Many exist, despite the moronic commentary from parts of the paranoid left who have never bothered to read or engage Leo Strauss. Here’s one:
I’m a liberal fan of Strauss (not to mention Allan Bloom), and I happened to attend a small (400 person) liberal arts school (St. John’s College, Annapolis) where Strauss spent his last days teaching. The school was founded, in a way, out of the University of Chicago, and educationally it represents much of what I think Strauss’s approach stood for: genuine, open-minded, thoughtful, and essentially apolitical enquiry. When seen through the lens of partisanship, that apolitical approach is branded "conservative", much in the same way that genuinely apolitical accounts in the media will strike some conservatives as "liberal". If we have to use these labels count me as an educational conservative and political liberal who nevertheless deplores the rape of texts on behalf of political agendas.
Hence despite my political views, I consider the effect of leftists in humanties academia to be nothing short of a disaster. (I would however defend their freedom to be idiots against the likes of Horowitz).
Above all, the liberal attack on Strauss is a misguided, ignorant, and nasty campaign. I have not seen a single citation from a book by Strauss in one of these critiques; that is remarkable, and frightening. Innuendo is enough to convict him – the mere suspicion that he didn’t buy into the relativist dogma that now dominates the university. It is also so self-defeating; one might take up the admittedly ambitious thesis that the leftist evisceration of the university paved the way for the triump of the neocons. Producing thoughtless people (who temporarily parrot politically correct views) is a dangerous project – such people will quickly parrot other dogmas, under the right circumstances.
Finally, Strauss was concerned about precisely the kinds of values that liberals care about; he merely treated the problem of liberalism (in the broad sense) as a genuine dilemma, not a fait accompli. Liberals ought to take the question of reason vs. revelation seriously, instead of reacting with a kind of religious fervor to the idea that anyone would dare raise such questions.
Yesterday’s and today’s post were a nice antidote.
Incidentally, I read your blog regularly for reasons similar to those that guide my views on Strauss: it’s intellectual honesty and genuine thoughtfulness that matter. (Socrates famously noted that there is more value in being refuted than agreed with).
All refutations of this email gratefully received.
(A hack attack on Robert Alter’s review can be read here. A more nuanced defense of today’s conservatism of certitude can be read here. I read Strauss as a skeptic, like Oakeshott. But I can understand why today’s hard-right dogmatists and those neocons without a philosophical bent want to enlist him in their "cause.")
The Dish 