David Pinsof (b. 1986), David O. Sears (b. 1935), and Martie Haselton, in “Strange Bedfellows: The Alliance Theory of Political Belief Systems” (Psychological Inquiry, 2023), argue that political belief systems do not derive from abstract values. They derive from alliance structures. When partisans mobilize support for allies, they generate patchwork narratives that appeal to ad hoc and often incompatible moral principles. The theory rests on two assumptions: humans possess cognitive systems for forming and detecting alliances, and humans deploy propagandistic biases (perpetrator, victim, and attributional) to support allies and oppose rivals. Pinsof and his coauthors add a claim that stings: political elites are just as inconsistent as the masses. Elites are merely better attuned, or more loyal, to the historically contingent alliances of their society.
The Straussian schism offers a test case at the elite end of the scale. Here is a community of a few hundred scholars, all trained in the same texts, many by the same teachers, all professing loyalty to Leo Strauss (1899-1973), who split into two camps that have spent five decades accusing each other of betraying the master. The standard account says the split is philosophical: a disagreement about whether the American Founding is ancient or modern, whether the Declaration of Independence states a truth or a useful proposition, whether Locke was a closet Hobbesian. Alliance Theory suggests a different reading. The doctrines came second. The alliances came first.
The two camps
The East Coast camp formed around Allan Bloom (1930-1992) at Cornell, Toronto, and Chicago, Harvey Mansfield (b. 1932) at Harvard, Walter Berns (1919-2015) at Cornell and Georgetown, Thomas Pangle (b. 1944) at Toronto and Texas, and Werner Dannhauser (1929-2014) at Cornell. Its habitat was the elite research university and, through students such as Paul Wolfowitz (b. 1943) and Abram Shulsky (b. 1943), the national security apparatus. Its teaching, put crudely: the American regime is modern, Lockean, built on low but solid ground. The philosopher stands at a distance from the city. The Declaration's self-evident truths are salutary opinion, not philosophy. Patriotism is a civic good the philosopher supports without believing everything the patriot believes.
The West Coast camp formed around Harry Jaffa (1918-2015) at Claremont McKenna College and the Claremont Graduate School. His students founded the Claremont Institute in 1979: Larry Arnn (b. 1952), now president of Hillsdale College, Charles Kesler (b. 1956), editor of the Claremont Review of Books, Thomas West (b. 1945), John Marini, Ken Masugi. Its habitat was the movement think tank, the donor network, Hillsdale College, and eventually the Trump administration. Its teaching: the Declaration is true. The Founding fuses Aristotle and Locke. Lincoln is the greatest interpreter of the regime, and the progressive movement, with its administrative state, is the regime's mortal enemy. Michael Anton (b. 1969) wrote “The Flight 93 Election” in the Claremont Review of Books in September 2016. John Eastman (b. 1960), a Claremont figure, advised Donald Trump on overturning the 2020 election.
Both camps read Plato's Republic line by line. Both believe in esoteric writing. Both revere Strauss. On the Chambers-style rating task Pinsof cites, where liberals and conservatives agree at r = .97 about who belongs to which coalition, any Straussian could sort Mansfield, Pangle, Kesler, and West into their camps without error. The alliance structure is common knowledge inside the community, just as Alliance Theory predicts for any polarized society.
Choosing allies: similarity, transitivity, interdependence, stochasticity
Pinsof identifies four forces that determine ally choice. Each one operated on the Straussians.
Similarity worked through vocabulary and institutional culture. All Straussians share the master tags: “regime,” “natural right,” “the theologico-political problem,” “esotericism.” But sub-tags mark the camps. Say “the administrative state” or “statesmanship” or “the principles of the Founding” with reverence and you signal Claremont. Say “the philosophic life” or “the low but solid ground” or “the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns” as your center of gravity and you signal the East. Graduate students learn the dialects fast because the dialects govern placement. An East Coast Straussian fit the culture of Harvard and Chicago, where open piety about the Declaration reads as boosterism. A West Coast Straussian fit the culture of the conservative movement, where irony about the Declaration reads as decadence.
