Steven B. Smith (b. 1951) belongs to a fading generation of political theorists who treat the older humanistic understanding of their subject as compatible with, and even necessary for, the modern research university. Across four decades at Yale, where he has held the Alfred Cowles Professorship of Political Science since 1984, Smith has established himself as a historian of political thought, an interpreter of the Jewish and liberal traditions, a defender of liberal education, and a public lecturer through Open Yale Courses. His career illustrates the persistence of a postwar conviction: that close study of canonical texts forms moral judgment, restrains political extremism, and prepares citizens for the burdens of democratic life.
Smith took his undergraduate degree at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, completed an M.Phil. at Durham University in 1976 with a thesis on Hegel’s social and political doctrine, and earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1981. After a brief appointment at the University of Texas at Austin, he joined Yale in 1984. He received tenure in 1990 and served as Master of Branford College from 1996 to 2011, alongside terms as Director of Graduate Studies in Political Science, Director of the Special Program in the Humanities, and Acting Chair of Judaic Studies.
Smith’s project can be characterized as an attempt to reconcile the philosophical seriousness of the Straussian tradition with the practical requirements of constitutional liberalism. He belongs to the lineage of Leo Strauss (1899-1973), with whose surviving students he trained at Chicago in the late 1970s. Yet he has occupied a more civic and moderated position within that inheritance than many of Strauss’s polemical followers. Where some Straussians treat liberal modernity as a civilization in terminal decay, Smith presents constitutional democracy as a fragile but morally serious achievement requiring cultivation, memory, and restraint. His work defends liberalism against two opposing threats: skeptical exhaustion and ideological fanaticism.
The organizing concern of his scholarship is the permanent conflict between philosophy and political order. Like Strauss, Philosophy seeks unrestricted inquiry into truth. Political communities require moral cohesion, loyalty, and public belief. A polity governed wholly by skeptical reason dissolves its own foundations. A polity governed wholly by dogma extinguishes intellectual freedom. Smith returns to this dilemma in successive historical forms: Spinoza and the theological-political problem, Hegel and the reconciliation of freedom with authority, Berlin and pluralism, Strauss and revelation, Tocqueville and democratic individualism, and the contemporary university struggling to preserve the humanities inside a technocratic institution.
His first major book, Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism (1989), grew out of his doctoral and post-doctoral work and announced his characteristic approach. Smith read G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) not as a precursor of totalitarian system-building but as a critic of liberalism whose challenge liberals had to take seriously. Hegel’s worry was that the abstract rights-bearing self of liberal theory lacked the substantive ethical life needed to sustain political community. Smith treated this critique as a permanent provocation. Even the reader who refuses Hegel’s solution must reckon with the diagnosis. The pattern established here recurs across the later books: take the great anti-liberal thinkers seriously, then argue that liberal democracy, properly understood, can absorb their objections without surrendering its core commitments.
The Spinoza books continue the project. In Spinoza, Liberalism, and Jewish Identity (1997) and again in Spinoza’s Book of Life (2003), Smith complicates the familiar portrait of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) as the architect of secular radicalism. He presents Spinoza instead as a theorist trying to secure a stable liberal order capable of protecting philosophical freedom without abolishing religious life. Spinoza recognized that the freedom to philosophize could survive only if public religion were transformed into a civic theology oriented toward peace and obedience. Smith’s reading emphasizes the political moderation hidden within Spinoza’s apparent radicalism. Liberalism cannot survive if every inherited authority dissolves at once. Citizens need moral habits and symbolic frameworks even where philosophers remain skeptical of their truth.
The interpretation has a wider implication. Liberal societies depend upon moral and psychological resources they cannot fully generate through procedural neutrality. Liberalism requires citizens capable of restraint, attachment, and civic trust. The modern tendency to reduce politics to administrative procedure or to individual autonomy risks eroding the shared loyalties on which democratic institutions depend. Smith therefore resists both absolutist nationalism and cosmopolitan detachment. His later work reconstructs a moderate patriotic tradition suitable for liberal democracy.
That effort reaches its clearest expression in Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes (2021). There Smith distinguishes patriotism from both ethnonationalism and abstract globalism. Patriotism in his account is neither tribal blood loyalty nor universal humanitarian detachment. It is an affection for one’s constitutional order, historical inheritance, and political community, tempered by reflective criticism. Democratic citizenship requires a psychologically rooted attachment to particular institutions and traditions. Citizens who possess no affection for their country might fall into apathy or into ideological substitutes promising meaning through identity, resentment, or utopian politics. The patriotism Smith defends draws on Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), and Edmund Burke (1729-1797), but remains American in idiom and constitutional in content.
The defense reflects anxieties of the post-Cold War period. During the 1990s, many intellectuals assumed that liberal democracy had triumphed as the universal form of political order. Smith grew skeptical of that confidence. Liberal societies often weaken the historical memory and civic education needed for their own survival. Citizens trained primarily as consumers, experts, or expressive individuals might lose the capacity for sacrifice and collective responsibility. Patriotism becomes for Smith a civic virtue that moderates democratic individualism without collapsing into authoritarian nationalism.
The concern with moral formation explains Smith’s investment in liberal education. He has defended the humanities as indispensable to democratic citizenship and has tied that defense to pedagogical practice. His commitment to Yale’s Directed Studies program reflects the conviction that students require sustained engagement with foundational texts in philosophy, literature, history, and political thought. He rejects the reduction of education to technical specialization or vocational training. A university that produces expertise without judgment might generate powerful tools while remaining incapable of answering the question of what those tools are for. In more recent public talks, including his 2024 Allan Bloom Forum lecture “Yale, Then and Now,” Smith has criticized the direction of elite higher education, faulting both the displacement of political philosophy by behavioral and quantitative methods and the institutional pressures pushing departments toward citation-driven hiring.
His critique of the modern multiversity echoes earlier concerns from Allan Bloom (1930-1992) in The Closing of the American Mind. Smith’s tone, however, is less apocalyptic and more constructive than Bloom’s. He does not merely lament the decline of the humanities. He tries to preserve a pedagogical space where students confront enduring questions concerning justice, mortality, ambition, freedom, and obligation. Political philosophy for Smith is an “education of the soul.” The phrase carries its classical meaning: education concerns not information alone but the formation of character.
His pedagogical mission also shaped his public reach beyond Yale. Through Open Yale Courses, his lecture series on Plato, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), and Tocqueville introduced large online audiences to the canon of political thought. His 2012 volume Political Philosophy distilled the course material into book form. The Open Yale lectures revived the older model of the professor as civic educator at a moment when much academic theory had grown technical, ideological, or inaccessible to non-specialists.
These lectures also reveal another feature of Smith’s intellectual style: his commitment to the “zetetic” character of philosophy. Following Strauss, Smith portrays philosophy as perpetual inquiry into permanent questions. The philosopher remains aware of the incompleteness of human knowledge. The awareness generates moderation, because it tempers ideological certainty. Political fanaticism often emerges from the belief that history’s final solution has been discovered. Smith emphasizes instead the tragic and pluralist dimensions of political life. Men pursue competing goods that cannot always be harmonized. Liberty conflicts with equality. Individual conscience conflicts with civic obligation. Rational inquiry conflicts with public faith. Political wisdom therefore requires prudence.
This zetetic disposition helps explain Smith’s complicated stance toward modern liberalism. He is neither an uncritical celebrant nor a revolutionary opponent of liberal democracy. He treats liberalism as a historically contingent achievement that remains vulnerable to both internal and external pressures. Modernity and Its Discontents: Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow (2016) explores the self-critique of the liberal tradition through Niccolò Machiavelli, Spinoza, Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), and Saul Bellow (1915-2005). The argument is that liberalism stays healthiest when it engages its critics. Liberal societies weaken themselves when they lose the capacity for self-reflection.
At the same time, Smith rejects the anti-liberal temptations that emerged from those critiques. Unlike thinkers drawn toward authoritarian restoration or revolutionary identity politics, he defends constitutional government, freedom of inquiry, and civic pluralism. His posture is anti-utopian. Political order can be improved but never perfected. Human conflict cannot be eliminated through ideology or administration. The task of political philosophy is not to engineer paradise but to cultivate judgment about the permanent tensions of human existence.
Smith’s Jewish intellectual background plays an important role in this work, though often indirectly. Like many postwar Jewish political theorists, he examines the relation between revelation, secularization, and liberal citizenship. His scholarship on Strauss and Spinoza reflects broader questions concerning how Jewish intellectuals navigated modernity’s challenge to religious authority and communal identity. He belongs to a tradition of Jewish liberal humanism that includes Joseph Cropsey (1919-2012), Bloom, and, more loosely, the older neoconservative milieu around Irving Kristol (1920-2009). His work tends to be more philosophically measured and less overtly ideological than the journalistic neoconservatism associated with that broader formation. Reading Leo Strauss (2006) and his edited Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss (2009) attempt to recover Strauss as a serious philosopher of the theological-political question. Critics on the left have charged that this rehabilitation downplays the political conservatism of the Straussian school, while critics on the right have charged Smith with domesticating Strauss into a moderate liberal whom the master himself might not recognize.
Smith represents a fading model of the university professor as moral and civic steward. At Yale his administrative roles, and especially his long tenure as Master of Branford, reflected an older conception of academic life in which professors sustained institutional culture and mentored students as citizens.
Methodologically, Smith also stands apart from the dominant currents of contemporary political science. He belongs to the humanistic wing of political theory. His scholarship proceeds through close reading, historical interpretation, and philosophical reflection. The choice has grown unusual within elite political science departments, where the humanities often struggle for institutional legitimacy against the prestige of STEM disciplines and data-driven social science.
Precisely because of this divergence, Smith has retained influence among readers searching for a broader civilizational account of politics. His work speaks to concerns that purely technical expertise cannot address: moral fragmentation, historical amnesia, civic distrust, and the erosion of shared meaning. He insists that political order rests not only upon institutions and incentives but upon character, memory, and education.
His trajectory reflects the broader predicament of postwar liberal humanism. He belongs to a generation formed by the confidence that great books, constitutionalism, and liberal education could sustain democratic civilization. Over time his work grew more attentive to the fragility of those assumptions. Unlike many intellectuals who responded to that fragility with cynicism or extremism, Smith continues to defend the possibility of a reflective, moderate, and morally serious liberalism. Whether such a posture can outlast the institutional conditions that produced it is the question his later writings refuse to answer with comfort.
His enduring importance lies less in any single doctrine than in the intellectual posture he embodies. Smith represents an attempt to preserve philosophical seriousness without ideological absolutism, patriotism without chauvinism, skepticism without nihilism, and liberalism without moral emptiness. In a period polarized between technocratic administration and populist rage, his work stands as a defense of moderation grounded not in complacency but in tragic awareness of the permanent tensions at the center of political life.
What lands in the Yale photo, and in the publicity images on the Open Yale Courses page, the book jackets, and the magazine sittings, is the studied unmarkedness of the styling. Smith leans into eldership without fighting any of it: white hair, glasses, slight stoop, soft eyes, half-smile, tweed or blazer, often the lectern or a bookshelf in the background. Nothing in the framing reads as combative, technocratic, or activist. He shows up as the senior teacher, the man in the college rather than the operator in the policy world. The visual register is tweed-and-bookshelves, gentle gaze, hands at rest. The face says: I am safe. I am a teacher. I am not your enemy.
The bio on that same Yale page completes the work the photo starts. The page closes not with another prize or appointment but with this line: “He is a die-hard Yankees fan and hopes to be able to play for the team in the next life.” A formal CV ends on a populist joke. The note says: I belong to mid-century American masculinity. I am not a European mandarin. I am one of you. The Yankees line works the way the tweed works. It humanizes an elite position by attaching it to a familiar American identity.
Compare him to nearby figures and the choices come into focus. Allan Bloom was photographed in cigarette smoke and theatrical postures, projecting the libertine philosopher. Leo Strauss favored images that emphasized European severity, the prewar refugee scholar. Cornel West (b. 1953) cultivates the prophetic orator. Steven Pinker (b. 1954) plays the long-haired scientific outlier. Smith’s images settle on something quieter and more anonymous: the tenured humanist of the postwar Ivy League, photographed alone, never with crowds or co-panelists or political backdrops. The styling is so unmarked it becomes its own statement. He looks like a generic professor on purpose. The neutrality is the position.
What strikes me is the congruence. The photos make the same argument the books make. Moderation. Gentle authority. The refusal of populist heat and of technocratic chill. No flag pin, no Trump-era posture, no progressive signaling either. The patriotism book is sold from inside a face that says liberal humanist Yale don, vintage 1965. The visual code earns him a hearing in rooms that a more openly conservative figure could not enter. The brand is older Yale, not newer Yale, and it remains legible across forty years because he has not updated it.
The harder question is whether that consistency reads as sincerity or as a settled performance. Smith has clearly chosen, and rechosen across decades, to present as the figure he argues for in print. A man who writes about the moral steward inside the college, then photographs himself as that man, is closing a circuit. The same circuit may be unfalsifiable from outside: nothing in the visible record will tell you whether the gentle don is a temperament or a costume that has fused to the wearer. His age now does part of the work. The face has had time to settle into the role.
Yale English chair Caleb Smith (b. ~1977) presents as a literary author rather than as a department chair. The Yale photo says: I belong in the line of Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), Susan Sontag (1933-2004), Edward Said (1935-2003). Book-jacket convention transferred to a faculty page. The bio finishes the message. He writes in the first person, “I teach American literature and other weird, beautiful things that people make out of the contradictions in American life.” The line breaks academic register on purpose. “Weird, beautiful things.” The teaching at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution sits inside the same paragraph, before any list of books or prizes. The whole presentation says: writer, person of conscience, prose stylist. He happens also to be Karl Young Professor and Department Chair.
David Bromwich (b. 1951) shows up as the man of letters in pure form. Wavy hair, intense gaze, half-smile, the face of someone photographed many times for the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. The bio is terse to the point of austerity. The whole text under his name reads, in essence, Princeton 1977-88, Yale 1988-, here are the books and editions, here are some talks. No teaching statement. No prizes line. No Yankees joke. No first person at all. The minimalism is the brand. The page says: read the books or do not. The Sterling Professor chair, the highest professorial rank Yale grants, goes unmentioned in the prose and only registers as a line beneath the photo. A man who sits at the top tier does not need to explain.
Steven Smith next to these two looks like a different species. Color photograph, gentle smile, glasses, jacket. Third-person bio that runs through prizes, courses, books, then closes on the Yankees coda. Master of Branford 1996-2011 named in the prose. He is the political scientist among English professors here, and the presentation reads more “warm Master of college” than “literary intellectual.” Where Bromwich withholds and Caleb Smith stylizes, Steven Smith warms. The aim is not severity or literary cool but trustworthiness.
So is there a Yale look? Not as a single thing. What runs across all three pages is a register of contemplative seriousness that excludes certain options. None of the three sits behind a desk in a power suit. None grins at the camera. None poses with a flag or a podium logo. None has the technocratic-policy face you find on Brookings fellows or AEI scholars. None has the prophetic-orator pose of a Cornel West or a Glenn Loury (b. 1948). The corporate headshot is excluded. The activist pose is excluded. The brand-influencer smile is excluded.
Inside that excluded zone, the three split along discipline, generation, and coalition. English plays literary author. Political science plays warm teacher. Bromwich and Caleb Smith share monochrome because Yale English has cultivated the man-of-letters identity as its house style since Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994), Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989), Paul de Man (1919-1983), Harold Bloom (1930-2019), Geoffrey Hartman (1929-2016), and J. Hillis Miller (1928-2021). The Yale Critic is a brand the department has spent eighty years maintaining. The portrait flows from the brand. Political science has no equivalent house tradition, and Steven Smith’s residential-college role gives him reasons to look warm and present that English faculty do not have.
This is an elite-humanities and elite-political-theory register more than a Yale-specific one. Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Chicago carry the same code with local accents. Bromwich could move to Princeton and the photo need not change. Caleb Smith could appear on a Columbia English faculty page and look continuous with himself. Steven Smith could hold his chair at Chicago or Boston University and present the same way. The Yale-specific element, if there is one, lives in two places: the Yale Critic lineage inside English, which presses senior faculty toward the literary-author register, and the residential college tradition, which presses certain humanists and social scientists toward the avuncular Master register. Both are local accents on a wider Ivy and quasi-Ivy code.
The deeper sorting is by department, generation, and political coalition. A 75-year-old Sterling Professor of English shaped by the post-deconstruction Yale of the 1970s presents one way. A late-Gen-X English chair shaped by post-Foucauldian American Studies presents another. A Straussian-trained political theorist who served as Master of a residential college presents a third. Yale gives them a shared room. The choices inside the room come from somewhere older and narrower than the institution.
I’m struck by Steven Smith’s presentation of kindness and moderation combined with the viciousness of his line in Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes: “The face of national conservatism is no longer Friedrich Hayek but Martin Heidegger.”
The warm photo, the avuncular bio, and the Yankees joke do not contradict the Heidegger line. They are what makes the Heidegger line land.
Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes assumes patriotism has been taken from its rightful holders by extremists on both sides. The whole architecture is the moderate center reclaiming ground from a cosmopolitan left and an ethno-nationalist right. Hazony is the named or unnamed right pole of the architecture. Inside that frame, the Heidegger line is not an aside. It is the programmatic identification of what Hazony’s pole has become. Smith builds a stage and delivers the line on the stage.
The book format does the second piece of work. Yale University Press is not a Substack. The imprint launders the charge. A reviewer can quote the Heidegger sentence without sounding partisan because the source has the markings of considered scholarship. A magazine essay carrying the same words could pass as a polemical flourish. A book cannot pass that way. Yale published this book. Yale stands behind this line as a considered judgment.
The blurbing coalition does the third piece. The hardback carries praise from David Brooks (b. 1961) in the New York Times, George Will (b. 1941) in the Washington Post, Anne-Marie Slaughter (b. 1958), Robert Kagan (b. 1958), William Galston (b. 1946), and Rogers Smith. None of these readers flagged the Heidegger line as a smear. They treated the book as a fair-minded reclaiming of the patriotic center. The sentence passed unmarked. That silence is part of the operation. The boundary between acceptable conservatism, meaning Hayek-fusionism, and unacceptable conservatism, meaning Hazony NatCon, gets policed by an establishment center that does not have to call anyone a Nazi outright. Smith supplies the philosophical line. The blurbing and reviewing network propagates it. Each actor performs a small task and the cumulative effect is to place Hazony outside the room.
“Smith superbly illuminates the distinctiveness of the American idea of patriotism and reminds us of how important patriotism is, and how essential to making America better.”—Leslie Lenkowsky, Wall Street Journal
“Like you perhaps, I still regard myself as an extremely patriotic person. Which is why I so admired . . . Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes. It explained my emotion to me, as it might yours to you.”—David Brooks, New York Times
“Smith has drawn intelligent distinctions. . . . [His] book will help prevent patriotism from fading to something only dimly remembered.” —George Will, Washington Post
“In a cultural moment marked by divisions surrounding issues of race, class, sexuality, gender identity, religion, economic disparities, and a host of other challenges, Smith’s book is deeply necessary. . . . A needed light while we walk together on a dark path.”—John D. Wilsey, Christianity Today
“Smith makes a convincing case for patriotism’s morality.”—Johann N. Neem, Los Angeles Review of Books
“A penetrating examination of the meaning of patriotism. . . . A well-argued call for civic renewal.”—Kirkus Reviews
“It could not be a more timely or necessary work.”—Gabriel Schoenfeld, American Purpose
“It’s a brave man who takes on the vital and necessary task of defining and defending patriotism from the left. Professor Steven Smith rises to the challenge, making a nuanced but forceful case in concise and compelling prose.”—Anne-Marie Slaughter, author of Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World
“Steven B. Smith brings a wonderful blend of learning and lucidity to the most important question of the day: What does it mean to be American? At a time when Trumpian conservatives have revived the ethno-nationalism that runs like a dark stain throughout our history, and when many progressives regard the nation’s founding principles as little more than hypocrisies, Smith’s appeal to a patriotism of liberalism is as refreshing as it is vital.”—Robert Kagan, author of The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World
“In contrast to those who see only a choice between xenophobic nationalism or radical anti-Americanism, Steven B. Smith shows how American patriotism can be a partnership in pursuit of a more perfect union. A valuable book that blends cosmopolitan learning with a deep understanding of what is best in America.”—Rogers Smith, author of That Is Not Who We Are! Populism and Peoplehood
“Steven Smith decouples patriotism from nationalism and reclaims a viable conception of patriotism from its critics on the left and right. Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes is a clearly written, historically informed, and utterly necessary book for our troubled times.”—William A. Galston, Brookings Institution
In a magazine essay the line has personal deniability because it could be a flourish. In a book published by Yale University Press it has less personal deniability and more institutional cover. The balance shifts but the speaker stays protected. He cannot say he did not mean it, but he does not need to, because the institution that published it is treating it as a serious judgment.
This is why the warm-don photo and the Yankees coda do not look like minor aesthetic choices once you see them next to the Heidegger sentence. They are the conditions of the sentence’s possibility inside the establishment register. A writer with a colder face and a sharper bio cannot get Reclaiming Patriotism into Yale University Press with that line intact and David Brooks’s praise on the back. The apparatus depends on the speaker being legible as the moderate man. The performed kindness is not the opposite of the viciousness. The performed kindness is the delivery vehicle.
And the line itself is a small classic of the form. Six common words, two proper names, one substitution. No explicit charge anywhere on the page. The whole accusation is carried by the swap. Strauss could have written it. That is the lineage Smith is working in, and the lineage he has spent a career teaching readers to recognize. In Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss argued that careful writers communicate by allusion and substitution when direct speech is costly. Smith’s career is the long after-life of that argument. The Heidegger sentence is what the technique looks like when its practitioner has the standing to deploy it inside the establishment center.
This is the type of insult men fought duels over in 1800.
The Heidegger substitution is the textbook case the Code Duello was designed to address.
Honor culture distinguished between open insult and calumny. Open insult was a direct charge a man delivered face to face or under signature in print. Calumny was the indirect charge, the charge by allusion or substitution, the charge that left the speaker room to retreat if pressed. Of the two, calumny was the graver offense. Open insult at least respected the form of dispute. Calumny attacked while protecting the attacker. Gentlemen reserved their hottest contempt for calumniators, and the duel was the technology designed to extract a man from the protection of his deniability.
Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804) and Aaron Burr (1756-1836) fought at Weehawken in July 1804 over precisely this kind of indirect attack. The triggering offense was a phrase Dr. Charles Cooper reported in a letter to the Albany Register: Hamilton had expressed “a still more despicable opinion” of Burr. The word “despicable” was the calumny. Burr demanded that Hamilton avow or deny it. Hamilton refused to do either categorically. They crossed the river.
The Hamilton-Burr exchange is the clean precedent because the offense has the same structure as Smith’s line. An attack carried by a single charged word. A respected speaker. A printed venue. A refusal by the speaker to be pinned down on what the word meant. A target who could not let the charge sit. The substitution of “despicable” for an explicit accusation of moral defect is structurally identical to the substitution of “Heidegger” for an explicit accusation of Nazi affinity. Both work by allusion. Both reserve deniability. Both demand response.
Translated to 1800 register, Smith’s line reads: “Mr. Hazony’s principles are Jacobinical.” A Federalist of that era hearing his political identity called Jacobinical treats the charge as an attempt to read him out of the gentleman class, because Jacobinism stands for regicide and the dissolution of the social order in the same way Heidegger stands for Nazism today. The remedy is a letter from seconds. If Smith and Hazony are 1800 men of standing, the letter arrives within the week. Hazony’s seconds demand that Smith specify whether he means Hazony is philosophically tainted or politically tainted. Smith has to choose. If he refuses to choose, the field.
But most affairs of honor in 1800 end short of the field. The negotiation of letters between seconds is the standard finishing move. Smith has several options: clarify that he meant only the lineage of certain ideas and not the moral character of the man, apologize for the awkwardness of the formulation, publish a softer restatement in the same venue. The duel is the worst-case ending and the system is set up so the worst case rarely arrives. The threat of the worst case is what produces the negotiation.
Two things change between 1800 and 2021 that explain why Smith faces no analogous pressure. Personal accountability vanished. A modern professor publishes a sentence about another scholar and risks no personal demand for satisfaction. The reputational stakes still exist, but the personal cost has been outsourced to institutions, and institutions are slow, abstract, and corruptible in ways persons are not. Second, the medium scaled up. In 1800, a published charge traveled at the speed of mail, and the witnesses were a finite circle of gentlemen who knew whether the speaker stood by his words. In 2021, the line sits in a Yale University Press book reviewed by The New York Times and The Washington Post, and the relevant audience is too dispersed for the older accountability to apply.
The rhetorical technique survived the abolition of the duel. The accountability did not. Smith uses an 1800 weapon without the 1800 cost. The Heidegger substitution is the Cooper letter laundered through Yale Press. In the older system, the speaker had to be ready to die for the charge. In the newer system, the speaker has to be ready to give a lecture about the charge.
This may be why honor culture, for all its violence and waste, produced a certain restraint about innuendo. Men did not throw the heavy charge unless they were ready to defend it with their lives. Modern academia keeps the heavy charge and abolishes the defense. The result is more calumny, not less.
I am not neutral here. As soon as I read that line, my body reacted that Steven B. Smith was my enemy. I felt like he was deliberately spitting in my face. Next, I decided that everyone who praises the book is also my enemy.
The line hits a Jewish nationalist with extra force. Hazony is Jewish. I am Jewish. The Heidegger reference is the move calculated to make a Jewish reader flinch in two ways at once, because Heidegger is the philosopher who joined the Nazi Party and the philosopher Jewish thought has been working through for eighty years. To be told that your political coalition’s face is Heidegger is to be told that you have failed at being a Jew at the most basic moral level.
‘Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism’ (1989)
Steven B. Smith’s first book grew from his Chicago dissertation. The argument runs as follows. Classical liberal theory rests on a defective philosophical anthropology, the abstract individual stripped of social and historical context. G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) diagnoses the defect and proposes a richer account. Modern freedom requires concrete ethical life, Sittlichkeit, the lived practices of family, civil society, and the state. Smith reads Hegel as a friend of liberalism reconstructed on better foundations, not its enemy.
The book has three targets. The first is the Marxist appropriation of Hegel, Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968) on one flank and the Frankfurt School on the other. Smith argues Hegel is no proto-Marxist. The second target is the totalitarian caricature of Karl Popper (1902-1994), who lumped Hegel with Plato (c. 428-348 BC) and Karl Marx (1818-1883) as enemies of the open society. Smith argues Hegel is no proto-fascist. The third target, less explicit, is contemporary Rawlsian liberalism, which Smith sees as philosophically thin. The implicit cure: read Hegel, recover Sittlichkeit, and liberal modernity gains a thicker self-understanding.
David Pinsof’s (b. ~1985) misunderstanding essay cuts this project at several points.
The book diagnoses liberalism’s troubles as philosophical inadequacy. Liberal theory misunderstands the self. Liberal practice atomizes citizens. The cure runs through a corrected anthropology. Pinsof responds that liberalism’s atomization is not a philosophical mistake awaiting correction. It is a coalition outcome. The liberal vocabulary of rights-bearing individuals served particular factions in their long fight against throne and altar. It still serves particular factions today. The vocabulary wins not because it is philosophically correct but because it organizes alliances that hold institutional power.
Smith presents three readings of Hegel as competing interpretations needing resolution. Pinsof might respond that each reading served a coalition. Popper’s Hegel served Cold War liberals fighting both fascism and Soviet communism. Kojève’s Hegel served mid-century Parisian Marxists and the post-war French intelligentsia. The communitarian Hegel of Charles Taylor (b. 1931) and others served late twentieth-century theorists who wanted critique of liberal individualism without sliding into socialism. Smith’s Hegel serves yet another coalition: 1980s American liberal academics seeking communitarian leaven without communitarian conclusions, a way to absorb the critiques of Michael Sandel (b. 1953) and Alasdair MacIntyre (b. 1929) while preserving their seat at the Rawlsian table.
None of these readings is innocent of coalition work. The library shelf of Hegel scholarship is a coalition graveyard. Smith adds another stone.
The book flatters its author and audience. By reading Hegel carefully, the political theorist participates in saving liberal modernity from its philosophical deficiencies. The philosopher becomes diagnostician. The patient is liberal modernity, suffering from atomism. The cure is Hegelian Sittlichkeit transmitted through university seminars. Pinsof targets this exact posture. Intellectuals frame political ills as philosophical confusions that intellectuals are uniquely placed to fix. The framing serves the framer by design, and it survives because it pays its proponents in tenure, citations, and the quiet pleasure of feeling indispensable.
Smith’s coalition in 1989 was clear. The University of Chicago Press published him. Yale political science employed him. He worked on a canonical European thinker in a respectable analytical register. The book offended no faction with power to harm him. It pleased the liberal political theorists who wanted communitarian seasoning without communitarian commitments. The truth Pinsof points to, that the whole conversation about liberal foundations is mostly elaborate coalition ritual, might have cost Smith his place in the conversation. He could not say it and remain a respected contributor to it.
Where Smith partly escapes Pinsof. Hegel himself was no naive idealist. Philosophy of Right by G.W.F. Hegel sees the rabble produced by civil society, the unintegrated poor whom commerce creates and cannot absorb. Smith inherits this hardness. He knows liberal modernity has material casualties. He knows ideas track interests. To that extent the book recognizes what Pinsof recognizes. But Smith’s corrective remains philosophical. A better theory of the social self, instantiated in proper institutions, reconciles freedom and belonging. Pinsof’s reply: no theory does that work. The institutions that produced ethical life dissolved because coalitions with no use for them won. No Hegel chapter rebuilds them.
