Why the Contemporary Right Loves Nietzsche (and Heidegger and Schmitt)

BYMATT MCMANUS

Today’s right-wing thinkers look to Nietzsche and other German reactionaries to ground their elitist politics — and to do battle with leftists' project of universal emancipation

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Detail of Edvard Munch, Portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche, 1906


In his excellent new book, Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition, Edmund Fawcett asks a fair question: If the Left is so smart, how come we’re not in charge? Since John Stuart Mill’s lacerating characterization of conservatives as the “stupid” party, many opponents of right-wing politics have delighted in simply mocking the vulgarity and dogmatic prejudices of their foes. But time has shown that we do so at our own peril. Lobbing grenades without understanding our adversaries is a foolhardy endeavor.

On today’s political right, three late German thinkers loom large: Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt. All three wrote their most important works between 1850 and 1950, a time of transformative rise and Luciferian fall in Germany, and despite major differences, all three expressed profound discomfort with the egalitarianism and libertinism of modernity.

For stalwart defenders of capitalist hierarchy like Jordan Peterson, illiberals like Adrian Vermeule, and of course the alt-right, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schmitt furnish the intellectual armor to do battle with the Left. Ironically, the reactionary trio has also had their fair share of left-leaning fans and interpreters — which makes examining and critiquing their work all the more important for leftists today.

Nihilism and Hierarchy in Nietzsche


Every elevation of the type “man,” has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society and so it will always be — a society believing in a long scale of gradations of rank and differences of worth among human beings, and requiring slavery in some form or other. Without the pathos of distance, such as grows out of the incarnated difference of classes, out of the constant out-looking and down-looking of the ruling caste on subordinates and instruments, and out of their equally constant practice of obeying and commanding, of keeping down and keeping at a distance — that other more mysterious pathos could never have arisen, the longing for an ever new widening of distance within the soul itself, the formation of ever higher, rarer, further, more extended, more comprehensive states, in short, just the elevation of the type “man,” the continued “self-surmounting of man,” to use a moral formula in a supermoral sense.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Nietzsche is far and away the most influential of the three, both because of the powerful effect his ideas had on Heidegger and Schmitt, and his immense impact on culture as a whole. He is also a rarity among German philosophers: reading him is a pleasure. Nietzsche had a genuine sense of humor and loved nothing more than to drop in counterintuitive turns of phrase.

Through the years, many ostensible left-wing thinkers and movements — from countercultural artists to post-structuralists and feminists like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler — have drawn on Nietzsche, too. This would have likely surprised the Antichrist, who prophesized an end to the egalitarian “slave morality” of Christianity (along with its progeny, liberalism, and socialism) and the emergence of the noble and aristocratic supermen in their place. As Malcolm Bull puts it in Anti-Nietzsche, “equality has no fiercer critic than Nietzsche, whose ‘fundamental insight with respect to the geneaology of morals’ is that social inequality is the source of our value concepts, and the necessary condition of value itself.”Some leftists have looked favorably upon Nietzsche’s anti-Christian animus, seeing it as an emancipatory weapon against oppressive moralism. But Nietzsche had something far different in mind.

At the heart of Nietzsche’s outlook is a concern for the problem of nihilism. In his mind, nihilism was the inevitable consequence of a fall from the honorable, fierce aristocracies of yore and their replacement by Christianity, which postured as a religion of compassion and pity for the weak, poor, and humble. Far from being based on love, Nietzsche argued, Christianity was a kind of Platonism for the people, giving voice to their resentful belief that the real world was so filled with evil and suffering that it could only be justified if an eternal world existed above and below.

In this eternal world, the suffering inflicted by the aristocrats, the wealthy, and the violent would be meted out against those who had been powerful and arrogant in their mortal lives. It’s no accident that in The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche pays great attention to Tertullian’s comment that one of the great joys in heaven will be witnessing the suffering of the damned in hell. Unable to achieve revenge in this life, the weak will get to enjoy it eternally in the next one.

Some leftists have looked favorably upon Nietzsche’s anti-Christian animus, seeing it as an emancipatory weapon against oppressive moralism. But Nietzsche had something far different in mind. He felt that the desire for emancipation and equality was simply the continuation of the Christian theological project under a new, secularized guise.

Since the French Revolution — the “continuation of Christianity,” as Nietzsche put it in his notes for The Will to Power — the leveling impetus of the slave morality was more universalized than ever, bringing with it the decay of institutions and noble individuals who alone could provide a sense of meaning in a nihilistic post-God world. This was true of liberalism, and especially socialism, which held that the weak, sickly, and unworthy should unite and take over the world to end exploitation and dominion. For these doctrines, Nietzsche had nothing but contempt:

Whom do I hate most heartily among the rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists, the apostles to the Chandala, who undermine the workingman’s instincts, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his petty existence — who make him envious and teach him revenge. . . . Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the assertion of “equal” rights. . . . What is bad? But I have already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from revenge. — The anarchist and the Christian have the same ancestry. . .”

Only an unequal system, Nietzsche argued, could produce truly creative souls with life-affirming values. These values could not be judged morally in a nihilistic world, but only according to the one metric left after the death of God: aesthetically. For Nietzsche, the great-souled man will inevitably use others as his clay in tremendous and often terrifyingly violent projects — indifferent to, if not directly hostile toward, the mostly worthless masses whose primary value is being put to use by the coming superman. The inferior masses, Nietzsche was saying, should simply accept their exploitation by their betters.
Schmitt and Heidegger on Modernity

It would be too much to call Nietzsche a proto-Nazi. While he has profoundly influenced fascist and far-right movements, Nietzsche’s disdain for nationalism, antisemitism, and strident individualism resist the caricature of him as a Nazi thinker advanced, among others, by his own sister.

The same can’t be said for Schmitt and Heidegger. Both were active members of the Nazi party, and both played a significant role in legitimating it. Ironically, despite accusations by figures like Jordan Peterson that any defense of Marx or Marxism is virtually an apology for mass slaughter, Schmitt’s and Heidegger’s political commitments haven’t kept them from influencing the contemporary 

right.

Martin Heidegger. (Wikimedia Commons)

At the center of Schmitt and Heidegger’s reactionary politics is a critique of modernity. This takes a number of forms: skepticism of humanism, anxiety about relativistic individualism’s privileged place in modern morality, alarm at the rise of the chattering classes and “idle talk” in liberal representative democracy, and, above all, contempt for the declining commitment to existential struggles that generate authenticity and meaning.

Like Nietzsche, Schmitt and Heidegger are committed to the idea that overcoming the limitations of modernity means supplanting the two great modernist doctrines of liberalism and socialism with a new kind of total nationalist politics directed by the leader figure or, more vaguely, the “spiritual mission of the German people.”

Neither, then, had much good to say about liberalism or socialism. For Heidegger, writing in the Introduction to Metaphysics, they were both “metaphysically the same” in their materialism and egalitarian concern for human welfare. When you boiled it down, the so-called great debates between liberals and socialists were ultimately technical disputes over how to build and distribute better refrigerators.

Carl Schmitt. (Wikimedia Commons)

Schmitt, while more nuanced, would have largely agreed with Heidegger. For Schmitt, political struggle was and should be at the core of human life since it provides a grandiose, homogenizing sense of meaning for groups of people. Politics binds us together by constructing an ultimately theological view of how the world should be and contrasting it with one’s political enemies. It was in part through the (frequently violent) struggle against political adversaries that a shared identity was forged.

According to Schmitt, the great error of liberalism was supposing that politics could be overcome through talk in representative institutions, which made it both hypocritical and weak. Marxist socialism was little better since it emphasized the historical significance of class struggle as an engine of meaning. But in the long run socialists also wanted an end to meaning-giving political struggle, which would be transcended — along with alienation — in the economic democracy to come.

Schmitt ridiculed this life as one of managed, bureaucratic hedonism where state officials would assume the role of caretakers and stifle the grander, frequently violent impulses of humankind.

Reactionaries, Liberals, and Socialists

Unpacking the German reactionaries’ writings — among the most profound and disturbing arguments for right-wing politics available — serves a purpose beyond critique. It can also help sharpen our understanding of left politics.The triumvirate blossom evergreen because they will always appeal to those who see the drive for more democracy as a danger to be confronted and defeated.

Recently, I’ve argued that liberalism and socialism have important intellectual affinities, even if they represent distinct political traditions. Both view human beings as moral equals and, as opponents of traditional hierarchies, advocate as much freedom as possible. Liberalism falters in blanching at the thoroughgoing pursuit of not just political but economic democracy.

But both doctrines stand in stark contrast to the reactionary views of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schmitt. For all its differences, the trio was united in holding that the modernist project is a fundamental danger precisely because it permits too much equality and freedom. Existence can only be meaningful with the presence of hierarchy, whether between individuals (Nietzsche) or with the withering away of nihilistic liberal democracies in the face of more spiritually attuned nationalist, unified polities (Heidegger and Schmitt). This could only be achieved by eliminating dissident enemies within and without, along with uniform subordination to the “spiritual mission” that reactionary intellectuals laid out.

We’ve seen the horrifying consequences of this project over the twentieth century, which almost buried the reputations of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schmitt with them. But the triumvirate blossom evergreen because they will always appeal to those who see the drive for more democracy as a danger to be confronted and defeated. Grappling with their ideas and appeal is vital to countering their efforts — and advancing the humanistic project of securing equality and freedom for all.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matt McManus is a visiting professor of politics at Whitman College. He is the author of The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism and Myth and the coauthor of Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/12/nietzsche-heidegger-schmitt-modernity-hierarchy

Our new issue, “Failure Is an Option,” is out now. We discuss why the United States’ institutional breakdown won’t stop after Trump leaves office and what can be done to improve things for working people. 


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Behemoth and Leviathan: 

The Fascist Bestiary of the Alt-Right

If we want to fight the new fascism, we must not only organise against it politically, but also understand its ideology. Far from being a morbid curiosity, this is essential for understanding twenty-first century fascism’s inner dynamics. Beyond racist tweets, memes, and Richard Spencer’s obnoxious media appearances, we need to lay bare the images, concepts, and ideas that form the core of alt- right thought. We must lay bare the altright imagination.

This imagination is an unstable and fractured thing, torn between two opposing ‘animal spirits’. These are Behemoth and Leviathan. Originating in the Bible, these beasts gained philosophical meaning in Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy, and entered fascist thought through the writings of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.