Transitivity, the enemy-of-my-enemy logic, sorted the camps' external alliances. Jaffa fought a three-front war in the 1970s and 1980s: against paleoconservatives such as M.E. Bradford (1934-1993), who attacked Lincoln from the right; against libertarians, who reduced the Founding to property; and against his fellow Straussians, whom he accused of teaching that the Founding was merely modern and therefore indefensible. The fronts were connected. Bradford and the East Coast Straussians agreed that the Declaration's equality clause was not the soul of the regime, so Jaffa treated them as one enemy with two faces. Meanwhile the East Coast camp's rivals were the historicists, relativists, and New Left radicals inside the university. Bloom's Closing of the American Mind (1987) is a war memoir of Cornell in 1969. The East allied with neoconservatism, whose flagship journals and administration posts it could reach; the West allied with the populist and nationalist right, which the East's academic allies despised. By the 2010s transitivity had done its work: Claremont writers defended Trump because Trump fought the ruling class that Angelo Codevilla (1943-2021) had named in 2010, and East Coast figures such as William Kristol (b. 1952), a Mansfield student, became Never Trumpers in part because Trumpism had become the West's ally.
Interdependence is the crudest force and the most explanatory. The East Coast camp depended on elite universities for salaries, presses, and students. Its reading of America as modern and its posture of philosophic distance kept it employable in institutions where conservatism was tolerated only as a form of skepticism. The West Coast camp was locked out of those institutions, or walked out, and built a parallel patronage system: the Claremont Institute, Hillsdale, the Bradley and Olin donor networks, talk radio, and eventually the White House personnel office. That system pays for a usable patriotism. A donor funds the claim that the Founders were right, not the claim that the Founders built low but solid ground on a noble simplification. Each camp's doctrine matches its revenue model with a fit too close for coincidence.
Stochasticity supplies the rest. Nothing in Strauss's corpus required two camps. Strauss praised both Athens and Jerusalem, wrote on both Locke and Aristotle, and left the American question open. The split began with accidents of temperament and geography. Jaffa was combative; his colleagues called his polemics obsessive. He moved to Claremont in 1964, the year he wrote the “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” passage for Barry Goldwater's convention speech, and three thousand miles of distance let a separate network of students, jobs, and grudges accumulate. Small initial differences snowballed, exactly as the theory's models predict. That Jaffa and Berns, antagonists for forty years, died on the same day, January 10, 2015, gave the schism the closing symmetry of a feud.
Supporting allies: the three biases
Perpetrator biases. The clearest West Coast case is slavery and the Founders. Thomas West’s Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America (1997) does what its title says: it minimizes the Founders' transgressions, stresses mitigating circumstances, and stresses good intentions, the full perpetrator repertoire Pinsof catalogs from Baumeister's interpersonal research. The exercise is advocacy for allies who cannot defend themselves, performed because the Founders anchor the coalition's authority. The same bias migrated to living allies. Claremont writers rationalized Trump's conduct after the 2020 election in terms they never extended to progressive presidents, and Eastman's legal theories treated a transgression against constitutional order as a defense of it. The East Coast version is quieter but real: a camp that teaches the nobility of the philosophic life supplied intellectual cover for the Iraq war, and its members held the war's architects, several of them students and friends, to a gentler standard than they applied to progressive social engineers. Each camp condones in its allies what it condemns in its rivals, which is Pinsof's Table 1 rendered in seminar prose.
Victim biases. Both camps run victimhood narratives, and they compete. The East's master story is the trial of Socrates: philosophy persecuted by the city, replayed as Bloom hounded from Cornell and Straussians blackballed by the APSA mainstream. The West's master story is the dispossession of middle America: Kesler's “cold civil war,” Codevilla's ruling class versus country class, Anton's charge that the families of flyover country face demographic and cultural replacement while bicoastal elites sneer. Within the guild, each camp also claims victim status against the other. Jaffa spent decades presenting himself as the excluded truth-teller whom the prestige Straussians refused to answer, and East Coasters presented themselves as scholars harassed by a crank. Victim biases, Pinsof notes, make no sense as self-image maintenance and good sense as mobilization. Jaffa's grievance letters recruited students. Bloom's Cornell story sold a million books.