A deeper Pinsofian point about the book’s timing. 1989 was the year liberal democracy declared victory. The Berlin Wall fell that November. Francis Fukuyama (b. 1952) published The End of History? that summer. Smith’s book joined the chorus, in a quieter register: liberal modernity, rightly grounded in Hegelian terms, was the end station. The triumph could now be philosophically secured. Pinsof’s view: 1989 was a coalition outcome, not a philosophical proof. The collapse of Soviet communism opened a window for liberal triumphalism that has since closed. Smith’s Hegelian foundation did not prevent the closure. Coalitions did the work.
Smith might reply that Pinsof’s framework leaves the philosopher nothing to do. The reply has force. If everything is coalition fighting, the philosopher has no station beyond cataloguing the fights. Smith’s book pushes back by treating Hegel’s Sittlichkeit as a serious resource for thinking about freedom under modern conditions. The argument has dignity. It is harder than Pinsof’s blunt instrument allows. The dignity does not protect the book from the social analysis Pinsof offers. The book remains what Pinsof’s framework predicts: a coalition technology in the form of careful scholarship, produced by a man whose career depends on its production, marketed to an audience whose self-respect depends on its consumption.
The honest accounting. Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism is a serious book. It reads Hegel well. It clears away crude caricatures. None of this protects it from Pinsof’s frame. The frame asks why Smith wrote what he wrote, for whom, and what coalition rewarded him for it. The frame asks whether liberal modernity has problems philosophy can fix, or problems no philosophy can fix because the problems are not philosophical. Smith’s book bets on the first answer. Pinsof bets on the second. Thirty-seven years on, the second bet wins.
‘Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity’ (1997)
This is built around a tension the book never quite resolves. Baruch Spinoza was formally excommunicated by the Sephardic community of Amsterdam in July 1656, at the age of twenty-three. The herem was unusually severe in its language and unambiguous in its intent. The community declared that Spinoza was no longer one of theirs. They cursed him by day and by night, forbade his name to be spoken, prohibited contact with him, removed him from their pedagogical and communal life. The institutional act was definitive. Spinoza spent the rest of his life among non-Jewish Dutch philosophers, signed his letters Benedictus rather than Baruch, wrote in Latin, did not return to Jewish observance, did not attend synagogue, did not marry within the community, and showed no public interest in his former Jewish identity.
Against this institutional fact, Smith argues that Spinoza retained a tacit Jewish dimension that secularization did not erase. The argument requires the dimension to survive what looks like an unusually clean break. Stephen Turner’s critique of the tacit lets the reader see why the argument needs the dimension to do extraordinary work and why the work cannot be done.
Turner’s framework distinguishes among three kinds of claim that the language of the tacit might be making. The first claim concerns individual cognitive content: Spinoza personally retained the arguments, problems, references, and modes of reasoning acquired through his Jewish education. This is the uncontroversial reading. Spinoza read Moses Maimonides (1138-1204). He knew the biblical text in Hebrew. He had been formed in a particular pedagogical tradition. The formation left traces. Education leaves traces on everyone educated.
The second claim concerns a collective tacit substrate: Spinoza shared something with other Jews not reducible to what he individually learned. The substrate is supposed to explain the continuity of Jewish thought across thinkers, periods, and contexts. This is the kind of entity Turner has spent his career arguing against. The objection is the standard one. If the substrate is fully tacit, no clear story explains how it gets from one person to another. If it transmits through explicit channels, then it reduces to the first claim and adds nothing.
The third claim concerns retrospective construction: later Jewish thinkers built a tradition that included Spinoza, and the tradition then appears to disclose a substrate that the constructed lineage produced. Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), Leo Strauss, Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), and many others have engaged Spinoza as a problematic but inevitable presence in Jewish thought. The engagement creates the impression of a continuous tradition. The impression is partly the result of the engagement.
Smith oscillates among these three claims without choosing. The oscillation produces the impression of a thicker argument than any of the three might sustain on its own.
Take the first claim alone. If Smith’s thesis is that Spinoza retained content from his Jewish education, the thesis is true but modest. It tells us about Spinoza’s biography. It does not establish a continuing Jewish identity. Spinoza also retained content from his reading of Descartes, from his Dutch philosophical interlocutors, from his Latin schooling under Franciscus van den Enden (1602-1674), from his engagement with Hobbes and the broader European republic of letters. The Jewish content was one input among several. Calling Spinoza Jewish on the basis of this content is like calling him Dutch on the basis of his Dutch education or Cartesian on the basis of his Cartesian training. The inputs shaped him. They did not constitute his identity.
Smith wants more. He wants Spinoza to be Jewish in a stronger sense.
Whatever Spinoza carried, he carried in his head. The contents of his head are in principle accessible through his writings, his correspondence, his recorded conversations. We can ask what he in fact knew, thought, and engaged with. The asking is empirically tractable. The answers do not require a tacit substrate. They require historical scholarship of the kind Spinoza specialists have been pursuing for decades.
The substrate enters when scholars try to say more than the historical scholarship supports. They want to claim that something deeper than individual learning persists. The deeper something has to be either a feature of Spinoza’s individual psychology that the writings do not fully express or a feature of a collective that Spinoza shared with others. The first option faces evidence problems: what is the feature, and how do we identify it without circular reasoning from the conclusion to the evidence? The second option faces the transmission problem.
A second pressure point concerns the question of what makes a theme Jewish. Smith identifies certain themes as Jewish: election, exile, prophecy, law, theological politics. The themes are biblical. The Bible is shared between Jewish and Christian traditions. Protestant Hebraists in the seventeenth century engaged the same themes with comparable seriousness. Grotius wrote on biblical interpretation. John Selden (1584-1654) wrote extensively on Hebrew law. Petrus Cunaeus (1586-1638) wrote on the Hebrew republic. Spinoza’s engagement with biblical themes occurred within a broader Christian Hebraist context, not in isolation from it.
Smith’s framework implies that Spinoza’s engagement was distinctively Jewish in a way that Christian Hebraist engagement was not. The implication requires a criterion. What makes Spinoza’s reading of the Hebrew Bible Jewish? The answer cannot be that Spinoza was born Jewish, because that reduces identity to biology, which Smith explicitly rejects. The answer cannot be that Spinoza approached the texts from within a Jewish framework, because his approach is among the more demystifying in the period and treats Jewish historical claims with critical distance.
Smith’s response is to identify something like a Jewish sensibility or a Jewish horizon within which Spinoza thinks. The horizon is supposed to give the engagement its Jewish character even when the explicit content does not. Turner’s framework presses on the horizon. What kind of object is a horizon? Either it is a metaphor for the content Spinoza personally acquired through his education, or it is a metaphor for something collective he shared with others. The first reduces to the first claim discussed above. The second reintroduces the collective substrate. Neither delivers what Smith wants.
A third pressure point concerns the herem. The excommunication was an institutional act. The community used the social tools available to it to mark Spinoza as outside. Turner’s framework treats such acts with seriousness. Institutions produce identity by inclusion and exclusion. The Sephardic community of Amsterdam included its members through education, ritual, marriage, commerce, and shared participation in communal life. It excluded Spinoza through the formal act of the herem.
After the herem, Spinoza was not included in the institutional practices that produced Jewish identity in his time and place. He did not attend the synagogue. He did not study with rabbis. He did not participate in Jewish commerce. He did not marry into the community. He did not raise children in the tradition. He did not contribute to Jewish institutions. He did not write in Hebrew or Yiddish for a Jewish audience. By the institutional criteria Smith elsewhere accepts as constitutive of identity, Spinoza was no longer Jewish after 1656.
Smith wants to override the institutional criteria with something deeper. The deeper something is the tacit dimension. But the tacit dimension has to do real work to override an explicit institutional severance. Turner’s framework asks for the work. The work cannot be done by appeal to themes shared with Christian Hebraists. It cannot be done by appeal to a sensibility that has no independent specification. It cannot be done by appeal to a collective substrate whose transmission Smith cannot explain.
A fourth pressure point concerns the language choice. Spinoza wrote his major philosophical works in Latin. The choice was not forced. He could have written in Portuguese or Spanish for the Iberian-descended Jewish diaspora. He could have written in Hebrew for a learned Jewish audience. He could have written in Dutch for his immediate context. He chose Latin, the universalist language of European scholarship. The choice signaled an aspiration to address a transnational, transconfessional audience. Latin was the language of Catholic theology, Protestant scholarship, Cartesian philosophy, and the European republic of letters. It was not the language of the Jewish tradition.
The choice has interpretive consequences. Spinoza’s philosophical work was directed to readers who were not Jewish and did not need a Jewish framework to read him. His engagement with the Hebrew Bible was conducted for these readers. His arguments about prophecy, election, and law were arguments his Christian readers could engage on their own terms. The framing was universalist, not particularist.
Smith might argue that the universalist framing reflects a Jewish modernizing aspiration. The argument has some plausibility, but it also has the structure Turner identifies as suspect. Any feature of Spinoza’s work can be read as expressing a Jewish dimension if the dimension is loose enough. Universalist framing becomes Jewish modernizing. Critical engagement with the Bible becomes Jewish critical engagement. Concern with the political organization of religion becomes Jewish theological-political concern. The reading is unfalsifiable because the criterion of Jewishness is whatever Spinoza did. The unfalsifiability is the curator’s tool.
A fifth pressure point concerns Smith’s broader project. The book is part of a larger inquiry into Jewish thinkers and modern liberalism. Smith later wrote on Strauss and other Jewish figures of the twentieth century. The Spinoza book sets up the framework: Jewish thought engages liberalism from within a residual Jewish identity that survives secularization. The framework lets Smith treat Strauss, Berlin, and other Jewish liberals as continuing a tradition that begins, paradoxically, with the excommunicated Spinoza.
Turner’s framework helps see what the larger project requires. It requires a continuous Jewish tradition that includes secular Jewish thinkers. The continuity has to be real enough to support the framing but loose enough to include thinkers who reject Jewish orthodoxy. The tacit dimension is the conceptual device that produces the required continuity. Without the tacit dimension, the tradition fragments into individual thinkers who happen to be Jewish and happen to engage liberal questions. The “Jewish liberal tradition” becomes a curatorial achievement.
The project is not therefore worthless. Curatorial achievements can be illuminating. They group thinkers in ways that produce insight. Smith’s grouping of Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Cohen, Strauss, and Berlin under the rubric of Jewish liberalism allows comparisons that might be missed if the thinkers were treated in isolation. The grouping is productive. What it is not is a discovery of an underlying tradition. It is a construction of one.
A sixth pressure point concerns the postwar American Jewish intellectual context within which Smith writes. The question Smith asks, what survives of Jewishness after religious observance and communal membership weaken, is the question of his milieu. American Jewish intellectuals in the late twentieth century faced this question existentially. They were the children and grandchildren of immigrants who had largely abandoned traditional practice. They wanted to claim a Jewish identity that did not require traditional belief or observance. The “tacit Jewish dimension” is the kind of identity their situation called for: real enough to claim, undefined enough to remain available to those who had given up the specifics.
Smith’s book gives this identity philosophical respectability by finding it already at work in Spinoza. The move serves the milieu. Turner’s framework asks whether the move is also historically accurate. Did Spinoza in fact have what the milieu needs him to have? The historical evidence is thin. Spinoza’s biographers find a man who lived among Dutch philosophers, worked in Latin, ground lenses, declined Jewish reconciliation, and showed no signs of identifying with the community that had excommunicated him. The “Jewish Spinoza” of Smith’s book is partly a Spinoza needed by Smith’s intellectual context.
A seventh pressure point concerns the Marrano background. Spinoza’s family were Portuguese-descended New Christians who had returned to Judaism in Amsterdam. The Marrano experience included several generations of formal Christian practice and only partial knowledge of Jewish tradition. The community’s Jewishness was a reclaimed identity, recovered after the rupture of the Iberian expulsions and forced conversions. Yirmiyahu Yovel (1935-2018) developed influential arguments about Marrano duality, the experience of holding two identities, suspicion of all orthodoxies, and the philosophical productivity of in-between status.
Smith engages this background. Turner’s framework asks what the background contributes to the identity claim. If Spinoza’s Jewishness is a Marrano recovery, partial and contested, then the identity claim becomes doubly fragile. The reader is asked to believe that a community whose own Jewish identity was recently recovered and incompletely transmitted nonetheless transmitted to Spinoza a tacit Jewish dimension robust enough to survive his subsequent severance from the community. The story has more breaks than continuities. The breaks deserve more weight than Smith gives them.
A final note on what Turner’s intervention does not establish. The intervention does not show that Spinoza was uninfluenced by his Jewish education. He clearly was. The intervention does not show that Smith’s book is uninteresting. It is interesting precisely because it raises a hard question. The intervention does not show that Jewish identity is unreal or that Jewish tradition does not exist. Jewish identity and Jewish tradition exist as institutional practices, learned content, and reproduced patterns of life. They do not exist as tacit substrates that survive the breakdown of the practices that produced them.
What the intervention does establish is that Smith’s central claim requires more than the evidence supports. The claim of a tacit Jewish dimension surviving the herem performs work that the dimension cannot sustain. Either the dimension reduces to individual learned content that does not deliver continuing identity, or it requires a collective entity whose transmission Smith cannot specify, or it is a curatorial construct projected backward from later Jewish thought. In each case, the strong identity thesis fails.
The weaker thesis remains available. Spinoza was educated in a particular community. The education left traces. Those traces are part of what made him the philosopher he became. They do not make him a Jewish philosopher in any sense beyond the biographical. They make him a philosopher whose biography included a Jewish phase. The difference is the difference between identity and influence. Turner’s framework asks Smith to choose. The book’s strength comes from refusing to choose. The Turnerian critique suggests that the refusal is what gives the book its persuasive force and what undermines its philosophical defensibility.
Smith’s allies are the East Coast Straussians at elite universities (Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, Thomas Pangle, the late Allan Bloom (1930-1992) tradition softened of its rougher edges), the mainstream Yale humanities, the philosophically literate American Jewish intellectual home that prefers Spinoza over the rabbis, the canonical political philosophy syllabus, and the defenders of liberal democracy as a regime worth keeping. His rivals are the Claremont Straussians, the populist right that read Strauss against the liberal regime, the postmodern theorists who treat the canon as a power play, the Orthodox Jewish traditionalists for whom Spinoza remains under cherem, and the Schmittian anti-liberals like Adrian Vermeule (b. 1968) and Patrick Deneen who read Strauss to undermine the regime Strauss claimed to study. The map is the same one drawn by his book reviews, his interview choices, and his syllabus.
The paper says people pick allies on the basis of similarity, transitivity, and interdependence. Smith’s coalition shows all three. Similarity holds his East Coast Straussian allies together: Yale and Harvard and Toronto and Notre Dame Tocqueville Program faculty share dress, vocabulary, conference circuit, journal preferences (Review of Politics, American Political Science Review, Public Interest in its day). Transitivity holds: his allies’ allies are his allies. He defends the regime that Yale defends, the canon that Mansfield defends, the Spinoza that Jonathan Israel (b. 1946) defends. Interdependence holds: Yale provides salary, status, audience, and protection; the Jewish studies world provides invitations and reviewers; the East Coast Straussian network provides students, citations, and successors. The bundle is held in place by the goods the coalition exchanges.
The paper insists on stochasticity. Small variations in initial conditions snowball into seemingly arbitrary alliance structures. The East Coast / West Coast Straussian split is a textbook case. Strauss had students at Chicago. Some went east toward Cornell, Toronto, Harvard, Yale, and Boston College. Some went west toward Claremont. The split looks like a philosophical disagreement, with the East reading Strauss as a careful friend of philosophy in liberal democracies and the West reading him as a friend of the American founding against modern decline. Pinsof’s paper predicts that such splits track historical accident as much as substance. The Claremont coalition fused with the populist right after 2016. The East Coast coalition distanced itself. Smith sits inside the second coalition, and his Strauss is the Strauss that coalition can use.
Now the propagandistic biases. The paper names three, and Smith’s work shows each.
Perpetrator biases downplay the transgressions of one’s allies. Smith’s Spinoza is the founder of liberal modernity and the herald of Jewish self-emancipation. The Amsterdam community’s view, that Spinoza broke from the Jewish people and earned his cherem, gets framed as a tragedy of misunderstanding. Liberal modernity, in Smith’s Modernity and Its Discontents gets defended against its critics with grace, but the indictments those critics make (that modernity dissolves the homes that gave men meaning, that it produces the deracinated self Charles Taylor (b. 1931) describes) get answered. The transgressions of his coalition, Yale humanism, liberal modernity, post-Orthodox Jewish intellectual life, are minimized. The transgressions of his rivals, Schmitt, Heidegger, the populist right, get full weight.
Victim biases magnify the grievances of one’s allies. Smith’s Strauss is a victim of misreading. Strauss the careful esoteric writer was misunderstood by the West Coasters, by the Shadia Drury-style critics, by the popular press that linked him to the Iraq War. Smith’s books rehabilitate. His Spinoza is a victim of the Amsterdam authorities, a martyr to philosophical freedom. His liberal modernity is a victim of its careless critics. Each victim is on his side of the alliance map.
Attributional biases credit allies for their advantages from internal causes and credit rivals for theirs from external causes. The Yale humanities owe their prestige to merit, to the seriousness of the work done there, to the integrity of the tradition kept alive. The Claremont Institute owes its influence to political opportunism and Trump-era populism, an external accident. The East Coast Straussian success on Ivy League faculties looks like the natural fit of careful thinkers with serious universities; the West Coast presence at conservative think tanks looks like a retreat to friendly territory. The paper predicts this asymmetry. It shows up.
The strange bedfellows pattern. Smith bundles positions that do not have to go together. Defense of liberal modernity sits next to defense of the great books, even though the great books include thinkers who attacked liberal modernity at its root. Defense of Spinoza sits next to public identification as a Jew, even though Spinoza’s Amsterdam community treated those two stances as incompatible. Straussian close reading sits next to mainstream Yale liberal-democratic commitments, even though Strauss read Plato and Maimonides as suspicious of the regime they served. The bundle does not cohere on philosophical grounds. It coheres because the coalition coheres. The pro-life evangelical / wealthy libertarian Republican bundle the paper cites does not cohere either, and the East Coast Straussian / Yale humanist / Spinoza-as-Jewish-hero bundle is a bundle of the same kind, just with a different membership.
Now the rival theories the paper takes down, applied to Smith.
Intolerance Theory says conservatives are more hostile to outgroups than liberals. Applied to Smith, the parallel claim might run: Smith, a moderate liberal academic, is more tolerant of diverse views than a Claremont counterpart. The paper’s evidence cuts against this. Liberals show equal hostility to their rivals as conservatives do to theirs. Smith’s engagement with Vermeule, with Deneen, with Yoram Hazony (b. 1964), with the Claremont readers of Strauss, would test the claim. The honest description is that he engages his allies with care and his rivals with distance, and the line tracks the alliance map, not a general tolerance disposition.
Authoritarianism Theory says conservatives respect authority more. The paper notes that respect for authority tracks the authority figure in question, not authority in general. Smith respects the authority of Yale, of peer review at Cambridge and Princeton presses, of his own teachers and their teachers, of the canon as transmitted by his coalition. He does not respect the authority of Claremont, of populist think tanks, of integralist Catholic intellectuals, of Orthodox rabbinic authorities on Spinoza. His pattern of respect matches alliance, not a general disposition.
Egalitarianism Theory says liberals support equality as a moral principle. The paper’s longitudinal evidence (Goren 2005) shows party identification predicts subsequent egalitarianism rather than the other way around. Smith’s egalitarianism is selective in the way the paper predicts. He defends the equality of Jews to participate in liberal modernity, the equality of Spinoza to sit on the philosophical canon, the equality of the East Coast Straussian reading to sit on the same shelf as Rawls. He does not extend the same egalitarian generosity to the Claremont reading, to the integralist reading, to the populist reading. The principle tracks the coalition.
Smith’s intellectual life looks like the life of a man who trusts his coalition’s side of the story. He reads Strauss the way his coalition reads Strauss. He reads Spinoza the way his coalition reads Spinoza. He defends modernity the way his coalition defends modernity. The paper says this is what coalition membership looks like from inside, and what it looks like from outside is precisely what Smith’s bibliography shows. The bundle is the loyalty. The loyalty is the bundle.
Who provides Smith status, income, and protection? Yale, the political theory profession, mainstream university presses, Jewish studies institutions, the Phi Beta Kappa kind of recognition his Emerson Prize represents. He directed Judaic Studies. He sat as a residential college master for fifteen years. His career runs through institutions that reward a moderate, accessible, canon-defending humanist who poses no threat to the elite university.
Who does he risk angering by speaking plainly? Two groups at once. If he leans too far toward Strauss-as-anti-liberal, he angers his Yale colleagues and the liberal mainstream that grants him standing. If he leans too far toward defending the elite university and its progressive turn, he angers the conservative readers and donors who keep East Coast Straussianism alive as a counterweight inside the academy. The bundle he carries holds these tensions inside a moderate package. Speaking plainly on either side breaks it.
Who benefits if his framing wins? Yale humanism benefits, because Smith’s framing keeps the canon teachable and Strauss respectable without conceding anything to the populist right. The East Coast Straussian project benefits, because Smith’s success at Yale shows the project belongs at elite universities. Mainstream American Jewish self-understanding benefits, because Spinoza-as-forefather gives a liberal, philosophically literate, post-Orthodox Jewish identity a usable past. The Claremont coalition does not benefit.
What truths might cost him his position? That Strauss was a deeper critic of liberal modernity than the East Coast reading allows, and that Smith’s accessible Strauss softens an edge Strauss put there on purpose. That Spinoza’s break from Judaism was a break and that the Amsterdam community read him correctly. That the East Coast/West Coast Straussian split looks less like a disagreement over Strauss and more like two coalitions choosing different host institutions, with the philosophical differences following from the choice. That defending liberal modernity from a Straussian platform requires a flattening of Strauss the platform cannot quite acknowledge. None of these claims are easy to defend at Yale. Each carries a cost.
The bundle holds because the cost of breaking it runs high. Smith might privately think Strauss meant more by his critique of modernity than the East Coast reading admits. He might privately think Spinoza was harder on Judaism than his book suggests. Pinsof’s account does not require him to be a hypocrite. The point is softer. The bundle a man carries shapes what he can see, what he can say, and what he can publish. Smith reads Strauss and Spinoza from inside a coalition position, and the readings the coalition rewards come out of his keyboard.
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
If Mearsheimer is right, Smith’s project rests on an anthropology that does not describe the creature it claims to describe. Mearsheimer makes three claims: man is social from start to finish, not atomistic; man is born into a group that shapes him before he can think for himself; reason is the least of the three forces that fix preferences, behind socialization and inborn sentiment. Smith builds on the opposite picture. The implications run deep.
Take Smith’s defense of liberal modernity first. Liberalism rests on the individual as the locus of rights and the reasoner as the agent of political life. Smith defends this picture in the great-books register, treating Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Kant, and Mill as a sequence of arguments that produce liberal political order. If Mearsheimer is right, Smith answers liberalism’s critics on philosophical grounds while accepting an anthropology those critics reject. The defense holds inside the seminar room. It lands on softer ground in the world Mearsheimer describes, where the home, the church, the tribe, and the nation form the man long before any philosophy reaches him.
The Spinoza story collapses next. Smith’s Spinoza walks out of the Amsterdam synagogue and opens a path for the modern Jew to be a Jew and a free thinker at once. Mearsheimer’s anthropology predicts that Spinoza could not walk out. He was a Jew of Amsterdam, formed by that community before he could philosophize about it. His writing presumes Jewish readers, Jewish quarrels, Jewish concepts of revelation and law even where he turns those concepts against the tradition. The cherem was not arbitrary cruelty. It was tribal accuracy. The community saw the bond breaking and acted to protect itself. After the cherem Spinoza lived at the margin, ground lenses, died at forty-four. Smith reads this as the tragedy of a modernity not yet ready for its herald. Mearsheimer might read it as the tribal verdict catching up with a man who underestimated his own embeddedness. Spinoza-as-liberal-hero requires the autonomous individual the anthropology rules out.
The Strauss reading thins. Strauss thought philosophy and the city stood in tension. He thought the philosopher had to hide his thoughts from the city to survive. Smith softens this to a productive tension that liberal democracy permits. Mearsheimer’s anthropology sharpens it back. The city has prior claim on its members. The philosopher who breaks the bond gets cast out or shut up. Liberal democracy does not abolish the tension. It papers it over with prosperity and procedural rights for a stretch of decades. When the prosperity recedes and the rights start asking the city for things the city did not consent to, the tension returns. Smith’s Strauss is the Strauss compatible with a liberal regime that the anthropology says is unstable. The flatter Strauss the East Coast school produced cannot survive Mearsheimer’s premises.
The reflexive cut comes next. Smith treats his liberal commitments as reasoned conclusions earned by reading the canon with care. Mearsheimer says reason is the least of the three forces. If Mearsheimer is right, Smith’s commitments are products of his socialization (Chattanooga, Durham, Chicago, Yale, the postwar American Jewish academic home) and his innate sentiments before they are products of his philosophical reasoning. He produces philosophy to defend conclusions his formation already supplied. This does not make him dishonest. It makes him human in Mearsheimer’s sense. It does cut against the picture of himself he offers in his books, where engagement with great texts yields his political stance. On Mearsheimer’s anthropology the order runs the other direction: the stance is upstream, the reasoning is the defense.
Smith has already half-conceded the point. Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes reaches for civic attachment, shared memory, and devotion to the regime as conditions of liberal survival. Pure liberal individualism, he sees, cannot hold a country together against populist tribal patriotism on the right or rootless cosmopolitanism on the left. He borrows from the anthropology he otherwise opposes. The patriotism book sits uneasily next to the Spinoza book. The Spinoza book treats the man’s exit from his tradition as the founding gesture of modern freedom. The patriotism book treats attachment to one’s tradition as the precondition of liberal survival. Mearsheimer’s view says you cannot have both at once. Smith’s coalition asks for both.
The Jewish liberal home Smith inhabits sits on the same fault line. American Jewish liberal intellectual life built itself on the premise that a Jew can be fully Jewish and fully American, with liberal individualism holding both together. Mearsheimer’s anthropology says the premise is fragile. Tribal attachment runs deep. When the American Jewish community comes under pressure, from anti-Israel sentiment on the campus left, from anti-Jewish currents on the populist right, from the post-October-7 realignments, the liberal synthesis is the first thing to bend. Smith’s project assumed the synthesis. Mearsheimer’s anthropology predicted the strain. Yoram Hazony’s alternative, the Jews as a people, the nation as the home of meaning, becomes more legible the more Mearsheimer’s anthropology proves out. Smith’s bundle needs the liberal premise.
The pedagogy looks different now. Smith taught political philosophy at Yale and through OpenYale to a generation of educated American liberals. He framed the course as reading the great books to think more carefully about politics. If Mearsheimer is right, the course did something else as well, perhaps more powerfully. It inducted students into the East Coast Straussian / Yale humanist coalition. The reading served as the membership ritual. The students left with the bundle the coalition holds, not because they reasoned their way to it but because they were socialized into it during the long undergraduate childhood Mearsheimer describes. The pedagogy works. It just works the way Mearsheimer says human formation works, not the way Smith’s course advertises.
Smith rejects Carl Schmitt’s friend-and-enemy account of the political. Mearsheimer’s anthropology lets Schmitt back in through a different door. If man is tribal first, friend-and-enemy is closer to how politics moves than the liberal-procedural picture Smith defends. The right-wing readers of Strauss who took Schmitt seriously (Adrian Vermeule, Hazony, some of the Catholic integralists) sit on firmer anthropological ground than Smith does, whatever one thinks of where their politics goes. Smith might still oppose them on prudential or moral grounds. He cannot oppose them on the ground that they have misread human nature, because on Mearsheimer’s view they have not.
Smith’s body of work defends a regime built on a model of man Mearsheimer rejects as a fantasy. The defense is graceful and the books are good. They might also be answering questions on terms the deeper anthropology rules out. Reading Smith after reading Mearsheimer is reading the work of a serious man holding a position the ground beneath has shifted under. The shift was always there. Samuel Moyn (b. 1972) and others have charted the recent visibility of it. Mearsheimer states it plainly. If he is right, Smith’s project sits in the awkward space where a fine house was built on a slope no one quite measured.
‘Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism’ (2008)
Stephen Turner developed his critique of the tacit across three decades, beginning with The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions (1994), continuing through Brains/Practices/Relativism: Social Theory after Cognitive Science (2002), and arriving at Understanding the Tacit (2014). The critique provides analytical purchase on Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism. The point of contact lies in how Smith reconstructs Leo Strauss (1899-1973) as a friend of liberal democracy, and in how that reconstruction depends on interpretive procedures that resist explicit codification.
Turner’s argument moves along a narrow front. He attacks a family of theories that posit shared tacit elements as the substrate of intellectual life. Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) offered the classic formulation in Personal Knowledge (1958), proposing that scientific competence rests on inarticulable skills passed through apprenticeship. Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) extended a related idea to scientific revolutions through paradigms that include tacit components. Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) developed habitus as embodied disposition, acquired through socialization, governing perception and judgment below the level of conscious rule-following. Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025) built tradition-constituted inquiry around the claim that rational standards remain internal to communities of practice. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) made prejudice and tradition the conditions of understanding.