Who are these monsters? Behemoth is a lumbering giant; it is usually mammalian, often an elephant or trampling bull, occasionally a Russian bear.

Behemoth jealously defends its territory against incursions by the sea monster, the serpentine whale-fish called Leviathan. As Schmitt put it in

1942’s Land and Sea, ‘Behemoth exerts itself to rip apart the Leviathan with its horns or teeth, while the Leviathan, on the contrary, holds shut the

mouth and nose of the land animal with its fins so that it cannot eat or breathe’. For Schmitt, this describes a naval blockade, and has its analogy in

the conflicts between England and Russia in the nineteenth century, and England and Germany in the twentieth.

These beasts are a pair of opposites: Behemoth is autochthonous, representing the stable order of earth-bound peoples. Leviathan is thalassocratic, embodying the fluid dynamism of seafaring peoples. Behemoth signifies terrestrial empires, while Leviathan suggests commercial trade and exploration. The former stands for traditional, divinely sanctioned state authority, the latter for the spirit of pirate-capitalist enterprise (what Schmitt calls ‘corsair capitalism’).

Today, the ‘Traditionalist’ philosopher Aleksandr Dugin and the ‘neoreactionary’ philosopher Nick Land are the standard bearers of Behemoth and Leviathan, respectively. They are also the conduits by which these animal spirits have entered the twenty- first century alt-right imagination. It is for this reason that the alt- right mind is such a conflicted, contradictory thing. It is not that most reactionaries today engage much with Dugin and Land’s texts, let alone Carl Schmitt’s. But the seemingly opposed worldviews of Land and Dugin are the very ether within which alt-right thought is steeped. It is an ideology torn between technophilic Futurism and neo-Orthodox Traditionalism. Both positions reject Enlightenment modernity, but each of these fascist ‘postmodernisms’ represents its own distinct variety or brand. For Dugin, the break with modernity is accomplished through an ethno-religious apocalypse – a return to orthodoxy, and an activation of a mystical eschaton beyond time. Land imagines the break from liberal modernity will be accomplished through an accelerating techno-capitalism, superseding humanity itself. Despite these differences, both figures reject modernity as ending in the nightmare of cultural Marxism.

by Harrison Fluss (http://salvage.zone/harrison-fluss/) 

& Landon Frim (http://salvage.zone/landon-frim/)

READ THE REST HERE 

12/29/2017 Behemoth and Leviathan: The Fascist Bestiary of the Alt-Right | Salvage
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WHERE IN WE MEET OUR OLD FRIEND (SIC) CARL SCHMITT

The Political Personality As An Aim Of Education

Dr. Eduard Spranger

Source: http://library.flawlesslogic.com/spranger.htm
(WARNING FASCIST SITE)

The historical development of civilised humanity may be compared to a river which but seldom fills the entire breadth of its bed. According to the fall of the ground it drives the bulk of its energy now to this side, now to that; sometimes whole stretches of land between the two banks remain unwashed by the waters; then again it presses forward with might and main, making use of all its possibilities towards expansion.

This change of energy in the stream of life may be traced in particular in the change which takes place with regard to educational aims insomuch as we become conscious of them. Later on, educational aims of a chiefly economic or political, or learned or aesthetic nature, branch off from the religious source which still comprises existence in its entirety. Their intrinsic value, too, changes, of course, with the general situation of the times and with the specific will to life of the generations. Yet there is something typical in them, or they could not be given such general names. In Germany today people expressly profess the aim of education to be political.

If we would understand the main issue of this idea, we should have to comprehend the essence of what is political. Carl Schmitt, the leading expert in political law, has termed the contrast friend-enemy to be the original phenomenon on which are based all political groupings. Doubtless this contrast pervades all forms of culture which stand out in the life of the Nations as a whole as being definitely political. But the problem must be pressed further: why are people each other's friends or enemies? Frequently they are so from incentives and in a manner which has little to do with what is political, even if the meaning of the word is traced back to an original sense which existed before the outer and inner organisation of public life, a method which I take to be the right one. What is political has, it is true, only become quite manifest within the compass and in the life of the polis. The friend-enemy relation of men may mean a mere horizontal relation between groups and individuals. What is originally political, however, comprises vertical relations, the tendency to be at the top and not at the bottom. In other words: the will to power as a fundamental fact of men living together, indeed even as a vital root of individual life, is the main issue of what is political. The State is only a complicated form of balancing the different powers, and, finally, the highest collective power emanating from, or, vice versa, forging a national unit.

At all times the education of man to become a political personality -- an ideal which appears very frequently and most emphatically in the history of the human mind -- has meant a development of the will to power in one sense or another. It is subject to all the laws of structure and happening which pervade the sphere of power. It presupposes in the individual as the centre of his life, so to speak, a disciplined will which is ennobled in the school of obedience towards the ethical art of commanding. This discipline of the will, however, that is, self command as a preliminary condition of commanding others, sends forth its ray in various directions as soon as it is practised in the sphere of political life as such. For in that case a State-supporting personality is to be formed, who, in the highest stage of perfection, may some day rise to a personality commanding the State.

There is sufficient evidence in the history of education that a State-supporting personality may appear in many varieties. In his original form he is the able bodied man ready to defend the State, his Country, and his Folk, thus contributing his share towards the physical power of the State. However, the State is never an expression of power alone, but, at the same time, a structure regulated by law. It is power partly through law and in the shape of law. On the other hand, law itself is a particular manifestation of power and a system of the distribution of power, of a collective guarantee of duties and rights (spheres of liberty). So there is another variety of the political personality, namely, the legal personality, a fact which becomes most evident in the ancient Roman conception of the personality. Finally, history teaches us that, apart from the display of military power, the art of rhetoric has always been an essential political expedient, particularly in the domestic fight for power between rival groups. In spite of Plato, philosophy has not managed to become the organising power in political life. Rhetoric, which in ancient times struggled against it for centuries to win the first place in education, has certainly taken precedence in political matters, The third variety, therefore, of the political personality is the rhetorical personality, if we mean by this that type of human being who develops and uses the power of speech expressly as a political expedient. Thus the educational ideal of the political personality is split up into the three primary types of the military personality, the legal personality, and the rhetorical personality.

All three have their peculiar history. The soldier, the jurist, the orator of today are different from what they were in the Attic democracy of the fourth century, in the Rome of the Emperors, or in the so called Renaissance period. Naturally they all absorbed an ever increasing portion of the scientific and technical tradition of their time. They all formed themselves and changed according to the structure of the political organism in whose service they stood, and which they supported. In their primary type, however, as special original phenomena of what is political, they remain what they were throughout the ages.

The political personality, as he is meant to be the ideal of education in Germany today, bears a peculiar mark of his own. We are experiencing a renewal of our Folk which goes back to the vital biological roots of the successive generations and of the individual. We are, further, passing through a process which is going to recast and reverse our national strata, at the same time bringing about a fundamental change in our social structure. The new form demands a decisive discipline of the will for its basis, which we have found to be the general foundation of what is political. This discipline begins with the health of the body and the instincts, rising to a defensive capacity, to a type of man which should never be termed warlike or menacing, because its intention is to realise the eternal form of soldierly attitude in the entire sphere of life, not in a professional military sense. The spirit of self sacrifice, a readiness to serve and a consciousness of being deeply connected with the Nation as a whole -- these are the fundamental virtues which are to support the State. So there is a superpersonal ideal background to the entire system of education: a feeling of responsibility towards the Nation and the State, manifesting itself in deeds and not only in words. Everything depends on clearly distinguishing this ideal from a collectivism which we find in Russia, and which is definitely rejected by the German mind.

Turning away from individualism does not mean a depreciation of the individual. After the Napoleonic period, Pestalozzi, one of those who discovered that each Folk has its national individuality, most emphatically stressed the fact that education is not based on the collective existence of the human race, nor that this can be its aim. (See his book: An die Unschuld, den Ernst und den Edelmut meines Zeitalters -- To The Innocence, Seriousness, And Magnanimity Of My Age, 1815.) All true education is applied to the individual, but today this is the case in a very special sense. Education does not take the individual as an isolated being whose vocation is mere self preservation, not even as a being whose chief aim would be mere self realisation, but it means the individual as a future responsible representative of superindividual values and their moral consequences. The individual as such is indispensable, it is true; he is indeed the only representative that we know of which is superindividual. For a generation, a Nation, even a State, only live as long as they make the whole of their individuals now living the vessel of their values and representatives of their spirit. National education, also national education with a political aim, never penetrates to the masses unless it has reached the individual first. Mass education is a term which gives rise to misunderstandings; the moral focus of the will, of decision, of even discipline, always rests with living souls in whom the divine spark must first flare up, if it is intended to kindle the great fire of the common spirit. Collective responsibility consists of many small responsibilities. The national language, for instance, does not exist by itself, it only exists through the medium of those who take part in the community of language and who are, in their small part, responsible for the purity, spirit, and growth of the language. The entire culture of a Folk, which it has acquired in the course of history, is only alive if it lives through individual souls who are conscious of their responsibility in the successive generations. The same is the case with the State.

The catchword education of the political personality means neither the mass being nor the individual without a soul. In its last interpretation, it rather implies that we are beginning to mean by soul something more than what is in the body, and by personality something more than self-sufficiency and self-seclusion. The soul itself is the point of intersection of the spiritual stream; it widens with the duties it fulfils, conscious of its own responsibility. The political personality is one which takes part in the spiritual connections. Apart from all this, the soul is ever and alone that point in life where there is a connection with God. For to whom should we feel thus responsible, if not to God? The personality is the individuality chosen by the spirit to be its representative, thus ceasing to cultivate, in its narrow sphere, a misunderstood autonomy. It is the name of a person conscious of moral ties and obligations. The term political personality must therefore be based on an ethical ideal, which the best representatives of the Nation have anticipated in former times. Today it is perceptibly and effectively being appropriated by a youth that is ready and eager to accept real responsibility.

Forschungen und Fortschritte Vol. 1, No. 1 (January 1935).


