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Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: whole questioning, truth squads, modern prince, United States, Leo Strauss, Last Man (more...)
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Punchy, personal and passionate, this book aims to explain "how an unlikely group of academics came to power in Washington and provided the philosophical justification for the war on Iraq." The German-born Strauss (1899–1973) came to the United States as a Jewish refugee in 1938, ultimately teaching political philosophy at the University of Chicago. In sketching his life and the legacy of his ideas, Norton (95 Theses on Politics, Culture and Method) argues that Strauss’s method of closely reading great books (à la late disciple Allan Bloom) does not presuppose the neoconservative politics with which the method has come to be associated. Strauss’s readings of Islamic texts, in particular, she says, are contrary to the "clash of civilizations" that has been constructed by Straussians William Kristol and Robert Kagan in their collection Present Dangers. Norton, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, was trained by Chicago Straussians herself, and she writes less as a turncoat than as a watchdog. She tracks Paul Wolfowitz’s years at the University of Chicago and decries the culture of clubby, masculine power that she says Bloom created there. She also traces the series of Strauss-related political appointments that brought Wolfowitz to the Bush administration. Straussians, Norton claims, admire Lincoln for his willingness to act dictatorially on behalf of democracy; Strauss himself, she suggests, was far less Machiavellian. Some strands could be better woven together to explain how Straussians directly undergird the war, but this book should nonetheless stimulate debate.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The New Yorker

Many neoconservative intellectuals and Bush Administration officials claim Leo Strauss, the philosopher who fled Nazi Germany for the United States in the nineteen-thirties, as their political forebear. Norton studied at Chicago, the center of the Straussian academic universe, and the book has the flavor of an amusing tell-all. (When she moves to Brown and discovers Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, one horrified Straussian says, "You have gone over to the dark side of the Force.") Norton's account is a sort of critical field guide to Straussians, taxonomizing their "variants and subspecies" and assessing the ways in which some of them have affected U.S. foreign policy. She points out that, whereas neoconservatives talk of clashes between Islam and the West, Strauss was a close reader of medieval Muslim political theory and decried Western intellectuals for their ignorance of the non-Western world: "The Straussians have set themselves to guard the gates Strauss opened."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Yale University Press (September 10, 2004)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0300104367
  • ISBN-13: 978-0300104363
  • Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #747,471 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Anne Norton
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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whole questioning, truth squads, modern prince
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United States, Leo Strauss, Last Man, Allan Bloom, Paul Wolfowitz, University of Chicago, African Americans, Campus Watch, Leon Kass, President Bush, Sayyid Qutb, Carl Schmitt, The Closing of the American Mind, Carnes Lord, Pax Americana, President's Council, William Kristol, Joseph Cropsey, Lee Kuan Yew, New York Times, Abram Shulsky, Ivy League, Sheldon Wolin, Soviet Union, Albert Wohlstetter
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80 of 103 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Joyfully dissecting the neocons, June 23, 2005
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.
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30 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Misleading title, no organization, and lacks the courage of her convictions, July 16, 2005
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.
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26 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars READ THIS BOOK!! , July 8, 2005
By marty in the rain (Brighton Beach, NY) - See all my reviews
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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars The esoteric truth is out
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 (? Read more
Published 8 days ago by Ashtar Command

1.0 out of 5 stars Anne Norton's personal vendetta against the Struassians
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. Read more
Published 3 months ago by J. Lerner

4.0 out of 5 stars Strauss, Straussians and the University of Chicago
This is a most engaging book - and after reading other reviews, this is a book to be placed in context. Read more
Published 12 months ago by Geoffrey Goldberg

5.0 out of 5 stars GUTSY, PERSONAL, AND SUPERB
This is a book that had to be written. Thank you, Anne Norton, for your courage. Most politically-active Americans are well aware of the oft-cited "think tank" known as the... Read more
Published 17 months ago by Mark Watterson

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Introduction to Neo Conservatism
Though the neocon movement seems more and more like a thing of history, this is a nice quick and easy read (that is also wonderfully catty) about Straussian's in the academy. Read more
Published 21 months ago by S. T. Sullivan

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful and thrilling book, not for everyone
For me this book is wonderful and thriling, without question. I only wish it could educate the mass public. Read more
Published on September 16, 2006 by W. Tuohy

5.0 out of 5 stars Outing the neocons
Anne Norton's quirky, edgy account of the followers of Leo Strauss who became today's influential neoconservatives is both comprehensive and disturbing. Read more
Published on August 24, 2006 by Norman Abjorensen

5.0 out of 5 stars A Classic
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... Read more
Published on March 26, 2006 by Al

5.0 out of 5 stars Tracing Strauss's influence
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. Read more
Published on October 10, 2005 by critik

3.0 out of 5 stars Is book about Strauss or attacking Bush's War on Terror?
Perhaps Anne Norton really is an expert on Leo Strauss. She writes well and throws out a lot of names. Read more
Published on July 25, 2005 by TF

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