---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2006 00:10:43 -0400
From: moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG
To: PORTSIDE@LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG
Subject: 'Reading Leo Strauss' : A Review
'Reading Leo Strauss,' by Steven B. Smith
Neocon or Not?
Review by ROBERT ALTER
Published: June 25, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/books/review/25alter.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bu&oref=slogin
FOR a scholar who addressed what the general public
would regard as abstruse topics in a dry academic
fashion, Leo Strauss has become a name that
reverberates widely -- and, for many, ominously. He is
seen as the seminal thinker behind neoconservatism, its
intellectual father.
READING LEO STRAUSS
Politics, Philosophy, Judaism.
By Steven B. Smith.
256 pp. The University of Chicago Press. $32.50.
Born into an Orthodox Jewish home in a small German
town in 1899, Strauss was trained in the rigorous
discipline of Geistesgeschichte, intellectual history.
He began his career in the 1920's in an innovative
adult Jewish learning institute. His first book was on
Spinoza, and he subsequently devoted scrupulous, often
maverick, studies to major figures of political
philosophy from Plato and Maimonides to Machiavelli,
Hobbes and the framers of the American Constitution. He
left Germany in 1932, went to England via Paris, and in
1938 came to the United States. He taught for a decade
at the New School in New York and then from 1949 to
1968 at the University of Chicago, where he exerted his
greatest influence. He died in 1973.
Strauss was very much caught up in an extraordinary
intellectual ferment among German Jews who came of age
around the time of World War I. He was friends with
Gershom Scholem, the great historian of Jewish
mysticism, in the early 1920's. He worked with Franz
Rosenzweig, the bold architect of a Jewish
existentialist theology. He was admired by Scholem's
friend Walter Benjamin, the eminent literary critic and
cultural theorist. Like all these thinkers, he was
concerned with the tensions between tradition, founded
on revelation, and modernity, operating with unaided
reason.
How, then, has Strauss come to be viewed as a sinister
presence in contemporary politics? Some of his
students, or students of his students, went on to
become conservative policy intellectuals in Washington.
Perhaps the most well known of his disciples, Allan
Bloom, remained at the University of Chicago, where he
wrote his best-selling book, "The Closing of the
American Mind" (1987), a scathing critique of the
debasement of American higher education by conformist
progressivism. In the mid-1980's, a highly critical
article in The New York Review of Books linked Strauss
with conservatism, and in the next few years, numerous
pieces in other journals followed suit. It has become
received wisdom that a direct line issues from
Strauss's seminars on political philosophy at the
University of Chicago to the hawkish approach to
foreign policy by figures like Paul Wolfowitz and
others in the Bush administration.
"Reading Leo Strauss," Steven B. Smith's admirably
lucid, meticulously argued book, persuasively sets the
record straight on Strauss's political views and on
what his writing is really about. The epigraph to its
introduction, from an essay by the political scientist
Joseph Cropsey, sounds the keynote: "Strauss was a
towering presence . . . who neither sought nor had any
discernible influence on what passes for the politics
of the group."
Although it is said that Strauss voted twice for Adlai
Stevenson, he appears never to have been involved in
any political party or movement. What is more important
is that his intellectual enterprise, as Smith's careful
exposition makes clear, repeatedly argued against the
very idea of political certitude that has been embraced
by certain neoconservatives. Strauss's somewhat
contrarian reading of Plato's "Republic," for example,
proposed that the dialogue was devised precisely to
demonstrate the dangerous unfeasibility of a state
governed by a philosopher-king.
"Throughout his writings," Smith concludes, "Strauss
remained deeply skeptical of whether political theory
had any substantive advice or direction to offer
statesmen." This view was shaped by his wary
observation of the systems of totalitarianism that
dominated two major European nations in the 1930's,
Nazism in Germany and Communism in the Soviet Union. As
a result, he strenuously resisted the notion that
politics could have a redemptive effect by radically
transforming human existence. Such thinking could
scarcely be further from the vision of neoconservative
policy intellectuals that the global projection of
American power can effect radical democratic change.
"The idea," Smith contends, "that political or military
action can be used to eradicate evil from the human
landscape is closer to the utopian and idealistic
visions of Marxism and the radical Enlightenment than
anything found in the writings of Strauss."
Liberal democracy lies at the core of Strauss's
political views, and its basis is the concept of
skepticism. Since there are no certainties in the realm
of politics, perhaps not in any realm, politics must be
the arena for negotiation between different
perspectives, with cautious moderation likely to be the
best policy. At one point, Smith, the Alfred Cowles
professor of political science at Yale, describes
Strauss's position as "liberalism without illusions."