ALSO SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=carl+schmitt

“When all you have is a hammer…”: why Agamben’s ideas were bound to lead to this


February 8, 2022

LONG READ

Length:5342 words


Summary: Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s attack on public health measures during Covid 19 is linked to undialectical perspectives rooted in Nietzsche, and contrasted to other thinkers like Toni Negri, Naomi Klein, and Peter Linebaugh – Editors


Padua, Italy — When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The Italian political philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, who for decades has warned us about the seemingly unstoppable ability and will of even democratic states to impose a “state of exception” – a state of emergency powers overriding all law, constitutional restraints, and citizen or human rights – has now become the most sophisticated spokesperson for the anti-vax and other forces opposed to the public health restrictions due to the Covid 19 virus crisis. He has founded an intellectual group opposed to the restrictions, public health measures, vaccination requirements and other actions taken by public officials to combat the spread of the virus and its lethality.

Agamben is one of the most influential philosophers of recent years, and he was especially “hot” and in fashion during the Bush/War on Terror years after 9/11, when his analysis seemed to help explain the restrictions on constitutional and human rights. Agamben has many admirers, and his work has influenced that of many in and out of academia. His recent insistence, however, that the entire Covid pandemic is a manufactured crisis, whose true intent has been to impose a “biopolitical” regime that “reduces us all to mere biophysical existence”, making us into “lemmings” who, bending to the will of state power and direction have been stripped of all ethical, moral and cultural traits, leading us to stand naked in front of the sovereign, willing to accept the destruction of our liberties for the sake of presumed security, has led many to wonder whether his current stance throws light – or better shadow – on his previous work which has been so widely celebrated.

Since in 2011 I wrote and got published a lengthy attack on Agamben and his work[1] , an essay I wrote when he was at the height of his popularity and his work at its most in fashion, I have to say that I saw something like this coming from a mile away, and think this seeming turn to the irrational Agamben was entirely predictable. But the problem with being a no-name independent scholar and activist publishing in a fine, reputable but hardly widely-read and followed journal an attack on the work of an intellectual superstar, is that you don’t have the impact you wish you had. So only now are people wondering what went wrong with Agamben. To which, the only reply is: nothing, his work was always wrongheaded. I hope to briefly explain why here.

Agamben is known mainly for his concept of the “state of exception” and for arguing, and seeming to demonstrate empirically, that the overriding of all constitutional or legal limits by state power has become the norm, not a “crisis” or a “state of emergency” but a sort of permanent state of emergency. So crushing of human and legal rights by reference to some crisis or emergency is the principal form of government – or better governance in the world today, including in the western democratic states. He uses categories from the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt to show how sovereignty is essentially the power to impose one’s will on others, that is, the power of the state or of its executive branch to declare a state of emergency at will and use that situation to put society into a Hobbesian state of nature – one where law does not yet exist, because law itself must be based on a prior condition in which law is made in the first place so that other laws can be fashioned based on this “constituent power”. Constituent power is a concept of Schmitt’s that the Italian autonomist Marxist Toni Negri has used with some creativity to describe the potential founding of new societies by social movements and revolutions, but which for Schmitt and Agamben instead describes the true power of the state that precedes law and constitutions, that power that makes law and constitutions in the first place, and so is mainly a menace, not a possibility, for popular forces. For Negri, this is the moment of revolution, when a movement is in a position to become the new order of society. For Agamben, it is instead the moment of state power that reveals the state’s real essence, as raw power to impose its will, the Leviathan of Hobbes. In the face of that state power, all of us, citizens and refugees alike, are mere Homo Sacer – an ancient Roman category that referred to persons who had no rights, nor any right to have rights, who could be killed with impunity. For Agamben, the Jews in the Nazi camps are the prototype of the human condition for all today.

I criticized Agamben ten years ago in my article of the time, and hold to my criticisms today, on the grounds of his not addressing any history or relationship of the state to capitalism and its processes, and of not addressing in any way the long history of struggles against capitalist expropriation and exploitation – the anti-slavery movement, the anti-colonial movements, the movements for women’s equality and the working class movements, as well as the democratization – partial as it is – of state power. By ignoring capitalism and the struggle against it, Agamben ignores the experiences of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, of colonized peoples, of women, of slaves and of proletarians, whose survival under capitalism is always contingent. Ignoring these central experiences of the modern world enables him to treat the states of emergency around the world and historically that are so important to him as more novel and more urgent and as new norms. Instead, as my list of social actors shows, the experience of being homo sacer in one form or another – of the very state he is warning us about, has in fact been the main experience of the majority of people around the world for centuries. And, until recently, with the end of slavery, advances in women’s rights, labor unions, democratization and advanced welfare state and social democracies, it has been the experience of the majority of people in every society since the rise of classes. I think these criticisms of his work still hold today, even before his recent seeming descent into madness over vaccinations, Covid restrictions and public health measures, positions I see as entirely in keeping with and consistent with his previous work, indeed their logical trajectory and outcome.

But it is the contrast of his work with that of Toni Negri’s on the shared concept of constituent power that I think can best show what problem is at the heart of not just both their work, but that of an entire field of works by various authors, of which Agamben is merely currently the worst and most extreme example.

Negri sees the state of exception as a potential moment of revolutionary reconstitution of society as a whole, to paraphrase the Communist Manifesto, Agamben as the moment of greatest peril, as the expression of a state power whose guarantees to citizens of their rights is worth no more than the paper it is written on, since those rights can be annulled at will at any moment and apparently are being so as the new norm across the world.

Each, we see, has a one-sided view of the whole thing, and of the relationships involved. What is missing, in other words, is any dialectic in either of their analyses, though to be fair Negri’s work does utilize dialectics in other ways in its analysis of the relationship of social movements, capitalism and state forms. But not in seeing the side of constituent power that Agamben sees and vice-versa. In each case, missing is an opposing side, or even an interlocutor, and so no dialectic is possible. Put differently, with Agamben, there is no vision of what victory would constitute or look like, and with Negri, the possibility of defeat never really enters the picture or the analysis. The role of ruling classes opposing the movements Negri theorizes, most usefully is his master work Potere costituente, translated into English and published by the University of Minnesota Press as Insurgencies, or that of the pre-existing state institutions in re-shaping the efforts of revolutionary movements plays no or little role in his otherwise often admirable work. And the role of movements for democratizing the state, ending or abolishing concrete historical forms of “homo sacer” such as slavery, Native American genocide, the worst oppressions of patriarchy, colonial occupations, child labor, the conditions of labor before the ten-hour and eight-hour movements and so on, do not play any role at all in Agamben’s work. Not even the European Resistance to the very Nazi occupations and states of exception that are the center of his view of the modern state makes an appearance.

In my article of ten years ago, and still today, I contrast these one-sided accounts with two other works, in my view more useful for our needs in the service of struggles today. One is that of Naomi Klein, in her bestseller Shock Doctrine, and the other is the work of Peter Linebaugh in his Magna Carta Manifesto. The dialectic in Klein’s work is that the struggles that gave rise to social democracy, the end of colonialism and apartheid, and to even the welfare state elements of Stalinist regimes are what capital is working to overcome through neoliberalism – privatization, deregulation, governance by central banks and openness to capital markets and global markets for goods. Since these policies are deeply unpopular, a state of emergency of some sort or another, permitting “shock therapy” –a swift reorganization of the economy in favor of capital, is needed. So Agamben’s states of exception are directly the result of the class struggle and a particular capitalist strategy to overcome working class, democratic and popular opposition. It happens because nothing else would enable the reforms that shift the balance of power in favor of capitalism. And it is needed, because capitalism finds itself in crisis or facing eventual crisis if profit rates cannot be increased through these neoliberal mechanisms.

For Linebaugh, our legal rights, our constitutional rights, have an economic basis in access to subsistence and in control of common lands and common goods. When these are expropriated, our legal rights do become, or risk becoming if a new form of class struggle does not emerge to protect them, merely the paper they are written on. Our rights and freedoms, which Agamben is so concerned about, always risk becoming dead letters, except when struggles and movements emerge to defend them, movements and struggles for whom the legal rights are tools. But movements and struggles for whom the real objective is the concrete meeting of needs and control over or access to common goods and resources we need for our lives, and guarantees and access to subsistence. These analyses by Linebaugh and Klein are light-years ahead of those of Agamben on the very question that tortures him and informs his whole body of work, because in each there is a dialectic at work – the struggle between capitalist forces and those of people defending their access to livelihoods and needs. The form of the state, its policies, and its institutions, and the balance of power between these in the formal constitutions of states – and in what Negri usefully calls the material constitutions – are both the outcome of, and themselves actors in these struggles.

Historic struggles against states of exception, be they antislavery or anticolonialism, the resistance to capitalist coups in Chile in 1973 (unsuccessful) or Venezuela in 2002 (successful) or Honduras or Brazil in recent years, or even the seizure of the Bastille by the people of Paris on July 14, 1789 to prevent Louis XVI’s attempt at a state of exception, all these are nowhere to be found in Agamben’s view of the world. Yet WE need to know about these cases, who the actors were, what they wanted and why, how and why they succeeded or failed.

Marxists Humanists and readers here of course, don’t need me to tell them how important to an analysis dialectics are, but I would like to show how lacking a dialectic in social and political analysis leads directly to Agamben’s disastrous current project of anti-vax, anti-public health measures in the face of a pandemic that has taken millions of lives around the world. The point is, that lack of a dialectic has been a central part of his work all along, and not only of his. So I will conclude after the analysis of Agamben’s accusations regarding Covid requirements with a comment on some other recently fashionable thinkers and political stances.

All Agamben has is a hammer: the state is bad, it is Nietzsche’s Will to Power personified, its “biopolitics” (Foucault) is deadly in nature and reduces us to bare life, naked homo sacer stripped of ethical, moral, legal and cultural features before it, requiring us to do everything for mere survival, especially now when it requires us to stay home, or get a vaccine, or wear a mask, or not interact with each other. As if this reduction of human being’s cultural and ethical characteristics to “mere worker” – a means to an end were not already a primary feature of capitalism as Marx showed as long ago as his manuscripts on Alienation in 1844. But Agamben’s state is entirely one-sided: it is only repression.

