Free Republic

THE NEW YORK TIMES, the New Yorker, and the Boston Globe, among others, have sounded the alarm: The Bush administration, particularly its foreign policy team, is in the grip of a coterie of neoconservative intellectuals who are themselves in the grip of the antidemocratic and illiberal teachings of Leo Strauss, a political philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago in the '50s and '60s and who died in 1973. On its face, this scenario is wildly implausible. It supposes that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and National Security Adviser Rice, non-Straussians...

One day, this Iraq War will be thought of as the Intellectuals' War. That is, it was a war conceived of by people who possessed more books than common sense, let alone actual military experience. Disregarding prudence, precedent and honesty, they went off - or, more precisely, sent others off - tilting at windmills in Iraq, chasing after illusions of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and false hope about Iraqi enthusiasm for Americanism, and hoping that reality would somehow catch up with their theory. The problem, of course, is that wars are more about bloodletting than book-learning. Tilting at...

Why radical Islam might defeat the West "Does Spengler know, for instance, that in the last century 2,000 distinct ethnic groups have gone extinct?" Eric Garrett asks in his June 12 riposte, A question of identity, to an earlier article of mine, Neo-cons in a religious bind. Garrett's organization, the World Conservation Union, is devoted to preserving fragile cultures. As a matter of fact, I reported in this space that in the next decade, yet another 2,000 distinct ethnic groups would go extinct (Live and Let Die of April 13, 2002). Ignore the endangered Ewoks for a moment, Mr Garrett,...

Why not blame the war on a sinister clique which has duped the public and even the President? Hardly a day passes now when I don't wake up to read about myself in the papers. I've become one of the hottest topics in journalism. In European, American and even Canadian newspapers, the articles proliferate. The world continues prostrate in awe or rage toward the "Straussian" legions who allegedly control American foreign policy and brought us the war against Saddam. The "Straussians," c'est moi. True, unlike my friends in the Bush administration, I just belong to the academic wing of our...

<p>The New York Times and The New Yorker go off the deep end.</p> <p>"Just weeks after the LaRouche in 2004 campaign began nationwide circulation of 400,000 copies of the Children of Satan dossier, exposing the role of University of Chicago fascist 'philosopher' Leo Strauss as the godfather of the neo-conservative war party in and around the Bush Administration, two major establishment publications have joined the exposé."</p>

If all values are relative, then cannibalism is a matter of taste Leo Strauss Leo Strauss about whom you've probably never heard has been dead for 30 years. You've probably never heard of him because he was a sickly and obscure professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago who wrote Xenophon's Socratic Dialogues, The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, The City and Man, and other volumes that now mostly gather dust in library stacks. And even if you have heard of him, you've almost certainly never read him, because his fixations were abstruse and his prose was dense,...

The Strategist and the Philosopher Leo Strauss and Albert Wohlstetter By ALAIN FRACHON and DANIEL VERNET Translated for CounterPunch by Norman Madarasz. Who are the neoconservatives playing a vital role in the US president's choices by the side of Christian fundamentalists? And who were their master thinkers, Albert Wohlstetter and Leo Strauss? It was said in the tone of sincere praise: "You are some of our country's best brains". So good, added George W. Bush, "that my government employs around twenty of you." The president was addressing the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC on February 23 (quote from an...

An e-mail sent by a Yale professor naming Jewish students from an Israel advocacy group as a "pro-war cabal" has caused an uproar at the elite Ivy League university. Students charge that listing the Jewish names was anti-Semitic; many claim they are outspoken opponents of the war against Iraq. "Just to insinuate that people who espouse pro-Israel views at Yale are automatically complicit in promoting the war is ridiculous and offensive," said Nelson Moussazadeh, co-president of Yale Friends of Israel. The e-mail, sent Saturday by an associate professor of genetics, Mazin Qumsiyeh, to the several hundred members of Yale’s anti-war...

The New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Boston Globe, among others, have sounded the alarm: The Bush administration, particularly its foreign policy team, is in the grip of a coterie of neoconservative intellectuals who are themselves in the grip of the antidemocratic and illiberal teachings of Leo Strauss, a political philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago in the '50s and '60s and who died in 1973. On its face, this scenario is wildly implausible. It supposes that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and National Security Adviser Rice, non-Straussians...

Ever since the New York Times published a long article explaining that most of the architects of the Bush foreign policy are "Straussians," more and more journalists have been asking the question, "What the heck is a Straussian?" A number of common principles have emerged after these writers have examined the writings of Leo Strauss, the godfather of neoconservativism. Straussian Principle #1 is the perversion of the idea of natural rights, as understood by John Locke and the American founding fathers. The natural law tradition holds that man possesses natural rights to life, liberty, and property and that the state...

The secret that Leo Strauss never revealed No sillier allegation has found its way into mass-circulation newspapers than the notion that a conspiracy of Leo Strauss acolytes has infiltrated the Bush administration. Supposedly Defense Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz, a Strauss doctoral student, and other lesser-known officials form a neo-conservative cabal practicing some sort of political black arts. If anything, the Straussians are dangerous not because they are Machiavellian but because they are naive. First of all, there is no Straussian conspiracy, for the simple reason that no two Straussians agree about what Leo Strauss (1899-1973) really meant to say during his...

Leo Strauss, Conservative Mastermind By Robert Locke FrontPageMagazine.com | May 31, 2002 IN CONTEMPORARY American intellectual life, there is only one school of conservative intellectuals that has taken root in academia as a movement. They are the Straussians, followers of the late Leo Strauss (1899-1973). The hostile New Republic referred to Straussians as "one of the top ten gangs of the millennium." Strauss is an ambiguous, sometimes even troubling, figure, but he is essential to the conservative revival of our time and he offers the intellectual depth we are so desperately in need of. As a crude measure of his...

<p>The late Leo Strauss has emerged as the thinker of the moment in Washington, but his ideas remain mysterious. Was he an ardent opponent of tyranny, or an apologist for the abuse of power?</p> <p>ODD AS THIS MAY SOUND, we live in a world increasingly shaped by Leo Strauss, a controversial philosopher who died in 1973. Although generally unknown to the wider population, Strauss has been one of the two or three most important intellectual influences on the conservative worldview now ascendant in George W. Bush's Washington. Eager to get the lowdown on White House thinking, editors at the New York Times and Le Monde have had journalists pore over Strauss's work and trace his disciples' affiliations. The New Yorker has even found a contingent of Straussians doing intelligence work for the Pentagon.</p>

WASHINGTON - Is United States foreign policy being run by followers of an obscure German Jewish political philosopher whose views were elitist, amoral and hostile to democratic government? Suddenly, political Washington is abuzz about Leo Strauss, who arrived in the US in 1938 and taught at several major universities before his death in 1973. Following recent articles in the US press, and as reported in Asia Times Online This war is brought to you by ... in March, the cognoscenti are becoming aware that key neoconservative strategists behind the Bush administration's aggressive foreign and military policy consider themselves to be...

All right, so weapons of mass destruction haven't yet been found in Iraq. And no firm link has been established between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. So what was the war in Iraq about, then? According to one school of thought, our most recent military adventure turns out to have been nothing less than a defense of Western civilization — as interpreted by the late classicist and political philosopher Leo Strauss. If this chain of events seems implausible, consider the tribute President Bush paid in February to the cohort of journalists, political philosophers and policy wonks known — primarily to...