Turner’s response across these positions remains consistent. In Understanding the Tacit, he distinguishes Tacit One from Tacit Two. Tacit One names the Polanyian phenomenon of individual embodied skill, the kind of knowing-how that the bearer cannot fully articulate but performs reliably. Tacit Two names the postulated collective implicit framework: the paradigm, habitus, or tradition supposedly shared among members of a community and supposedly explanatory of their convergent judgments. Turner accepts Tacit One as a legitimate psychological category. He treats Tacit Two as a confusion. The confusion arises because theorists move from the observation that individuals possess inarticulable competences to the claim that groups possess shared inarticulable competences, and the second claim does not follow from the first.
The decisive argument concerns transmission. If a practice is fully tacit, no clear story explains how it moves from one head to another. If it transmits through explicit instruction, demonstration, or correction, then it is not tacit in the strong sense. Turner calls this the no-transmission problem, and he treats it as fatal to strong practice theory. What appears to be a shared tacit framework dissolves on inspection into convergent individual habits, each acquired through a similar history of training, each operating within a single cognitive system. The collective object that practice theorists invoke does not exist as a causal entity. It exists as an interpretive shorthand for patterns of individual behavior that have similar causes.
This sounds like a technical dispute in social theory. Turner draws out the sociological payoff. Appeals to the tacit license a particular kind of authority. They allow a community to claim that proper judgment in some domain depends on acquired competence that outsiders lack and cannot easily acquire. The tacit functions as a credential that resists external audit. When a community defines competence through tacit standards, dissent from the community’s judgments can be reclassified as failure of competence. The critic does not disagree; the critic does not yet see. Turner traces this move through Kuhn’s reception in philosophy of science, through the Bourdieusian sociology of education, and through the Polanyi tradition. He develops the political implications further in The Politics of Expertise where he argues that liberal democracies face a recurring difficulty in incorporating expert judgment without surrendering political authority to communities whose standards of competence resist public examination.
Smith’s Reading Leo Strauss reads differently once the Turner apparatus comes into view.
The book appeared at a moment of acute jurisdictional pressure. The Iraq War years saw Straussianism become a target of public criticism. Journalists and political commentators drew lines from Strauss through his students to the architects of the war and to a posture of elite manipulation. Anne Norton (b. 1954) published Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire by Anne Norton (2004). Earl Shorris (1936-2012) wrote an attack in Harper’s. Shadia Drury (b. 1950), in work begun earlier and extended through this period, argued that Strauss taught a doctrine of noble lies and elite rule. The charge that Strauss was a covert anti-democrat and the source of a manipulative political school entered mainstream commentary.
Smith argues that Strauss defends liberal democracy on philosophical grounds, that his critique of relativism and historicism strengthens the liberal regime, and that the charges of esoteric authoritarianism rest on misreading. Smith presents Strauss as a moderate, a friend of constitutional government, a thinker whose recovery of classical political philosophy serves democratic self-understanding.
Smith does not refute the political critics through a frontal engagement with their claims. He does something different. He models a way of reading Strauss that produces the moderate, liberal-democratic conclusion. The book teaches the reader how to read. It demonstrates a competence. The reader who follows Smith into the texts learns to see irony where the political critics see endorsement, to find restraint where they find subversion, to register the distinction between Strauss’s voice and the voices of the ancient authors he expounds.
The Turnerian question follows. What are the criteria of competent reading?
Smith offers some explicit guidance: attention to context, sensitivity to Strauss’s distinction between exoteric and esoteric writing, awareness of the philosophical questions Strauss inherits from Plato (c. 428-348 BCE) and Aristotle (384-322 BCE), patience with apparent contradictions. These criteria are real. They give the reader something to work with. They do not, however, generate Smith’s interpretive conclusions algorithmically. Two readers might apply the same criteria and arrive at different judgments about where Strauss’s irony falls, which contradictions resolve in favor of which side, what Strauss endorses, and what he merely reports.
The gap between explicit criteria and final judgment gets filled by something else. That something else is what Smith and other senior interpreters bring to the text: a trained sensibility, a feel for Strauss’s voice, a sense of which readings count as serious and which as crude. Smith does not claim this trained sensibility is mysterious. He treats it as the ordinary work of careful scholarship. Turner’s point is that this ordinary work has a structure, and the structure carries consequences.
The structure assigns interpretive authority to those who have done the training. Junior scholars learn to read Strauss by reading him under the guidance of teachers who already know what counts as a serious reading. The student who produces the approved kind of reading earns recognition as a careful reader. The student who produces an unapproved reading might be told that he has not yet grasped Strauss’s method, that he reads too literally, that he misses the irony, that his interpretation falls into vulgarity. The corrective is not a counter-argument at the level of textual evidence. The corrective is a judgment about competence.
Turner identifies this pattern in his analyses of scientific communities, but he treats it as a general feature of intellectual schools. Communities that organize themselves around interpretive practice tend to evolve standards that combine explicit criteria with tacit judgment. The combination remains stable because the explicit criteria license the appearance of objectivity while the tacit judgment retains the power of final assessment. A school can always say to a critic: you applied the criteria but you applied them poorly.
A further wrinkle deserves attention. Strauss’s most famous interpretive doctrine, developed in Persecution and the Art of Writing by Leo Strauss (1952), is itself a thesis about tacit communication. Strauss argues that philosophers under political pressure write in two registers, an exoteric surface for the many and an esoteric depth for the few. Reading Strauss therefore requires a competence in detecting esoteric signaling: contradictions, omissions, deliberate errors, suggestive juxtapositions. The doctrine builds tacit competence into the object of study. To read Strauss correctly, one must read him as a thinker who writes esoterically, and esoteric reading is itself a tacit skill.
This produces a recursive structure that Turner’s apparatus illuminates. The competence Smith displays is competence in detecting esoteric meaning. The criteria for that competence resist full codification by design. Strauss’s own doctrine forbids the reduction of esoteric reading to an explicit method, since an explicit method would make esoteric writing pointless. The school inherits an interpretive practice that builds in resistance to external audit. When Smith reads Strauss as a liberal democrat, he applies a competence whose standards live within the school. When critics read Strauss as an anti-democrat, the school can respond that they have read at the exoteric level only, that they have missed the deeper teaching. The doctrine guarantees that disagreement looks like incompetence.
Turner does not need to engage Strauss’s doctrine on its own terms to make the sociological point. The point is that any interpretive practice that licenses such asymmetric responses to critics has the social properties Turner attributes to strong appeals to the tacit. The license might be deserved on textual grounds. Some authors really do write esoterically, and competent reading really does require trained sensibility. Turner asks only that the deservedness be assessable. A community that resolves the assessability question by appeal to its own competence has constructed the kind of closed circle Turner spent a career describing.
This pattern explains a feature of the post-Iraq controversy that puzzled observers. The Straussian community did not respond to the political critics by point-by-point refutation. Smith’s book exemplifies the broader strategy: reconstruct Strauss in a register the critics do not occupy. Smith addresses the academic political theorist, the reader of the Cambridge Companion series, the graduate student in political philosophy. The political critics are not so much answered as bypassed. Their authority to judge gets challenged at the level of training and method rather than at the level of evidence.
The bypass works because the academic register operates within an institutional jurisdiction that the political critics cannot enter. Smith holds a chair at Yale. He publishes with a university press. He writes within the genre conventions of academic political philosophy. Norton and Drury also hold academic positions, but their interventions on Strauss enter a different jurisdictional space: they make claims about Strauss’s political effects, about American foreign policy, about the genealogy of neoconservatism. Smith’s book stays within textual interpretation, philosophical history, and the canon of liberal political thought. The two genres do not meet on common ground.
Turner’s framework illuminates how interpretive communities reproduce themselves under pressure, what kinds of authority their members deploy, and why certain disputes prove resistant to resolution. Smith might be correct that Strauss reads as a friend of liberal democracy. The Turnerian question concerns what makes that reading authoritative and what makes the contrary reading appear incompetent.
The answer lies in the combination Turner diagnosed. Explicit criteria do part of the work: Smith gives reasons, cites passages, traces arguments. Tacit competence does the rest: the reader who follows Smith comes to share a feel for the texts that aligns with Smith’s conclusions. The training and the conclusions reinforce each other. A reader who completes the training and arrives at different conclusions is rare, and the rarity gets read as evidence of the training’s success rather than as evidence of its circularity.
Turner’s sharper criticism arrives at this point. He argues that appeals to tacit competence often substitute for the public defense of contested judgments. A community defends its interpretive practice by pointing to its competent members and the consensus they have reached. The consensus rests on the practice. The practice produces the competent members. The circle closes. Turner does not claim such circles are unique to the humanities. He finds them in scientific communities, in legal communities, in religious communities. He claims that recognizing the circle should change how outsiders weigh the community’s claims to special authority.
For Reading Leo Strauss, this means the book’s success at calming the post-Iraq controversy within the academy depended on a kind of authority Turner finds suspicious. The political critics held a weaker form of credential. They could read Strauss, they could quote him, they could trace his influence, but they did not hold the chair at Yale or write for the Cambridge series. Smith’s book did not need to refute their evidence to displace their interpretive claims. It needed only to model a competent reading and let the academic jurisdiction do the rest.
A few qualifications deserve note. Turner does not advocate epistemic populism. He does not hold that academic credentials lack value or that journalists read Strauss as well as Yale professors. His critique targets a particular structure of authority, not the general institution of expertise. He develops a more positive account of expert legitimacy in The Politics of Expertise, where he argues that liberal democracies need ways to incorporate expert judgment without surrendering political authority to experts. The critique of the tacit fits within that broader project: it asks expert communities to defend their judgments in terms that allow external assessment, even when full transparency proves impossible.
Smith’s book withstands a Turnerian audit better than some alternatives in the Straussian literature. Smith gives reasons. He cites passages. He engages texts directly. He does not retreat into pure invocations of esoteric reading. His Strauss reads as a thinker with arguments, not a sphinx whose meaning only initiates can decode. The Turnerian critique applies to a tendency in the book, not to the book’s entire method. Where Smith argues, he opens his reading to assessment. Where he models a sensibility, he exercises an authority Turner asks the reader to examine.
The deeper question concerns what kind of intellectual community Straussianism is and what kind of community Smith’s book helps reproduce. Turner offers no formula for this assessment. He offers tools: the no-transmission problem, the reduction of Tacit Two to convergent Tacit One, the analysis of tacit competence as boundary practice, the attention to jurisdictional pressure. Applied to Reading Leo Strauss, these tools yield a reading of the book as institutional repair work. The book restores the Straussian school’s claim to interpretive jurisdiction over its own founder at a moment when that jurisdiction faced public challenge.
Whether the restoration was warranted on the textual evidence is a separate question. Turner’s framework brackets that question. It asks instead how the restoration was accomplished, what kind of authority it deployed, and what the deployment reveals about the community that needed the repair. The Turnerian reading does not settle the dispute between Smith and his critics. It changes the terms within which the dispute can be assessed, by showing how the apparent neutrality of academic interpretation rests on practices that allocate authority in particular ways.
‘Modernity and Its Discontents: Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow’ (2016)
Steven B. Smith attempts historiography of a sort Stephen Turner’s body of work treats with consistent suspicion. The book offers modernity as a sensibility, a state of mind, a temperament traceable from Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) through Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), and Saul Bellow (1915-2005). The argument rests on the reader’s capacity to perceive a family resemblance across five centuries of writing. Turner’s critique of the tacit puts pressure on the perception.
The pressure comes at a precise point. Smith locates modernity in something internal: a mood, a disposition, a recurring set of psychological tensions. This is not modernity as the rise of capitalism, the spread of bureaucracy, the consolidation of nation-states, the disenchantment of nature, or the secularization of public life. Smith acknowledges these phenomena but treats them as backdrop. The foreground is a sensibility. The sensibility runs across centuries and unites thinkers whose explicit positions diverge sharply. To see modernity, on Smith’s account, is to see this sensibility recur.
Turner’s question to such accounts has remained consistent across his career. What kind of object is a sensibility shared across centuries? Two answers seem available. The first treats the sensibility as a psychological phenomenon occurring in individuals, recurring in different individuals at different times, and resembling itself across instances. The second treats the sensibility as a collective phenomenon, transmitted somehow from generation to generation, sustained by something more than the contingent overlap of individual psychologies. Smith oscillates between these answers without choosing.
The oscillation has consequences. If the sensibility is purely individual, recurring through coincidence or through the action of similar conditions on similar minds, then the lineage Smith traces holds only the explanatory force of an interesting pattern. Machiavelli and Bellow might both express a certain restlessness, but the restlessness need not be the same restlessness. It might be two restlessnesses, occurring in different historical conditions, resembling each other at a level of description high enough to subsume them. If the sensibility is collective, transmitted across generations, then we owe an account of the transmission. How does a state of mind propagate from sixteenth-century Florence to twentieth-century Chicago? Books play a role, but books transmit arguments, claims, images, examples. The transmission of a sensibility through books requires that readers acquire the sensibility from reading, and the acquisition story is what Turner spent decades demanding from practice theorists.
Turner’s response in The Social Theory of Practices was to deny that the second answer can be made to work. Collective sensibilities, paradigms, habitus, and traditions all face the same difficulty. Either they reduce to convergent individual habits that have similar causes, or they require a transmission story that no proponent has supplied. Polanyi’s appeal to apprenticeship gestures toward such a story but does not deliver it. Bourdieu’s appeal to socialization gestures similarly. Neither account specifies how the inarticulable content moves from one head to another. The content has to be in heads to do the explanatory work attributed to it. Heads acquire content through processes describable at the individual level. Once that work has been done, the collective entity drops out as a needless addition.
Apply this to Smith. The modern sensibility, on Turner’s framework, reduces to a set of individual psychological dispositions held by different people at different times. The dispositions might converge in interesting ways. Various features of early modern political life might produce similar anxieties in those who reflect on them. Various features of twentieth-century life might produce comparable anxieties in their reflective inhabitants. The similarities are real. They do not require a continuous sensibility connecting the centuries. They require only that similar conditions sometimes produce similar reflective responses.
Smith’s lineage, then, performs work the lineage obscures. It presents convergence as continuity. The selection of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Berlin, and Bellow appears as if these figures formed a chain. The chain image carries an implicit causal claim. Earlier figures pass something on, later figures receive it, the inheritance constitutes the tradition. But the actual causal story, when one traces it, fragments. Spinoza read Hobbes and Machiavelli. Rousseau read Hobbes critically. Tocqueville read Rousseau and Montesquieu (1689-1755) and many others. Berlin read Tocqueville and the rest of the canon. Bellow read whom he read. The reading happened. What got transmitted through the reading was specific content, specific arguments, specific images. Smith’s account abstracts from this content to a sensibility, and the abstraction is the curator’s work.
A second pressure point concerns the direction of inference. Smith builds his lineage by working from a settled conception of modernity backward. He has Bellow’s twentieth-century version. He reads Berlin’s mid-century version as continuous with Bellow’s. He reads Tocqueville’s nineteenth-century version as anticipatory. He locates seeds in Rousseau, Spinoza, Hobbes, and finally Machiavelli. The procedure makes the lineage look continuous because each step has been selected for its continuity with the next. The discontinuities, the figures who do not fit, drop out before the lineage forms.
Turner identifies this procedure in many places. He treats it as a structural feature of how traditions get constructed. The curator starts from a present commitment, selects past figures by their resemblance to the commitment, presents the resulting sequence as a discovered lineage, and then uses the lineage to authorize the present commitment. The circularity stays invisible because the curator’s labor disappears into the result. The reader encounters the lineage as a given, not as a construction.
For Smith, the present commitment is a particular vision of modernity as bourgeois sensibility under strain. The vision derives from his own training, primarily the Straussian tradition of political philosophy in which Smith was educated and within which he has worked at Yale. Joseph Cropsey (1919-2012) and Leo Strauss assembled History of Political Philosophy edited by Strauss and Cropsey (1963), a textbook that organized political thought into a sequence running from antiquity through the moderns. The textbook taught generations of political theorists to read modernity as the work of a sequence of major figures whose problems and solutions defined the modern condition. Modernity and Its Discontents extends this pedagogy. Smith’s lineage substantially overlaps with the modern half of the Strauss-Cropsey volume. The continuity is not coincidental. Smith inherits a curated tradition and extends it.
Turner’s point cuts both ways here. The Strauss-Cropsey volume did curatorial work that has shaped how political theorists perceive modernity. Smith’s book inherits and extends that perception. Readers trained within this pedagogical tradition recognize Smith’s modernity as natural because they have been trained to recognize it. Readers trained within different traditions, Marxist or Weberian or Foucauldian, might find Smith’s modernity strange. The naturalness is local to a particular interpretive community.
A third pressure point concerns the specific category Smith uses to define modernity: sensibility, mood, state of mind. The category does work. Other categories might have organized the same materials differently. If modernity is defined by institutional transformation, the lineage runs through Jean Bodin (1530-1596), Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), the rise of administrative kingship, the development of international law, the consolidation of bureaucratic states. If defined by epistemic change, the lineage runs through Francis Bacon (1561-1626), René Descartes (1596-1650), Isaac Newton (1642-1727), John Locke (1632-1704), the development of modern science and its philosophical reception. If defined by economic transformation, the lineage runs through Adam Smith (1723-1790), David Ricardo (1772-1823), Karl Marx (1818-1883), Max Weber (1864-1920). Each lineage selects different figures, draws different connections, identifies different problems as definitive.
Smith chooses the sensibility lineage. The choice is not neutral. Sensibility is a category that suits literary reading. It can be detected in the tone of a text, in the rhetoric, in the moods the writing produces or expresses. A political theorist trained in close reading of canonical texts will be especially well-equipped to track sensibility. The category plays to the strengths of the academic tradition Smith inhabits. Other categories might play to other strengths and might require other expertises. The choice of sensibility as the defining category aligns the question of modernity with the kind of expertise Smith and his readers possess.
Turner recognizes this alignment as a recurring feature of how disciplines secure their authority. A discipline defines its object such that the methods it possesses are the methods needed to study the object. Other definitions, requiring other methods, get treated as missing the essential. The “real” modernity, on this view, is the modernity available to literary-political reading. Other modernities are derivative, surface phenomena, the institutional or economic clothing on the sensibility underneath.
A fourth pressure point concerns the endpoint. Smith ends with Bellow. The endpoint is not arbitrary. It performs work in stabilizing what counts as modernity. Bellow was a postwar American novelist of a particular stamp. He wrote about Jewish American intellectual life, about urban experience, about midcentury academic culture, about the discontents of a specific bourgeois social formation. His sensibility was the sensibility of one milieu. By placing Bellow as the culmination of the modern lineage, Smith implicitly identifies modernity with what Bellow’s writing expresses. Other endpoints might yield other modernities. If Smith had ended with Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), modernity might look more Germanic, more philosophical, more concerned with technology and being. If he had ended with Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), modernity might look more political, more concerned with totalitarianism and public life. If with Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) or Doris Lessing (1919-2013), modernity might look more gendered, more concerned with confinement and emergence. Bellow is a particular endpoint. He stabilizes a particular vision.
The selection of Bellow also reveals the milieu Smith addresses. Bellow is canonical in American liberal humanist circles, especially Jewish American intellectual circles in which Yale political philosophy participates. Bellow has been an object of admiration and emulation in this milieu since at least the 1960s. To end modernity with Bellow is to address an audience that recognizes Bellow’s significance, that reads Bellow as a representative figure, that finds in Bellow’s prose a register resonant with its own self-understanding. Turner’s point is not that this audience errs in finding such resonance. The point is that the resonance is local to the audience, and the universalization of the resonance into “the modern sensibility” performs an institutional task.
A fifth pressure point concerns the framing as “discontents.” Why discontents? The choice carries weight. Modernity might be framed as a series of achievements, a sequence of stabilizations, a set of solutions to recurring problems. Smith frames it instead as a sequence of dissatisfactions, restlessnesses, anxieties. The framing aligns with a particular reading of modernity as a project that perpetually fails to settle, that produces its own critics, that contains an irreducible discontent at its core.
Turner notes elsewhere that such framings tend to be self-confirming. If one looks for discontents, one finds them, since any sufficiently complex thinker produces material that can be read as discontent. The category licenses selective reading. Hobbes’s anxieties about civil war count as modern discontent. Hobbes’s confidence in the absolute sovereign as solution gets bracketed. Rousseau’s critique of civilization counts as discontent. Rousseau’s positive vision of the general will gets bracketed. Smith reads each figure for what fits the frame. The frame survives because it has filtered the evidence.
This procedure is not unique to Smith. Turner identifies it as a feature of intellectual history written in the genealogical mode. The genealogist selects past figures by their service to a present argument. The selection produces the lineage. The lineage authorizes the present argument. The argument was already in the genealogist’s mind before the lineage formed. The lineage projects the argument backward in time.
A sixth pressure point concerns the apparent unity of the bourgeois category that organizes the book. Smith’s subtitle promises a story of “making and unmaking the bourgeois.” The bourgeois is a contested category. In Marx, it names a specific class with specific economic relations to the means of production. In Weber, it overlaps with discussions of rationalization and the Protestant ethic. In Georg Simmel (1858-1918), it appears in analyses of money and metropolitan life. In Tocqueville, it appears under the heading of democratic equality. In Bellow, it names a postwar American social type. The category travels through different theoretical frameworks, changing as it travels.
Smith’s book treats the bourgeois as a character type whose features remain stable enough to be tracked across centuries. The treatment requires substantial abstraction from the different theoretical commitments that the bourgeois has carried in different bodies of work. Turner’s framework points to this abstraction as the curator’s work. The unified bourgeois is not given. Smith constructs it by selecting features that recur, or can be made to recur, across different uses of the term and ignoring features that do not. The bourgeois of Modernity and Its Discontents is a curatorial achievement, not an inherited concept.
The cumulative effect of these pressure points is not to refute Smith. Turner’s apparatus rarely refutes. It illuminates the kind of work a text performs alongside the work the text claims to perform. Modernity and Its Discontents claims to identify and trace a sensibility. The Turnerian reading suggests that the book constructs the sensibility through curatorial selection and presents the construction as discovery. The book teaches readers to perceive modernity in the way Smith perceives it, and the perception then appears to confirm the underlying historical claim.
A final note about what Turner’s framework does not say. Turner does not hold that curatorial labor is illegitimate. Intellectual history requires selection. Every account of a period must choose figures, themes, and connections. The choice is not optional. Turner’s point concerns the relationship between the curator’s labor and the apparent givenness of the result. Curators who acknowledge their selections can be assessed on the merits of their selections. Curators who present their constructions as discoveries hide the assessment criteria. The reader cannot easily ask whether the selection was apt because the selection appears as nature rather than as choice.
Smith’s book operates closer to the second mode than to the first. The lineage from Machiavelli to Bellow appears as if it had historical inevitability. The sensibility appears as if it had been there all along, waiting to be recognized. The reader receives an invitation to recognize rather than to assess. Turner’s framework asks for assessment. It asks what Smith selected, what he excluded, what alternative lineages might have been built from adjacent materials, what work the “sensibility” category does that other categories might not do. Asked these questions, the book becomes harder to take at its self-presentation.
The harder reading does not diminish the book’s achievement. It changes what the achievement consists in. Smith has produced a powerful curatorial argument for a particular vision of modernity. The vision serves certain pedagogical and intellectual purposes, especially within the postwar liberal humanist tradition Smith inherits and extends. The vision does not, in Turner’s terms, uncover a hidden tacit substrate. It produces a coherent picture from selected materials and offers the picture for the reader’s recognition. Whether the recognition feels natural depends on whether the reader’s training has prepared him to perceive what Smith has assembled. Turner’s contribution is to ask why naturalness should be the criterion of intellectual history, and what gets concealed when it is.
‘Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes’ (2021)
Steven B. Smith’s book opens with a verb that carries assumptions: reclaim. To reclaim is to recover something previously possessed and now lost. The verb commits Smith to a temporal narrative. There was once a patriotism that worked. It has been damaged or abandoned. Recovery is possible. Stephen Turner’s critique of the tacit puts pressure on each step of this narrative.
The damage diagnosis structures the book. Smith identifies two enemies: a strident nationalism on the right and an indifferent cosmopolitanism on the left. Between them sits a constitutional patriotism that Smith locates in the founders, in Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) and his revision of the founders, in the civil rights movement’s revision of Lincoln, and in a pedagogical tradition running through American secondary and higher education. The patriotism is thicker than mere allegiance to procedural liberalism, thinner than ethnic or racial nationalism, rooted in particular texts and rituals, sustained through immersion in shared practices. The reclamation Smith calls for is the restoration of this middle thing against its enemies on both sides.
Turner’s framework does not engage Smith’s politics on its own terms. It asks what kind of object Smith assumes patriotism to be. The assumption shows in the immersion claim. Citizens become patriotic, on Smith’s account, by participating in shared practices that carry an attachment too thick to be reduced to propositional content. The thickness is what distinguishes constitutional patriotism from mere constitutional acceptance. The carriage happens through the practices.
The Turnerian question is whether the carriage story holds up. What gets carried? Smith oscillates between two possibilities. On one reading, the practices carry a tacit substrate: a civic disposition, a shared sensibility, an underlying attachment that the rituals express and reinforce. On another reading, the practices simply produce habits of allegiance in individuals who participate in them, and the resemblance among the habits reflects the resemblance among the inputs. The first reading requires a transmission story Turner has spent decades demanding from practice theorists. The second reading dispenses with the substrate entirely.
Smith does not choose. The book treats patriotism as both an individual disposition and a shared inheritance, sometimes within the same paragraph. The slippage is not careless. It does work. The treatment as inheritance lends moral weight to the practices Smith wants to defend. They become carriers of something deeper than themselves. The treatment as individual disposition keeps the account empirically tractable. Patriotism is something people have, something that can be measured by their behavior and reported by their statements.
Turner’s positive account, developed in his later work, supports only the second reading. People acquire skills, dispositions, and attachments through experience. The acquisition operates at the individual level, even when the experiences are widely shared. A society that subjects its members to similar inputs produces members with similar habits. The similarity does not require a collective entity to explain it. It requires only that the inputs be similar. Convergent individual habits look like shared culture from the outside, but the inside of each individual contains only what that individual has acquired through his own history.
This sounds austere. The austerity is the point. Turner has resisted explanations that posit shared collective entities precisely because such entities do work that simpler explanations can do without them. Smith’s immersion thesis tempts the reader to think that something more than individual habit-formation occurs when citizens stand for the anthem together. A collective attachment seems to be expressed in the shared posture. The Turnerian counter is that the shared posture is the attachment. There is no further entity that the posture expresses.
A puzzle pressed by this reading is the case of the adult patriot. Many Americans were not raised in the immersion Smith describes. Foreign-born citizens often arrive without the childhood rituals, the family stories, the school commemorations Smith treats as carriers. Some of these citizens become more strongly attached to the country than those who underwent the full immersion. The immigrant who studied for naturalization, took the oath, and built a life under American conditions can display a patriotism that puts native-born skeptics to shame. If patriotism passes through immersion in shared traditions, the adult immigrant case demands explanation.
Smith’s framework strains to absorb the case. The immigrant might be said to have undergone a compressed immersion, learning the rituals later in life and adopting them as carriers of the same tacit substrate. But the move concedes the point. If patriotism can be acquired in adulthood through deliberate exposure to civic content, then patriotism is not the deep inheritance Smith’s rhetoric suggests. It is a learnable disposition, acquirable by anyone willing to learn it, more like a skill than like a familial trait. Turner’s framework predicts this. Skills transfer to those who practice them. The transfer requires neither prior immersion nor mysterious substrate.
The mirror case is also instructive. Many Americans who underwent the full immersion become anti-patriots. They were raised on the rituals, schooled in the texts, exposed to the symbols, surrounded by family stories of military service or political engagement. They emerged hostile to the country or indifferent to it. Reliable immersion-to-patriotism causation cannot account for these cases, and they exist in numbers large enough to require explanation. Turner’s framework offers one. Individual exposures interact with individual histories, individual reflective capacities, individual social positions. Two people exposed to the same content develop different attachments because the content gets metabolized through different psychological histories. The “shared” tradition does not produce shared attachment because the sharing runs shallower than the metaphor suggests.
A second pressure point concerns the constitutional content Smith invokes. Smith draws on Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) and his notion of constitutional patriotism, developed in essays from the late 1980s, in which Habermas argued that citizens could be attached to a constitutional order rather than to an ethnic identity. The attachment to principles would replace the attachment to peoplehood. Smith wants something thicker than Habermas’s version but uses similar conceptual tools. He wants attachment to a particular set of institutional practices, including the Constitution and its history of interpretation.
Turner has engaged Habermas critically across several decades. The criticism focuses on Habermas’s tendency to attribute to language, communication, and public reasoning a normative content that the practices do not contain. Habermas builds his political theory by reading rational norms out of communicative behavior. Turner argues that the reading puts more into the behavior than the behavior supplies. Similar concerns apply to Smith’s reading of patriotic practices. Smith reads patriotism out of the rituals, but the rituals are mute about what they mean. Different participants take them differently. Some take the anthem as a moment of solemn dedication. Others take it as routine before the game. Still others take it as the occasion for protest. The ritual does not adjudicate among these takings. What gets adjudicated, when adjudication happens, is adjudicated by additional considerations external to the ritual.