As Hal Draper showed in his monumental Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, the state takes on basic and necessary public functions – community collective defense, roads, schools, law and a judicial system – that will exist in any society or community of any kind – as paradoxically Graeber and Wengrow’s recent celebrated work The Dawn of Everythingdemonstrates. In a class society, however, the state, under the primary influence of the dominant class and defending its interests, will carry out these basic functions in a distorted way, in a way that both carries them out and enhances the wealth and power of the ruling class and the inequalities of wealth and power in society as whole, at least more often than not. When the two conflict, the struggle between classes, within the state and across society as a whole decides which will win out. The state’s legitimacy is bound up with its ability to carry out these essential functions for society, and its failure to do so can lead to it, or at least its leaders, losing the support of society’s larger membership, something that the Chinese “Mandate of Heaven” being lost due to inability to provide for people during famines, floods or earthquakes, the dangers to the Egyptian Pharaohs if they failed to organize the Nile flooding and agricultural adequately, and even George W. Bush’s failure to secure New Orleans from the Mississippi’s overflowing the levees, stand as examples of. So, there is a dialectic within the state: legitimate social functions versus state power qua ruling class power. And on the side of legitimate social functions stand the social and physical needs of the non-ruling class part of the population. This conflict is at least as old as Hammurabi’s Code, which both protected the poor, widows, orphans and slaves, and codified the class power and privilege of nobles. With the rise of democracy, this struggle becomes even more central, as structural and institutional pressure by popular forces are also written into the form and content of the state, even as capitalist power and dominance are as well. Thus, the dialectic inherent to the state in a class society is directly tied to the class struggle in society itself. With the rise of democracy, this dialectic is now written into the relationships between the institutions of the state themselves. Some agencies, institutions and actors lean toward basic social functions, and are more directly linked to and under the pressure of popular needs and demands. Others are more well-sheltered from popular pressure and democratic power – this is where Klein’s emphasis on the role of shifting decision-making to Central Banks for instance is important – leaning toward a more one-sided preoccupation with ruling class and capitalist interests.

Thus, during a crisis such as the Covid crisis, we should turn our attention to these dialectics – is capital taking advantage of a crisis to further its project of privatizing wealth and power and public policy? – an issue at the center of Klein’s work on “disaster capitalism” but nowhere to be found in Agamben; are capitalists profiting off the now vital and emergency needs of people in the face of a public health catastrophe? Are the restrictions that a basic and necessary social function of the state – the protection of society and its members in the face of a natural or public health disaster – designed and implemented in a way that is appropriate to the crisis and its resolution? Can the state act as an organizer of production and distribution of basic necessities such as medical products and implements, and if so, will it do so with an eye toward production for use or for exchange and capital accumulation? Are policies designed and implemented in ways that are fair and equitable and take into account the needs of various social actors – teachers and students and parents, workers and employers, health providers and patients, the marginalized and the majority, or are they clearly or subtly means of only favoring the interests of, and shifting of power to, employers, large firms versus small business, the rich and well-connected? These are the kinds of questions we need to, and have every right to ask.

But if instead one has no sense of these dialectics within and between the state, civil society and social classes and actors, then one cannot see the reality of the pandemic. To see the pandemic as real means to see that some public health measures are called for, as well as some changes in individual and collective behavior for the period of the crisis, realizing that merely because extreme measures are needed temporarily, they are not necessarily – and indeed are not intended – to be permanent. States of emergency over short-term natural disasters are a frequent occurrence, but are usually lifted as soon as the hurricane, flood, fire or earthquake is over or its consequences have been sufficiently cleaned up. At times public interest would be better served by prolonging states of emergency lifted too quickly in order to satisfy business interests. Other times, they are lifted too slowly, as the concerns of everyday people are not listened to and taken into account. And legitimate struggles and protests may ensue in these cases and sometimes do. Indeed, in some extreme cases, the state utterly fails in its social obligations and allows people to suffer from such emergencies without assuming emergency powers to help, or even doing so, but then not really helping. But if there is no such dialectic within the state as a complex entity, between legitimate public power in the service of social needs, and the distortion of these powers and their use due to the influence of dominant class interests and power, then all one sees is the bad state imposing its will. The pandemic itself has to be, according to the already existing logic of Agamben’s work, wished away as non-existent, since any emergency or crisis must be manufactured by the state as an excuse to impose a state of exception. And this is what Agamben claims, in ever-escalating and insulting rhetoric, is happening now and has been for the past two years.

Thus, Agamben refers to “The Invention of a Pandemic” (https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia ) in a widely-read article of February 2020, at the start of the Covid impact in Italy, which was the first country outside of China to have a major wave of Coronavirus cases. Comparing the virus to the flu, and downplaying its dangers, Agamben accused Italian media of “spreading a climate of panic”. He has more recently claimed in on Twitter that “Today in my country measures are applied against “anti-vaxxers” that are 10X (ten times) more restrictive than the fascist legislation of 1938 against ‘non-Aryans’” (https://twitter.com/Agonhamza/status/1489978672215904257 )– by which he means Mussolini’s anti-Semitic laws that led tens of thousands of Italian Jews to the death camps. A more insulting and false set of claims would be hard to imagine, and here Agamben’s rhetoric is at one with that of the American far right, not something we would expect from a supposedly left-wing philosopher. In November 2020 in a talk with students in Venice, Agamben claimed that these restrictions are bringing humanity “towards extinction – if not physical at least ethical and political”. (https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-intervento-al-convegno-degli-studenti-veneziano-). I would be tempted to suggest that Agamben, in clinging to his February 2020 view, based on early information and misinformation as to the real nature of the virus and its impact, is engaging in what Hegel termed “Understanding” – maintain rigid fidelity to categories based on old realities that they no longer explain under newer conditions. But for Hegel, Understanding did correspond to reality, was a right or least useful way of explaining or defining phenomena at one time at least. Instead, in the case of Agamben, all we have is what in Organizational Behavior is called “anchoring” – sticking with your initial way of understanding something that is happening, and not changing your view when more or new information comes about, because you have already made up your mind.

To claim that the efforts to stop the spread of, and reduce or end the fatalities it has caused and continues to cause lack ethical, political, moral, cultural, or even religious characteristics from a humanist point of view, as Agamben does, is sheer madness and falsehood. The vast majority of the population in every country has recognized the ethical need to vaccinate oneself and to wear masks and engage in social distancing. This reality is something we should find cause of hope and cautious optimism in – an affirmation of basic ethical concerns overriding even economic interests and needs. This extended even to the patience with which populations around the world accepted total or near total lockdowns – NOT as Agamben claims, because we are lemmings, an echo of the “sheeple” insult by the US right to those who act to protect others and themselves, but out of a sense of ethics born of a sense of collective belonging and interdependence.

And though predictably capital has lobbied hard, used its influence and in general has done all it could as a class interest to reopen business, and to continue to have work done in very unsafe conditions, the majority around the world have made clear that they want workplaces and classrooms to be safe. In many cases, as in the mass refusal that has come to be known as the Great Resignation in the US and UK, millions of workers have stayed home, quit jobs, or refused to take new ones if they are not satisfied as to the conditions, including the public health ones. In other words, most people – even if hardly unaware that government can be repressive or unfair or corrupt – are aware of the two-sidedness of the state – that in this case it is at least to a great extent acting in the legitimate public interest of protecting public health and lives. People get angry at corruption, but stop at traffic lights. There is a difference. Where people aside from the anti-vax minority have made demands, these have been completely legitimate demands that if one’s workplace or small business must shut down directly as a government policy, that compensation be made to keep people’s livelihoods protected; that parents needing to work at home have their privacy protected from employers; that schools be made safe and opened whenever possible, and so on. These demands reflect the clear understanding that the crisis must not be used to expropriate or exploit their work and small businesses by capital, while accepting the legitimate side of state policy in the public interest. Such demands led to job and payroll guarantees in Denmark, the UK and elsewhere and the – even if minimalist – direct payments by the US government to citizens to provide some income, as well as rent and student debt moratoriums. Public pressure has led even to the Italian government’s distribution of small funds to certain categories of unprotected workers and self-employed people, and some job protections here. And in Italy and elsewhere demands were made on the EU to act as a legitimate public power and provide aid, materials for health care, and money to Eurozone countries that can’t produce their own currency, demanding in other words that it be more than a mere institutionalization of the power of finance capital.

What Agamben and others could usefully be doing instead is making clear the danger of the finally arriving EU funds to Italy being turned over primarily to the banks and large corporations and corrupt political organizations. The near-unanimous consensus among ruling class spokespeople is that former EU Central Bank President Mario Draghi, now Italy’s unelected prime minister is a genius, a wizard, the zeitgeist on a white horse. But his government seems determined to distribute the EU funds and most likely to the class forces that Draghi has represented all his professional life. Here indeed we have an example of the capitalist interests overriding, or seeking to override, the legitimate public functions of the state in a crisis. Draghi replaced a popular and elected government that, whatever its errors and failings had, under Giuseppe Conte, guided the country through the worst with palpable compassion and empathy, and with continual communication and responses to the public and press. the Draghi government has already lowered taxes on the very rich, and seems prepared to be the “executive committee of the bourgeoisie as a whole.” But even in this case, popular outrage was reflected in the decision of Italy’s parliament not to make Draghi the next President of the Republic, Italy’s head of state. To ignore popular struggles, to ignore the dialectics of society and state, will lead one into trouble every time. Agamben seems unconcerned with the real threats to democracy of technocratic governance in the interests of capital, on one side, and the rising and growing fascist threat – one that he is either knowingly or unwittingly feeding with his stance on Covid restrictions – on the other, and their mutual reinforcement. Instead, his attacks are on the legitimate role of the state in protecting public health and the ethical actions and legitimate class demands of the people. These latter are manifested most people abiding by the requirements of being vaccinated, and of having the “Green Pass” confirming one’s vaccination status as a requirement to be in public restaurants and on public transportation, and living with the requirements to wear masks and social distance. All while demanding that state policies meet economic needs arising from these restrictions, and not protect privileged sectors instead.

