{"id":187666,"date":"2026-05-15T07:01:52","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T15:01:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=187666"},"modified":"2026-05-15T07:14:34","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T15:14:34","slug":"the-conspiracy-theories-of-leo-strauss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=187666","title":{"rendered":"The Conspiracy Theories of Leo Strauss"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the truth scale, Leo Strauss<\/a> failed. On the attention scale, he won, producing a devoted cult.
\nStrauss made many claims that have the structure of conspiracy theories, though dressed in scholarly clothing.
\nThe 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.
\nModernity 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.
\nThe 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.
\nMaimonides 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.
\nAlfarabi 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.
\nXenophon 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.
\nThe 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.
\nHeidegger’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.
\nThe 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.
\nThe 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.
\nThe 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.
\nThe Strauss appeal sits in a different register than truth. Take the channels in rough order of force.
\nInitiation. 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.
\nFlattery 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.
\nPermission 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.
\nA 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.
\nA 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.
\nA 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.
\nThe 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).
\nSophisticated 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.
\nMentorship 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.
\nEndless 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.
\nConspiracy 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.
\nAdd 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.
\nStrauss’s circle developed several features that earn the word “cult.”
\nThe 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.
\nThe 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.
\nDid Strauss’s conspiracy thinking get amplified by his students? Yes.
\nAllan 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.
\nThe disinformation frame fits parts of this story.
\nA 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.
\nThe 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.
\nThe harms attributable to the school, in descending order of confidence:
\nFirst, 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.
\nSecond, 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.
\nThird, 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. Shadia Drury’s reading exaggerates this drift, but the drift is real.
\nFourth, 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.
\nFifth, 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.<\/p>\n

‘The U of C & Me | Yale Professor Steven B. Smith’ (Sep. 12, 2023)<\/strong><\/p>\n