The Habermas connection points to a broader problem. Constitutional patriotism in either the Habermasian or the Smithian version asks the constitution to carry attachment that the constitution alone cannot generate. The American Constitution is a document that distributes powers, restricts government, protects certain rights, and provides procedures for amendment. The document does not produce love. Love requires something else. Smith identifies that something else as the surrounding rituals and traditions. The rituals and traditions are then asked to produce love through immersion. But the rituals and traditions are also documents and behaviors, not affective forces. The love must come from somewhere. Smith’s framework keeps deferring the production of love from one carrier to another without locating where the affect originates.
Turner does not claim the affect originates nowhere. He locates its origin in individual psychological histories interacting with available cultural materials, and he holds that the interaction produces a wide range of outcomes that cannot be predicted from the cultural materials alone. Some people develop strong patriotic attachment. Some develop weak attachment. Some develop hostility. The available cultural materials shape the range of possible attachments but do not produce any of them by themselves. Smith’s account treats the materials as more determinative than the empirical record supports.
A third pressure point concerns the prescription. Smith’s book is not only diagnostic. It recommends action. Civic education should be strengthened. Public rituals should be defended. Symbols should be honored. Schools should teach American history with attention to its achievements as well as its failures. These recommendations follow from the immersion thesis. If patriotism passes through immersion in shared practices, then strengthening the practices should strengthen the patriotism.
The Turnerian question is whether the prescription rests on the thesis it claims to rest on. Civic education produces what civic education produces: knowledge of American history, familiarity with founding documents, exposure to canonical narratives. Whether this knowledge produces patriotism depends on how the knowledge interacts with the students’ other experiences, their existing attachments, their reflective capacities, their social positions. American history taught well produces some patriots and some critics. The teaching cannot be tuned to produce only patriots without becoming propaganda, and propaganda produces a different attachment than Smith claims to want.
The prescription faces a further difficulty. The practices Smith wants strengthened are practices about which Americans no longer agree. Should public schools teach the Civil War as a tragic conflict between honorable men or as a war for human freedom against an evil institution? Should the Confederate dead be commemorated or repudiated? Should the founders be celebrated for their political achievements or criticized for their personal moral failings? Should the flag be saluted unconditionally or treated as a contested symbol whose meaning each citizen determines? These questions admit different answers. The answers reflect deep divisions about what American history means and what kind of country America is. Smith’s prescription assumes a level of agreement that no longer exists, if it ever existed.
Turner’s framework predicts this. The “shared tradition” Smith invokes is shared less than the rhetoric suggests. Different communities preserve different memories, observe different commemorations, treat different texts as canonical. The American patriotic tradition is multiple traditions, each carried by particular communities with particular institutional arrangements. The tradition appears unified when viewed from the perspective of an elite milieu that has stabilized a particular curation. The unity dissolves on closer inspection.
A fourth pressure point concerns the relation between Smith’s patriotism and other forms of group attachment. Religious belonging, ethnic identification, regional loyalty, professional commitment, family affiliation: these are also forms of attachment that develop through immersion in shared practices. Smith treats patriotism as morally weighty in ways these other attachments are not. Patriotism deserves defense; tribalism deserves criticism. But Turner’s framework offers no principled distinction between them at the level of psychological process. Similar habit-formation produces all of them. Whether a particular attachment counts as patriotic or tribal depends on the observer’s evaluation, not on the underlying process.
This is not to say all attachments are equally valuable. Smith might still have good reasons to prefer constitutional patriotism over ethnic nationalism. But the reasons cannot be that constitutional patriotism arises through a special kind of immersion that ethnic nationalism does not. Both arise through similar processes. The preference must be defended on the merits of the content, not on the route by which the content is acquired. Turner’s framework pushes Smith toward a more honest accounting of what makes constitutional patriotism preferable. The answer cannot lie in the immersion process, since that process is general.
A fifth pressure point concerns the political-theology resonance of Smith’s account. Smith’s description of patriotism reads at times like a description of religious belonging. There are sacred texts (the Declaration, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address). There are commemorative rituals (Independence Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day). There are pilgrimage sites (Philadelphia, Gettysburg, Washington). There are charismatic founders. There are doctrinal disputes. There is a sense that immersion in the tradition produces a kind of attachment that those outside cannot fully understand.
Smith partly acknowledges this resonance. He treats civil religion as a serious category. Turner’s framework treats religious belonging the same way it treats other collective phenomena. The shared faith is not an entity that the practices express. The practices are the faith, in the sense that what gets called the shared faith reduces to convergent individual dispositions produced by similar exposures. Religious sociologists have long known that those who appear to share a faith may hold quite different beliefs while participating in the same rituals. The same point applies to patriotism. Those who appear to share patriotic commitment may hold quite different views about what America is and what it should be. The shared participation in rituals masks the unshared content of the participants’ attachments.
This last point reaches the heart of Smith’s project. He wants patriotism to be the basis for civic unity in a fragmented age. The fragmentation, on his account, is the problem. The reclamation is the solution. Turner’s framework suggests that the fragmentation is the underlying reality and the apparent unity in earlier periods was the curatorial achievement of institutions strong enough to filter dissent from public view. The reclamation project then becomes not a return to a prior unity but the construction of new institutional capacities for producing the appearance of unity.
A note on what this critique does not establish. Turner’s framework does not show that patriotism is illusory, harmful, or unworthy of defense. It shows that the immersion thesis carries explanatory burdens it cannot bear. Patriotism remains a phenomenon to be understood. The understanding requires attention to how individuals acquire dispositions through their experiences, how institutions shape those experiences, how reflective capacities transform the dispositions over time, and how the resulting attachments interact with the other commitments individuals hold. This is a longer and more empirically demanding inquiry than Smith’s book undertakes. The book offers a vision; the Turnerian critique asks for an account.
The asking does not diminish the vision. It clarifies what the vision is and what its acceptance commits the reader to. Readers who accept Smith’s account commit themselves to a picture of patriotism as something that exists between participants in shared traditions, transmitted through rituals, sustained by institutions, lost when the institutions weaken, recoverable through institutional renewal. Readers who follow Turner commit themselves to a picture of patriotism as a set of convergent individual dispositions produced by similar institutional exposures, varied in content and intensity across individuals, sometimes acquired by adults without childhood immersion, sometimes failing to develop in those who underwent the full immersion, dependent on continuing institutional production.
The second picture is harder to argue from. It does not justify the rhetorical lift Smith’s title performs. There is no patriotism to reclaim, in the sense Smith implies, because there was no collective object to be lost in the first place. There were institutions producing dispositions, and there are now different institutions producing different dispositions. Whether the second set of institutions can be redirected to produce dispositions closer to Smith’s preferred ones is a practical question. The practical question does not turn on the truth of the immersion thesis. It turns on what institutions can be built and what dispositions they can produce.
Turner’s contribution to the discussion is the demystification. He strips the immersion language of its metaphysical weight and asks Smith to defend his preferred dispositions on the merits. The defense becomes harder without the metaphysical weight, but the discussion becomes more honest. Smith’s book is a powerful exercise in civic moralism. The Turnerian reading suggests the moralism would carry more force if it acknowledged its own foundations.
Hybrid Vigor and other Biological Frames
Start with heterosis. Smith’s own intellectual life is mildly heterotic. Chattanooga undergraduate, Durham MPhil on Hegel under English supervision, Chicago doctorate inside the Straussian project, Yale career inside the East Coast humanist establishment. Southern American, English academic, German-Jewish Straussian, Yale liberal. The crossings show up in the books. The range of his Spinoza reading owes something to the Durham Hegel work, the Hegel work owes something to the Chicago method, and the Chicago method owes something to a German émigré tradition that itself crossed Athens, Jerusalem, and Weimar. The vigor of Smith’s prose, the breadth of reference, the comfort with both Anglo-American academic conventions and Continental seriousness, look like what heterosis predicts when several lines of inheritance meet in a single career.
The subject matter doubles the point. Sephardic Amsterdam in the seventeenth century was itself a heterotic Jewish community. Iberian conversos returning to open Judaism after generations in Catholic Spain and Portugal, carrying scholastic training the Ashkenazi mainstream did not have. Ashkenazi traders and printers arriving from the German lands. Sephardic merchants connecting Amsterdam to the Levant, North Africa, and the New World colonies. The community Spinoza grew up in was the kind of crossing the Babylonian Talmud essay treats as the engine of intellectual elaboration. Spinoza is the hybrid offspring of that mixing, the strange new growth a heterotic environment produces. Smith’s Spinoza book examines a heterotic event without naming it as such. The biology helps name it.
Now the opposite pole. East Coast Straussianism, as an institutional school, shows the closed-population pattern the heterosis essay treats as the failure mode. Strauss taught at Chicago. His Chicago students went to a handful of universities: Cornell, Toronto, Harvard, Boston College, Yale, Claremont. Their students went to the same places, plus a few more. The conferences recur. The journals are predictable. The dissertation committees draw on a small pool. Marriages inside the school are common. The “esoteric reading” technique reads at moments like an in-group ritual. Reading Leo Strauss defends the school against outsider critics, which is what a closed system does when its homozygotes come under selective pressure. The school’s strengths are real (philological care, attention to rhetorical surface, refusal of presentist reading). Its weaknesses are the weaknesses of any small, closed breeding pool: the same moves repeat, the same blind spots persist, the same arguments rehearse themselves across generations because no foreign material entered the gene pool to expose them. Smith’s own work sits at the more open end of the school, but the school is the school.
Niche construction explains the institutional shape. East Coast Straussianism built a niche at elite universities over four decades. Political theory subfields incorporated its texts and methods. The dissertation pipeline produced reliable replacements. The journal Interpretation, the Press of the University of Chicago, the Yale University Press political theory list, the Notre Dame Tocqueville Program, the Claremont Review of Books for the western wing: each is a piece of the niche the school constructed. Smith’s career was built inside that niche. He did not invent it. He inherited a constructed environment that selected for the traits he had to offer. The Yale chair, the residential college mastership, the OpenYale series, the public lectures: these are the niche rewarding the organism it was constructed to support.
Endosymbiosis explains the Yale relationship. Yale and East Coast Straussianism formed a mutualistic bond. Yale gained a “conservative” presence that proved its openness without threatening its liberal mainstream. East Coast Straussianism gained institutional prestige, salaries, students, and protection from the populist tarring that hit Claremont. Each party depends on the other. The relationship is not parasitic. It is closer to the mitochondrial arrangement Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) described: an incorporation that benefits both organisms while leaving each unable to function fully without the other. Yale without its Straussians is a thinner political theory department. The East Coast Straussians without Yale, Harvard, and Toronto have nowhere to put their best students.
Crypsis and countershading explain the rhetorical surface. Smith presents as a careful, even-handed reader of the great books. The Strauss he produces is the Strauss compatible with mainstream Yale liberalism. The Spinoza he produces is the Spinoza compatible with mainstream American Jewish liberalism. The signal his prose sends is “I have no coalitional agenda; I just read carefully.” This is countershading. The flat surface cancels the three-dimensional coalition position underneath. Compare Adrian Vermeule, who refuses countershading and gets read as a threat. Smith reads as a moderate. He works the same canon as Vermeule, draws on overlapping interpretive traditions, but pursues the coloration that lets him stay inside the elite university niche. Vermeule does not. The biology predicts which organism survives where.
Costly signaling explains the bibliography. Two books on Spinoza. Decades of line-by-line teaching of the canon. The OpenYale recordings that made his lectures available worldwide without charge. Each is expensive in time. Each signals philosophical seriousness in a register cheap signals cannot fake. Amotz Zahavi (1928-2017) argued that reliable signals must be costly because cheap ones can be faked. Inside the East Coast Straussian world the slow, patient close reading is the handicap that proves fitness. The cheaper alternatives (op-eds, podcast tours, public intellectual posturing) signal less because they cost less. Smith’s choice of signal type is a coalition choice.
Life history theory explains the career shape. Smith is a slow-strategy academic. Forty years at Yale. Books spaced years apart. Long horizons. Low risk tolerance. Career staked on incremental elaboration of a stable interpretive position. The strategy paid off in his environment, which rewarded depth, consistency, and patient elaboration inside a known niche. The faster strategies (Jordan Peterson lecture tours, Christopher Rufo activism, Claremont policy advocacy, the West Coast Straussian shift to political combat) trade depth for reach, accept higher mortality risk for higher reproductive yield. Smith made the slow bet. The niche rewarded it.
Horizontal gene transfer explains the school’s spread. Smith carried Chicago Straussian methods into Yale political theory. His Yale students carried versions of those methods into the departments they joined. Personnel movement, not treatise, spread the adaptive traits. The school replicates by placing graduates rather than by winning arguments. Most political theorists who do not work in the Straussian tradition have not been persuaded by Straussian arguments. They simply work in departments where some seats are held by Straussians and the rest by others, and the adaptive coexistence keeps both populations stable.
Evolutionary mismatch explains the current strain. Smith’s toolkit was calibrated for the mid-century American liberal university where Straussian close reading could stand as a serious option among the seminar offerings, the audience shared an interest in the great books, and the political environment treated philosophy as a worthy companion to citizenship. That environment has shifted. Humanities enrollments are declining. The populist right reads Strauss against the liberal regime Smith defends. The postmodern and post-postmodern left reads the canon as power play. American Jewish intellectual life is reorganizing around Israel and peoplehood in ways Smith’s Spinoza-centered framework cannot quite address. The toolkit produces its expected outputs in an environment where those outputs no longer answer the central questions. Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes is the partial recalibration, an attempt to update the toolkit toward civic attachment. The biology predicts such updates rarely close the mismatch fully. The organism shaped by one environment can adjust at the margin. It cannot retool from scratch.
Stephen Turner and Steven B. Smith work the same century from opposite ends. Both engage Weber. Both read carefully. Both stand in the long shadow of German social thought. Then their roads fork.
Turner’s deflation of the normative runs like this. When philosophers talk about oughts, reasons, and norms as if those terms named a sui generis domain, they smuggle metaphysics past the customs check. Press any normative claim hard and you find either an empirical regularity (people coordinate this way, train this way, accept this) or an unsupported assertion. Practices and training go all the way down. No extra normative ether floats above the social fact.
Smith builds his life’s work on the opposite premise. Political philosophy on his model recovers something. Careful reading of Spinoza, Hegel, Strauss, and Berlin yields knowledge about justice, the best regime, the good life of a citizen. The permanent questions are permanent because they track something real about the human condition. Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes defends restrained civic patriotism as a virtue, not a preference. Modernity and Its Discontents by Steven B. Smith treats the bourgeois virtues as a normative achievement worth defending against decay.
Turner reads all of this as practice. Smith reads his own work as something more. That is where Turner lands hard on Smith.
Take the patriotism book. Smith argues we ought to be patriots in the right register. Turner translates the “ought” into the empirical. Here is a practice some Americans sustain. Here are the institutions that train them. Here is the coalition that benefits when civic patriotism holds. The philosophical “ought” adds nothing the practice does not already carry.
Take the canon work. Smith treats Plato through Berlin as interlocutors on the permanent questions. Turner reads canons as coalition artifacts. The set of great books is the set certain communities have chosen to sustain and transmit. The framing of “permanent questions” presumes the normative purchase Turner denies.
Take the inheritance from Strauss. Smith preserves a chastened version of natural right. Turner has no patience for natural right under any chastening. The move from “humans are like this” to “humans ought to do that” carries a load it cannot carry.
Smith has a serious response. Turner’s deflation, taken straight, collapses into the historicism Strauss spent his life diagnosing. If political philosophy yields no normative knowledge, liberal democracy has no rational defense against Schmittian decisionism or against the men who want to rule by force. Smith inherits this Straussian worry directly. He thinks the deflationary path ends in nihilism, and that the price of nihilism is regimes worse than the bourgeois one.
Smith might also note that even practices need standards. The moment Turner says one practice is more coherent or more sustainable than another, the normative slips back in by the side door. Turner has heard this objection. His answer is that “more coherent” and “more sustainable” are empirical claims about what holds together and what does not. No metaphysics required. Whether that answer satisfies depends on how much weight you think coherence-talk can bear without smuggling oughts back in.
A direct verdict. Turner’s critique lands on Smith’s philosophical claims. The normative as a free-standing domain does not survive Turner’s pressure, and Smith’s appeals to it cannot be cashed out in the terms Smith needs. But Smith’s practice, taken as practice, has its own integrity. Reading Spinoza closely shapes certain communities. Defending civic patriotism over ethno-nationalism may produce a better polity. Turner’s deflation refuses to refute the choices Smith makes. It refuses to dress those choices in metaphysical robes.
The open question for Smith is whether he can defend his work in deflated terms. Whether he can say: I sustain this canon, I train these students, I argue for this kind of patriotism, and that is what I do, without claiming a normative authority Turner has shown he cannot earn. Strauss in his more zetetic moods sometimes wrote close to that register. Smith might follow him there. The institution he serves will resist, because Yale political theory’s standing depends on the older claim.
The Neutralization Theory of Hatred
Smith is a practiced calumniator deploying information warfare from inside an institutional position that absorbs the personal cost of the deployment.
“The face of national conservatism is no longer Friedrich Hayek but Martin Heidegger.” Six words plus two proper names plus one substitution. The whole charge sits in the swap. Sell, Scrivner, Landers, and Lopez name this operation when they describe information warfare as the central strategy of hatred against a target too costly to attack openly: spread information that lowers the target’s status in third-party minds, deny the target voice, refuse negotiation, mobilize the hatred coalition through indirect signal rather than direct accusation. The substitution does each of these in one stroke. Hayek (1899-1992) marked the boundary of acceptable American conservatism inside the postwar fusionist coalition. Heidegger marks the philosopher who joined the Nazi Party and the figure twentieth-century Jewish thought has wrestled with as the great enemy. To swap one for the other is to relocate Hazony’s wing from inside the room of acceptable conservatism to the lineage of European civilizational catastrophe. No explicit accusation appears anywhere. The lethal work is done by association alone.
The paper says hatred-driven information warfare avoids giving the target voice because voice allows the target to bargain his association value back upward. Smith’s line gives Hazony no voice. It does not engage Hazony’s published positions on nationhood, peoplehood, or the Hebrew Bible. It does not quote Hazony. It does not name him at the moment of the strike. It places the symbol where Hazony stands and walks past. The target cannot answer a sentence that did not name him without confirming that the shoe fits. The paper predicts exactly this design feature. Hatred avoids the target’s perspective because hearing the perspective threatens the coalition mobilization the hatred is for.
The avuncular author photo, the Yankees-fan coda, the Yale University Press imprint, the David Brooks blurb on the back cover. These are the chemical signature the predatory organism produces to defeat the prey’s detection system. The pirate perch produces no warning scent and the prey swim past it. Smith produces no warning scent and the reviewing audience reads past the Heidegger line as if it carried no charge. The David Brooks (b. 1961) blurb in The New York Times did not flag it. The George Will (b. 1941) blurb in The Washington Post did not flag it. The Robert Kagan (b. 1958), Anne-Marie Slaughter (b. 1958), William Galston (b. 1946), and Rogers Smith blurbs did not flag it. The Sell paper’s prediction is precise: a hateful actor with sufficient crypsis can mobilize a hatred coalition through indirect signaling that the coalition members do not consciously register as hatred. The blurbing network performed the social transmission the paper names. Each blurber executed a small task. No blurber called Hazony a Nazi. Cumulatively, the line entered the establishment record as a considered judgment.
Smith taught readers, for forty years, to detect substitution, allusion, and coded charge inside canonical texts. Reading Leo Strauss trained a generation of students in the precise technique Strauss laid out in Persecution and the Art of Writing by Leo Strauss. The careful writer, said Strauss, communicates by what he omits, by what he places next to what, by which name he substitutes for which name when direct speech is costly. The Heidegger line is Smith demonstrating mastery of the technique on his own page. A student trained in Smith’s seminar would recognize the move immediately. The pedagogue executed the lesson in his own prose against a man he could not afford to attack directly. The lineage runs straight from Strauss’s manual to Smith’s sentence.
The Heidegger weapon used by a Jewish liberal humanist against a Jewish nationalist is selected for maximum cost infliction on a Jewish target inside the symbolic universe both men share. Heidegger is not a generic anti-liberal in Jewish memory. He is the philosopher who joined the Nazi Party, refused after the war to apologize, and stands in Jewish intellectual history as a specific kind of moral disaster the tradition has spent eighty years processing. To name him as the face of Hazony’s wing is to assign Hazony’s wing to the lineage of the catastrophe. The cost is calibrated to land twice on a Jewish reader: once at the philosophical claim, again at the symbolic placement of one’s coalition inside the wrong half of Jewish history. The Sell paper says hatred-driven information warfare is designed to be cost-efficient: maximum damage to the target for minimum cost to the deployer. The Heidegger line is the maximum charge available in the discourse, delivered at the cost of a single sentence inside a book whose other 200 pages provide the cover.
Sell and colleagues note that hatred is reciprocal: a target who detects he has been hated typically hates back, because the hater’s continued existence imposes ongoing fitness costs through information warfare against him. The Jewish nationalist readership of Reclaiming Patriotism received the line at full force. They detected what the establishment reviewing audience did not. Smith’s information warfare worked on the audience whose hatred coalition he needed to mobilize, and registered as a hatred attack on the audience he was excluding. Both audiences responded as the paper predicts. The first ratified the charge by silence. The second reciprocated the hatred.
Smith deploys hatred-class information warfare against rival Jewish-political coalitions from inside an institutional position that absorbs the personal cost of the deployment. The kindness, the Yankees joke, the Yale imprint, the blurbing network, and the avuncular bio are not personality. They are the weapon system. The Strauss training is the methodological skill that makes the weapon work. The Heidegger line is what the whole apparatus exists to deliver, occasionally, against the targets the coalition needs neutralized. He picks his strikes sparingly, which is part of why the surface stays clean. When he strikes, the strike is calibrated to the maximum charge available inside the symbolic universe shared by the target. Smith is hatred-deploying inside a system that suppresses his personal cost so completely that his deployment looks, to readers who buy the surface, like its opposite.
Leo Strauss (1899-1973) made the strongest possible claim for a tacit dimension. He argued that great philosophers wrote esoterically because plain speech endangered them, and that careful readers could recover the hidden meaning by attending to deliberate contradictions, suspicious citations, missing references, and other surface anomalies. This requires a tacit competence. You must be the kind of reader who notices what other readers miss. The competence cannot reduce to a method, because a method open to all would no longer protect the philosopher from the city. The art has to remain in the hands of the few.
Turner asks the question that closes the trap. When two Straussians disagree about the esoteric meaning of a passage, what settles the dispute? Nothing external. The shared tacit competence supplies the warrant for each reading. Each reading supplies evidence of the shared tacit competence. The circle closes on itself. Turner has been waiting for this circle. It is the place where the metaphysical cause hides from inspection.
Smith performs the Straussian art at institutional scale. He served as Master of Branford College from 1996 to 2011, presiding over the Master’s Tea, curating undergraduate intellectual life from a residence built for that purpose. The residential college does what Turner says cannot be done. It transmits a way of being intellectual through proximity to a Master. Smith embodies the institution that embodies the claim Turner attacks. He has also directed Graduate Studies in Political Science, directed the Special Program in the Humanities, served as Acting Chair of Judaic Studies, and holds the Alfred Cowles Professorship. The chair came from a financier. The financier’s endowment funds the proposition that something rare passes through small seminars. If Turner reads the situation correctly, the chair funds a coordination performance.
Directed Studies supplies the test case. The model assumes that exposure to the canon, in small seminars led by senior faculty, produces a particular kind of educated person. Turner asks what gets produced. An undergraduate emerges with overlapping reading habits, an overlapping vocabulary, an overlapping set of touchstones. He has not absorbed a tacit civilizational competence. He has been trained in a coordination scheme. The graduates can talk to each other. The graduates cannot talk to outsiders without translation. From the inside the asymmetry looks like depth. From the outside it looks like a private language. Turner’s account predicts both appearances at once.
The Straussian succession compounds the problem. Strauss’s students were the first generation. They trained the second. Smith comes second or third depending on how you count Bloom, Mansfield, Cropsey, Pangle, Jaffa as intermediaries. With each generation the tacit content thins. The first generation could appeal to Strauss himself to arbitrate a disputed reading. The second appealed to memory of Strauss. The third has the texts and the lineage. The art of reading becomes a citation pattern. You cite Strauss. You cite Bloom. You cite Mansfield. The citations become the warrant for membership. Turner predicted this drift. As the tacit substrate recedes into the past, what was tacit becomes explicit citation work.
Reading Leo Strauss performs a normalization function. Smith positions Strauss as a friend of liberal democracy against critics who, after Iraq War coverage, treated “Straussian” as code for “neocon.” Smith makes Strauss safe for Yale, for New Haven, for the Cambridge Companion treatment. The tacit-knowledge framing serves the coalition by protecting the school from outside scrutiny. Outsiders lack the competence to judge. Insiders have it. The boundary patrols itself. Anyone who reads Strauss as a reactionary stands outed by the reading as a poor reader. Anyone who reads Strauss as a liberal enters the community of careful readers by the same act. The reading and the membership constitute each other. Turner has seen this move in Kuhn, in Polanyi, in Bourdieu. A school protects itself by making its own competence the criterion for entry.
Modernity and Its Discontents argues that modernity is a state of mind, a constellation of self-criticism, doubt, pride, and anxiety running from Machiavelli to Bellow. This is a tacit-knowledge claim about historical periodization. Smith assembles the constellation by selection. He picks Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Berlin, Bellow. He could have picked differently. The constellation is his construction, not history’s gift to him. The shared modern sensibility appears shared because Smith chose figures with overlapping moods. The moods belong to individuals. The sharing belongs to the curator. Turner says all traditions work this way. Someone curates a list. The list looks like a tradition. The tradition looks like a substrate. The substrate is a curatorial achievement.
Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes makes an immersion claim. Civic attachment grows from participation in shared traditions, and patriotism passes through immersion rather than instruction. Turner asks: immersion in what? Statues, school lessons, court decisions, presidential speeches, family rituals, songs at games. These produce individual habits of allegiance. The habits resemble each other because the inputs resemble each other. No underlying patriotism that the practices express. The practices are the patriotism. Remove the substrate and the practices stand on their own, neither more nor less than what they are.
In Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity, Smith wants to say something Jewish about Spinoza even though Spinoza was excommunicated and rejected the Law. Turner asks what the something is. If it is intellectual style, the style names habits Spinoza picked up from his teachers and his reading. If it is preoccupation with election, exile, law, prophecy, and theological politics, those preoccupations came through specific texts and specific interlocutors. No Jewish substrate sits underneath Spinoza’s mind that he carries unconsciously. The Jewish character of his thought traces his education and his community. Turner does not deny that Amsterdam shaped Spinoza. Turner denies that anything remains beyond the shaping.
Smith’s career rests on the premise that careful reading produces understanding inaccessible to the careless. The Straussian art assumes privileged access to texts. Turner says no such access exists. There are habits of attention that look like access from the inside. If Turner has the right of it, Smith has spent forty years performing a sophistication whose philosophical content lives entirely in the performance. The performance has institutional value. It makes Yale Yale. It makes Branford what it became under his fifteen-year tenure. It gives undergraduates a model of the cultivated intellectual. It does not deliver the philosophical truth it claims to deliver. The work is real work. It is not the work Smith takes it to be. What he treats as depth is width. What he treats as tacit understanding is overlapping habit. What he treats as the art of writing and reading is a curated repertoire of moves passed from teacher to student by imitation, not by the transmission of any hidden thing.
In other words, Leo Strauss didn’t hand down a magic decoder ring to his favorite students.
No decoder ring. No initiate’s key. No hidden faculty that lets the trained reader see what untrained readers cannot see.
What looks like the decoder ring is a set of moves. Notice the deliberate contradiction. Count the chapter numbers. Watch for the missing citation. Track the shift in pronoun. Attend to the dropped reference to Maimonides. These moves can be taught. Strauss taught them. Bloom taught them. Smith teaches them. Anyone willing to sit through the seminars can learn to perform them.
The decoder ring story makes the moves sound like an instrument that delivers hidden content. Turner says the moves are the content. Perform them and you produce a Straussian reading. That is all. There is no further thing the reading delivers. The reading is the delivery.
This explains why Straussians disagree with each other about what Plato or Maimonides or Spinoza secretly taught. If the decoder ring were real, the trained readers would converge on the hidden meaning. They do not converge. They produce overlapping but distinct readings, each defended by appeal to the art. The non-convergence does not embarrass the school because the school does not require convergence. Membership requires performance of the moves, not agreement on the output. The ring is a credential, not an instrument.
The Smith career makes sense in these terms. He trained at Chicago. He learned the moves. He performs them with skill and decency. He passes them on at Yale. The undergraduates leave able to perform them in turn. The chain holds. Nothing magic passes down the chain. The chain itself is the thing that passes down.
The Leo Strauss moves have no built-in stop. Applied to any sufficiently complex text, the moves will find deliberate contradictions, suspicious citations, missing references. The moves do not contain a test for distinguishing recovered intent from projected pattern. Skilled performance produces output regardless of whether the author wrote esoterically. The result functions as a Type I error machine. It will identify hidden teachings in texts that have hidden teachings. It will identify hidden teachings in texts that have none. It will not distinguish the cases. The school treats this as a feature, since the master reader knows when the moves apply. Turner reads it as a defect, and Turner has the better of the argument.