Attributional biases. The East attributes its position at Harvard and Chicago to merit: deeper scholarship, better Greek, finer minds. It attributes Claremont's marginality to internal defects: vulgarity, popularization, a preference for the stump over the seminar. The West reverses the attributions. East Coast prestige derives from an external and corrupting cause, accommodation with the liberal academy; Claremont's marginality derives from an external cause, gatekeeping by that academy, and its own successes derive from courage. Each side's account of the status hierarchy is self-serving in the pattern Bradley documented in 1978, and neither account survives contact with the other.
Doctrine follows alliance
The strongest evidence for the Alliance Theory reading is temporal. Pinsof cites Goren's four-year panel study: party identification predicts subsequent values, values do not predict subsequent party identification. The Straussian record shows the same arrow of causation at the individual and institutional level.
Jaffa is the type specimen. Harry V. Jaffa‘s Crisis of the House Divided (1959) argues that Lincoln transcended a Founding that was Lockean, self-interested, and morally incomplete. A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000) argues that the Founding was already Aristotelian and complete, and Lincoln its faithful expositor. Jaffa acknowledged the change. What changed between 1959 and 2000 was not the documentary record of the 1780s. What changed was Jaffa's coalition. A movement conservatism at war with progressivism needed a Founding that was sacred, not deficient, and Jaffa's doctrine moved to meet the need of his allies. His East Coast critics said so at the time, though they could not see the mirror-image process in themselves: a camp whose livelihood depended on standing apart from movement conservatism developed a doctrine in which standing apart is the highest activity.
The Claremont Institute's migration from Reaganism to Trumpism makes the same point at institutional scale. The texts did not change. Aristotle, Locke, Lincoln, and the Federalist sat on the same shelf in 1985 and 2016. The coalition changed, and the readings followed. An institute devoted to the proposition that all men are created equal became the intellectual home of writers flirting with the claim that the proposition, applied to immigration, is a suicide pact. That is a strange bedfellow in Pinsof's exact sense: natural-right universalism allied with ethno-cultural particularism, a pairing no philosopher derives from first principles and any coalition manager can explain in one sentence. On the other coast, teachers of Socratic skepticism about political idealism endorsed exporting democracy to Mesopotamia at gunpoint. Neither pairing emerged from philosophical analysis. Both emerged from the alliance structures of their decade, like libertarianism and Christian fundamentalism in the Republican coalition of the 1970s.
What the rival theory would predict
Take the sincere-philosophy account seriously and it generates predictions. Positions should be stable across coalition changes, since texts do not move. Recruitment should follow argument, with students converting on the merits and distributing between camps at random with respect to job markets. Standards of judgment should apply symmetrically to allies and rivals.
The record fails all three predictions. Positions shifted with coalitions. Recruitment tracks placement networks: a student who wants Hillsdale writes Declaration piety, a student who wanted Harvard wrote Locke skepticism, and conversion narratives cluster around job transitions. Standards run asymmetrically, camp by camp, in the directions the three biases predict.
Two limits. First, Pinsof built his theory on mass publics with high-quality survey data; a guild of a few hundred scholars offers anecdote, not N = 5,522. Second, texts do constrain. There is a real interpretive question about Locke's presence in the Founding, and honest scholars weigh it. Alliance Theory does not require that every Straussian argument is propaganda. It requires that the distribution of conclusions across the community track the distribution of alliances rather than the distribution of evidence, and that the double standards fall where allegiance, not principle, predicts. On that test the schism performs like any other polarized polity, only with better footnotes.
Two Chairs in the Attention Space: Randall Collins and the Straussian Schism
The Straussians make a fitting subject for the theory because they claim exemption from it. Both camps teach that the philosopher sees through the cave's shadows, that most political opinion is unexamined loyalty dressed as principle. Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton suggest that the philosophers built a cave of their own, with two chambers, and that the arguments echoing between them are what alliance maintenance sounds like when the allies have doctorates. The primary difference between an East Coast and a West Coast Straussian is whom they count as allies, and whom as rivals, and the beliefs about Locke arrive afterward, on schedule, to serve.
Alliance Theory explains why Straussian beliefs track Straussian allies. It does not explain why the guild split into two camps rather than three or five or none, why the split happened when it did, or why the feud has burned for fifty years without settling anything. Randall Collins does. The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998), his study of intellectual networks across twenty-five centuries and several civilizations, treats schools of thought as products of network structure, ritual interaction, and a scarce resource he calls attention space. Apply his apparatus to the Straussians and the schism looks like a law-governed event that the participants experienced as a quarrel.