All this may sound a little antiquated, and Smith is
right to associate Strauss with cold war liberals like
Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Walter Lippmann and Lionel
Trilling. But it's a view from the middle of the past
century that might profitably be fostered in our own
moment of political polarization, when a self-righteous
sense of possessing assured truths is prevalent on both
the right and the left.
The other general point that Smith makes about
Strauss's alleged paternity of neoconservatism is that
a considerable part of his work has nothing to do with
politics of any sort. Smith divides his book -- a
collection of previously published essays, inevitably
with some repetition among them -- into two parts, the
first entitled "Jerusalem," the second, "Athens."
Strauss used these terms to designate the two poles of
Western culture, roughly corresponding to revelation
and reason. It is in the "Athens" section that Smith
traces Strauss's trajectory through the history of
political philosophy. The essays of the "Jerusalem"
part, on the other hand, follow his engagement with
Maimonides, Spinoza, Scholem and Zionism (a movement
that he had embraced from adolescence but that he
thought did not alter the metaphysical condition of
galut, exile, in which Jews found themselves).
The Jewish-theological side of Strauss certainly had no
perceptible effect on his American disciples, most of
them Jews and all of them, as far as I know, secular.
In these concerns, Strauss was thoroughly the
intellectual product of 1920's German Jewry. Like
others of that period, including Walter Benjamin, he
approached the idea of revealed religion with the
utmost seriousness. It does not appear that he remained
a believing Jew, yet he was not prepared simply to
dismiss the claims of Jerusalem against Athens.
On the contrary, the sweeping agenda of reformist or
revolutionary reason first put forth in the
Enlightenment worried him deeply, and he saw religion,
with its assertion of a different source of truth, as a
necessary counterweight to the certitudes of the 18th
century. His vision of reality was, to use a term
favored by both Scholem and Benjamin, "dialectic." Why
some of his most prominent students missed this
essential feature of his thought, and why they turned
to the right, remains one of the mysteries of his
intellectual legacy.
-----------------
Robert Alter's most recent book is "Imagined Cities:
Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel."
____________________________________________
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twine
>>>>>>>>>>>Subject: twine-
>>>>>>>>>>>Sent: Jun 10 '06 07:14
>>>>>>>>>>>
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>>>>>what
>>>>>>>i mean when i mean)
>>>>>>>>was
>>>>>>>>>a
>>>>>>>>>>big
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>>>>>>>Forgive
>>>>>>>>me
>>>>>>>>>if
>>>>>>>>>>I'm
>>>>>>>>>>>lost at the moment (we're dealing with things and
>>>> really
>>>>>>bad
>>>>>>>>>and extremely sexual, forbidden sexual issues, in fact,
>>>>>>>>>>>) - do you have a potential list? I can send
>>>>>you
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>what
>>>>>>>>>someone
>>>>>>>>>>>wants to do. I suggested she might do it.
>>>>>>>>>>>
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"the code of the dancer's body"
chiasmus
http://www.asondheim.org/maudxx.mp4
coroner's table operating table piston pump Good Maud synchronous
stratigraphy plain plane imminent vector tableland 2-stroke cycle +++
4-stroke circulate
tableland
immanent vector
sheave
cliff
cross=section
diachronous
Bad Maud
top-spin
takeoff landing
control panel
physical therapy
---
http://www.asondheim.org/maudxx.mp4
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2006 21:35:18 -0400
From: moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG
To: PORTSIDE@LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG
Subject: Why Neil Young Is Wrong
Why Neil Young Is Wrong
By Stephan Smith-Said
July 2006
http://progressive.org/mag_smith0706
On Sunday, May 14, the San Francisco Chronicle
published my open letter to Neil Young, "Hey, Neil
Young, We Young Singers Are Hog-tied, Too." I tried to
explain how the corporatized music industry has
censored protest music in the past several years. The
letter went viral on the Internet, and I was flooded
with enthusiastic responses from all kinds of people.
Even Neil and his team posted it front and center on
his blog for the entire week.
What prompted my letter and the outpouring was Young's
comment about why he felt compelled to write his new
anti-Bush album, Living with War. "I was waiting for
someone to come along, some young singer eighteen-to-
twenty-two years old, to write these songs and stand
up," he told the Los Angeles Times. "I waited a long
time. Then I decided that maybe the generation that has
to do this is still the '60s generation. We're still
here."
As the first protest singer to rise from the streets of
anti-war and WTO protests and get a major worldwide
distribution deal, I felt compelled to explain that
today's Dylans, Ochses, and Neil Youngs are here, but
they're being silenced by an industry that has for
years derived its profits from kiddy porn and dreamy
boys.
