Leo Strauss and the American Right.

• Author: Lind, Michael

In the past half century, one of the most striking phenomena in American intellectual life has been the influence of European emigre intellectuals who fled Hitler (or in some cases Stalin) in the 1930s and 1940s. The American New Left of the 1960s would hardly be conceivable without the influence of Herbert Marcuse and other German Marxist emigres. Postwar-American conservatism also counts among its patron saints intellectual exiles from Europe such as Ludwig von Mises and Eric Voegelin. In Leo Strauss and the American Right, Shadia B. Drury, a professor of politics at the University of Calgary in Canada, examines the influence on the American right of one of the most celebrated emigre intellectuals, Leo Strauss (1899-1973).

Strauss, a German Jewish professor of philosophy, taught political science at the University of Chicago after fleeing Nazi Germany. The list of Strauss' students and admirers includes a number of luminaries of the conservative intellectual movement between the 1950s and the 1990s: Willmoore Kendall, Irving Kristol and his son William, Robert Bork, Harvey Mansfield, Alan Keyes, Clarence Thomas, and William Bennett, among others. The late Allan Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind, and Francis Fukuyama, in The End of History, have made the larger public and not just the intellectual community aware of Straussian themes.

Straussian thought is hard to wrap your mind around, in part because Strauss and his disciples write in a highly abstract style that keeps trespassers out. Their enemies have accused Straussians of forming a cult, a charge that is risible when it comes from disciples of Marx, Freud, or Derrida. It is true that Strauss believed that many if not most philosophers, for fear of persecution, wrote in ways that concealed their views as much as they revealed them. A secular Jew, Strauss believed that the harsh truths of philosophy should not be publicized, for fear of undermining the public orthodoxy on which any stable community must rest. Strauss and his followers tend to blame both communist and fascist totalitarianism for the undermining of traditional belief systems by intellectuals. "Strauss understood both Weimar and America in terms of Plato's analysis of how democracy gives way to tyranny," Drury writes. "The licentious quality of the American love of freedom and its resemblance to the freedom of Weimar was therefore a reason for disquiet"

From Willmoore Kendall in the 1950s to Irving Kristol...