Bronze Age Pervert’s Dissertation on Leo Strauss - Tablet Magazine

Whatever passes for conservative thought in the American academy usually passes through the influence of Leo Strauss. In his teaching, the political philosopher combined an outward respect for liberal democracy with concern that this regime neutralizes the higher types of human beings, those capable of free thinking. Strauss, however, developed his ideas in an elliptical fashion meant to evoke the kind of thought he held to be the privilege of this type. Out of the Straussian fold sometimes emerge singular thinkers who galvanize public opinion. One was Strauss’ student Allan Bloom, who in the 1980s transformed himself from a translator of Plato into a bestselling culture warrior with his book The Closing of the American Mind. Its success proved the truth of the Straussian insight that texts address multiple audiences, and that their perceptive readers are a small minority. On the surface, Bloom offered Reagan’s America a defense of the literary canon and old-fashioned morality against

Whatever passes for conservative thought in the American academy usually passes through the influence of Leo Strauss. In his teaching, the political philosopher combined an outward respect for liberal democracy with concern that this regime neutralizes the higher types of human beings, those capable of free thinking. Strauss, however, developed his ideas in an elliptical fashion meant to evoke the kind of thought he held to be the privilege of this type. Out of the Straussian fold sometimes emerge singular thinkers who galvanize public opinion. One was Strauss’ student Allan Bloom, who in the