But Agamben should also, I believe, be seen in a wider context of a number of influential thinkers that sees the state as the main, indeed usually the only threat to liberty and human well-being, to the exclusion of the dynamics of capitalism, or at least playing down the role of the latter. Each of these has a one-sided view of the state, based either loosely, or closely, either unconsciously and indirectly or consciously and directly on the ahistorical Nietzschean will to power, or on a one-sided view of the state as entirely and exclusively capitalist in form and content. This field stretches from Foucault’s biopolitics with its concern about the state being ever more involved in questions of health care, science, housing, employment and livelihoods with the rise of the welfare states, a view that deeply informs Agamben’s, to John Holloway’s call to avoid the state at all costs as an entirely capitalist enterprise, and to change society exclusively by not taking power, to Guattari and Deleuze’s writings that ignore the longest part of human history of hunters and gatherers and egalitarian societies, but then go on to theorize state power ahistorically on the basis of the questionable category “nomadism”, to Raul Zibechi’s writings on Latin American social movements, James Scott’s anthropology of grain-based societies, and Graeber and Wengrow’s recent bestseller. All see the state as only bad. A default anarchism has taken hold of a considerable part of the intellectual left in recent years and while we must gain what we can from the insights that these present us with, we need to see that such one-sidedness, such lack of dialectic, can only lead one to grave errors. Agamben has not gone mad recently, his work was always flawed, and he is not alone. We need better theoretical ways of understanding what is happening, and the ways things are; ones that see the all-sidedness of crises, struggles, states, societies, institutions and ideas, that can grasp what Marx called “the ensemble of social relations”. We can only hope that those who have instead decided to guide themselves by such deeply wrong ideas about ethics, public health and public authority, democracy and freedom, will not lose their lives in the process to this still dangerous and terrible pandemic is indeed very real, nor cost the lives of others.

Addendum: As I was writing this article, the crisis in Canada grew, such that, on Saturday February 6, 2022, the mayor of the capital city of Ottawa declared a state of emergency, in response to a blockade and mass occupation of the city’s streets by mostly self-employed truckers and right wing, including openly neo-Nazi militants, protesting requirements that truckers entering the country from the United States, where Covid remains rampant, and other public health measures, including mask wearing. The protesters have been threatening and harassing neighborhood residents, entering shops maskless en masse, forcing many to remain shut and essentially keeping a large part of the population of the nation’s capital hostages, shut up in their homes fearing for their safety. The protests have spread to Quebec City and Toronto. For Agamben, the danger is the declaration of a state of emergency. In reality, the danger, to the health and physical safety of the people living in these cities, and to Canadian democracy and the freedoms enjoyed by Canada’s people, is to the very forces Agamben now justifies openly, and with whom his analysis was always in danger of justifying: the fascists threat of a few thousand aggressive and violent activists who demand a right to put the lives of others in danger, the right to have no concern for the lives and safety of others, and who refuse even the most innocuous limits on their personal license and activities, regardless of the consequences for other people or for society. Just as in the time of Lincoln and the US Civil War, a state of emergency is the recognition of reality: a genuine threat to democratic government that needs to be addressed by organized self-defense of society by society, a concept lacking in Agamben, and most of the other thinkers criticized above.

The people of Canada, or anywhere else, we, have a right to resist this will to power by a fascist minority, through collective struggle, through the use of law and institutions, through self-organization, and yes, if necessary through the use of force organized collectively in democratic states and public authorities in defense of democracy and of our collective lives and well-being. That is no state of exception, that is legitimate popular government. And if we need to go beyond it to an even more democratic, more egalitarian system, we will do so while dialectically maintaining the good in what we have already won through centuries of popular struggle, or not at all.

[1] Available through the following sites: 

http://www.jceps.com/wp-content/uploads/PDFs/09-1-05.pdf ; https://www.academia.edu/29698373/Nothing_Exceptional_Against_Agamben .


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steven Colatrella  is the author of the recent book, Looking Over the Abyss: The US and Europe Beyond Capitalism, Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ 2021.

Yale Fascism expert: Pandemic offers Trump a dangerous opportunity to ‘rule by decree’ — and consolidate his power

May 11, 2020 By Chauncey Devega, Salon- Commentary

A moment of reckoning is here. America must have committed great wrongs to be afflicted with the coronavirus pandemic and Donald Trump at the same time.

Authoritarians like Trump love disasters. Because they can only destroy and not create, authoritarians use such moments of misery and fear to expand their power.

Donald Trump is announcing that fact when he proclaims himself to be a “war president.” Such language is not just the superficial trappings of Trump wrapping himself in the flag and using empty words about “sacrifice” and “bravery” and “heroism.” It is something far worse and more sinister. As a “war president,” Trump is putting himself above the law and proclaiming the country is in a state of emergency.

I recently spoke with Yale University philosophy professor Jason Stanley, author of the books “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them” and “How Propaganda Works.” He warns in this conversation that the coronavirus pandemic is an opportunity for the Trump regime to further advance its campaign against the Constitution, democracy, human rights, human dignity and freedom across all areas of American society.
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Stanley also explains how the fake coronavirus “protests” staged by Trump supporters in Michigan and other parts of the country exemplify the kinds of forces that have brought fascist and authoritarian movements to power, including Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime.

Stanley explains that he sees America’s colleges and universities as key sites for teaching critical thinking and engaged citizenship — which is why gangster capitalists, neo-fascists and other right-wing forces are using the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to further undermine the country’s system of higher education.

You can also listen to my conversation with Jason Stanley on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

At this moment there are rent strikes and other forms of protest taking place all across the United States in response to the economic calamity and destruction brought on by the coronavirus pandemic and the Trump administration’s response. Discontent is most certainly in the air.

If discontent isn’t in the air now, when is it going to be? Consider what has happened with the stimulus. Trillions of dollars have been given to the wealthiest individuals and the largest corporations. Did they think that people would not notice?

A vast fortune has been transferred to the richest Americans under so-called trickle-down economics — a theory which has been disproved, by the way. The idea is that giving money to the richest Americans is supposed to help average people. Let us see what happens when the average people determine if that is in fact the case. Hopefully, that moment will be one when people mobilize.

The 2020 election is quickly approaching. Nearly four years into Donald Trump’s rule, how is American democracy doing? Where are we in the story of Trump and American authoritarianism?

Propaganda is the denial of reality. For example, when Donald Trump says, “I’ve done the best job ever.” His surreal press conferences are another example. Trump has been able to use the coronavirus pandemic to transfer the country’s news media environment into one big authoritarian spectacle. He was able to be on television for two and a half hours a day for a month. Such a thing happens in authoritarian societies. Trump’s authoritarian rule is really a sign of the problem with the Republican Party. The United States is now in a situation where the minority party, in terms of representing the people’s will, has a lockdown on many of the nation’s institutions.

The problem with the United States is that it is already a flawed democracy. When there is such extreme partisan capture of our country’s institutions, does there really need to be a fascist or authoritarian takeover? With gerrymandering, voter suppression, control of the courts and making voting difficult in other ways, one does not need an explicit takeover and overthrow of democracy by an authoritarian movement to exercise almost the same level of power and control.

How do you make sense of this nightmare confluence of events, with the combination of an authoritarian regime and the coronavirus pandemic?

The concept of “emergency” is essential to fascism. Trump is able to use the pandemic to rule by decree. Another example of authoritarian takeover through “emergencies” is a Reichstag fire moment, such as how Hitler and the Nazis took control in Germany, where one manufactures the “emergency” and then claim a need to seize full power.

By comparison, the coronavirus is a real emergency. Authoritarian governments all over the world are using the pandemic as an excuse to seize more power. In the United States this has taken place with Trump and the Republicans using the pandemic as protective cover for massive corruption. With Trump’s purge of inspector generals there is really no independent oversight of his administration.

The public does not know, for example, where the money from the coronavirus relief bill is really going. As with other authoritarians, the coronavirus emergency is a way for Trump to enact his goals and policies much faster and with less oversight and possibilities for resistance.

Trump and his news media and representatives are consistently using the language of “war,” and describing Trump as a “war president” during this pandemic. Most mainstream commentators and analysts have failed to understand the true meaning and origins of that language. “War president” is another example of a logic where democracy no longer applies. Carl Schmitt — a political theorist and jurist whose thinking was foundational for the Nazi regime — described this condition as one of “exception,” where the leader can ignore the rule of law and other norms. How can we better explain what Donald Trump and his agents really mean when they talk about him as a “war president”?

You are absolutely correct. When an authoritarian or like-minded leaders and regimes want to suspend democracy, they use the language of “war.” Trump calling himself a “war president” enables him to do drastic things such as rushing bills through Congress without proper debate, hearings and public scrutiny. An emergency is a very dangerous time, and the fact that the coronavirus pandemic is a real emergency makes matters much more perilous and complicated.

Trump, the Republicans and many of their supporters have argued that older people and others who are especially vulnerable to the coronavirus should be willing to face death as an act of “loyalty” and “patriotism” to save “the economy.” How does this relate to authoritarianism and fascism?

This coalition of the business elite, right-wing Christian evangelicals, and white nationalists and other white supremacists is very dangerous. Fascism is ultimately a death cult.

Social Darwinism is the heart of fascism as well as the heart of capitalism. With the pandemic, and the way capitalism is a type of religion in America, the Darwinian idea of “survival of the fittest” is made even more central. The notion that “Life is always a struggle, the weak will die” is central to fascism. That idea is also common to certain ways of thinking about capitalism. Remember, Adolf Hitler’s book was called, “My Struggle” — that “struggle” was survival of the fittest. That is exactly what we are seeing in this moment with Trump, the Republican Party and the coronavirus pandemic.

Crisis is an opportunity for Donald Trump. Several weeks ago, Donald Trump announced via Twitter that the United States was ending all legal immigration because of the coronavirus emergency. Of course, that is part of Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s white supremacist agenda.

Notice Trump’s verbiage when he describes the coronavirus: He calls it the “invisible enemy”. That language is an allusion to Jewish people. For centuries anti-Semites and other hate mongers for centuries have used such eliminationist, conspiratorial language. Trump’s announcement “banning” legal immigration — which was likely written by Stephen Miller — was also made on Hitler’s birthday. Miller has repeatedly signaled through his policies, language, emails and use of codes such as “14” and “88” in government documents and announcements a deep affinity with Nazis and other neo-fascists.

It is obvious that the Trump administration was going to move from stopping “illegal immigration” by nonwhite people and other stigmatized groups to then finding a way to stop legal immigration. Now Trump and Miller are using the coronavirus as an excuse to do just that. That Trump announced such a change on Hitler’s birthday should have been much bigger news. That the news media did not pick up on that date and the announcement, quite frankly, is shocking to me.

Who is Trump’s real audience? What other ways is he signaling his intent to them?

This goes back to the philosopher Carl Schmitt. The friend-enemy distinction is at the heart of fascist ideology. By summoning the logic of the friend-enemy distinction during a war or other type of dire emergency, then all actions by the leader or ruler are justified. The truth does not matter when you are fighting an enemy. There is no democratic way of dealing with the enemy or resolving the crisis or emergency. Science is not a solution. One must use any means available, be it fair or not fair. That’s what the friend-enemy distinction does. Again, it is Social Darwinism. Kill or be killed.

