Yes, we should think about Melville & Heraclitus’s personal background if we really want to understand their thinking. Yet, for some reason, if we apply this same logic to someone like Leo Strauss, people get a lot more sensitive. Where was Strauss from? What major events in politics & war defined his early & middle life? How might his Jewishness, for example, shape his interpretation of Plato and of Thucydides — and how might his exile from his birthplace, and his being unable to find work in England because he was Jewish, have shaped his teaching when he finally found work in academia in America?
These seem like reasonable questions to me — but if we arrive at a hunch that his personal experience gave him cause to subvert or work to change certain definitions or even to deceive students for his own benefit, or for the benefit of other exiles, etc., well — that seems all the sudden more controversial.
There are many books and articles about Leo Strauss that examine these very questions. Did Godward look at them? Did he even look for them? If he did, he should state that. If he did not, he should state that. The honest man won’t proclaim we can’t talk about things that many scholars publicly discuss.
Leo Strauss was from Germany, he escaped the Nazis, and he wanted to create a world safe for Jews. Strauss praised religion but was an atheist and did not practice Judaism. He praised Zionism as he thought it was wonderful for Jews to pursue their ethnic interests, but he had no interest in living in Israel and he thought it would be awful if Europeans pursued their ethnic interests. Strauss thought that Jews being conscious of their race was wonderful but if Europeans were conscious of their race, that was terrible. Strauss thought that Christianity, in moderation and so long as it did not inconvenience Jews, was good. His thinking boiled down to — is it good for the Jews?
Stephen Turner notes: “One cannot really understand the Frankfurt School, or Leo Strauss, or Hans Kelsen, or Hans Morgenthau, without understanding what they both absorbed and rejected from [Carl] Schmitt.”
In his book Persecution and the Art of Writing, “Strauss sets forth the thesis that many philosophers, especially political philosophers, have reacted to the threat of persecution by disguising their most controversial and heterodox ideas.” That sounds like Godward.
…the importance of extra-rational charisma in the appeal of egomaniacal, messianic intellectuals like Marx and Freud to younger Jewish students. Over the last 150 years, secular Jewish intellectuals have repeatedly reproduced the traditional brilliant rabbi-student relationship in launching powerful cults. Among the more recent examples have been Ayn Rand (see Murray N. Rothbard’s hilarious 1972 article “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult“), Susan Sontag (see Terry Castle’s hilarious 2005 article “Desperately Seeking Susan“), and Leo Strauss (see the unintentionally hilarious 2003 article “What Leo Strauss Was Up To” by two true believers, William Kristol and Steven Lenzer).
From the book Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America by Paul Gottfried: “This book offers an original interpretation of the achievement of Leo Strauss, stressing how his ideas and followers reshaped the American conservative movement. According to this study, Strauss and his disciples came to influence the establishment Right almost by accident. The conservative movement that reached out to Strauss and his legacy was extremely fluid and lacked a self-confident leadership. Conservative activists and journalists felt a desperate need for academic acceptability, which they thought Strauss and his disciples would furnish. They also became deeply concerned with the problem of “value relativism,” which self-described conservatives thought Strauss had effectively addressed. But until recently, neither Strauss nor his disciples have considered themselves to be “conservatives.” Strauss’s followers continue to view themselves as stalwart Truman-Kennedy Democrats and liberal internationalists. Contrary to another misconception, Straussians have never wished to convert Americans to ancient political ideals and practices, except in a very selective rhetorical fashion. Strauss and his disciples have been avid champions of American modernity, and “timeless” values as interpreted by Strauss and his followers often look starkly contemporary.”