The apparatus
Collins builds from the bottom up. Intellectual life runs on interaction rituals: gatherings with bodily copresence, a mutual focus of attention, and a shared mood. Successful rituals generate emotional energy in the participants, sacralize the objects at the ritual's center, and produce membership symbols that mark insiders. Ideas are not free-floating propositions; they are tokens charged by the rituals in which they circulate. Intellectuals carry their charge from encounter to encounter in chains, and the people who accumulate the most energy and the best cultural capital become the stars around whom networks form.
Above the ritual level sits the attention space. At any moment a field can sustain only a small number of positions, somewhere between three and six, because attention is scarce and a position survives only if enough people argue about it. Collins calls this the law of small numbers. It has a corollary that governs succession: the students of a dominant master cannot win attention by repeating him. Accurate transmission is a service, not a position. To exist intellectually, the next generation must divide the master's synthesis and stake rival claims to its parts. The division follows lines of maximum ambiguity in the master's teaching, because that is where differentiation is cheapest and the argument is live. Creativity, in this account, is structured rivalry. Positions are born in pairs and triads, defined against each other, and the conflict between them is the engine of intellectual life.
One more element: positions need organizational bases. An idea persists when a chair, a journal, a patron, or an institute pays for its reproduction. When the bases change, the attention space reorganizes, whatever the arguments say.
Strauss as network star
Collins finds that eminent philosophers almost never appear from nowhere. They stand at dense nodes in intergenerational chains, students of the eminent, rivals of the eminent, teachers of the eminent. Leo Strauss fits. He heard Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, corresponded with Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), Gershom Scholem (1897-1982), and Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968), and arrived in America carrying the charge of the Weimar networks at their peak. In Collins's terms he brought cultural capital of the highest grade into an American political science that had little to match it.
What he built at the University of Chicago was a ritual technology. The Strauss seminar had every feature Collins requires: bodily copresence around a table, a single text as the mutual focus, the shared mood of initiates reading for what the vulgar miss. The line-by-line reading is a liturgy. It slows the text to ritual tempo, converts interpretation into collective practice, and charges the book itself, the Republic, the Guide of the Perplexed, the Prince, into a sacred object. The doctrine of esoteric writing intensified the effect, since a text with a hidden teaching demands a community of readers and a master who can find it. Students left those rooms with high emotional energy, the felt conviction Collins says drives careers, and with membership symbols, the vocabulary of regime and natural right that let them recognize one another anywhere. The extraordinary loyalty Strauss commanded, remarked on by friend and enemy alike, is what a high-intensity ritual chain produces. It is also what makes succession dangerous.
The split as structural necessity
Strauss's teaching contained a load-bearing ambiguity. He praised the ancients against the moderns, and he praised America, which is modern. He never resolved in print whether the American regime is a decayed product of the modernity he criticized or a partial recovery of the natural right he defended. Collins predicts that a first generation must differentiate, and that it will differentiate where the master left the question open. The Straussians split on the American question, the exact point of maximum ambiguity. The content of the two positions, Lockean modernity read from the East, Aristotelian founding read from the West, matters less than that two positions formed at the fault line the master left them.
The timing follows the same logic. While Strauss lived, the attention space had one center, and disagreement among students stayed subordinate, family argument under the father's roof. Strauss died in 1973. Collins's model says the death of a dominant figure reopens the attention space, and claimants must move fast because slots are few. The Jaffa polemics of the late 1970s and 1980s, the attacks on Martin Diamond (1919-1977), on Walter Berns, on Thomas Pangle's The Spirit of Modern Republicanism (1988), arrived on schedule. Their function was not persuasion. No Harry V. Jaffa polemic converted an East Coast reader, and Jaffa can hardly have expected one to. Their function was position-taking: loud, repeated differentiation that forced the field to organize around a divide. The East obliged by answering, sometimes at length, sometimes with the cutting dismissal that is itself a form of attention. Each round of the feud recharged both camps. Collins insists that conflict is the energy source of intellectual life, and the Straussian feud shows the mechanics in miniature: fifty years of mutual denunciation kept both positions alive in an attention space that ignores the quiet. Jaffa needed Berns. Berns, though he would have denied it, needed Jaffa. That they died on the same day completed the pattern with a symmetry no novelist would risk.