The anti-lockdown “protests” have featured armed right-wing paramilitaries and militias. What is their role in failing democracies and the emergence of fascism and authoritarianism?

Fascism involves the typed of paramilitary forces we have seen in Michigan and elsewhere during Trump’s time in office, and before as well. Trump has constantly called for his supporters to use force against their and his “enemies.” Trump is trying to organize armed paramilitary groups on his behalf if there is a contested 2020 presidential election or some other outcome he does not like.

Trump’s paramilitary forces are making violent threats against Democratic elected officials and other lawmakers. The armed militia that tried to take over the Michigan state capitol building by blocking the governor’s door is an example of such a threat.

Right now, we are seeing how many men with guns can be called out on to the street by Donald Trump and his administration. The United States military is controlled by civilians. But with Trump’s paramilitary forces and other armed groups, he can give them orders and then claim some type of plausible deniability. These types of armed militias and paramilitaries are given license to act by Donald Trump and other authoritarians.

The official leaders in a full-on authoritarian regime or failing democracy then deny responsibility for the violence. The history of fascism repeatedly shows that leaders such as Donald Trump inspire these militias and paramilitaries to act, and then Trump can say, “No, that violence and those groups have nothing to do with me. They’re not the government. Those are some random people on the street!”

What is the role of higher education in resisting fascism and authoritarianism, especially during this emergency?

One must locate the attack on colleges and universities within an international perspective. If you look at the other countries which are under the control of far-right leaders, such as Brazil, India or Hungary, they all have featured incredible attacks on universities and other sites of higher education and learning. Academic freedom has been overturned. Schools have been defunded. Universities and their professors, staff and students have been targets of right-wing violence. In these regimes, universities are being attacked for supposedly being hotbeds of left-wing ideology.

In the United States such attacks are being mainstreamed by the right wing, in terms of attacking colleges and universities by slurring them as sites of “cultural Marxism.”

In terms of dismantling resistance to fascism, how does that work?

If we cannot physically gather together it makes it harder to resist. Universities are sites of resistance, which is why they are always targeted by fascists and authoritarians. Universities are places for free speech, questioning the government and engaging with challenging ideas about the relationship between power and society.

What happens when there is an educational system which does not teach critical thinking and engaged citizenship? What types of citizens are being produced by such an educational system?

Those citizens will not be democratic, capable of understanding, nurturing, participating in and protecting a healthy democracy. Democratic citizens criticize the powerful. That is what they do.

The goal of these authoritarians and right-wingers in the United States is to reduce and replace critical thinking that is taught and learned in the humanities and social sciences with just a “great books” curriculum and job training. Any other type of education and thinking is to be vilified as “cultural Marxism.”

Leo Strauss and the Calgary School

Critics of the neo-conservative movement in the U.S. White House have identified the philosopher Leo Strauss as their mentor . Strauss however has his most ardent followers in the neo-conservative movement not in the U.S. but in Canada. The real Straussian School is at the University of Calgary.

They are political advisor's to the Alberta Government and to the Federal Harper Conservative Government. Both governments which practice a Straussian politics of secrecy and elitism combined with a Schmitt authoritarianism of the strong man as leader. They are known as the Calgary School of right wingers who teach political science, and military history etc.at the University of Calgary; Barry Cooper, Tom Flanagan, David Bercuson, Ted Morton, et al.

The Calgary School has both European and American roots and sources. Three leading Europeans have done much to shape and form the Calgary School. Those of us who spend a good deal of time teaching political theory cannot avoid the names of Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin and Frederick Hayek. Hayek and Voegelin were Austrians. Hayek was a great fan of free trade, and Voegelin was an opponent of Hitler. He fled Austria when Hitler came to power; he came to the USA and taught there for much of his life. Leo Strauss fled Germany, like Hannah Arendt, when Hitler came to power, and both came and settled in the USA. These Austrian and German refugees, for different reasons, saw the USA, as the great and good place. It was, was it not, the country that defended liberty and freedom against the totalitarianism of Germany, Italy, Japan and Communism. The Calgary School is very much indebted to those like Strauss, Voegelin and Hayek for their inspiration, and many within the Calgary School are well known scholars in the area of Strauss, Voegelin and Hayek. The point to note here is that the Calgary School does not take its lead from the indigenous Canadian tradition. They turn elsewhere for their great good place. Such is the nature, DNA and way of the compradors. But, there is more to the tale than this.

The Calgary School also has strong American roots. Again, the comprador way comes to the fore and front stage. Tom Flanagan is well known in Canada for his revisionist read on Louis Riel. He was also born and bred in the USA, and he has strong American republican leanings. Barry Cooper is yet another of the clan. He is a Canadian, but he did his graduate studies in the USA, he did not find much support for his republican leanings at York University, hence he turned to the political science department at the University of Calgary. Cooper is a well-known Voegelin scholar. David Bercuson, Ted Morton and Rainer Knopff fill out the ranks quite nicely. At a more popular level, of course, Ted and Link Byfield have played their roles in shoring up and defending the American republican way. The comprador class in Alberta did much to both bring Preston Manning to power and to dethrone him. Stephen Harper was more the ideologue that served their purposes; hence he was offered the crown he now wears.

In the dance of the dialectic the most ardent critic of Strauss and Straussian politics of the neo-con right is also a graduate of the University of Calgary; Shadia Drury. Her work the result of being in a school dedicated to real Straussian politics.

As with Strauss the Calgary School is well versed in Marxism and critiques of Marxism as we can see in the publications of its major proponent Barry Cooper. Cooper admire's Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt and Eric Voegelin and see's them as the political alternative to Marxism, and ironically these political philosophers are far more statist than Marx was.

It was very difficult to read Leo Strauss (1). But I did manage to wring out some ideas. He says if political philosophy wants to do justice to its subject matter, it must strive for "genuine knowledge" of "true standards" (2). This absolutist idea may be at least in part the reason Straussians (and neoconservatives) are willing to force a political system on countries, using war, lies, and the like. He begins to discuss Machiavelli (3) and says Karl Marx was a Machiavellian, which moves me toward the edge of my seat (even though this is no surprise) and this movement continued as I read more of Strauss on Machiavelli. The latter continually made me think of Bush and his neoconservatives.

Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin are Anti-Hegelian, like Karl Popper, declaring that Hegel is the end of history, that philosophy thus needs to return to its ancient sources. In Hegel they see Gnosticism, and attack his and Marx's dialectics as heresy, embracing the fundamentalist and literalism of the evangelical Christian right.

There are four major periods in Hegel’s life during which he seems to have been strongly under the influence of Hermeticism, or to have actively pursued an interest in it. First, there is his boyhood in Stuttgart, from 1770 to 1788. As I shall discuss in detail in chapter 2, during this period Württemberg was a major center of Hermetic interest, with much of the Pietist movement influenced by Boehmeanism and Rosicrucianism (Württemberg was the spiritual center of the Rosicrucian movement). The leading exponents of Pietism, J. A. Bengel and, in particular, F. C. Oetinger were strongly influenced by German mysticism, Boehmean theosophy, and Kabbalism.

This is no abstract philosophical debate, the social conservative protestant right wing has a new political theology. It opposes liberal society as Gnostic, and blames liberalism, relativism, values laden education, etc. as the basis for Totalitarianism. Strauss, Voegelin and Schmidt argued that Hegel was the source of the Nazi's political power and thought, as did Karl Popper, then the same argument was applied against Marx, Marxism and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Today their followers like the Calgary School and others use it against the pluralistic social democratic polity in Canada, they indeed loathe Canadian society as it is.

Hegel is known largely through secondary sources and a few incriminating slogans and generalizations. The resulting myth, however, lacked a comprehensive, documented statement till Karl Popper found a place for it in his widely discussed book, The Open Society and Its Enemies. After it had gone through three impressions in England, a revised one-volume edition was brought out in the United States in 1950, five years after its original appearance. Walter Kaufmann


Hegelian Dialect is a perfect example of what J. Budziszewski (What We Can't Not Know, pp. 187) termed the "black magic spells of imposture and unraveling." Hegel's form of dialectics is itself an impostor. It effectively unravels truth and norms and then replaces them with a 'new truth' which is yet another impostor.

Whence came the deformed conceptions of anti-Constitutional, regulatory government and judicial activism?

American liberal-socialism is the gnostic descendant of the French Revolution and its Reign of Terror. The genealogical connection begins with Henri de Saint-Simon, the French intellectual who codified the doctrine of socialism in the first decades of the 1800s, shortly after the Revolution.

His colleagues and followers, including Auguste Comte, formed a body of disciples known as the Saint-Simonians. They spread the Gnostic gospel to German universities, where it became mixed with the philosophies of Fichte and Hegel.

Hegel studied alchemy, Kabbalah (caballa, kaballa, etc.) and theosophy. He "read widely on Mesmerism, psychic phenomena, dowsing, precognition and sorcery. He publicly associated himself with known occultists.... He believed in an Earth Spirit and corresponded with colleagues about the nature of magic.... He aligned himself, informally, with 'Hermetic' societies such as the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians" and embraced their symbolic systems of sacred circles, mystical triangles and astrological signs.[3]

Considering Hegel's occult connections, it's not surprising that his teachings would undermine Biblical faith and all opposing facts. Nor is it strange that the postmodern generation has been largely immunized against genuine Christianity. After all, Hegel's revolutionary dialectic process was the center-piece of Soviet brainwashing. It effectively purged God's unchanging truths and filled the vacuum with evolving "truths" and enticing dreams.

While Communist leaders embraced Hegel's process, they ignored his occult beliefs. In contrast, the Western world began to restore those pagan roots long before revolutionary baby-boomers began shouting their demands for sensual freedom and earth-centered spirituality. In other words, the sixties didn't initiate this radical change; the turmoil of the sixties was the result of the psycho-social program of "re-learning" which had begun to transform America decades earlier.

These are the arguments of the Cold War, which while now over, remains the bugaboo of the right. One does not invest fifty years of constructing anti-liberal, anti-socialists, anti-secular, anti-humanist arguments to abandon them with the mere collapse of the Berlin wall. Today the arguments used against socialism and liberalism by Strauss, Voegelin and Schmitt are now used in day to day editorials and arguments from the Right.