The moves also resist falsification. If a non-Straussian challenges a reading, the Straussian can claim the challenger missed the further layer. No procedure exists for showing a Straussian reading wrong. Historical-philological work can sometimes settle interpretive disputes by appeal to manuscript evidence, contemporary usage, or biographical fact. Straussian readings often cannot be settled because the warrant for the reading is the trained intuition of the reader, and trained intuitions cannot be cross-checked.
The substantive metaphysical claim is the largest problem. Strauss believed the great philosophers shared a deep teaching about the relation of philosophy to the city, and that their surface differences masked a shared esoteric understanding. This is an empirical claim about the history of philosophy. Most historians of philosophy reject it. The hidden unity is mostly Strauss’s projection. He found the same teaching everywhere because he brought the teaching to every text.
Smith believes Leo Strauss was a friend of liberal democracy. This belief carries his career. If Strauss was the man East Coast Straussians used to justify the Iraq War, or the man West Coast Straussians used to justify Trump-era nationalism, Smith’s position becomes hard to hold. He has to be the Strauss reader who keeps Strauss respectable. A right-wing Strauss costs Smith his Yale standing. A radical Strauss costs Smith his moderate brand. The liberal-democratic Strauss costs him nothing and pays him a great deal. Books, lectures, students, invitations, prestige.
What might Smith have to admit if he rejected the belief? That his teacher’s teacher had a darker view of the modern project than Smith allows. That the cave allegory, the philosopher-king material, the cryptic writing thesis, and the critique of Locke add up to something more corrosive of liberal democracy than Smith’s reading concedes. That domesticating Strauss has been his life’s project, and Strauss resisted domestication. The cost of that admission runs high. The cost of holding the safer reading runs to zero.
Second belief. Smith holds that patriotism can be reclaimed in a civic, constitutional form, separate from ethnicity, religion, and tribe. His 2021 book Reclaiming Patriotism makes the case. The belief pays well because it lets him write on patriotism, a hot topic that sells books, without coding as right-wing. He gets the audience that wants serious thinking on national attachment without losing the colleagues who might shun him for nativism. A civic patriotism asks nothing of him that his Yale life does not already supply.
What might he have to admit if he rejected the belief? That patriotism has run on blood, soil, religion, and shared ancestors for most of human history, and that the civic version is thin gruel by comparison. That his framework asks Americans to love a procedural republic while pretending the thicker bonds do not count. That the people who feel patriotism most strongly are the people his civic version scolds. The cost of admitting this is alienation from his coalition. The cost of holding the civic reading is nothing.
Third belief. Smith holds that Spinoza solved the problem of Jewish life in the modern world by offering a liberal framework of toleration and rational citizenship. His first book, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity, makes the argument. The belief sits well with a liberal Jewish professor at Yale. It gives him a usable Jewish ancestor who points toward the life Smith leads. Spinoza becomes a precursor of the assimilated, liberal, philosophically serious Jew.
What might he have to admit if he rejected the belief? That Spinoza’s project, taken seriously, dissolves Jewish particularity. That the Jewish communities he came from cursed him for a reason. That the descendants of Spinoza’s program are not flourishing Jewish liberals but lapsed Jews whose grandchildren no longer identify as Jews at all. That his own community at Yale represents the late stage of a process Spinoza set in motion, and that the religious Jews he writes around are the ones who reproduce Jewish life. The cost of this admission runs high. The benefit of Spinoza-the-liberal-precursor runs large.
Fourth belief. Smith holds that the American founding remains sound and needs reclamation. This belief lets him push back against the 1619 Project crowd without joining the right-wing critics. He plays the reasonable middle. He defends the founders against woke revisionism while staying clear of the integralists and the post-liberals who reject the founding from the right. The middle is cheap real estate at Yale.
What might he have to admit if he rejected the belief? Either that the founders were as bad as the left says, which costs him his moderate brand, or that the founding had deeper problems the right has identified, which costs him his Yale standing. Holding the reclamation thesis lets him avoid both costs.
Fifth belief. Smith holds that the academy remains a place of free inquiry where his work gets a fair hearing on its merits. Every tenured professor at an elite university has to hold some version of this. The alternative is that his career has been a function of conformity to coalition pressures. Few men can hold that thought about their own lives.
What might he have to admit if he rejected the belief? That the questions he chose to pursue, and the answers he chose to give, were shaped by what Yale would tolerate. That a different career path was closed to him not by his judgment but by the coalition costs. That his moderation is not a virtue but a survival strategy. The cost of this admission is the meaning of his career. The benefit of the academy-as-free-inquiry belief is the coherence of his life.
Turner’s test asks what a man would have to give up if he changed his mind. For Smith, changing his mind on Strauss costs him his career frame. Changing his mind on patriotism costs him his recent book. Changing his mind on Spinoza costs him his first book and the Jewish-liberal synthesis the rest of his work rests on. Changing his mind on the founding costs him his middle position. Changing his mind on the academy costs him his sense of his own life.
Five beliefs. Five large costs of rejection. Zero costs of holding. That ratio is what Turner’s frame predicts for a successful academic at an elite university, and it is what Smith’s career shows.
Stephen P. Turner has spent his career attacking essentialist claims in social theory. He argues that when scholars invoke shared practices, traditions, or collective minds, they posit hidden essences that do no explanatory work.
A Turner-style audit of Smith asks what essences his arguments rely on and what those essences hide.
Take Smith on Jewish identity. He treats Jewish identity as a coherent object with a history to which Spinoza, Mendelssohn, and Rosenzweig contribute. He writes as if a thing called the Jewish tradition exists, a thing one can join, leave, modernize, or recover. Turner presses the question. Where does this tradition live? Not in any one head. Not in any one text. Not in any one rite. Smith’s tradition functions as a placeholder for a cluster of disagreements among Jews at Yale, at JTS, in Mea Shearim, and in Pico-Robertson, who share little beyond a label and the partial overlap of habits. The essence-talk papers over the gap.
Take Smith on liberal democracy. He treats it as a tradition with a coherent set of commitments one can affirm and defend. Turner asks the same question. What gets carried? Smith writes from a Yale chair. The liberal democracy he defends matches the procedural norms of the institution that pays him. His convenient belief is that the tradition he inhabits has universal warrant. The essence-claim does the work an argument cannot.
Take Smith on Strauss. Smith presents the moderate Strauss, the Strauss who reads with care, who values the city, who admires Lincoln. Other readers find a Strauss who teaches gentlemen to lie for the good of the regime. Turner’s framework predicts what happens here. Smith’s Strauss is the Strauss that Yale can keep. The other Strauss, the one Drury and Norton describe, threatens the coalition Smith belongs to. Smith resolves the conflict by reading the essence of Strauss out of the corpus and into a shape that fits the Yale faculty common room. He does not argue from the texts that the harsh Strauss is absent. He argues that the moderate Strauss is the real one. Essence again does the work.
Take Smith on patriotism. He distinguishes patriotism from nationalism. Patriotism loves the regime in its better self. Nationalism loves the tribe in its worse self. Turner’s question. Who decides which love is which? Smith does. The love he ratifies sounds like the love of a Yale political theorist who admires Lincoln and Tocqueville. The love he condemns sounds like the love of the Trump voter in Ohio. The essence of patriotism, as Smith draws it, maps onto the cultural preferences of his class. Turner would call this a convenient belief dressed as a normative discovery.
Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity. This book treats Jewish identity as a coherent object that Spinoza modernizes. Smith asks what Spinoza’s break with the Amsterdam community means for Jewish identity, what Mendelssohn does to it, what Rosenzweig recovers of it. The grammar assumes a stable object. Turner’s critique strikes at the grammar. There is no Jewish identity that Spinoza modernizes. There are Jews in Amsterdam in 1656 with overlapping habits, texts, and quarrels. There are Jews in Berlin in 1780 with different habits, texts, and quarrels. Smith’s noun connects them. The connection is a postulate, not a finding. Smith never shows what travels from Amsterdam to Berlin to Yale. He names it and treats the name as the thing.
The same critique applies to Smith on the liberal tradition. Modernity and Its Discontents by Steven B. Smith. This book treats liberalism as a tradition with a coherent set of commitments that one can defend or attack. Turner asks what makes the seventeenth-century Dutch republican, the nineteenth-century English Whig, and the twentieth-century American political scientist share a tradition. Reading the same authors does not establish a shared essence. Smith assumes the essence and writes the history of its development. Turner reverses the move. Start with the historians, lawyers, and theorists who use the label. Ask what coalition the label serves. The tradition is the shadow cast by the label, not the substance that explains why the label sticks.
Reading Leo Strauss. This book treats Strauss as a coherent thinker with a real doctrine that Smith can recover and defend. Turner’s critique cuts here too. What is Strauss? A man, dead, who wrote books. The books contradict one another at points. The students disagree about what the books mean. Drury reads one Strauss. Norton reads another. Pangle reads a third. Smith reads a fourth. Smith’s Strauss is moderate, friendly to liberal democracy, and devoted to careful reading. Where does this Strauss live? Not in any one text. Not in any unambiguous doctrine. Smith constructs him from selected passages and posits the construction as the essence of the man. The essence does the work an argument cannot do, because no argument from the corpus alone can settle the question.
Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes. This book treats patriotism as a discrete love distinct from nationalism. Smith draws the line and defends it. Turner asks how the line gets drawn. Two Americans pledge allegiance, sing the anthem, salute the flag, vote, pay taxes, and serve in the military. One Smith calls a patriot. The other Smith calls a nationalist. The difference does not lie in any observable practice. It lies in attitudes, tones, associations, and political alignments that Smith reads off from cues outside the practice. The essence of patriotism is a sorting tool, not a discovery. Turner predicts the move and names it. When the data underdetermine the category, the theorist posits an essence to do the sorting work that the data refuse to do.
Smith’s books read well because the essences carry the prose. Take the essences out and the books need to be rewritten as histories of labels, of coalitions that use the labels, and of institutions that pay theorists to defend the labels. That rewriting is the Turner program. Smith has not done it. His corpus stands as a long argument from essences that Turner’s critique treats as fictions.
Watergate as Democratic Ritual
Jeffrey Alexander’s account of Watergate gives a frame for reading Smith’s career. Alexander shows how an event passes from profane political squabble to sacred crisis through generalization. Public attention shifts from goals to norms to values. Ritual specialists perform the work that revivifies civil culture. The Senate hearings produce a liminal space outside ordinary time. Sam Ervin appears with Bible and Constitution. The committee staff bracket their partisan biographies. They speak in the register of mythic civic universalism. The cameras frame them as keepers of a sacred order. Alexander’s central point cuts against Durkheim: in fragmented modern societies, ritual repair does not happen on schedule. It depends on the alignment of consensus, anxiety about the center, social control, elite countercenters, and symbolic interpretation. The alignment is rare.
Smith’s classroom does ritual work in slower time. The lecture course on political philosophy treats Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and Lincoln as a canon. Students enter as initiates. The teacher initiates them. The texts hold sacred standing. Smith’s voice on the recordings sounds measured, ironic, learned, calm. The performance carries the ritual qualities Alexander identifies in the Watergate hearings: hushed tones, ceremonial framing, a sense of stepping out of partisan time into a more sacred register. The Open Yale platform extends the ritual past the room. Hundreds of thousands of viewers participate from a distance, as Americans once participated in the Senate hearings through television.
The ritual produces civic citizens of a certain type. Yale students leave with a feel for the canon, an ear for the great books, a habit of close and slow reading, a disposition toward moderation. They learn to mistrust enthusiasm. They learn to honor founders, constitutions, and the principle of office over the man who holds it. They learn that the American republic rests on a thin moral inheritance that requires constant repair. Smith teaches them to honor impeachment of Nixon as a defense of office. Alexander describes this civic religion. Smith is a chief educator of its current generation.
Apply Alexander’s five conditions to Smith’s project. First, consensus. The civic ritual Alexander analyzes worked because a wide swath of Americans by mid-1973 shared the perception that Watergate threatened common moral commitments. Smith writes and teaches in a period when consensus has come apart. The country no longer shares a settled view of the founders, the canon, the Constitution, or the meaning of patriotism. Smith stakes out the position from which consensus might be rebuilt. He cannot rebuild it alone. He can offer the materials.
Second, anxiety about the center. Watergate moved from sign to symbol once Americans started to worry that the rot reached the presidency itself. Smith’s audience holds a parallel worry about Yale and the constitutional order Yale once served. The worry runs in two directions. One camp sees the universities as the rot. Another sees the universities as the last line of defense against the rot in elected office. Smith’s work speaks to the second camp. He gives them reasons to keep the faith.
Third, social control. The Watergate ritual could move because courts, prosecutors, and congressional committees took the legal and procedural steps that gave the ritual its teeth. Smith’s project lacks comparable institutional partners. The Department of Justice does not enforce a canon. No congressional committee subpoenas a curriculum. The civic ritual Smith performs has no coercive backstop. It depends on persuasion.
Fourth, elite countercenters. Alexander stresses that the Watergate crisis advanced because alienated elites in journalism, the universities, the law, the foundations, and Congress positioned themselves against Nixon. Smith’s elite position now sits closer to the structural center under attack than to a countercenter on the rise. He holds an endowed chair at Yale. He publishes at Yale University Press. He receives prizes from Phi Beta Kappa. The institutions that gave Alexander’s countercenters their moral standing have lost public credit. Smith’s voice carries inside the elite he addresses. Outside that elite, the voice meets resistance the Senate hearings did not face.
Fifth, ritual symbolic interpretation. This is where Smith does the most work. The Yale lecture course, the books on Strauss and Hegel and Spinoza, the patriotism book, the Lincoln anthology: each performs the labor of purification and pollution that Alexander locates at the heart of civic ritual. Smith places the founders, the canon, and the principle of office on the sacred side. He places personalism, factional loyalty, and contempt for constitutional restraint on the polluted side. Reading Leo Strauss (2006) extracts Strauss as a philosopher from Strauss as a political coalition marker. The book gives the East Coast liberal reader a Strauss he can welcome back into the room without endorsing the Bush administration. The Lincoln anthology gives the contemporary American a Lincoln he can read as the embodiment of office obligation over personal will.
Alexander’s deeper claim is that modern rituals are contingent and rarely complete. The Watergate hearings worked, and even then a fifth of the country never accepted the verdict. Smith’s wager is that the universities can still serve as the ritual center for liberal democracy. The wager faces strong headwinds. Students who once arrived at Yale predisposed to receive the canon now arrive skeptical of the canon’s racial and gender composition. The political class that once granted Yale its civic standing now treats elite universities as enemy territory. Donors complain. State legislatures threaten. A Republican administration treats Harvard, Yale, and Columbia as targets. The educated centrist coalition that gave Smith’s vocation its audience has shrunk. The civic ritual continues. The audience that takes the ritual seriously has thinned.
Reclaiming Patriotism reads, against this backdrop, as an appeal from a position of partial defeat. Smith stakes out a centrist patriotism against both the woke Left and the Trump Right. The book performs the move Sam Ervin performed at the Senate hearings: an appeal to a sacred middle that rises above partisan combat. Ervin’s performance worked because television gave him a unified national audience and because elite consensus held. Smith’s performance reaches a thinner audience and faces a divided elite. The structure of the appeal stays the same. The cultural conditions differ.
Here Alexander’s framework shows its edge. The ritual specialist cannot summon the conditions of his own success. He can perform the ritual. He cannot guarantee that the society receives it. Smith performs at a high level. He gives the lectures, writes the books, takes the chair, accepts the prize, trains the next generation of teachers. The ritual is well executed. Whether it does the work the Watergate hearings did, of generalizing public attention from goals to values, depends on factors past the classroom.
Smith stands at the center of one civic-religious order at a moment when that order has lost its grip on the wider society. He performs the ritual with skill, learning, and reserve. The performance might keep the embers warm. Whether the fire spreads again depends on conditions he cannot make.
The Conspiracy Theories of Leo Strauss & the Straussians
On the truth scale, Leo Strauss failed. On the attention scale, he won, producing a devoted cult.
Strauss made many claims that have the structure of conspiracy theories, though dressed in scholarly clothing.
The grand cipher of philosophy. The whole esoteric thesis is a meta-conspiracy. For two thousand years, from Plato through the seventeenth century, philosophers wrote on two levels and concealed their real teachings from authorities and from the multitude. Whole generations of scholars missed the code. Only the careful reader, trained to notice contradictions, repetitions, numerical patterns, and strategic silences, breaks the cipher. Strauss claimed this art had been lost only because the modern academy stopped looking.
Modernity as a coordinated plot. Strauss read the modern project not as the gradual emergence of new ideas but as a deliberate philosophical war. Machiavelli began it knowing what he did. Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke continued it. The Enlightenment, on this reading, was a long campaign whose goal was the discrediting of revelation, conducted through ridicule rather than refutation because direct argument could not win. The moderns were a conspiracy of philosophical revolutionaries who reshaped Western life by stealth.
The Enlightenment did not refute religion, it mocked it. In Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (1930), Strauss argued that the Enlightenment claim to have answered orthodoxy was a fraud. The arguments did not work. The Enlightenment won by laughter, satire, and gradual reframing, not by demonstration. The supposed victory over religion was a public-relations triumph passed off as a logical one.
Maimonides was hiding something dangerous. Strauss’s reading of The Guide of the Perplexed scandalized many Jewish scholars. The surface piety, he argued, conceals a teaching far more radical than orthodox Maimonideans admit, possibly approaching a naturalistic critique of revelation. Maimonides did not write for everyone. He wrote for the rare reader capable of receiving what could not be said openly.
Alfarabi preserved a secret line. Strauss claimed Alfarabi (c. 872-950) carried forward a Platonic teaching the Latin West had lost. Behind Farabi’s apparent piety lay philosophical naturalism. Through Farabi, the true Plato reached Maimonides. Through Maimonides, fragments reached Spinoza. A hidden line of transmission ran across centuries and across the Christian-Muslim-Jewish divide.
Xenophon was deeper than he looked. Strauss read Xenophon (c. 430-354 BCE) as a more cunning writer than commonly recognized, hiding his philosophical seriousness behind apparent military memoir and gentlemanly chatter. The whole tradition that dismissed Xenophon as a lightweight had been fooled by the surface. The rehabilitation of Xenophon was the recovery of an esoteric art.
The crisis of the West is hidden from itself. Strauss argued that liberal democratic society cannot name its own predicament. Its confidence rests on classical and biblical inheritances it has repudiated. The intellectual class conceals this from itself through historicism and positivism, both of which forbid asking the question of the good. The West, on this reading, sleepwalks, and the supposed normal scholarship enforces the sleep.
Heidegger’s Nazism was no accident. Strauss saw Martin Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism as the consistent working-out of his philosophy, not a personal failing or a temporary lapse. Radical historicism, taken seriously, leaves no ground for resisting whatever the moment demands. The greatest mind of the age followed his thinking where it led. The professorial habit of treating this as embarrassing biography missed the point.
The Platonic Socrates is a mask. Strauss argued that the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues is a literary creation, not a transcript. Plato writes a Socrates who serves Plato’s pedagogical purposes. The reader who treats the dialogues as records of conversation has been fooled by Plato’s art. The historical Socrates survives only in fragments, and the Platonic Socrates teaches Plato’s lessons, not his own.
The teaching of every great book is what the book takes pains to hide. This is the unifying claim. Strauss inverted the normal reading habit. The surface lessons of philosophical texts are the bait. The real teaching lies in what gets stated once and dropped, what gets contradicted, what gets placed at the structural center of the work, and what gets said only by the most disreputable speaker. The careful reader looks for the awkward, the buried, and the apparent mistake.
The shared logic of all these claims is that truth resists open statement and that any culture serious about philosophy will have learned the art of saying and not saying.
The Strauss appeal sits in a different register than truth. Take the channels in rough order of force.
Initiation. A bright eighteen-year-old enters college without a clear sense of what kind of intellectual to become. The Straussian school offers a complete identity for the taking. A posture of gravity and ironic distance from current politics. A syllabus that runs from Plato through Maimonides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and Nietzsche. A vocabulary, the theological-political problem, the philosopher and the city, the gentleman, the quarrel of the ancients and moderns. A method, close reading for surface and depth. A community whose members recognize each other instantly. Most academic options offer fragments. This option offers the whole man.
Flattery built into the method. The Straussian art tells the student he is not one of the many. He is among the few capable of reading what the careless miss. For an intelligent young man who has spent his life suspecting he is smarter than his teachers and his peers, the confirmation is intoxicating. The flattery is structural, not personal. The method itself flatters anyone who performs it.
Permission to take ideas seriously. American higher education by the mid-twentieth century treated old texts as historical curiosities. Plato had to be understood in his time and then set aside. The Straussian school said no. Plato might be right. Maimonides might be right. The student gets permission to read the great books as live arguments about how to live. No other school grants this permission so cleanly.
A diagnosis of modernity. Strauss said modern life suffers from a particular illness, the rejection of natural right and the embrace of historicism and value-relativism. The diagnosis fits the intuitive sense many students carry that something has gone wrong. The school offers an account of what went wrong and how to think about it. Most academic schools do not offer a diagnosis at all. The market gap is enormous.
A defense against postmodernism. Where deconstruction sees only power and play of signifiers, the school says the great texts can be read for truth. The school positions itself as the citadel of meaning. Students who refuse the postmodern offer have somewhere to go.
A religion-substitute. The structural elements of religious community appear without the supernatural commitments. Masters and disciples. Texts read with reverence. Rituals in the seminar. Heretics and orthodox. A long lineage of teachers stretching back into the past. A way of life. For a Jew or Catholic or Protestant losing observance, the school offers continuity of form with relief from content.
The Jewish case sits at the center. Strauss was Jewish. Maimonides anchors the canon. The theological-political problem comes from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sources. Bloom, Mansfield, Berns, Cropsey, Jaffa, Smith. The roster reads heavily Jewish. For Jewish intellectuals who want serious Jewish life without the synagogue, the Straussian engagement with Maimonides, Halevi, and Spinoza supplies a Jewish intellectual home without the demands of observance. Many of the school’s most influential figures fit this profile. The school does the work of Jewish continuity through philosophy rather than through practice (Halacha).
Sophisticated conservatism. Post-war American conservatism in the academy had nowhere to go. Crude reaction was unrespectable. Religious traditionalism was unfashionable. Libertarian economics was dry. The Straussian school provided a form of conservatism that engaged the great tradition. It defended bourgeois democracy without embracing technocratic liberalism. It worried about the cultural Left without joining the religious Right. For a young conservative with intellectual ambition, the school was the only serious option for decades and remains close to that.
Mentorship and career. Strauss took his students seriously. His students became serious teachers in turn. The school has been good at mentorship in an academy where graduate students are often neglected. It offers attention, letters of recommendation, placement, introduction to senior scholars. The infrastructure includes chairs at major universities, the journal Interpretation, foundations like Earhart, think tanks like the Claremont Institute, and government positions especially in Republican administrations. For a smart young man willing to perform the moves, the school offers a career path that competing schools do not match.
Endless work. Every great book contains hidden teachings. Every great philosopher coordinated his rhetoric. The student can spend a lifetime producing readings. Each reading can be defended within the school by appeal to the master’s intuition. The method never runs out of material. This is academic gold.
Conspiracy theories thrive because they supply pattern, community, esoteric knowledge, flattery (the believer sees what others miss), and explanation of a confusing world. The Straussian school supplies the same goods at higher altitude. It is conspiracy thinking for intelligent men with classical educations. Each great book contains hidden teachings. Each great philosopher coordinated his rhetoric. The world makes sense once you have the key. The believer sees what others miss. The community recognizes its own. The comparison should not be heard as insult. The structural goods that conspiracy provides are the same goods the school provides. The school just provides them with better texts, better company, better tailoring, and academic prestige instead of basement chatrooms. A conspiracy theorist on Reddit and a Straussian at Yale run the same psychological program with different production values and different reading lists.
Add the channels together and the appeal is overdetermined. Identity, flattery, permission, diagnosis, defense against nihilism, religion-substitute, Jewish home, conservatism with respectability, mentorship, career, endless work, and a sense of belonging to a long chain of careful readers reaching back to antiquity. Truth-tracking sits nowhere on this list. The school can deliver all these goods while delivering little new knowledge of Plato or Aristotle. The persistence of the school reflects the continuing absence of alternatives that offer a comparable package, not any vindication of its scholarship.
Strauss’s circle developed several features that earn the word “cult.”
The master’s asides and jokes get the same close attention as the books. The reading method only the trained can use properly. A vocabulary signals membership: regime, the philosopher, the city, low but solid ground. An inside-outside line gets policed by the question of whether someone reads correctly. Transmission happens through personal contact rather than published argument. Factions and schisms run deep (East Coast versus West Coast, Claremont versus Toronto versus Chicago versus St. John’s, Jaffa versus Pangle). Sacred texts hold authority internal to the group. Criticism counts as evidence of incomprehension rather than disagreement. The lecture notes circulated only to the trustworthy. The Strauss archive at Chicago stayed tightly held for decades until Heinrich Meier began publishing the German materials.
The closed shop has its own ranking and its own rewards. Those rewards require silence and a habit of indirection. Plain answers belong to outsiders. Vagueness signals that the real teaching cannot be reduced to plain speech.
Did Strauss’s conspiracy thinking get amplified by his students? Yes.
Allan Bloom made the diagnosis of modern crisis a bestseller in The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Harry Jaffa (1918-2015) pressed the recovery of natural right into American constitutional argument, fighting Pangle and Mansfield in long feuds about whether Lincoln continued the Founding or reformed it. Harvey Mansfield (b. 1932) pushed the manliness theme and the suspicion of feminism and modern liberalism. Carnes Lord and Abram Shulsky carried the esoteric method into work on intelligence. Shulsky and Gary Schmitt wrote Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (1999), arguing that intelligence analysts should read foreign communications the way Strauss read Maimonides. William Kristol (b. 1952), through The Weekly Standard, applied the rhetoric of regime, virtue, and decline to American foreign policy.
The disinformation frame fits parts of this story.
A practice of treating public speech as a code concealing real intent trains an analyst to assume manipulation everywhere. It also licenses production of public speech that conceals real intent. The two skills are the same skill turned in opposite directions. Reading and writing in code share a grammar.
The Office of Special Plans under Douglas Feith (b. 1953) in the run-up to the Iraq War got directed in part by Shulsky. The OSP existed to produce intelligence assessments contradicting the CIA’s, supporting the case for invasion. The unit existed because the regular intelligence community refused to produce the readings the political leadership wanted. Shulsky brought his Straussian training in finding hidden meanings to the task of finding Iraqi WMD programs and Al Qaeda ties in fragments of evidence that intelligence professionals had already discounted.
The harms attributable to the school, in descending order of confidence:
First, the Iraq War. The Straussian network did not cause the war on its own. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush wanted it. But Paul Wolfowitz (b. 1943), Shulsky, Feith, Kristol, and the writers around them supplied the intellectual case and the institutional energy. The war killed many thousands of Americans and many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. It cost trillions of dollars. It opened space for ISIS. The school did not act alone, but the school sits on the ledger.
Second, the corrosion of plain speech. If every important text says the opposite of its surface, no public document means what it appears to mean. A managerial elite gets trained to assume manipulation in others and to license it in itself. Public reasoning becomes theater. The school did not invent this attitude, but the school dignified it as wisdom.
Third, the noble-lie license. Strauss himself did not advocate lying to the public. His students, or at least the popularizers of his students, drifted toward the view that elite deception of the masses is principled rather than corrupt.
Fourth, the aristocratic disdain for democratic deliberation. The competent few must guide the incompetent many. The classics teach this, on the Straussian reading. The political consequences include impatience with consultation, with congressional oversight, with public argument.
Fifth, an intellectual culture immunized against empirical correction. The esoteric reading method generates secret meanings from any text. No external evidence can refute the reading, since the reader can always claim to see what the unsubtle reader has missed. The same habit transferred to policy means evidence does not constrain the reading. The case for invasion already existed. The intelligence had to fit.
Jeffrey Alexander’s (b. 1947) cultural trauma theory treats traumas not as natural responses to terrible events but as constructions. Carrier groups make claims about pain, name victims, link victims to a wider audience, and assign responsibility. The work is meaning-making. Alexander rejects the lay view that events traumatize on their own. Schools can fail, regimes can fall, economies can collapse, and none of it produces collective trauma unless agents construct one. The trauma process unfolds through speech acts addressed to an audience inside an institutional arena. A master narrative emerges only when carrier groups succeed at this meaning work.
Smith is a carrier-group agent. He works within several carrier groups at once.
As a Straussian, he carries the master narrative of modernity-as-decline. Classical political philosophy gave way to early-modern lowering of horizons, the lowering opened a path to ideology, and ideology helped produce the catastrophes of the twentieth century. Modernity and Its Discontents by Steven B. Smith (2016) tells that story. The pain is the loss of philosophical seriousness. The victim is the Western mind. The responsible parties are Machiavelli, Hobbes, and their heirs. The audience is the educated reader still capable of reading old books.
As a defender of Yale’s older culture, Smith carries a more local trauma claim. The 2024 lecture frames a wound: the university that once trained citizens and statesmen has become a credentialing factory governed by citation indices and inclusion bureaucrats. The pain is the loss of liberal education. The victims are students who never encounter Plato, professors hired by quasi-scientific metrics, and figures like Socrates, Spinoza, and Emerson who, Smith suggests, might not find a place on today’s campus. Responsibility falls on DEI administrators and the STEM research model. The audience is the alumni readership of the Yale Daily News and the readers of conservative-leaning op-ed pages.