The number of camps also follows. Two organizational bases existed to pay for Straussian positions: the elite research university, which the East held, and the movement counter-academy of think tank, donor network, and Hillsdale College, which the West built when the first base closed to it. Two bases, two positions. A field's attention space, Collins argues, mirrors its material substructure, and the doctrinal map of the schism reproduces the funding map with little remainder.
The middle and the exits
The law of small numbers is hardest on moderates. A position framed as the reasonable synthesis of two poles asks the field to stop arguing, and the field declines, because argument is what sustains attention. Catherine Zuckert and Michael Zuckert, the center of the so-called Midwest school, wrote The Truth about Leo Strauss (2006) as a corrective to both camps and to the anti-Straussian conspiracy literature. The book is careful, scholarly, and structurally doomed to the fate it met: respectful citation and no army. Midwest Straussianism produced no institute, no review, no feud, and therefore no pole. Collins would have predicted it from the title alone. The truth about a master is a service to the network, not a position within it.
The other escape routes confirm the model from a different side. Not every Strauss student joined the war over America. Seth Benardete (1930-2001) differentiated into philology and the close reading of Greek poetry and philosophy, competing in the classicists' attention space rather than the political theorists'. Stanley Rosen (1929-2014) differentiated toward Continental philosophy, fighting Heidegger and Jacques Derrida for attention rather than Jaffa or Pangle. Muhsin Mahdi (1926-2007) took the Arabic-Alfarabi niche. Each found an adjacent field with an open slot and exited the schism. The men who stayed to fight were the men whose capital was invested in the American question, which is to say, in the contested slot. Collins's picture of intellectuals as strategic occupants of scarce niches, maneuvering half-consciously by feel for where the energy runs, fits the dispersal of Strauss's students better than any account of them as readers following arguments wherever they lead.
Rituals of the two congregations
After the split, each camp rebuilt the ritual technology and pointed it inward. The West has the Claremont Institute's Publius and Lincoln fellowships, summer gatherings where young conservatives read the Declaration and the Gettysburg Address around a table with Charles Kesler or Larry P. Arnn presiding. The form is the Strauss seminar; the sacred objects have changed from the Republic to the American founding documents, as the position requires. The Claremont Review of Books runs on the ritual calendar of a quarterly, renewing membership symbols with each issue. The East runs its chains through Harvard University and Chicago dissertations, conference panels, and the slower liturgy of academic presses. Each camp maintains its boundary the way congregations do, through stories of apostasy and betrayal told with an emotional charge that mere disagreement never carries. When a West Coast writer defects to respectability, or an East Coast student goes over to Claremont, the reaction on both sides has the temperature of profanation, because in Collins's terms that is what it is: a sacred object handled by the wrong hands.
This is the layer Alliance Theory cannot reach. Pinsof explains the direction of the biases, whom each camp defends and whom it attacks. Collins explains the heat: why men who agree on Plato, esotericism, and the crisis of the West can hate each other with an intensity they never direct at Rawlsians, who share none of it. Proximate rivals fight hardest because they compete for the same attention, the same students, the same claim to the same inheritance. The feud is fratricidal because only a brother can contest the will.
What Collins cannot do
The frame has limits. Collins predicts that a split would occur, where the fault line lay, when the succession would open, how many camps the bases could support, and why the middle failed. He does not predict which camp would take which doctrine, or why the West's position would bind to national populism and the East's to neoconservatism. For that mapping, the alliance structure of American politics does the work, and Pinsof's frame resumes. Collins also runs on long historical averages, twenty-five centuries of networks, and a fifty-year American episode is a small sample for laws of that scale. The fit is strong; it is still one case.
But the case has a moral that Collins states about every school and the Straussians resist about their own. Both camps teach that ideas rule, that the history of the West turns on what Machiavelli wrote and how Locke was read, that the philosopher's argument moves the world. Collins's twenty-five centuries suggest that arguments move through bodies in rooms, charged by rituals, funded by bases, and rationed by an attention space that admits few and forgets most. The Straussians hold their doctrine of the power of ideas with high emotional energy, which, on Collins's account, is exactly what a well-run ritual chain produces in its members, whatever the doctrine says.