In Terror and Civilization: Christianity, Politics, and the Western Psyche, Drury regards the contemporary political problem as "thoroughly Biblical." "Each (civilization) is convinced that it is on the side of God, truth and justice, while its enemy is allied with Satan, wickedness, and barbarism."

"A civilization can .. advance and decline at the same time-but not forever. There is a limit towards which this ambiguous process moves; the limit reached when an activist sect which represents the Gnostic truth organizes the civilization into an empire under its rule. Totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of Gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization." Eric Voegelin.

In the realpolitik's of Cooper and the Calgary School the fundamentalist protestant right wing are the foots soldiers in their cynical attempt to restore a new age of Plato's Philosopher King through the creation of right wing populist political movements and parties. They created it in the autarchic leadership of Preston Manning over the Reform Party and now in the autarch in Ottawa who rules in the name of a reborn Conservative party, which is the ultimate Big Lie.

Strauss taught that an elite, wise ruling class must rule the unsophisticated masses by telling them noble lies for their own good.

Strauss loved Plato, interpreting his teachings to mean, “... true democracy is an act against nature and must be prevented at all costs.”

“Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed,” Strauss wrote. “Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united - and they can only be united against other people.” Leaders must always provide an enemy.

Straussian teachings spark delusions of grandeur in neocon intellectuals, who imagine themselves as the wise ruling elite, set free of the bonds of honesty and equality.

While publically declaring themselves libertarians of the right, they are anything but, again the Straussian deception and lies that cover their realpolitik. They want Plato's Philosopher King, the supreme ruler, and they see him sanctioned by the politics of social conservative Christianity.

What are we to think of Strauss? Murray Rothbard addressed this question more than forty years ago, in several reviews of Strauss’s works, written for the William Volker Fund. The situation that Rothbard confronted differed entirely from the present. Strauss did not then appear, whether rightly or wrongly, as the supposed mastermind behind an aggressive American foreign policy. Quite the contrary, to most American conservatives in the 1950s and 1960s, Strauss seemed a valiant battler against positivism and historicism in political science. In their stead, he wished to revive the study of the Greek classics; and he appeared to defend natural law against its modern detractors. Would Rothbard, himself a champion of natural law, find in Strauss a welcome ally?

Rothbard located a fatal flaw in Strauss’s work. He was no friend whom libertarians should rush to embrace: his view of natural law was entirely mistaken. Further, his mistake was not a mere theoretical failing, of interest to no one but a few scholars. The misunderstanding of morality that ran through Strauss’s work might lead, if applied in practice, to immense harm. Strauss wished to replace the ironclad restrictions on the state, imposed by natural law rightly understood, with the "prudential" judgments of political leaders who aim to enhance national power.

Murray N. Rothbard – writing over forty years ago – had Strauss's number:

"As Strauss sees matters, classical and Christian natural law did not impose strict and absolute limits on state power; instead, all is left to the prudential judgment of the wise statesman. From this contention, Rothbard vigorously dissents. 'In this [Straussian] reading, Hobbes and Locke are the great villains in the alleged perversion of natural law. To my mind, the 'perversion' was a healthy sharpening and development of the concept.' … Strauss's rejection of individual rights led him to espouse political views that Rothbard found repellent: 'We find Strauss . . . praising 'farsighted', 'sober' British imperialism; we find him discoursing on the 'good' Caesarism, on Caesarism as often necessary and not really tyranny, etc... he praises political philosophers for yes, lying to their readers for the sake of the 'social good'…. I must say that this is an odd position for a supposed moralist to take.'"

The Calgary School promotes the politics of Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin and Carl Schmitt, secrecy, power in the hands of a strong man, power must be held at all costs, and the cynical use of the religious right/ social conservatives as your base. Even if it means lying to the public and hiding your real agenda. Harper fits that bill as much as Bush does.

In fact I would argue that Harper has taken the ideological political formula that the right has devised from the works of Strauss and Schmitt to heart more so than his Yale counterpart. For an analysis of the influence of Carl Schmitt on the Harper autocracy see my; Post Modern Conservatives.

Despite the Conservative five priorities, their economic or environmental policies, Harpers regime comes down to two key right wing elements; Militarism and increasing the power of the Police and the Security State; Heil Hillier, Maintiens le droit.

The secrecy of the state, the rule of elite, the mobilization of your base against perceived enemies is the neo-conservative politics of the Reform/Alliance/Conservative party in practice. Which was ok to gain power, but now that they are in power the continuation of the secret strong man state has shocked it's conservative base speechless.

Strauss's thinking seems in important respects tailor-made for a rising elite that wants, on the one hand, to justify its own claim to power and, on the other, to discredit an older elite that it is trying to replace.

Under Harper the Reform Party populist democratic renewal project is but a shadow of itself; take Senate Reform, still a matter on the agenda, but it is not the Triple E Senate of the Reform Party. The Reform shadow play is there to satisfy the base that this is still Manning's old party, which of course it isn't.

Beginning almost twenty years ago, "the Calgarians" cultivated a relationship with the nascent Reform Party. Although the latter was perhaps too populist and plebiscitary in tone for their comfort, both Calgarians and Reformers were possessed of a conviction that the western provinces were being shortchanged within confederation as successive governments in Ottawa concentrated so heavily on the festering Québec issue.

Harper, unlike Preston Manning, was a student of the Calgary School. Harper's political practice is influenced more by this than Manning was. Hence Harpers surprise; the recognition of Quebec as a nation, giving it the separatism it wants within a decentralized federal state. That is more the nuanced politics of the Calgary School than the Reform Party demand that the West Wants In. The old anti-bilingualism of the Reformers is replaced with the subtle Two Distinct Languages policy of the Conservatives. Which again appeals to Quebecois nationalism, while also keeping the rest of Canada happy with one language; English.

And it is clear that the Calgary School influenced the Conservatives Environmental policy more so than Green Conservative Calgarians; Preston Manning and Joe Clark, since Barry Cooper is a founder of the climate change denier group the Friends of Science (sic). Science has nothing to do with it they are Friends of the Oil Patch. And in typical Straussian fashion all the Conservatives discussions with stakeholders on the environment were held in secret.

Also see my;

Whigs and Tories

Right to Life = Right To Work

Leo Strauss and the Grand Inquisitor

by Shadia B. Drury

There is a certain irony in the fact that the chief guru of the neoconservatives is a thinker who regarded religion merely as a political tool intended for the masses but not for the superior few. Leo Strauss, the German Jewish émigré who taught at the University of Chicago almost until his death in 1973, did not dissent from Marx’s view that religion is the opium of the people; but he believed that the people need their opium. He therefore taught that those in power must invent noble lies and pious frauds to keep the people in the stupor for which they are supremely fit.

Not all the neoconservatives have read Strauss. And those who have rarely understand him, for he was a very secretive thinker who expressed his ideas with utmost circumspection. But there is one thing that he made very clear: liberal secular society is untenable. Religion is necessary to provide political society with moral order and stability. Of course, this is a highly questionable claim. History makes it abundantly clear that religion has been a most destabilizing force in politics—a source of conflict, strife, and endless wars. But neoconservatives dogmatically accept the view of religion as a panacea for everything that ails America.

Leo Strauss

By John Gueguen, 13 May 2003. A memo in which Gueguen provides background for anyone wanting to investigate whether there may be substance to the allegations of Leo Strauss's complicity in the political work of contemporary “Straussians”.

1. The past decade has produced a ferment of critiques and defenses of Strauss in respect to several themes having to do with the general tenor of his work and of its particular aspects. I maintain a substantial file on this part of Strauss research, along with a larger collection of materials that extend back to my own study with him at Chicago in the early 1960s when I was pursuing the Ph.D. there.

2. This memo will consist primarily of a bibliographical review of the most interesting pieces I have collected that may have some relevance for this topic, at least to provide a sense of direction by indicating what has been done in recent years.

3. The leading critic of Strauss in N. America has been a sprightly young lady whom I met at a conference about a dozen years ago in Chicago—Shadia B. Drury, of the Univ. of Calgary. She came to the notice of colleagues with a substantial article in the journal, Political Theory (13/3, August 1985), “The Esoteric Philosophy of Leo Strauss” (pp. 510-535). It was followed two years later by a second article in the same journal (15/3, August 1987, pp. 299-315), “Leo Strauss’ Classic Natural Right Teaching.” This time the editors asked two prominent political philosophers to append their comments: “Dear Professor Drury” (by Harry V. Jaffa, one of Strauss' former students and major allies), pp. 316-25; “Politics against Philosophy: Strauss and Drury” (by Fred Dallmayer, who had been a critic of Strauss), pp. 326-37. Drury's severe critique was judged to be of sufficient potential to upset the standard perception of Strauss that it could not be ignored, even though it was by a relatively young and inexperienced author. She presents the case that Strauss was a dangerously deceptive ally of the modern philosophers he himself had spent his life criticizing because he elevated the philosopher above justice, thus making himself unaccountable.

The full-length critique Drury was working on at the time appeared at the end of 1987 as The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, 288 pp.). I quote from the publisher's notice: “This is the first book-length study. . .. In a portrait of the philosopher at odds with his general image, Drury maintains that Strauss has presented his thoughts wrapped in a veil of scholarship because he believes that the truth undermines religion and morality, and so is bound to wreak havoc on political society. . ..[She reveals] the extent to which Strauss' ideas are indebted to Nietzsche, Freud, and Machiavelli. . .and challenges many accepted beliefs about ‘the founder of a movement, a school of thought and even a cult.’..[and the] increasingly important influence [of the “Straussians”] on the present-day political thought. . ..”

This book generated many thoughtful reviews (mostly by Strauss' students and defenders), of which I have a collection. One says: “Drury means to convey that the reputation of Strauss as a natural right political philosopher with a high-minded approach to political life is simply false in all its essentials.” One reviewer admits that “as a philosopher, Strauss was moved by the sting of the awareness of lacking an adequate answer to the question of questions: Should I live theologically (morally-politically) or philosophically (serious questioning of the morality-piety informing my ‘cave’)?” The most substantial reviews include: Rev. Ernest Fortin A.A., “Between the Lines: Was Leo Strauss a Secret Enemy of Morality?”, Crisis (Dec. 1989), 19-26 (a vindication of Strauss which was rebutted by a letter in the March 1990 issue by a Drury supporter); and Marc Henrie, “The Ambiguities of Leo Strauss,” which reviews the Strauss “legacy” from his death in 1973 up to 1988.