As a liberal patriot, Smith carries a third claim. Reclaiming Patriotism presents the social fabric of the republic as torn by two extremes. The pain is the collapse of shared civic identity. The victims are Americans of the broad center. The responsible parties are Trumpian ethno-nationalists on the right and progressives on the left who treat the founding as hypocrisy. The audience is the constituency of David Brooks (b. 1961), George Will (b. 1941), and Robert Kagan (b. 1958), all of whom endorsed the book.
Alexander’s method does not ask whether Smith’s pain claims are true. It asks how the claims are made and what they do. Smith’s three trauma narratives stack. They reinforce one another. The decline of philosophy explains the decline of the university, the decline of the university explains the decline of civic patriotism, and the decline of civic patriotism explains the rise of the extremes. Each narrative supplies villains the others can borrow. The progressive student activist and the Trumpian populist appear in all three.
Smith speaks from Yale, from a named chair, from a tradition with a publishing infrastructure that runs through Yale University Press, Cambridge University Press, and University of Chicago Press, and from a network of allied scholars and journalists. Alexander notes that carrier groups can be elites or marginalized classes. Smith is the elite case. His material and ideal interests align with a construction of the cultural past: a Yale that valued his kind of work, a public sphere that took political philosophy seriously, a patriotism that named men like him as its civic teachers. His standing rises if the audience accepts the trauma narrative he offers.
The audience comes half-prepared before he arrives. Reclaiming Patriotism received warm notices from David Brooks, George Will, and Leslie Lenkowsky (b. 1946), who occupy adjacent positions in the same carrier group. Alexander calls this the originating audience. Smith does not have to persuade his core readers that something has been lost. He has to give them the language and the master narrative that shapes their preexisting sense of loss.
The institutional arena shapes the form. Smith writes in the academic register, places his trauma claims in scholarly monographs, and grounds them in canonical texts. He reaches for theodicy too. His patriotism book leans on a quasi-religious vocabulary of sacred founding ideals profaned by both extremes. Alexander treats theodicy as one channel for trauma narratives. Smith uses it without naming it.
A harder version of Smith’s university critique might name the trustees, donors, and administrators who run Yale, but the same Yale pays him, the same Yale presses publish him, and the same elite circuit invites him to lecture. He does not name them. A harder version of his patriotism book might examine whether the broad center he defends ever existed outside the memories of men born around 1951 who came of age during the postwar consensus. He does not pursue that question either. The carrier-group analysis predicts these silences without needing to label them.
Alexander’s framework lets us see what Smith’s narratives do for the audience. Cultural trauma narratives expand or restrict the circle of solidarity. Smith’s narratives expand a circle that includes readers of old books, defenders of constitutional government, and citizens who feel patriotic without feeling nationalist. They restrict a circle that excludes the DEI bureaucrat, the postcolonial theorist, and the ethno-nationalist populist. The expansion and the restriction happen in the same gesture. Cultural identity gets made and remade by this work.
Smith is candid about his Straussian formation. Leo Strauss (1899-1973) appears in Reading Leo Strauss as a thinker shaped by the trauma of European Jewish catastrophe. Smith treats Strauss’s project as a response to a wound. The carrier-group analysis can be turned on Smith with his own permission. He has already shown how it works.
Smith describes himself as an East Coast Straussian.
That self-description sets the signaling problem. To call yourself an East Coast Straussian at Yale in 2026 is to send a careful, layered defensive signal. It says: I read Strauss, I take him seriously, I belong to the lineage of his students. It also says: I am not Harvey Mansfield (b. 1932). I am not Charles Kesler (b. 1948). I am not those Claremont people who write about Trump and the Caesarism of the American founding. I have nothing to do with Michael Anton (b. 1969) or the Flight 93 essay. The East/West Coast distinction in Straussianism is an efficient defensive signal in American academic life. It lets a scholar claim Strauss while disclaiming the Straussians who became politically inconvenient.
David Pinsof (b. ~1985) argues that most signaling is defensive. The hammer fits Smith well. Read his books in sequence. He wards off more than he asserts.
Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism recovers Hegel as a friend of liberal modernity. The defensive content: I am not reviving the Hegel of right-wing nationalism. I am not reviving the Hegel of communist teleology. I read him to defend constitutional government. The book lets a young political theorist work on a suspect figure by reassuring his readers that the work serves liberalism.
Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity does similar work with a different valence. Smith reads Spinoza as a founder of liberal modernity who solved the Jewish question by inventing the secular state. The defensive content: I am Jewish, I write on Jewish thought, but I read Jewish thought as a contribution to universal liberalism, not as a tribal possession. He is not Yoram Hazony. He is not a Jewish particularist. He is a Jewish liberal at Yale.
Reading Leo Strauss does the heaviest defensive lifting of his career. The book appeared after the Iraq War, after the New York Times pieces and Anne Norton’s polemic, after Strauss had been blamed for neoconservatism and the invasion of Iraq. Smith argues that Strauss is a friend of liberal democracy, that the conspiracy theories about hidden teachings and noble lies are overdrawn, that Strauss belongs to the broader tradition of liberal political thought. The defensive content: I read Strauss, but the Strauss I read is not the Strauss who supposedly inspired Paul Wolfowitz (b. 1943) and the neocons. The book ran interference for the Strauss brand at a moment when the brand had taken heavy fire.
Modernity and Its Discontents (2016) tracks the figure of the bourgeois from Machiavelli (1469–1527) to Saul Bellow (1915–2005). The defensive content: I praise the bourgeois, I defend liberal modernity, I am not a romantic anti-modernist, I am not nostalgic for the polis, I am not one of those Straussians who longs for the ancients. The book signals moderation against the more radical anti-modern wing of his own school.
Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes is the most defensive book Smith has written. The title gives it away. The threat structure: Trump-era nationalism has discredited patriotism on the academic left, and academic cosmopolitanism has discredited patriotism on the populist right. Smith stakes out a middle position. He defends a liberal, civic, constitutional patriotism that distinguishes itself from blood-and-soil nationalism. The defensive content: I love America, but not in a MAGA way. I criticize cosmopolitanism, but not in a nativist way. I am a patriot, but the right kind of patriot, the Lincoln kind, the Tocqueville kind, the kind Yale can keep paying.
The pattern repeats. Smith’s books pick conservative-coded or politically suspect figures and read them as friends of liberal modernity. The recurring move signals: I can be trusted with these figures. I will not be radicalized by them. I will return them to you in safe condition.
The Pinsof account predicts this. Smith holds an endowed chair at Yale. Yale provides his status, income, and protection. Yale rewards moderation and punishes alignment with the political right. A Straussian at Yale survives by demonstrating, again and again, that he is the safe kind of Straussian. Smith has done this for forty years. The technique has worked. The chair endures.
What does Smith avoid saying? He names few contemporary figures. He picks few fights with progressive academic orthodoxies. He writes in a tone of irenic moderation that protects him from being placed on a partisan side. When he criticizes, he criticizes long-dead philosophers or abstract trends. The “what will people think” filter operates at full strength.
The recent change is small but telling. In November 2024, at an Allan Bloom Forum event at Yale, Smith gave a talk called “Yale, Then and Now” attacking DEI hiring, citation metrics, and the politicization of the university. He argued that department hiring is increasingly governed by Google Citation Index numbers and quasi-scientific metrics, and that DEI processes assume most candidates hold prejudices that must be evaluated by hiring committees. He asked whether Socrates, Spinoza, or Emerson would have a place on today’s campus.
Read this through Pinsof. Smith is in his mid-seventies. He has held his chair since the late 1990s. The Allan Bloom Forum is a friendly venue, named for a Strauss student whose attack on the modern university in The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom (1930–1992) made his career. The talk is a small offensive signal sent from inside a defensive perimeter. Smith no longer faces serious career consequences from such a talk. He has tenure, he has the chair, he is past the age at which the next promotion matters. The defensive signaling can relax a little. He can risk a small descent down the social ladder because the floor has been built.
Notice what he still does not do. He does not endorse a political candidate. He does not affiliate with the Claremont Institute, the National Conservatives, or any other right-coded organization. He does not write for First Things or Compact or the American Conservative. He keeps publishing with Yale and Cambridge presses. He gives the DEI talk in a Yale lecture hall under Yale auspices. The offensive signal stays inside the defensive frame.
Even the apparent offensive moves are wrapped in defensive packaging. Smith is not trying to climb to the top of the political-intellectual food chain by becoming the loudest anti-DEI voice. He is trying to avoid descending to the bottom of his own self-image as a serious scholar who watches his university decline. The talk reads more like “I am not the professor who pretends nothing has changed” than “look how brave I am.”
The signaling logic Pinsof describes runs through Smith’s career at every level. The choice of philosophers signals safety. The bracketing of Strauss signals safety. The defense of the bourgeois signals safety. The patriotism that distances itself from nationalism signals safety. The DEI critique delivered in a small Yale venue, in measured tones, signals safety even at the moment of breaking with academic orthodoxy.
A scholar who occupies an endowed chair at an elite university for four decades has solved a signaling problem most academics never solve. He has shown, through thousands of small choices, that Yale has no reason to remove him. The intellectual content of his books is real. He has written serious work on Spinoza, Hegel, and Strauss. The books also do signaling work, and he has done the signaling work with skill.
Pinsof writes that the “what will people think” filter screens out verboten impulses in nearly every waking moment. Smith’s books are what the filter passes through. They are the verboten impulses screened out, the dangerous readings softened, the controversial figures escorted across the border into liberal modernity. The filter is the writer.
The deeper question Pinsof’s framework raises is what gets lost. The Strauss who shows up in Reading Leo Strauss is a more liberal, more democratic, more reassuring Strauss than the one in Strauss’s own books. The Spinoza of Spinoza’s Book of Life is a more humane, more accessible Spinoza than the cold geometric Spinoza of the Ethics. The Lincoln of Smith’s anthology is a more philosophical Lincoln, less the political operator. Each reading shaves off the edges that might catch on the wrong audience.
A scholar who never lets his subjects offend anyone has never let them speak. The defensive signaling pays its price in the philosophers themselves. They arrive at Yale domesticated.
That might be the cost of the chair. Or that might be the truth about the philosophers, and Smith might be right that they belong to liberal modernity after all. Pinsof’s framework cannot answer that question. It can only show that the question lives inside a signaling environment, and that the environment shapes what answers can be given.
Smith’s books share a quiet premise. Our political troubles come from forgetting. We forgot what patriotism means. We forgot what liberalism requires. We forgot the great books. Recover the tradition, teach it well, and the civic body heals.
Pinsof’s frame says forgetting is not what happened. Coalitions that benefited from the tradition lost ground to coalitions that benefit from its replacement. The great books did not slip out of the curriculum because professors got sloppy. They were pushed out by a faction that correctly understood the canon as a status weapon held by the wrong people. The new canon is also a status weapon, held now by a different coalition. The fight was not about understanding. It was about who gets to credential whom and on what terms.
Smith writes as if the canon’s defenders and attackers share an interest in getting the philosophy right, and disagree only about what the philosophy says. Pinsof says no. The defenders and attackers share no interest at all. They want different worlds. The defenders want a world in which their kind of training confers authority. The attackers want a world in which a different kind of training confers authority. The texts are stakes, not subjects.
Smith treats civic decline as a teaching problem. Teach Lincoln better, teach Tocqueville better, teach the Federalist better, and citizens reacquire the right understanding. Pinsof’s reply: the people who would benefit from that teaching already get it at Yale, Chicago, and a few small liberal arts colleges. The people who do not get it do not get it because their coalitions have no use for it. Telling them to read more Lincoln is telling them to switch coalitions. They are not going to switch coalitions because a Yale professor wrote a good book.
The deeper problem with the forgetting premise. Forgetting implies a prior state of remembering. When was that state? Smith’s books suggest a vague past in which Americans understood patriotism, citizens read the great books, liberal democracy rested on shared philosophical foundations. No such past existed. The mid-century consensus Smith implicitly reaches for was the coalition product of specific historical conditions: Cold War urgency, mass military service, the GI Bill, a narrow elite consensus enforced by three television networks and a handful of magazines. The philosophy did not produce the consensus. The conditions produced the consensus, and the philosophy was its decoration.
Once the conditions changed, the consensus dissolved. The philosophy could not hold it together because the philosophy never held it together in the first place. Smith mistakes the decoration for the structure.
The whole recovery framing misidentifies what civic faith was and what dissolved it. Civic faith was a coalition product of vanished conditions. Restoring it requires restoring conditions, not restoring readings. No syllabus does that work.
Progressive disdain for patriotism reflects accurate stereotyping of who waves the flag and votes Republican. Conservative drift toward nationalism reflects accurate stereotyping of who calls themselves citizens of the world and votes Democrat. Neither side suffers from a reading deficiency. Both sides understand fine. They fight for control of the state, and they fight dirty because the stakes warrant it.
Smith’s framing positions the philosopher as healer. The patient is a confused civic body. The cure is careful exposition of Maimonides (1138-1204), Lincoln (1809-1865), and Tocqueville (1805-1859). Pinsof calls this self-flattery. Philosophy professors might find that civic ills stem from a shortage of philosophy professors, just as dentists find dental ills stem from a shortage of dental appointments.
Smith writes well. He reads carefully. His Spinoza lectures are first-rate. None of that protects him from Pinsof’s challenge. The challenge cuts at why he writes what he writes, for whom, and what coalition rewards him for it. The readers who buy his books already agree with him. The readers who do not will not be persuaded by another chapter on Lincoln. The misunderstanding myth flatters the seller and reassures the buyer. Both already share the prior commitments the philosophy is meant to produce.
Smith is a buffered self of the high academic type. His prose is calm, deliberate, secular. He writes about thinkers who once felt the pull of porosity, Spinoza and Maimonides (1138–1204) and Strauss, but he writes about them with the detachment of a man who has resolved that question. His Spinoza book treats the Theologico-Political Treatise as the founding charter of the modern liberal order, the document that closed the porous Jewish past and opened the buffered Jewish future.
Smith’s Judaism follows the same pattern. He is Jewish by birth, by family, by reading, by sympathy. He is not Jewish by submission to a Lawgiver whose word reaches into him from outside. He chooses his tradition. That is the buffered Jewish posture, and Spinoza is the patron saint of it.
His Strauss work shows the same move. Smith reads Strauss as a liberal, even a friend of liberal democracy, against readings that make Strauss a critic of the Enlightenment from a near-religious right. The Strauss Smith gives us is a buffered Strauss, a thinker who took Jerusalem seriously as a permanent option but kept Athens for himself.
His Hegel book reads Hegel as a theorist of modern freedom. Hegel the buffered modern, Hegel without the Geist. The same move again.
The tension comes with Reclaiming Patriotism. Patriotism, in Taylor’s terms, asks the buffered self to let something in. Love of country, attachment to a particular people and place, willingness to die for the polity. These are porous postures. They require that meaning come from outside the autonomous self, from a history and a soil and a we. Smith wants to recover patriotism for the buffered liberal. He argues that you can love America without becoming porous. The book strains under that load. It tries to make patriotism safe for the autonomous man.
A more porous writer might say that patriotism only works when the polity becomes sacred, when the flag is treated as a holy object, when the dead at Gettysburg are felt as a continuing presence. Smith cannot say this. His commitments to liberal individualism prevent it. So he gives patriotism a buffered form, an attachment one might choose, examine, modify, withdraw.
His treatment of religion shows the same shape. He respects religion. He does not despise it. He reads its texts with care. But he reads them as philosophy, as politics, as ethics, never as address from God to the reader. The texts cannot reach him because the boundary holds.
That boundary serves him well in the academy. Yale rewards the buffered scholar. Tenure, journals, prizes, doctoral students, the apparatus runs on buffered habits of mind. A porous Smith, a Smith who heard God speaking in Genesis, could not have written the books Smith has written. The buffer is a professional asset.
It also marks the limit of his project. Smith writes about thinkers who saw the buffered self as a problem, not a solution. Spinoza thought he had solved the problem by making the buffer rational. Strauss thought the buffer had emptied modern life and tried to recover Jerusalem without giving up Athens. Hegel thought the buffer might be opened from inside by reason. Smith reads all three as fellow liberals, which softens what each was trying to do.
The buffered Smith handles Spinoza well, because Spinoza is half-buffered already. He handles Strauss with more difficulty, because Strauss kept porosity as a live option. He handles Hegel by domesticating him.
Smith’s recent turn toward patriotism reads as a buffered man’s effort to recover what buffering costs. The cost is attachment, weight, given meaning. The recovery cannot succeed on buffered terms because buffering is what removed those things. You cannot choose to be porous. Porosity, in Taylor’s account, is a condition, not a decision. The condition might be lost. It cannot be reclaimed by argument.
Smith wants the goods of the porous self, patriotism and civic love and shared meaning, without the costs, submission to something outside the autonomous self. Taylor’s book suggests the trade does not work. The goods come with the costs.
Smith’s career is the career of a man who has gotten as much from the buffered position as the buffered position can give, who senses that something is missing, and who has tried in his late work to name what is missing without giving up the position from which the missing thing cannot be reached.
Smith and Hazony agree on this: “Liberal societies depend upon moral and psychological resources they cannot fully generate through procedural neutrality.”
Where do they depart?
Both reject the Rawlsian and Millian picture of a state that hovers above thick commitments and umpires fair procedures among free individuals. Both think that picture rests on resources the picture does not acknowledge: family loyalty, religious formation, national feeling, inherited custom, a sense of the sacred. Both think the late twentieth-century liberal consensus mistook these resources for either obstacles to clear away or private hobbies the state should leave alone. Both think the bill for that mistake comes due now.
The agreement ends there.
First, on the Enlightenment. Smith treats the Enlightenment as continuous with and corrective of religious tradition, not opposed to it. He reads Spinoza (1632-1677) as the founder of a Jewish liberalism that takes religion seriously and submits it to critical reason. He reads Lincoln as the American synthesizer of biblical and classical sources. Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes defends the Enlightenment inheritance as the moral resource the country must recover. Hazony sees the Enlightenment as a rival tradition that consumes the substrate it depends on. In Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022) he draws a sharp line between Anglo-American conservatism, rooted in Hebrew scripture, English common law, and Protestant covenant theology, and Enlightenment liberalism, rooted in Locke, Kant, and Mill. He thinks the conservative tradition is the real source of American constitutional life and the Enlightenment is a corrosive intruder. Smith wants to recover the marriage of Athens and Jerusalem. Hazony wants to recover Jerusalem and treat Athens as a foreign import.
Second, on religion and the state. Smith wants religion respected, protected, and active in civil society. He does not want religious establishment. He treats the separation of church and state as part of the liberal achievement, not a betrayal of it. Hazony wants the majority religion at the center of public life. In an American context this means Christianity in the schools, on the coinage, in the laws, in the symbols. In an Israeli context it means a state with a public Jewish religious character, not a secular state where Jews happen to be the majority. Hazony’s program runs against the disestablishment principle that Smith defends as part of the moral and psychological resource liberal democracy requires.
Third, on patriotism and nationalism. Smith adopts the Habermas-Sternberger distinction between patriotism (loyalty to a particular country with its institutions and history) and nationalism (loyalty to an ethnic or religious nation that may be jealous, exclusive, and aggressive). He thinks patriotism sustains democracy and nationalism corrodes it. Hazony rejects the distinction. The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) argues that nationalism is the political form that protects diverse peoples from imperial homogenization. Hazony sees nationalism as morally healthy and accuses the patriotism-only camp of disguised universalism. Smith reads Hazony’s position as a slide toward the exclusive nationalism that destroyed Europe in the twentieth century. Hazony reads Smith’s position as the universalism that emptied national community of substance.
Fourth, on the canon. Smith teaches Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Lincoln. Athens and Jerusalem stand in equal balance, with Greek philosophy carrying the heavier philosophical load. Hazony has argued that the Hebrew Bible is a philosophical text and that Greek philosophy is overrated as a source of Western political life. The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (2012) reads Genesis through Kings as a sustained philosophical argument. Hazony wants the Bible at the center of the political education and Plato pushed to the margins. Smith wants both at the center.
Fifth, on Strauss. Smith is an East Coast Straussian who reads Strauss as a careful philosopher reopening the question of revelation and reason. He treats Strauss with reverence even when he disagrees. Reading Leo Strauss (2006) extracts Strauss from the political coalition of Bush-era Straussians and recovers him as a serious teacher. Hazony has criticized Strauss for treating the Hebrew Bible as a tradition of revelation set against philosophy. Hazony thinks the Bible is philosophy and that the Strauss distinction between Athens and Jerusalem misreads the biblical material. The break with Strauss is intellectual and coalitional. Smith stays inside the Yale-Chicago Straussian network. Hazony positions himself outside it.
Sixth, on Spinoza. Smith treats Spinoza as the founder of modern Jewish liberalism, the man who first showed how a Jew might engage critical reason and democratic politics without abandoning Jewish identity. Spinoza’s Book of Life (2003) reads Spinoza as a positive resource for Jewish modernity. Hazony reads Spinoza as a Jewish heretic whose project of universal rationalism dissolves Jewish particularity. The disagreement on Spinoza maps the deeper disagreement on the Enlightenment. Smith sees Spinoza as a friend. Hazony sees him as a saboteur from inside the tradition.
Seventh, on Israel. Both support Israel as a Jewish state. They mean different things by the phrase. Smith supports a liberal-democratic Israel with a Jewish majority and full rights for Arab citizens, a state shaped by Jewish history but governed by liberal procedures. Hazony supports a Jewish state in religious-national terms, with the Bible and rabbinic tradition giving public character to law and education. The disagreement on Israel maps onto their disagreement on America. Both apply the same template in both places. Smith wants liberal procedures with a thick cultural skin. Hazony wants the thick cultural body to govern, with liberal procedures as a thin restraint when they help.
Eighth, on the enemy. Smith’s main enemies are the woke Left, which he thinks dissolves the constitutional order through identity politics, and the populist Right, which he thinks dissolves it through contempt for institutions. He defends the center. Hazony attacks the center as the source of the disease. He sees the educated liberal-centrist class as the carrier of the Enlightenment ideology that has hollowed out the West. His enemy is Smith’s coalition. Smith’s enemy is Hazony’s coalition. Each man’s defense of his shared starting premise leads him to the opposite political alignment.
Ninth, on the political program. Smith wants to defend existing constitutional institutions and rebuild trust in them through better civic education, restrained executive power, and a temperate patriotism. He works as a Burkean institutional conservative inside the liberal frame. Hazony wants to remake the political order to favor national, religious, and traditional family forms. He wants conservative governments to use state power to advance these substantive ends. He has helped organize the National Conservatism conferences and aligned with figures like Viktor Orban and J.D. Vance. Hazony’s program treats Smith’s institutional defense as part of the problem. Smith’s defense treats Hazony’s program as a threat to the constitutional order.
Tenth, on the source of the moral and psychological resources. Both agree liberalism needs them. They disagree about where to get them. Smith’s source: the canon of Western political philosophy from Plato to Lincoln, plus religious traditions kept in their proper sphere of civil society. Hazony’s source: the Hebrew Bible, the patriarchal family, the bounded nation, the inherited common law tradition. Smith’s resources sustain a liberal-democratic state with a culturally particular character. Hazony’s resources sustain a culturally particular state with a thin liberal restraint. The shared premise leads to opposite political forms.
The deep difference behind all ten departures comes down to this. Smith believes liberalism can be saved by recovering the cultural substrate it forgot. Hazony believes liberalism cannot be saved because its core procedural-neutralist commitments destroy the substrate. Smith wants liberalism with thicker soil underneath. Hazony wants thicker soil with liberalism as a thin layer of legal procedure on top, when it helps, and gone when it does not.
The shared starting line conceals these opposite finishing lines. Two men can agree on the premise and end up on different sides of the most consequential political question of the present century.
Smith’s anti-historicism is mostly methodological, not metaphysical. He resists reducing texts to context. He does not assert positive timeless truth.
The East Coast / West Coast Straussian split helps locate him. West Coast Straussians, centered at Claremont and shaped by Harry Jaffa (1918-2015) and Charles Kesler (b. 1956), take the natural right tradition as substantively true and applicable to American politics. They defend Lincoln’s reading of the Declaration of Independence as grounded in eternal moral truth. They make positive metaphysical claims about natural right and accept the political risks of those claims. East Coast Straussians, centered at Chicago, Yale, and Toronto, run more philosophically tentative. They treat Strauss’s recovery of natural right as a question worth keeping opend. They favor the ironic and tragic dimensions of philosophy. They hedge on whether timeless truth is accessible.
Smith fits the East Coast pattern and self-describes that way. His work asks questions. Reading Leo Strauss treats Strauss’s natural right project as a problem to preserve. Modernity and Its Discontents describes modernity as a state of mind characterized by self-criticism and doubt, not as a falling away from accessible eternal truth. Political Philosophy frames the field as a conversation across centuries about justice, freedom, and authority. The framing assumes the conversation is worth conducting. It does not assume the conversation has reached eternal answers.
Compare him to scholars who commit to natural right doctrines. Hadley Arkes (b. 1940) writes as if natural law is real and accessible. Robert P. George (b. 1955) builds a positive natural law theory in the new natural law tradition. Jaffa argued for the Declaration as grounded in eternal moral truth and took the political risks that came with the claim. These men make substantive metaphysical commitments and pay the costs of those commitments. Smith does not. He hedges. He stays at the level of “the question is worth keeping open.” He defends the practice of reading great books as if they might be right without committing to which ones are right. He criticizes historicism for foreclosing the question of truth without asserting which truths win.
The hedge has coalition value. It lets Smith oppose historicism rhetorically while practicing a sophisticated hermeneutics that any modern academic could perform under different vocabulary. It lets him maintain the Strauss school’s anti-modern posture while operating in distinctly modern academic settings. It lets him write books that conservatives find congenial and liberals find respectable. The hedge is what allows the East Coast Straussian to remain inside the modern university while claiming to stand outside it.
A methodological versus metaphysical distinction helps clarify. Smith’s anti-historicism is real as a method. He reads Plato as making arguments that can still be tested for truth. He resists reducing Locke to his historical setting. He treats texts as live interlocutors. This methodological stance does not require strong eternalism. A historian of philosophy who is privately a thoroughgoing historicist can adopt the same stance for pragmatic reasons, because it produces richer readings than the alternative. The reading practice can be performed under either flag. Smith flies the anti-historicist flag because the school’s identity depends on it. The flag is the membership marker. Whether Smith privately holds the metaphysics carries less weight than whether he flies the flag publicly, and he flies it.
The honest test for whether someone believes in timeless truth is to ask what specific timeless truths he commits to. Equality before the law? Natural right to property? The wrongness of slavery as such? A teleological human nature? Read through Smith’s published work and the positive commitments come up thin. He defends inquiry into these questions. He does not commit to particular answers. The thinness of the positive commitments tells you what you need to know about how seriously to take the anti-historicism as a metaphysical position.
Smith probably believes the philosophical questions are real, that the great texts have something to say about them, and that reducing texts to their contexts loses something. This is a defensible position. It is also much more modest than asserting access to truths outside time and space. The Strauss school markets the stronger position. Smith practices the weaker one. The gap between the marketing and the practice is one of the school’s persistent features. Most members operate in the gap, including the prominent ones, including Smith.
I began this essay noting: “His career illustrates the persistence of a postwar conviction: that close study of canonical texts forms moral judgment, restrains political extremism, and prepares citizens for the burdens of democratic life.”
We’ve now established that these claims are nonsense.
Close study of canonical texts does not form moral judgment. Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) read the canon with great care and joined the Nazi party. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) read it with care equal to anyone in the twentieth century and joined the same party. Leo Strauss read the canon with the deepest care of all, and many of his American disciples cheered the Iraq War. The historical record of close readers is mixed at best. The claim that the texts produce civic moderation has no empirical foundation. It is a guild myth.
The same line claims that the canon restrains political extremism. The graduates of Yale and similar institutions include men who pushed extreme political projects once they had power. The selection effect, not the curriculum, explains whatever civic moderation correlates with elite education. Students who arrived at Yale predisposed to centrist liberalism stayed centrist liberals. Students who arrived predisposed to right-wing radicalism left as right-wing intellectuals with better vocabulary. The texts cooperate with whichever disposition the reader brings.
The transmission, when it works, produces the manner of a certain class of educated American: ironic, restrained, fond of paradox, suspicious of enthusiasm, comfortable citing the founders. The manner can produce civic moderation. It can also produce sophisticated apologetics for whatever the in-group already wants. The manner stays neutral with respect to political content. The civic-formation story confuses the manner with moral substance.
Pinsof goes further. The conviction that close study forms moral judgment is a sacred value defended in the dark. The Yale political philosophy graduate cannot admit that he signals membership in a credentialed class. He has to believe he received something more: formation, judgment, the burdens of democratic life. If he sees the status game, the game collapses. So the sacred narrative protects the player from his own awareness.
The narrative also positions the coalition. The educated liberal-centrist class marks itself off from two enemies. To the right stand the philistines who scorn the canon. To the left stand the iconoclasts who want to break it. The class in the middle keeps civilization. The defense of the canon is the same move Pinsof catalogues: a status game disguised as defense of sacred values. The angry response to the question you just asked is the proof. Suggest at a Yale faculty dinner that the canon does not form moral judgment. Notice the temperature drop.
