Radley Balko picked Leo Strauss as a runner-up for Villain of the Year. I see no evidence that Balko has ever read Strauss. I’ve read half a dozen books by Strauss and I can tell you that most of the “criticism” of Strauss you see bouncing around the net is second, third, and fourth-hand nonsense.

In Balko we apparently have a fourth-hand view, he points us to the third-hand view of the learned authority Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope. I see no evidence that Cecil Adams has ever read anything by Strauss, but he appears at least to have read something by someone who has read Strauss. Maybe.

For a second-hand view of Strauss Adams recommends Shadia Drury. Most of the Strauss bashing you’ll find on the net today can be traced back to Drury who has indeed read Strauss, but not very well:

How could an admirer of Plato and Nietzsche be a liberal democrat? The ancient philosophers whom Strauss most cherished believed that the unwashed masses were not fit for either truth or liberty, and that giving them these sublime treasures would be like throwing pearls before swine.

Drury’s mind is as narrow as Strauss’s is broad. In the first place Strauss admired many philosophers he obviously did not agree with. And Drury doesn’t understand what Strauss admired in Plato of Nietzsche. Strauss spends most of his time demonstrating how to think through deep issues exhaustively and very little time advocating what people ought to think. It’s more important to him for others to think better than for them to think what he thinks. It’s typical for Strauss to argue his way up one side of an issue and down the other making points on each side that contradict the other when clearly neither side of the argument satisfies him. Apparently Drury always catches him on one side and doesn’t know what she’s looking at:

In Plato’s dialogues, everyone assumes that Socrates is Plato’s mouthpiece. But Strauss argues in his book The City and Man (pp. 74-5, 77, 83-4, 97, 100, 111) that Thrasymachus is Plato�s real mouthpiece (on this point, see also M.F. Burnyeat, ‘Sphinx without a Secret’, New York Review of Books, 30 May 1985 [paid-for only]). So, we must surmise that Strauss shares the insights of the wise Plato (alias Thrasymachus) that justice is merely the interest of the stronger; that those in power make the rules in their own interests and call it justice.

If you want to know if Drury knows what she’s talking about just read the pages she cites - you won’t find anything to support her thesis, quite the contrary.

Drury is bad enough but the corruption of Strauss gets worse at each hand-off. Thomas J. DiLorenzo writes:

Strauss (and his followers) rejected this view of natural rights in favor of Plato�s philosopher-king model of government: Eliminating restrictions on state power is fine as long as that power can be wielded by an elite few who can pursue their own vision of “the public good.”

But Strauss clearly holds that Plato and Socrates themselves reject the project outlined in The Republic and as a philosopher he clearly identifies with them on this. Has DiLorenzo read Strauss? I see no evidence that he has.

With all the current popular interest is the villainy of Strauss you’d think a few more people would be interested in learning what the man actually wrote.

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