Just two days after my article came out, MTV, which has
refused to play anti-war videos even by the biggest
stars, published an article addressing the need for
political consciousness in mainstream music. In a
flourish of Bush-like hubris, one of the country's
chief purveyors of military recruitment ads to youth
posted the article, "Where Is the Voice of Protest in
Today's Music?" The webpage boasted an Army video game
in the bottom right corner. (MTV, by the way, refuses
to air anti-war ads produced by organizations like Not
In Our Name and Win Without War.)
Where's the voice of protest? It's in MTV's trash can.
Where are today's protest singers? They're on the
"don't add" list at corporate radio stations, where
they've increasingly been placed since FCC deregulation
paved the way for the monopolization of the industry.
Just ask Scott Goodstein. He heads the great
music/political advocacy group PunkVoter, which, with
Fat Wreck Chords, released the Rock Against Bush
compilation CDs. Those CDs, which included songs from
Anti-Flag and Green Day, sold 650,000 copies combined.
When Goodstein approached MTV about getting airtime for
Rock Against Bush, they rebuffed him. "They told us,
'Your project's not relevant. Or, it's not mainstreamy
enough,' " he says. "And Rolling Stone's no better."
Meanwhile, Green Day's current anti-Bush album,
American Idiot, has sold five million copies.
Finally waking up, MTV has the nerve to extol Green Day
and include Anti-Flag in its story on political bands!
PunkVoter immediately posted a retort titled, "MTV,
Still Completely Worthless," stating that political
bands "will be there, waiting, when MTV is ready to
start covering some protest music. Not that they're
gonna."
Pete Seeger told me that the floodgates to freedom of
expression were opened in the 1960s when the Broadway
and Hollywood monopoly over the music industry was
broken by Rock and Roll, Motown, and Nashville.
Now, the subsequent monopoly that Rock and Roll,
Motown, and Nashville constructed is being broken by
the Internet, where artists and organizations are
creating networks that transcend corporate genres.
"Most corporate industry professionals just don't
understand it," says Molly Neitzel, executive director
of Music for America, a nonprofit organization that
engages music audiences in political issues. "We're a
generation who doesn't fit into boxes," she says. "We
listen to all kinds of music, and that just doesn't fit
into the old corporate model of selling records to kids
this age, that color, this demographic."
Considering how damaging target marketing has been for
our democracy, it's great that today's protest singers
span all genres: from the anti-cool subtlety of indie-
rockers like Death Cab for Cutie and Bright Eyes, to
in-your-face hip-hop artists like the Coup, Mr. Lif,
and Immortal Technique; from punk bands like Anti-Flag
and NOFX, to country and folk artists like Liza
Gilkyson and Merle Haggard; from rally regulars like
David Rovics, Pat Humphries, and Chris Chandler, to
genre-bending artists like Thievery Corporation and
Manu Chao.
Some labels are already picking up on the pulse. Andy
Kaulkin, who runs a label called "Anti-" for Epitaph,
tells me he's become fascinated by the civil rights
movement and contemplates what we could do with music
to create such a movement today. Accordingly, he has
signed artists across corporate music genres that
converge instead in political consciousness and
spirituality. The label's roster now includes Billy
Bragg, the Coup, Tom Waits, and Spearhead.
Speaking with Billy Bragg after my article came out, we
agreed that the modern "broadside"-the protest song
that actually has political effect because of its
timely ability to affect public opinion-is the free
mp3. "In the corporate model, it's all based on sales,
not on social consciousness, and even the Internet
releases are exploited as promo for upcoming releases,
so singles are still held up in this four-month lag
time the record industry requires for printing,
publicity, distribution," he says. In today's sound-
bite world, no one wants to write a song about a war
that might be over by the time the album comes out.
My conversations with Goodstein and Neitzel inevitably
veered toward the idea of a nationwide tour of a
diverse selection of artists to bring together a
raucous, mixed, and attentive audience. But we also
spoke of how to expand the kind of touring I and a few
other artists have been doing. We use our shows to
support local peace and global justice groups. Kind of
like what SNCC and SDS did in their day, except for the
global, Internet generation.
Where's protest music today? It's here, it's on the
Internet, and it may soon be coming to your town to
build an international movement for peace, civil
rights, and equality. _____
Stephan Smith-Said is an Iraqi American songwriter
whose father's family lives under the daily threat of
bombing in Baghdad and Mosul. His newest single,
"Another World Is Possible," has been released for free
at his website www.stephansmith.com.
www.rockrap.com
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