Who is served? Smith himself receives an endowed chair, a publisher, prizes, an audience, a place in the lineage. Yale receives tuition, donations, prestige, and the cultural authority to keep producing the next generation of credentialed citizens. The donors receive the felt experience of supporting civilization. Yale University Press receives a publication list. The students who buy in receive credentials that pay them well in the labor market and a self-conception as people of judgment. The political class that recruits from Yale receives a legitimating story for its authority. The Open Yale viewer in Sacramento receives a free taste of the same self-conception. The whole apparatus runs on the conviction. Take the conviction away and many people lose status, income, and meaning at once.
Who is hurt? The student at a community college who reads the same canon and gets no career bump, because the bump comes from the credential, not the texts. The vocational student whose training gets treated as second-rate. The taxpayer who subsidizes the apparatus through research grants and student loans. The public told that the people in charge are wise philosophers when they are mostly credentialed climbers. The moral reasoning of the Yale student, who shows little improvement from reading Hobbes but now believes he has been formed. The candidate for office who does not speak in the cadences and gets dismissed as unserious for that reason alone. The voter whose interests get filtered through this dialect before they reach any decision-maker. The whole class structure rests in part on the conviction that the educated stratum has earned its position through moral formation rather than through credentialing.
Is it just a status game? Mostly. The game has some positive byproducts. Some students do learn careful reading. Some texts get preserved. Some lawyers and judges show occasional restraint that traces back, in some small fraction, to a sentence they read in Tocqueville. The byproducts are real. They do not match the size of the claim. The claim says the canon forms moral judgment, restrains extremism, prepares citizens for democracy. The reality is that the canon serves as curriculum for a credentialing apparatus that selects and signals membership in the educated stratum. The civic effects, where they exist, come from the selection and the credentialing, not from the texts.
The deflationary reading does not require contempt for Smith. He performs the role with skill, intelligence, and grace. The role exists because the credentialing system needs it. Someone has to teach the courses, write the books, give the lectures, embody the dignity of the office. Smith does this better than most. The question is what the role does and what it does not do. The role reproduces a class. It maintains a vocabulary. It supplies a sacred narrative. It does not form moral judgment in the way Smith’s defenders claim. The status game is real. The civic transformation reads more as advertising than as substance.
A defensible version of Smith’s project drops the strong claim. The university preserves an older vocabulary that cannot be reproduced from scratch once lost. The lecture course functions as an archive. The student picks up a language that may serve him later when conditions change. This modest claim survives the deflationary reading. The strong claim about citizen formation does not.
Earlier I wrote: “The organizing concern of his scholarship is the permanent conflict between philosophy and political order.”
The sentence performs Straussian self-mythology more than it describes Steven B. Smith’s work. “Permanent conflict between philosophy and political order” is the house vocabulary of the Strauss school. It elevates the academic into a heroic figure in an ancient drama, casts him as a guardian of dangerous truths against the city, and signals tribal membership to other political theorists.
By Pinsof’s lights, the phrase does coalition work. It positions Smith and his readers as initiates who grasp something the herd cannot. It supplies prestige to a Yale professor whose job means teaching seminars, attending conferences, and writing books for university presses. The grand framing flatters the writer and the subject at once.
Who benefits if “permanent conflict between philosophy and political order” wins as a framing? Political philosophers, who get to claim an ancient mantle, and Strauss-school heirs, who get to claim Smith. What truth might cost him? Saying his field is a small academic specialty whose stakes register mostly inside its own coalition.
The plainer description: Smith writes about how philosophers from Spinoza to Strauss handled political pressure, and how political orders respond to philosophical dissent. That loses the heroic register and gains accuracy.
The pretension also sits in “organizing concern.” A man with one organizing concern across decades is a man telling himself a story. Most scholars have interests, habits, contracts, and a few obsessions. “Organizing concern” tidies a career into a vocation.
The Jewish Tradition
Smith was acting head of Judaic Studies at Yale. He interprets the Jewish tradition through three main channels: Spinoza, Leo Strauss, and the broader question of Jewish political existence in modernity.
Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity reads Spinoza as the first modern Jewish thinker, the man who recast Judaism to fit the liberal values of autonomy and emancipation from tradition, and the first to make the civil status of Jews a founding question of modern political thought. Smith treats Spinoza’s excommunication, his critique of Scripture, and his comparison of the ancient Hebrew commonwealth to the modern commercial republic as moves inside a Jewish argument, not moves away from one. The closing question of the book is sharp: can a Judaism so conceived survive? Smith refuses to soften it. He sees Spinoza as the father of a particular kind of secular Jewish identity, the kind that runs through Mendelssohn, Heine, Marx, Freud, and the founders of political Zionism, and he asks whether that identity has any future once its quarrel with traditional revelation has been won.
Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism reads Strauss as a Jewish thinker first and a political philosopher second, or at least as a thinker for whom the two cannot be separated. The theological-political problem, the quarrel of Athens and Jerusalem, is the spine of the book. Smith treats Strauss’s recovery of Maimonides and medieval Jewish rationalism as the heart of the Straussian project, and he reads Strauss’s response to the crisis of liberalism as inseparable from his response to the crisis of modern Jewish existence. He edited The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss in 2009, which sealed his role as a custodian of how Strauss gets read.
Smith treats the Jewish Question as native to modern political philosophy rather than a sectarian matter sitting on the side. He reads Spinoza and Strauss as the bookends of a single argument about whether Jews can live as Jews inside a liberal modernity that Spinoza himself helped invent. He keeps the question open. He does not, like some Straussians, recommend a return to revelation, and he does not, like some liberals, treat Judaism as private sentiment. He sits in the unresolved middle and reports from there. That is his standing as an interpreter of the tradition: a Yale political philosopher who takes Jewish thought as a serious site of philosophical work and who treats the Jewish Question as a live problem.
So what is distinctively Jewish?
Not much.
Smith reads Jewish thinkers, writes on Jewish problems, and sits in Jewish institutional chairs at Yale. The topics are Jewish. The method is not. He works as a Western political philosopher who finds Jewish material related to liberalism. He reads Spinoza in Latin and through the secondary literature of political theory. He reads Strauss in German and English. He reads Maimonides through Strauss. He does not work from Tanakh, Talmud, midrash, or halakha. He does not argue from Sinai. He does not argue from covenant. He does not wrestle with the rabbis. The categories he uses to organize Jewish thought come from Hegel, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Strauss, not from Rashi, Maimonides on his own terms, the Vilna Gaon, Soloveitchik, or Rav Kook.
The tradition shows up as object, not as voice.
Smith is what his own Spinoza book describes. He is a Spinozist Jew interpreting Jewish tradition through the frame Spinoza invented to do exactly that. Spinoza recast Judaism as a historical-political phenomenon open to liberal critique, severed from the authority of revelation, and intelligible through the categories of universal philosophy. Smith inherits that frame and applies it to Spinoza and to everyone after him. The Jewish Question becomes a chapter in modern political thought. The Hebrew commonwealth becomes a republican case study. Strauss’s Athens-Jerusalem problem becomes a philosophical antinomy. Smith’s refusal to resolve the Athens-Jerusalem question, his preference to sit in the middle and report, is a Spinozist posture more than a Jewish one.
There is one place where something more distinctively Jewish leaks through. His Spinoza book ends with the question of whether a Judaism so reconceived can survive. He does not answer. The question itself is the Jewish residue. A pure Spinozist might not bother to ask. Smith asks. The asking carries a worry that the project he is describing might end Jewish life as a continuous tradition, and the worry is itself a small piece of evidence that he has not entirely left the tradition behind. But it is a thin piece. He raises the question and walks away from it.
So the topic is Jewish, the institutional position is Jewish, a faint residual worry about Jewish continuity is Jewish, and almost nothing else is.
Why do so Many Intellectuals Love Spinoza?
Smith has built much of his career on the claim that Spinoza founded modern liberal democracy. That suits his position at Yale as a Jewish liberal democrat with Straussian training who defends modernity against the Straussian critique.
Spinoza serves several constituencies at once. He is the patron of secular Jews who left orthodoxy while keeping a Jewish identity. The 1656 herem from the Amsterdam community made him the first modern Jew expelled by his own people for thinking too freely. Every Jewish intellectual who later abandoned tradition could trace a line back to him. Isaac Deutscher (1907-1967) called this lineage the non-Jewish Jew. Smith, Yirmiyahu Yovel (1935-2018), Rebecca Goldstein (b. 1950), and Steven Nadler (b. 1958) all work this vein.
He also serves liberal democrats who want philosophical roots. The Theological-Political Treatise of 1670 argued for separation of church and state, freedom of thought and speech, and biblical criticism that treated scripture as a human document produced in history. That book influenced Locke, Jefferson, and the whole project of the constitutional liberal state. Smith reads Spinoza as the founder Locke gets credit for.
And he serves atheists who want religious language. Spinoza’s deus sive natura, God-or-Nature, lets secular intellectuals talk about God while denying any personal deity. Einstein claimed he believed in Spinoza’s God. The phrase gives cover.
Does Spinoza deserves this attention? Was he first or best at something?
Spinoza was not first at anything and not obviously best anything. On toleration, John Milton (1608-1674) published Areopagitica in 1644, twenty-six years before the Theological-Political Treatise. Roger Williams (c. 1603-1683) published The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution the same year, arguing for religious toleration on theological grounds. Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) later wrote more carefully and to wider effect. Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration of 1689 had more direct political influence on the modern liberal state than anything Spinoza wrote.
On biblical criticism, the picture is similar. Hobbes (1588-1679) in Leviathan of 1651 had already questioned Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Isaac La Peyrère (1596-1676) published Prae-Adamitae in 1655, arguing for pre-Adamites and challenging biblical chronology. Ibn Ezra (1089-1167) had hinted in coded medieval Hebrew at problems with Mosaic authorship, and Spinoza cites him directly in the TTP. Richard Simon (1638-1712) produced a more rigorous biblical criticism in 1678. Spinoza was bold and systematic. He did not invent the field.
Spinoza grabs attention not due to the merit of his work but because he is Jewish and secular Jews like to write about him because he’s useful. The herem of 1656 is the hook. Without the story of the Jewish heretic excommunicated by his own community, Spinoza is a difficult Dutch metaphysician. With the herem story, he becomes a romance, a founder, a martyr of free thought. Compare his contemporaries. Malebranche (1638-1715) was an important rationalist now barely read outside the academy. Leibniz (1646-1716) was a greater philosopher and a greater mathematician but does not occupy comparable cultural space. The difference is that Spinoza has the herem and they do not.
Jewish intellectuals dominate the popular Spinoza literature. Steven Nadler, Yirmiyahu Yovel, Rebecca Goldstein, Steven B. Smith, Antonio Damasio (b. 1944), David Bidney, Hasana Sharp. Much of the work that reaches general readers comes from Jewish scholars. The reason is straightforward. Spinoza is the founder of modern secular Jewish identity. Writing about him is writing about the Jewish condition under modernity. It is self-clarification. The biography of the heretic is the autobiography of the secular liberal Jew.
There are at least three Spinozas in current scholarship, and they barely speak to each other.
The Jewish Spinoza is the one Smith, Yovel, Nadler, and Goldstein write about. This Spinoza is the founder of secular Jewish liberalism, the hero of the herem, the Jew who solved the modern Jewish question. The Theological-Political Treatise is central. The Jewish background of Maimonides (1138-1204), Ibn Ezra, and Crescas (c. 1340-1410) is treated as the matrix from which his thought emerged. He is read as a Jewish thinker even after his expulsion from the community.
The analytic Spinoza is the one Jonathan Bennett (b. 1930), Michael Della Rocca (b. 1962), Don Garrett, and Edwin Curley write about. This Spinoza is a difficult metaphysician alongside Descartes and Leibniz. The Ethics is central. The Jewish background is biographical color, not philosophical content. The arguments get evaluated by the standards of contemporary analytic philosophy. Bennett’s A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics of 1984 barely mentions the herem.
The continental Spinoza is the one Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), Antonio Negri (1933-2023), and Étienne Balibar (b. 1942) write about. This Spinoza is a radical materialist, the philosopher of immanence, the prophet of joy against the priests of transcendence. The conatus and the affects are central. He gets recruited as a weapon against authority, hierarchy, and theology. Deleuze’s Spinoza: Practical Philosophy of 1970 reads him as the antidote to Hegel.
These three Spinozas use different texts, ask different questions, and reach different conclusions. The Jewish Spinoza is mostly a political thinker. The analytic Spinoza is mostly a metaphysician. The continental Spinoza is mostly a critic of power. Each version is partly the philosopher and partly the coalition that uses him.
Spinoza occupies far more cultural space than his contributions warrant. The extra space gets filled by the Jewish question, the herem story, and the use secular Jewish intellectuals have made of him to ground their own position in modernity. Strip out the Jewish element and you have a second-rate philosopher. Add it back in and you have a cultural icon for a particular coalition.
As a metaphysician, the praise exceeds the cogency. The Ethics is a strange book that almost nobody reads end to end. The geometric method, propositions and demonstrations modeled on Euclid, promises a certainty it cannot deliver. Many of the deductions do not follow. Substance monism, the claim that there is only one substance and that God and Nature are two names for it, is obscure in ways that have kept commentators busy for three hundred years without resolution.
Leo Strauss treated Spinoza as the founder of a project Strauss thought was philosophically interesting but politically dangerous, because the unmasking of religion might not produce the liberal calm Spinoza promised but the moral exhaustion of the West. Smith works within Strauss’s frame while defending the liberalism Strauss doubted. That tension gives Smith’s Spinoza work its energy.
Strauss read modernity as a wrong turn. He argued that Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke lowered the standards of political life. They replaced virtue with comfort, the noble with the useful, the highest with the most secure. The end of that road is Nietzsche, Heidegger, nihilism, the last man. Strauss thought the moderns were wrong to abandon Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides (1138-1204), and Al-Farabi. For Strauss, Spinoza is a hinge figure in the wrong turn.
Smith’s whole career is an argument against this picture. He says modernity is not a catastrophe. He says liberal democracy is the right answer to the theological-political problem. He says Spinoza did not begin a slide toward nihilism but founded a stable liberal order that solves the Jewish question and the religion question at once.
The position is delicate. Smith wants to keep the Straussian habits: careful reading, taking the canon seriously, attending to esoteric writing, treating political philosophy as the queen of the sciences. He does not want to keep the Straussian conclusion that modernity is a disaster. So he uses Straussian tools to defend the modernity Strauss attacked. Spinoza is the figure who lets him do this. Spinoza sits inside the Straussian canon. Strauss wrote his first book on him. Reading Spinoza as a success puts Smith inside the Straussian conversation while disagreeing with its main verdict.
The Jewish piece runs through all of it. Smith is Jewish. He writes about Jewish thinkers. He sees himself in a Jewish intellectual tradition. If Smith had endorsed Strauss’s return to the medievals, he might have written on Maimonides. Maimonides is the great Jewish alternative to modern liberalism in Strauss’s reading, a philosopher who hid his rationalism inside Jewish law and preserved political religion as a noble lie for the multitude. But Smith does not want Maimonides. He wants a Jewish founder of liberal modernity, a Jew who solved the modern Jewish question by making Jewish identity compatible with secular citizenship. That is Spinoza.
Yale shapes the position too. Yale political science has long been moderate liberal in temperament. Smith fits there. Chicago Straussianism produced a more conservative wing: Harvey Mansfield (b. 1932) at Harvard, Thomas Pangle (b. 1944), Allan Bloom (1930-1992) at Chicago. The East Coast Straussian tradition has tended moderate liberal. Smith inherits that institutional setting. His Spinoza work suits his employer as much as his temperament.
So four constraints converge on Spinoza. Smith needs a hero who is Jewish. He needs a hero who is modern. He needs a hero in the Straussian canon. He needs a hero who founded liberal democracy. Spinoza is the only figure who satisfies all four. That is why Smith wrote two books on him.
A scholar’s main subject is rarely chosen at random. It is the figure who lets him occupy the position he wants to occupy. Smith’s Spinoza is Smith’s self-portrait. A Jewish secular liberal who reads carefully, takes religion seriously enough to reject its political authority, defends the modern order against its critics, and treats philosophy as the highest calling: that is what Smith claims Spinoza was. It is also what Smith is.
Strauss said the choice of subject in political philosophy is a political act. Smith follows that teaching while disagreeing with the master’s verdict. The student turns the teacher’s method against the teacher’s conclusion. That is the energy that runs through Smith’s Spinoza work, and it is why the work feels personal even when it presents itself as pure scholarship.
‘The Global Wire Conversation – “Modernity and Its Discontents” with Steven B. Smith’ (May 22, 2020)
Smith works on his home ground, the history of political philosophy, and speaks more directly about what he believes. The patriotism material is downstream of this. Modernity and Its Discontents lays out the position. The patriotism work translates it into civic register for a different audience.
He defines modernity as the creation of the bourgeois (1:04). His bourgeois is not Marx’s owner of the means of production but “the emergence of what we might think of as sort of the free and responsible individual an individual who is liberated from the ties of guild of religious order of family of locality and is free to make their own way in life to be to pursue life as a kind of adventure with no necessarily necessary goal or purpose” (1:34). That is the type modernity creates and the type the discontents target.
The Hobbes argument carries the early section. Smith says Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is not a liberal but “later liberalism I think would not have been possible without Hobbs Hobbs makes the crucial moves that makes subsequent liberal political philosophy possible” (8:07). The crucial move: “it’s the business of politics not to save our souls it’s not concerned with what George will called many years ago soulcraft politics is about attending to the business of stability peace and civil civil freedom in in this world” (9:05). Politics with limited ambition. The state does not redeem you. That move opens the door for everything Locke and after build.
The interviewer asks about Patrick Deneen (b. 1964) and his argument that liberalism cannot provide home or place. Smith concedes that the communitarian turn “speaks to a genuine need of human beings and a need to belong and need a need for a home into place” (14:00). Then he turns: “I don’t want to take this in the direction of a kind of what I think of as furious denunciation and negation” (15:31). Not engagement. Refusal to be drawn. Deneen has an argument. Smith does not answer it. He says he understands the impulse and then declines to follow it. That works rhetorically and dodges the philosophical question.
The same move with Deirdre McCloskey (b. 1942). The interviewer summarizes her counter-argument: modernity gives us more community options, not fewer; the problem is judging which are authentic (11:00). Smith responds with “the tyranny of choices” (12:51). That is not McCloskey’s argument. McCloskey says bourgeois life has produced more thick sociability, not less. Smith does not address her data. He retreats to a familiar Tocquevillean line about restlessness.
The Flaubert chapter discussion is the most pleasing passage. He calls Madame Bovary “a kind of rebel without a cause” (21:47) and says Gustave Flaubert’s (1821-1880) response to bourgeois ugliness was “purely aesthetic” (22:23), art for art’s sake. The image of Homais the pharmacist as the highest type of the new bourgeois order, “a relentless sort of propagandist for scientists or for Public Health” (19:52), an advocate of “health care plans,” fanatically anti-religious, is sharp. Flaubert understood the type before sociology had names for it.
Fascism and communism, Smith says, were responses to the fraternity gap in liberalism. “if we take the famous trio of Liberty which is a liberty equality and fraternity liberalism has done well in thinking thinking about the first two of those Liberty inequality it hasn’t given much thought to the problem of fraternity and I think that’s where these ideologies are very anti liberal ideologies that liberalism I mean excuse me like communism fascism and certain contemporary offshoots of both of them come in to fill the gap” (26:51). The claim is too neat. Burke, Tocqueville, the civic republican strain inside liberalism, the communitarian liberals like Walzer and Sandel, the conservative liberals like Oakeshott, all have thought about fraternity within or alongside the liberal tradition. Smith makes liberalism thinner than it is to set up the diagnosis that fascism and communism filled a real gap. The diagnosis has some truth. The setup overstates the case.
The “comrade” reference (27:24) is to Jodi Dean (b. 1962), whose Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging by Jodi Dean (2019) argues the political category needs rehabilitation. Smith does not remember her name. He dismisses the project and does not engage it.
The Strauss-Heidegger material is the most rewarding section for a philosophical reader. Smith says Strauss’s Natural Right and History (1953) is “in some sense modeled on but also enough presenting an alternative to” Being and Time by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) (32:10). Strauss’s book is a counter-Being-and-Time. Smith says Strauss could never quite explain the connection between Heidegger’s philosophy and his 1933 commitment to National Socialism. He frames Strauss’s project: “Strauss wanted to use political philosophy to defend liberal liberal democracy and that was part of Strauss’s resistance to Heidegger he saw that there was something very dangerous politically dangerous powerful and yet dangerous and his life’s work began…was to provide a liberal alternative to” Heidegger (32:55). That is the most useful framing of Strauss the interview offers.
The “liberalism is anemic” exchange is where Smith’s defense gets thinnest. The interviewer asks the hard version: liberalism does not demand a leap of faith, does not require sacrifice, does not give followers something to be proud of belonging to (33:40). Smith first agrees that liberalism makes “much greater demands on people” because it demands reason and reflection (34:48). Then he gives the Robert Frost (1874-1963) line: “Frost who defined a liberal of someone who’s enable incapable of taking their own science and argument” (35:53). Then the rhetorical close: “if defending democracy isn’t passionate enough for you…if defending democracy isn’t enough for you what more do you need” (37:24). Smith does not engage the charge. The charge is that liberalism does not motivate. Smith answers by stating his own motivation. He treats his own commitment as the proof. That works as testimony, not as argument. The harder version of the charge, that the motivational deficit of liberalism is a structural feature and not a personal failing of the unmotivated, goes unanswered.
The Schmitt section is where the interview earns its keep on contemporary diagnosis. The interviewer raises the politics-as-religion theme: “politics has become an ersatz religion” (39:04). Smith picks it up on Carl Schmitt (1888-1985): “the revival of interest and someone like Carl Schmitt who you would have thought of would have never had any hearing at all and part of the Schmidt’s attempt to turn politics into a kind of spiritual struggle of us and damn it” (39:14). The new nationalism, environmental emergency politics, both share the structure. Smith names his own priors with self-awareness: “this is terrible because possibly because I’m a kind of a bourgeois liberal at heart maybe two but I think what once one know that one is one it’s easier to defend once you know where you are right” (43:23). Naming your priors makes you a better defender of them. That sentence is the most honest in the hour.
The Strauss “German Nihilism” essay discussion has weight (43:50). Smith argues Strauss in the essay is “thinking about himself in the 1920s he was one of he was one of those young German nihilist” (45:39). The essay is “a kind of coming to terms with his younger self” (46:33). That reading carries weight. Strauss came to Heidegger and Nietzsche from inside, drawn to them first, then chose against them. The patriotism work, much later, is the choice still being defended.
The closing Hobbes-as-moralist exchange is philosophically the best moment. The interviewer sets up Hobbes as anti-Nietzsche, anti-Schopenhauer, the man who tells you to obey the state and keep your faith private. Smith adjusts: “Hobbes wanted to celebrate you know life on this earth that were life is all there is and we’re not living here to get to to get to the afterlife” (49:13). Then a Strauss phrase: “a lowering of the sights of ancient philosophy” (49:46). The moderns aim lower than the ancients. They do not promise the highest good. They promise the protection of life. Hobbes “was in with in many ways a moralist who emphasized the centrality of life and the things necessary to preserve and protect protection on human life” (50:45). That is the argument. Hobbesian liberalism is not amoral. It centers on the value of life. The morality is decent, not heroic. Smith owns the decent and rejects the heroic. The patriotism work later defends the same position in different terms.
A few smaller observations.
The pandemic-era environmental aside (40:35) points at the Schmittian structure of emergency politics. Smith takes it seriously: “the exaggeration is on target” (41:43).
The Frost line is funnier than Smith makes it. The full version is “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” Smith softens it to fit his defense.
The interview catches Smith pre-Trump-second-term, pre-October-7, pre the political acceleration that drives the patriotism work into more defensive postures. Here he sounds like a man with time to think. The 2025 interviews sound like a man whose ground has narrowed.
Comparison with the patriotism interviews. Modernity and Its Discontents is the foundation. The bourgeois individual, Hobbesian limited politics, the rejection of furious denunciation, the suspicion of politics-as-religion, the Strauss inheritance, all of it. The patriotism book takes this position and asks what civic glue holds a society of bourgeois individuals together. The answer there is the creedal-plus-ethos hybrid. The answer here, more austere, is that bourgeois liberalism is enough if you understand what it is. The 2020 Smith is more philosophical and less defensive than the 2025 Smith. He has not yet had to defend Yale on camera. He has not yet seen the right turn against his book harder than the left.
Of the three, this one carries the most. The Bernstein interview is defensive. The Gross interview is candid but constrained by the patriotism frame. This one lets Smith say what he thinks. The weakest moments are still the moments when he refuses to engage hard versions of opposing arguments. The strongest is the Hobbes-as-moralist close. The patriotism work makes more sense once you see this foundation under it.
‘Steven B. Smith (An introduction to Political Philosophy’ (Feb. 1, 2021)
The strongest moment comes at 40:13-41:30 when Smith picks Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) as the philosopher of social media. Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction maps cleanly onto platform incentives. Smith ties it to Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Heidegger (1889-1976) without forcing the link: “that philosophy of friend and enemy us and them uh the other uh the existential other that very much describes I think the kind of social media world.” That move does more work in ninety seconds than the rest of the conversation combined.
The Plato’s Republic pitch around 9:21-10:21 reveals Smith’s teaching method. He tells each class: “there is someone sitting out there… in sometime in the future in five years ten years you are going to look back and you’re going to discover that Plato’s Republic was the most important book that you’ve ever read.” People write back saying they were that student. A prophecy that needs only one match per cohort to confirm itself, harmless for the rest. Good teaching, partly because it works on the few it targets.
Smith’s confession at 4:43 is honest in a way most senior academics avoid: “you must be out of your mind who who would want to listen to this course online.” He assumed nobody outside Yale cared about Rousseau (1712-1778). He was wrong, gracefully so.
His Marx treatment at 28:14-30:40 names the flaw as “perfectionism” with roots in a certain reading of Plato (428-348 BC). The just society “realized on earth,” in his phrase. He prefers thinkers attuned to “the imperfections of human nature… the fallibility of human reason… the plurality of values.” Standard liberal-Berlinite defense, stated cleanly. Whether perfectionism is the right diagnosis of what went wrong in Soviet Russia and East Germany is another question. Material conditions, Bolshevik organizational choices, and the war communism baseline shaped outcomes at least as much as philosophical perfectionism did.
The Foucault and Derrida section at 44:34-48:54 has the most useful tension. Smith calls postmodernism “passé” and the deconstructionists “tired.” Then he admits: “occasionally I will look into I’ll just be pick up a book… I’m impressed with them… they are far more impressive intellectually than the hordes of people who’ve gravitated and sort of taken and popularized the his ideas.” So the work holds up but the followers ruined it. That distinction does more work than the dismissal. It applies to nearly every philosopher who acquires a movement.
The Rousseau-as-rule-of-law reading at 1:13:20-1:15:20 is counterintuitive. Smith argues the general will is about generality and impartiality, a law that applies to everyone with no exceptions for rulers: “Trump sort of thought he was clearly but the law to be a law must apply to everybody.” He acknowledges this cuts against the usual reading of Rousseau as proto-totalitarian. He does not develop it. The general will has done a lot of authoritarian work in history because “what everyone really wants” stays recoverable by whoever claims to speak for the people. Smith picks the most defensible reading and leaves it there.
The Socrates point at 1:02:01-1:04:50 sits in tension with itself. Smith says philosophy for Socrates required one-on-one engagement, conversation, no writing. Then he notes Plato wrote the Phaedrus, which warns about the dangers of writing, while writing. The contradiction is the lesson, but Smith does not press it. Plato chose to write about the dangers of writing because the alternative, letting Socrates vanish, was worse. Every philosopher who matters faces a version of that trade.
The patriotism framing at 1:16:54-1:20:32 is the soft landing. Aristotelian mean between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Love of country like love of family: “you love your family sort of because it’s yours.” The trouble is that nationalists describe their loyalty in identical terms. The line between patriot and nationalist sits in the speaker’s stated attitude, not in the structure of the commitment. Smith does not address how to tell them apart when both claim the same vocabulary.
The Hobbes (1588-1679) section at 53:04-55:34 is the most fun. Smith captures the texture: “one thing you can say with certainty about Hobbes is that he did not lack for confidence.” The second half of Leviathan, the biblical exegesis, is Hobbes proving his political theory consistent with scripture by showing scripture means what he needs it to mean. Smith calls it “an extraordinary feat.” Honest assessment.
Two weaknesses worth naming.
The host wanders. The flat earth digression, the cult-leader-entrepreneur-politician-philosopher comparison without category distinctions, the comments about Germany “exporting mean stuff.” Smith handles each gracefully by picking the strongest reading and answering that. His grace is its own teaching, but the conversation never reaches the level of mutual probing that a sharper interlocutor might have produced.
Smith stays on safe ground. He gives the standard Yale liberal-pluralist framing throughout: tolerance, fallibility, plurality of values, midpoints between extremes. He never names where he disagrees with himself or where his own framework strains. The Schmitt moment is the exception. Everything else fits the public face of mainstream American political theory circa 2021.
The episode dates to February 2021, post-Capitol. The closing exchange about whether we are in a crisis reads differently now than it did then. The crisis kept coming.
Takeaways in order: Schmitt as philosopher of social media, the Foucault-vs-his-followers distinction, the Rousseau-on-generality reading.
