.