Drury had a chance to rebut her critics in a review of Strauss' The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: Essays and Lectures, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989). It appeared in the same journal which carried her original critiques, Political Theory, 19/4 (Nov. 1991), 671-675.

Critics of Strauss also accuse him of elitism and anti-democratic sentiment. Shadia Drury, author of 1999's Leo Strauss and the American Right, argues that Strauss taught different things to different students, and inculcated an elitist strain in American political leaders that is linked to imperialist militarism and Christian fundamentalism. Drury accuses Strauss of teaching that "perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what's good for them." Drury adds, "The Weimar Republic was his model of liberal democracy... liberalism in Weimar, in Strauss's view, led ultimately to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews." However, Strauss was hardly alone in arguing that liberalism had produced authoritarianism. Many German émigré, most notably among them Hannah Arendt, Theodore Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, made similar claims.

Strauss’ students are aware of the impression their admiration for him makes on outsiders. Allen Bloom was the best known of those students thanks to his best-selling 1987 anti-egalitarian diatribe The Closing of the American Mind, and more recently to his having been “outed” by his old friend Saul Bellow in Bellow’s novel, Ravelstein. In his tribute to his former teacher, published after Strauss’s death, Bloom observed that “those of us who know him saw in him such a power of mind, such a unity and purpose of life, such a rare mixture of the human elements resulting in a harmonious expression of the virtues, moral and intellectual, that our account of him is likely to evoke disbelief or ridicule from those who have never experienced a man of this quality.”[i] Bloom’s rhetorical strategy here of appropriating a projected criticism—the fawning admiration Straussians have for their teacher/founder and turning it around—also has the effect of demarcating an “out-group” that does not understand from an in-group that has experienced the truth, which is another characteristic feature of the style and substance of what makes a Straussian.

It is partly the aura that emanates from Strauss that gives credence to the claims of conspiracy when Straussians are involved in something, if that is in fact the claim that people make. More particularly, the prominence given to the notion of a charismatic founder within the Straussian fold means that it quickly begins to look like a cult.

		Faith and Political Philosophy The Correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934-1964 Peter Emberley and Barry Cooper, eds. 1993 Political Theory, Political Philosophy Hardback ISBN-10: 0-271-00883-0 ISBN-13: 978-0-271-00883-7 Out of Stock Indefinitely
Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin were political theorists of the first rank whose impact on the study of political science in North America has been profound. A study of their writings is one of the most expeditious ways to explore the core of political science; comparing and contrasting the positions both theorists have taken in assessing that core provides a comprehensive appreciation of the main options of the Western tradition. In fifty-three recently discovered letters, Strauss and Voegelin explore the nature of their similarities and differences, offering trenchant observations about one another's work, about the state of the discipline, and about the influences working on them. The correspondence fleshes out many assumptions made in their published writings, often with a frankness and directness that removes all vestiges of ambiguity. Included with the correspondence are four pivotal re-published essays-Jersualem and Athens: Some Preliminary Reflections (Strauss), The Gospel and Culture (Voegelin), Immortality: Experience and Symbol (Voegelin), and The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy (Strauss)-and commentaries by James L. Wiser, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Stanley Rosen, Thomas J.J. Altizer, Timothy Fuller, Ellis Sandoz, Thomas L. Pangle, and David Walsh.
Peter C. Emberley is Associate Professor of Political Science at Carleton University and editor of By Loving our Own: George Grant and the Legacy of Lament for a Nation (Carleton, 1990). Barry Cooper is Professor of Political Science at the University of Calgary and author of several books, including The End of History (Toronto, 1984) and Action into Nature: An Essay on the Meaning of Technology (Notre Dame, 1991).

BARRY COOPER
B.A. (UBC), A.M., Ph.D (Duke), F.R.S.C.

Political theory and Canadian politics, political thought and public policy.

Author of Merleau-Ponty and Marxism, Michel Foucault: An Introduction to His Thought; The End of History: An Essay in Modern Hegelianism; The Political Theory of Eric Voegelin; Alexander Kennedy Isbister, A Respectable Critic of the Honourable Company; Action into Nature: An Essay on the Meaning of Technology; Sins of Omission: The Making of CBC TV News; The Klein Achievement; and Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science. Co-author of the controversial best seller, Deconfederation: Canada Without Quebec; and of Derailed: The Betrayal of the National Dream. Articles have appeared in several philosophy and political science journals.

Dr. Cooper is affiliated with the Friends of Science. They have produced a video called "Climate Catastrophe Cancelled: What You're Not Being Told About the Science of Climate Change". In addition, Dr. Cooper hosts the McNish Lecture Series for the Advancement of Western Civilization. The inaugural lecture was given by His Excellency, Martin Palous, former Czech Ambassador to the USA, and Czech Ambassador Designate to the United Nations. The lecture was entitled Freedom of Expression in the New Europe.

Leo Strauss and the neoconservatives

By Shadia B. Drury

The Straussians are the most powerful, the most organised, and the best-funded scholars in Canada and the United States. They are the unequalled masters of right-wing think tanks, foundations, and corporate funding. And now they have the ear of the powerful in the White House. Nothing could have pleased Strauss more; for he believed that intellectuals have an important role to play in politics. It was not prudent for them to rule directly because the masses are inclined to distrust them; but they should certainly not pass up the opportunity to whisper in the ears of the powerful. So, what are they whispering? What did Strauss teach them? What is the impact of the Straussian philosophy on the powerful neoconservatives? And what is neoconservatism anyway?

Strauss is not as obscure or as esoteric as his admirers pretend. There are certain incontestable themes in his work. The most fundamental theme is the distinction between the ancients and the moderns - a distinction that informs all his work. According to Strauss, ancient philosophers (such as Plato) were wise and wily, but modern philosophers (such as Locke and other liberals) were foolish and vulgar. The wise ancients thought that the unwashed masses were not fit for either truth or liberty; and giving them these sublime treasures was like throwing pearls before swine. Accordingly, they believed that society needs an elite of philosophers or intellectuals to manufacture "noble lies" for the consumption of the masses. Not surprisingly, the ancients had no use for democracy. Plato balked at the democratic idea that any Donald, Dick, or George was equally fit to rule.

In contrast to the ancients, the moderns were the foolish lovers of truth and liberty; they believed in the natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They believed that human beings were born free and could be legitimately ruled only by their own consent.

The ancients denied that there is any natural right to liberty. Human beings are born neither free nor equal. The natural human condition is not one of freedom, but of subordination. And in Strauss's estimation, they were right in thinking that there is only one natural right - the right of the superior to rule over the inferior - the master over the slave, the husband over the wife, and the wise few over the vulgar many. As to the pursuit of happiness - what could the vulgar do with happiness except drink, gamble, and fornicate?

Praising the wisdom of the ancients and condemning the folly of the moderns was the whole point of Strauss's most famous book, Natural Right and History. The cover of the book sports the American Declaration of Independence. But the book is a celebration of nature - not the natural rights of man (as the appearance of the book would lead one to believe), but the natural order of domination and subordination.

In his book On Tyranny, Strauss referred to the right of the superior to rule as "the tyrannical teaching" of the ancients which must be kept secret. But what is the reason for secrecy? Strauss tells us that the tyrannical teaching must be kept secret for two reasons - to spare the people's feelings and to protect the elite from possible reprisals. After all, the people are not likely to be favourably disposed to the fact that they are intended for subordination.

But why should anyone object to the idea that in theory the good and wise should rule? The real answer lies in the nature of the rule of the wise as understood by Strauss.

It meant tyranny is the literal sense, which is to say, rule in the absence of law, or rule by those who were above the law. Of course, Strauss believed that the wise would not abuse their power. On the contrary, they would give the people just what was commensurate with their needs and capacities. But what exactly is that? Certainly, giving them freedom, happiness, and prosperity is not the point. In Strauss's estimation, that would turn them into animals. The goal of the wise is to ennoble the vulgar. But what could possibly ennoble the vulgar? Only weeping, worshipping, and sacrificing could ennoble the masses. Religion and war - perpetual war - would lift the masses from the animality of bourgeois consumption and the pre-occupation with "creature comforts." Instead of personal happiness, they would live their lives in perpetual sacrifice to God and the nation.

Arendt and Strauss

She appears to have been genuinely uninterested in acquiring or counseling power, another virtue increasingly scarce among our "public intellectuals." Witness her long-running feud with fellow-émigré Leo Strauss, who became a colleague of Arendt's at the University of Chicago. Besides rebuffing his amorous advances (what minor nightmares they must been), Arendt saw in Strauss' careful attitude toward the Nazis all the signs of a sniveling opportunist, especially when, as a Jew, he could hardly expect any favors. In the 1960s, Arendt became a grossmutter of sorts to many student radicals, while Strauss helped concoct the intoxicating blend of powerlust and esoterica that evolved into neoconservatism. His intellectual spawn now occupy editorial offices, university faculties, and the Bush Administration, and their Platonic noble lies, having issued in a needless and protracted war in Iraq, have stoked the flames of hatred and recrimination throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. Having seen the Master in action, Arendt would have known what to make of the Straussian cabal of sycophants and mediocrities.

Darwinian Conservatism by Larry Arnhart: February 2006

As I indicate in Darwinian Conservatism, the arguments for "intelligent design theory" as an alternative to Darwinian evolution were first stated in Book 10 of Plato's Laws. Leo Strauss's book on Plato's Laws raises questions about intelligent design in Plato's political theology. Those questions suggest the possibility that there might be a natural moral sense in at least some people that does not depend on the cosmic teleology of Plato's intelligent design theology. And if so, that suggests the possibility of justifying natural right as rooted in a moral sense of human nature shaped by natural evolution, which would not require an intelligent design theology.

In Plato's dialogue, the Athenian character warns against those natural philosophers who teach that the ultimate elements in the universe and the heavenly bodies were brought into being not by divine intelligence or art but by natural necessity and chance. These natural philosophers teach that the gods and the moral laws attributed to the gods are human inventions. This scientific naturalism appeared to subvert the religious order by teaching atheism. It appeared to subvert the moral order by teaching moral relativism. And it appeared to subvert the political order by depriving the laws of their religious and moral sanction. Plato's Athenian character responds to this threat by developing the reasoning for the intelligent design position as based on four kinds of arguments: a scientific argument, a religious argument, a moral argument, and a political argument.

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