‘Steven B. Smith (Patriotism, What makes a great political regime, socialism, European powers)’ (Apr. 7, 2021)
The Carl Schmitt material at 1:32:54-1:35:55 is the most substantive new content. Smith goes further than in the lecture or the first podcast: “we still struggle we still struggle with the legacy of Schmittism and I think it’s returning with the new nationalism today is really rediscovered rediscovering the claims of Schmidt about about enemies.” He then connects Schmitt directly to current anti-immigrant rhetoric: “Listen to the way in which many people talk about immigrants dehumanizing language in which in which they’re described uh enemies they’re coming to pollute us.” This is the strongest claim Smith makes across the three sessions. Schmitt is his through-line. The friend-enemy distinction is what he wants patriotism to refuse. If you wanted to write a one-sentence summary of Smith’s project, it would be: how do you preserve political community without buying Schmitt’s definition of the political? The patriotism book is the answer, and the answer leans on Lincoln, the family analogy, and the gratitude framing of belonging.
The Germany-as-stepchild thesis at 1:20:00-1:28:00 is the most interesting move and the most overdrawn. Smith argues that German philosophy from the late 18th century onward developed in conscious opposition to the bourgeois liberal West, driven by resentment at being behind France and England. “Germany was always in a way the stepchild of western europe it was always sort of aware that it was behind.” This frame works for Schmitt, for Romantic nationalism, for parts of Heidegger, and for the political reception of these thinkers. It strains when applied to the others Smith names. Marx (1818-1883) did not critique liberalism because Germany lagged France; he critiqued capitalism as a global system whose contradictions appeared first in England, the country furthest ahead. Nietzsche held German nationalism in contempt and praised the French tradition. Heidegger’s anti-modernism rests on his account of Being, not on German resentment of Versailles. Smith’s frame is convenient. It makes German thought into a national psychology of being-second-place. The actual material is more various than the frame allows. He concedes Kant and Hegel as exceptions, which suggests the frame is a sorting hat for figures he wants to discredit.
The Rousseau handling at 37:23-42:00 is the best of the three conversations. The host pushes Rousseau toward proto-socialism. Smith resists with specifics: Rousseau is more critic of inequality than advocate of equality, supported private property unlike Marx, wrote constitutions for Poland and Corsica, was a kind of nationalist, valued the Swiss model. “Rousseau is a critic of inequality… he’s interested in the moral and psychological consequences of inequality attitudes of entitlement and domination on the part of the rich attitudes of civility and acquiescence on the side of the core.” Strong reading. He introduces amour propre cleanly. He calls Rousseau a “strong democrat.” This is the kind of careful philosophical work Smith does well when he stays inside the canon he teaches.
Three small failures of attribution worth flagging.
At 45:24 Smith starts to attribute “there’s no such thing as society they’re just individuals” to “our professor.” The line is Margaret Thatcher’s, not a philosopher’s. He then calls it “kind of a hayekian view of the world there is no society.” Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) did not say there is no such thing as society. He argued against treating society as an agent with intentions, which is a different and weaker claim. Smith mixes a political slogan with a half-remembered philosophical critique. The mistake is small but the confidence with which he makes it suggests he is outside his strike zone on the Anglo-Austrian tradition.
At 1:01:46 Smith quotes Churchill: “America can always be counted on to do the right thing after every other alternative has been tried.” This is a famous misattribution. No documented source for it exists in Churchill’s writings or speeches. The line floats around and gets pinned on him because it sounds like him. Smith treats it as gospel and builds a small argument on it. Not large. A careful intellectual biographer would note the apocryphal status.
At 35:00 Smith uses Habermas (b. 1929) to make a point about realism: “habermas says… the ideals what he calls the ideal speech situation his kind of model of society is what he calls the ideal speech situation where the best argument wins.” Then he says the real world has powerful interests and passions that prevent the best argument from winning. The gloss is partial. Habermas’s ideal speech situation is a regulative ideal for evaluating actual discourse, not a literal model of society. The “best argument wins” framing is what critics often attribute to him. Habermas himself acknowledges that real discourse is shaped by power. Smith reaches for Habermas to score a point about realism without engaging what Habermas argues. The point about realism is right. The use of Habermas to make it is sloppy.
The civil war framing at 1:12:00-1:14:00 is sharp. The host asks why America has avoided major revolution. Smith says the country has been continuous “except for the massive fact of the civil war that happened you know in the 1860s where not exactly half the country but a large you know about a third of the country decided to reject the result of a popular election and to attempt to secede.” Then the move: “the people on january 6 often said they were reviving the spirit of 1776. I dispute that they were reviving the spirit of 1860.” That distinction does work. It puts January 6 in the lineage of secessionists.
The most interesting question Smith declines is the host’s 650-million-immigrants thought experiment, sourced to Matthew Yglesias’s book One Billion Americans. Yglesias proposes tripling US population through immigration and family policy. The book is the relevant test case for creedal patriotism. If American identity rests on shared creed rather than blood and soil, tripling the population through immigration is the policy where the creedal theory either pays off or fails. Either the creed scales or it does not. Smith dismisses the proposal as “not such a good idea” without engaging what it tests in his framework. He has spent three conversations arguing that American patriotism is uniquely creedal and not based on ethnic homogeneity. The Yglesias proposal is the steel-man case for his view applied to policy. He declines to defend it. The reason is presumably that he does not want to commit to its consequences. Either the creedal view licenses dramatic openness to immigration, or it does not. Smith wants the prestige without the policy bite.
The closing statement at 1:43:25-1:43:50 is the bare bones of his position: “The United States doesn’t have those… what we do have or what we might have is a set of shared ideas and beliefs that derive from a constitutional heritage and if we don’t have that then we don’t have anything else.” Honest, and a problem. If American identity rests on shared ideas, and the ideas are contested, then identity is contested. Smith treats this as a problem of education. Teach the creed better. The alternative possibility is that the creed has become a site of partisan dispute, with the right reading it one way and the left another, and education cannot rescue what politics has divided. The connected-critic framework cannot resolve this from the inside. Both sides claim to read the creed correctly. The framework asks them to be more loyal to the creed they already disagree about.
Smith is strongest on the philosophers he has lived with for decades. The Rousseau material is precise. The Plato and Hobbes material from the first podcast holds up. The Schmitt thread is the single most useful piece of his patriotism work. When he stays inside the canon he teaches, he is reliable.
Smith is weaker when he extends outward. The Germany-as-stepchild thesis flattens German philosophy. The Habermas reference is glib. The Hayek attribution is wrong. The Churchill quote is apocryphal. The Yglesias test is declined. These are not large failures individually. Together they suggest the limits of a framework built for the American case being asked to do too much comparative and contemporary work.
The amateur host is the same problem as before. He wanders, asserts, attributes views to people who did not hold them, conflates levels. Smith handles him with patience. The patience is admirable and costly. A sharper interlocutor might have pushed the Yglesias point, the Schmitt thread, the civil war framing, and the Germany thesis. None of these get the development they deserve because the conversation moves on to the next topic the host wants to raise.
‘Constitution Day Lecture: “Patriotism – Our Most Contested Virtue” with Steven B. Smith’ (Sep. 9, 2021)
The strongest moment of the lecture comes at 1:08:14-1:10:17 when a self-identified nationalist invokes Carl Schmitt by name and challenges Smith directly. The questioner argues that nationalism is the mean and patriotism the dangerous accommodation of multiculturalism, citing “servants of leviathan to servants of other leviathans.” Smith identifies the source instantly: “what you just said the thesis of a famous german political theorist and legal philosopher named carl schmidt who defined politics more or less exactly along the lines that you did.” He rejects it: “I should say I think it’s highly un-American but uh our country is not based on a we’re based on an idea of the declaration of independence an idea of rights it’s not a question of creating friends and enemies.” Then he closes with the only joke that lands all evening: “I think you should read a little more Jefferson and a little less Schmidt.” The exchange shows Smith reading his opponent accurately. It also shows the limits of his framework. The reply is rhetorical, not analytic. He asserts the un-Americanness of Schmitt rather than refuting him. If someone rejects the creed, creedal patriotism has nothing left to say.
The lecture opens at 8:34 with patriotism as university embarrassment: Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) on the scoundrel, Shaw, Forster on betraying country before friend. Smith says one of the “secret pleasures” of writing the book was “the look of the expressions of shock of horror and occasionally discussed on the faces of colleagues.” He wears their contempt as a “badge of honor.” Cute. Also revealing. The audience for this book is the Yale liberal who feels foolish saluting the flag. Smith offers a framework that lets him salute without giving up his faculty status.
The core structure at 14:24-15:01 places patriotism as an Aristotelian mean between nationalism on the right and multiculturalism on the left. Both grow from a “legitimate desire for self-determination… to have oneself and one’s way of life strong and respected.” Both then deform. The structure is too neat. Nationalism and multiculturalism do not sit on the same axis. Nationalism is about how the political community defines itself against outsiders. Multiculturalism is about how the political community handles internal difference. The mean is borrowed for rhetorical balance, not derived from analysis. If Smith had placed civic nationalism on one side and cosmopolitanism on the other, the axis might line up. He chose multiculturalism because it is the form of left thought he wants to criticize, not because the geometry demands it.
His treatment of the 1619 Project at 17:24-19:24 is the lecture’s most contested claim. He says: “these claims have been widely repudiated by many of our best historians.” This overstates the consensus. Several historians criticized specific points, especially about the Revolution’s relationship to slavery. Others defended the project. The framing puts a thumb on the scale. His defense that “slavery was a contested institution” from the start is true and weak. Franklin (1706-1790) and Hamilton (1755-1804) ran abolitionist societies. They also signed a constitution that counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person, protected the slave trade for twenty years, and required free states to return fugitives. That an institution had domestic critics does not refute the claim that it was constitutive of the political order. Smith picks the most defensible reading of the founding and treats the contrary reading as already defeated.
The family analogy at 32:53-34:10 is the lecture’s emotional center. “Loyalty to country is something like loyalty to family. This does not require me to think that my family is better than all others.” He wants his son to succeed without wanting other children to fail. The move is sweet and structurally limited. Love of family is private. Loyalty to country has policy consequences for non-citizens. Border policy is not a parent’s preference for his child. The analogy controls less than Smith claims because nation-states have the power to admit or exclude in ways families do not. He glides past this.
The wear-a-mask patriotism at 44:30-45:00 is the softest point. “patriotism involves certain small sacrifices it is in many cases a kind of lower case virtue sacrifices like wearing a mask or getting a vaccine.” Then: “if these sacrifices seem too much to ask if they seem to violate your inviolable right to liberty then I worry that you will be incapable of any greater sacrifice for the public good.” This collapses civic virtue into compliance with September 2021 public health guidance. It dates the lecture badly. Citizens can disagree about mask mandates and vaccine mandates without failing as Americans. Smith uses his platform to score a partisan point and call it patriotism. The move undercuts his claim to a mean above the extremes. He has a side.
The Q&A confirms this. The closing line at 1:22:30-1:22:50 is the most revealing of the evening: “I believe our side will win.” After eighty minutes arguing for patriotism as transcending factions, he ends with our side. Who is our side? He does not say. Everyone in the room knows. The mean turns out to be a position.
The hardest moment comes at 1:02:43-1:06:30 when a Black woman asks when she and other non-White Americans get to be equal. She describes growing up segregated in South Phoenix, watching the language of equal opportunity get reverse-engineered into how-to-avoid-hiring-Blacks memos in the 1960s. She says she stopped saying the pledge before Kaepernick. Smith’s answer is the connected-critic framework applied gently: progress, hope, the arc bends, the book ends on hope. “I want to be optimistic on this while while acknowledging the the pain and the difficulty of achieving the kinds of things you’re addressing.” This is the polite version of what King called the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Smith’s framework gives him no tool to answer her except an appeal to patience and faith. Whether that is enough depends on what she has already given.
The strongest moment of intellectual humility comes at 1:14:01-1:15:30 when an international student asks whether the framework applies outside the United States. Smith concedes: “I did not write the book as a kind of um one size fits all patriotism.” He admits American patriotism is uniquely creedal and other countries will have to work out their own. Clean honest answer. It also concedes the parochialism of the project. The book defends a patriotism available to countries founded on written documents. That is a small subset.
The civil disobedience answer at 1:15:46-1:18:30 has an unworked tension. Smith opposes lawbreaking and cites Lincoln’s Lyceum address of 1838 on the dangers of lawlessness. Earlier he praised King as a connected critic. King broke laws on purpose. Smith says civil resistance is fine but illegality is not. He does not work the distinction out. The King he wants is the King of the Birmingham letter and the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The King who got arrested for breaking laws is left implicit.
The localism question at 1:18:35-1:20:30 is the gap Smith admits. The student asks about Tocqueville (1805-1859) and the trials of freedom at the local level, displaced by nationalized media and politics. Smith says he had not considered it. Honest, but the gap points to something larger. American patriotism in his account is about creed and ideas at the federal level. Tocqueville’s townships, the small associations, the civic muscle built by handling local affairs, these were central to the tradition Smith claims. He has lost them. The book defends a constitutional patriotism that has already abandoned the local sources of civic virtue.
Two patterns hold across the lecture and the Q&A.
First, the framework handles the easy cases and not the hard ones. Reagan on Japanese internment, King on the steps. Settled and beautiful. The Black woman’s question and the Schmittian nationalist’s question are not settled. Smith offers grace and platitudes for the first and dismissal for the second.
Second, the centrist pose covers a partisan position. Patriotism as a mean between left extremism and right extremism sounds balanced. The content of the mean aligns with the Yale faculty member who wears masks, votes for moderate Democrats, opposes January 6, and thinks the 1619 Project is overstated. Nothing wrong with that position. Smith holds it. The framework presents the position as the absence of position. The “our side will win” line at the close lets the mask slip.
Compared to the podcast from earlier in the same year, this lecture is more polished and more revealing. The polish smooths the surface. The Q&A roughs it back up. The Schmitt exchange and the international student’s question are the two places where the framework either holds or fails in real time. It holds against Schmitt rhetorically and fails analytically. It concedes honestly to the international student. The Black woman’s question is the one Smith cannot answer at all, and the failure is structural, not personal.
‘The U of C & Me | Yale Professor Steven B. Smith’ (Sep. 12, 2023)
The talk’s center is loss. Smith knows this and tries to head it off. He quotes Tony Soprano at 56:46, “the worst conversation is about the way things used to be,” then proceeds to have that conversation. The Tony Soprano fence works as a permit. He gets to lament because he announced he won’t.
The strongest material covers Allan Bloom. Smith admires him and tells stories that condemn him. Bloom “knew right away whether he thought you were worth cultivating and if you were not, you were out” (28:00). He “ridiculed Sappho as a second rater, made fun of Simone de Beauvoir” (28:25). His former undergraduate Miriam Galston, expecting the customary celebratory senior lunch, got taken to help with Bloom’s grocery shopping (29:00). Smith reports this and adds only, “you couldn’t get away with that today.” The structure of the anecdote does the rest of the work.
Then at the Q&A a host asks about Bloom’s homosexuality and Smith says it “was tolerated because there was something about him” (59:42) and “nobody cared” (1:17:32). Look at what Smith has already told us in the same talk: Bloom kept a court of young men who drove his car and did his laundry, excluded women from teaching, wore silk kimonos to greet guests, borrowed money from students that “was never repaid.” Smith presents these as color. The listener who has stayed an hour has more material than Smith uses.
The Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) line at 41:21 might be the best thing in the talk. “A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.” Smith says he agrees and that few philosophers stop to consider it. The talk never applies the test to its own author or to its subjects. Seth Benardete (1930–2001) reads an unreadable paper on the Statesman to Yale freshmen and then announces the Aeneid has “the zero at the center of the book” (37:05). Smith leaves the interpretation suspended between depth and elaborate bluff. He tells us he asked Benardete’s former students later and “there was no written record.” The Stanley Rosen anecdote at 33:43 cuts sharper. Rosen asked Benardete what we should love instead of other human beings; Benardete said “Greek vases”; Rosen called it “the most sophisticated argument I have ever heard except that it had one flaw. It was nonsense.” Smith reports the deflation and then writes about Benardete with the awe of the undeflated. He wants both.
On Chicago as the un-Yale, the contrast holds up. Marty Peretz at 12:42 gets warned, “it’s not Yale, it’s not Harvard, it’s not Princeton. You’re going to have to work.” Norman Nie welcomes the incoming class at 13:04 by telling them they will all end up teaching high school. That is a stance. Smith credits it: Chicago “appreciated originality and creativity. The only thing that was not tolerated was the commonplace or the banal” (18:35). The line might be true of the period. The accompanying claim that Chicago didn’t track prestige sits uneasily with the sociology of the Strauss circle. Leo Strauss had lecture notes mimeographed and circulated only to students deemed “trustworthy” (18:09). Joseph Cropsey (1919–2012) answered Smith’s questions about Strauss “with vagueness or platitudes” (18:16). Smith calls this “a conspiracy of silence” (17:48) and presents it as charm. It sounds more like a closed shop with its own ranking, just not the official one.
The most honest moment comes near the end. The host pushes him on the academy now. Smith says, “today I feel very often it’s your political identity and your political position that is the determining factor and whether you’re a scholar or not is something that I’m afraid I fear is becoming less and less important” (58:07). He walks it back inside ten seconds: “I don’t know, it’s just a sense.” The walk-back is the Yale move. The Chicago move might have been to leave the sentence alone.
The Bernard Silberman bit at 47:35 might be the most useful sentence in the talk for any graduate student. Asked whether you can do anything, “lie like a rug.” Can you teach a course you have no background in? Yes. Would you share an office? Love to. Silberman gave up serious scholarship and taught courses with titles like “Losers” and “Springtime for Hitler in Germany” (48:00). Smith reports this without elegy. Silberman traded the ambitions for the freedom to make jokes. Smith chose differently. The talk is partly a defense of that choice.
One omission worth naming. Smith spends real time on the Strauss circle’s secrecy and treats it with affection. He never asks what kind of intellectual culture produces students who refuse to discuss their teacher’s ideas because discussion itself counts as a sign of misunderstanding. He came up inside it. He might not see it.
The Cropsey line about Kolakowski and Adam Jaworski at 44:06 stays with me. Both Polish Marxists. Kolakowski moved right and wrote In Praise of Inconsistency. Jaworski stayed loosely Marxist. Smith asks Cropsey why the divergence. Cropsey shrugs and says, “some people learn from their experience.” Smith offers it without comment and moves on. It might be the harshest line in the talk.
‘Enlightened Patriotism & Liberal Education w/ Prof Steven Smith’ (Aug. 7, 2025)
The conversation has some sharp moments and some evasions. Steven B. Smith does his best work when he lets a particular observation carry the argument, his weakest work when he reaches for the broad defense.
The Golden Girls anecdote stops the listener. Smith recalls Dorothy telling Sophia, “mom you were the one who put the American flag in my hand. You were the one that told me what it was like to come to Ellis Island” (8:24). He notes that this stood out as “quite shocking to me um because I hadn’t heard it so long” (8:48). The point lands because he uses a small scene to mark a cultural shift. A sitcom from the late 80s sounds like another civilization. No theory required.
His diagnosis of why educated coastal people drift from patriotism cuts well too. Yale students, he says, “are kind of inculcated with the idea that the problems of today and tomorrow are global problems and you should think of yourselves not primarily as citizens of one state. that’s considered parochial, that’s considered uh kind of backward-looking” (10:08). He frames the global citizen identity as a class formation, not a moral achievement. That has bite.
His MAGA catch is good. He hears Bernstein’s question about brokenism and turns it: “it’s uh it’s make America great again again meaning in the past so there is an idea of…the I completely agree with mag, but it’s the h the second a that I’m I have trouble” (28:18). MAGA as a politics of return. He earns that line.
Then he weakens. Bernstein offers a sophisticated version of the campus antisemitism charge, that universities have absorbed an oppressor/oppressed framework that produces antisemitism downstream (33:31). Smith concedes the white settler thesis is “overtly anti-semitic” and a “perversion of of of the past and perversion of history” (34:30, 34:49), then asks “How how deep does this go in our universities” and says he does not know. When Bernstein narrows the question to political science at Yale, Smith refuses: “I’m a little bit loathed to speak on the air about my own department” (35:18). That refusal is the most revealing moment in the hour. He has spent the conversation calling on others to be honest about the country and its faults. When asked to be honest about his own house he declines.
His earlier defense of universities runs on a deflection: “Show me the institution that doesn’t have anti-semitism. Show me that. Show me the the one that doesn’t. The Congress” (31:01). True but useless. The question is degree, recent acceleration, ideological cover. He admits this himself a few seconds later: “you could you could assign a percentage to it. I mean it’s the kind of thing you could say okay on a 1 to 10 I think you know Yale’s a six and Congress is a three” (31:14). He raises the right standard and walks away from it.
He calls campus antisemitism “a very fashionable way of thinking” (32:08) about a problem he then declines to size. Calling a charge fashionable is a way of marking it as low status without engaging it. Bernstein then offers him the better version of the argument and Smith partly accepts it, which exposes the earlier dismissal as too quick.
His DEI line is clever and a little glib: “diversity actually means conformity. Inclusion actually means exclusion and equity usually means some form of injustice” (42:42). Then: “I am entirely in favor of diversity, equity, and inclusion. What I am opposed to is DEI” (43:18). The move separates the values from the bureaucracy. The distinction is real. But he does not say what the bureaucracy gets wrong as policy, only that it has grown large. The strongest thing he says about the bureaucracy comes later, on who gets counted as disadvantaged: “many of the uh so-called disadvantaged groups who come here actually come from the same middle and upper middle class families and went to the same middle and upper middle class suburban public schools or private schools as as everyone as everyone else” (46:39). That is the argument. He buries it.
The Strauss frame, progress or return, is borrowed from Leo Strauss and used loosely. Smith admits this: “I kind of repurposed it” (18:26). The frame holds that progressivism turned reformist instinct into historical determinism: “Progressivism came to have a dogmatic and and certain ways authoritarian character to it” (20:30). Fine as far as it goes. He does not say much about what return looks like when it stops being conservative caution and becomes restorationist politics. His MAGA observation gestures at it. He does not follow through.
The conversation ends on Alasdair MacIntyre, whose After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre argues that moral terms lost coherence once detached from the practices and traditions that gave them meaning. Smith invokes him to ground “ethos patriotism,” the claim that aspirational patriotism alone, the patriotism of propositions, cannot hold a country together without habits, language, ritual (51:43). That is the most serious point in the hour. He spends about ninety seconds on it.
A few smaller notes.
The Lincoln (1809-1865) quote Cliff Smith reads at the end, “let reverence for the laws be breathed in every American mother to the lick spittle lick spitting baby that paddles on her lap” (53:50), is from the 1838 Lyceum Address. Lincoln gave it at age 28. Smith identifies it as “his his lysm speech” (54:27) and moves on. Worth more.
The Bernstein-Smith exchange on “fundamental disagreement” at the 40 yard lines (14:04) is the standard centrist line and goes unchallenged. It might be true at the level of polled opinion. It is not obviously true at the level of elite institutional behavior, which is what Bernstein keeps trying to push Smith toward and what Smith keeps deflecting from.
Smith’s claim that political science is less ideologized than the humanities because of its “fetishism about numbers and quantitative stuff” (35:56) is partial truth at best. Quantitative work has ideological priors. He knows this. He is making a guild defense.
Overall: a smart, careful man who has thought about patriotism for decades, defending an institution he loves with arguments he half-believes. The book is probably better than the interview. The interview is better when he is observing than when he is defending.
‘The Liberal-National Idea, Episode 4 – with Steven B. Smith’ (Dec. 22, 2025)
This is a looser, more candid Smith than the David Bernstein interview. The Yale defensiveness drops away. Gross is friendly, the setting is Israeli center-right, and Smith speaks with more freedom about politicians by name and about his own diminishing faith.
He recycles the Fourth of July hostess anecdote (5:24). Same story, same beats. That he keeps using it tells you it works for him. The story carries the argument: a group of educated Americans flinches at the word patriotism on the Fourth of July. He frames the question simply: “why did a group of educated Americans, typical group, feel uncomfortable with the idea when they asked on our Fourth of July whether they felt patriotic” (7:14).
Then a useful admission. Gross asks about reclaiming patriotism and from whom. Smith says: “the harshest criticisms I received in the book were not from the left, they were from the right” (24:16). The book’s stated purpose is to win the term back for the center-left. The right hated it. Smith glides past the implication. Worth pausing on. If the right’s anger ran hotter than the left’s discomfort, then the book threatens something the right values, the unqualified version of patriotism that allows no apology. He gestures at this and does not push.
The full version of “my country right or wrong” is the line he uses to set up his case. “My country right or wrong, if right to be kept right, when wrong to be set right” (9:14). Carl Schurz (1829-1906) said this in the Senate in 1872. Smith does not attribute it. The line does work for him and most listeners do not know where it comes from. A minor scholar’s lapse but worth marking.
His pushback on JD Vance (b. 1984) is the sharpest moment in the hour. Vance, in Hillbilly Elegy, argues that men fight for the man next to them, not for ideas. Smith reads the quote (18:45) and answers: “how did we defeat fascism? How did we defeat communism? How did we send a man to the moon? How did we achieve any of these? I would say how did we end slavery? How did we achieve any of these great national ideals if we weren’t essentially a creedle people?” (19:31). The list is good rhetoric. The argument is partial. Vance’s claim is about combat psychology, not about national identity formation. Soldiers can fight for the man next to them and the country can still hold together by a creed. Smith treats Vance’s point as a denial of creedal patriotism when it might just be a description of small-unit cohesion. The bigger target lands anyway. If America has only ever been blood and soil, the entries on the historical ledger become hard to explain.
The Israeli protest comparison is the most concrete material in the hour. Smith joined the summer 2023 anti-judicial-reform protests in Jerusalem (11:46). He wrote a piece called “Patriotism and Protest.” He praises the Israeli protesters for waving Israeli flags and for picking up the trash: “thousands of people out there. After the things broke up, there were lots of people with plastic uh garbage bag picking up the trash afterwards. I mean, I’d never been in a protest where protesters actually picked up after themselves” (13:30). The detail is observed, not theorized. American protesters fly Palestinian flags or Mexican flags. The Israelis flew their own. That contrast does real work.
Gross then asks the harder question. Israel’s solidarity might owe a lot to the constant external threat (33:39). Smith pivots to national service. He wants America to import some version of the IDF integration model: “I deeply believe America should should embrace and endorse some form of national service” (34:34). He does not engage the harder version of Gross’s question, which is whether shared patriotism in Israel rests on conditions America cannot replicate by policy. Israel is small, demographically Jewish for most of its population, surrounded by hostile states, with conscription as default. American national service must substitute for those conditions without sharing any of them. Smith treats the policy as a transferable lever. It is not.
The Reagan example is good but oversimplified. Smith says: “no one ever accused Ronald Reagan of being deficient in patriotism and yet he apologized to the Japanese Americans for their internment during World War II” (42:08). Many conservatives at the time pushed back on the 1988 Civil Liberties Act. Reagan’s signing was contested on the right. Smith uses Reagan as a clean case because he wants the point that patriotism and apology can coexist. The point stands. The example needs a footnote.
The Obama line is misremembered. Smith says Obama said “there is no red America, there is no white America, there is just the United States of America” (45:14). The 2004 keynote contrasted liberal and conservative America and then Black, White, Latino, and Asian America. Smith mixes red/blue with Black/White. Compression in conversation, but the line he praises is not the line Obama gave.
The exchange on Hadar and Orwell at the close is the most interesting passage. Gross introduces the Jabotinskyan term, which has no English equivalent but carries pride without arrogance, dignity, expectation of mutual respect. Smith picks it up through George Orwell (1903-1950) on English decencies: “gardening, the local pub, bad food” (48:08). The exchange suggests Smith’s “ethos patriotism” idea has more depth than he gave it with Bernstein. The English version of national character is concrete things, habits, manners, food, language. Aspirational patriotism alone collapses. So does ethnic patriotism alone. The hybrid is what holds.
The Hamilton close is the strongest single quote in the hour. Federalist No. 1: “we are an experiment to find out whether a government can be based on reflection and choice or whether it must always rely on accident and force” (55:00). Smith comments: “we’re still trying to work that out in in many ways whether whether a country based on reflection and choice is is stable and possible” (55:33). He leaves it there. The honest answer is that the experiment is unsettled and current evidence is mixed. He gets close to saying so, softly.
A few smaller notes.
“The search for an enemy began to turn inward” (29:55) is sharp. After the Cold War, with no external threat, partisan polarization filled the vacuum. He says it cleanly.
“I do still have some uh um you know diminishing, but I still have I I still have faith in in the American project” (31:33) is the most honest sentence in the hour. He does not pretend the present is fine.
The “linguistic appropriation” point near the end is interesting and underdeveloped. The rebels took the word patriot from a wider field of possible meanings: “the people who were in rebellion against the king and against the empire of which they were subjects, they became the patriots” (53:32). The Loyalists thought of themselves as patriots in another sense. The American word now carries a rebellious charge built into it.
Compared to the Bernstein interview, this one is better. Smith is freer. He names names. He gives the Israeli protest material the Bernstein conversation never reached. He pushes back on Vance directly. He admits diminishing faith. The Bernstein conversation had him defending Yale and dodging hard questions about his own institution. This one has no such pressure. The looser setting brings out more of him.
The weaknesses remain. The Schurz quote is unattributed. The Vance pushback overreaches. The Reagan example glides past contemporary opposition. The Obama line is misremembered. The national service advocacy ignores the transferability problem. The Hamilton close is strong material left under-pushed. But the hour is more candid and more concrete than the first.
