Dr. Michael New reviews Intellectual Morons in Sunday's New York Post, offering a generally favorable take on the book. More negative is Paul Cella's review appearing on The American Spectator's website.

It's predictable, I guess, that these and other conservative reviewers, almost to a man, would complain about the book's criticism of Leo Strauss, an intellectual admired by many conservatives. What's interesting is that all of the conservative reviewers bothered by the inclusion of the Strauss chapter don't show any evidence in their reviews of having read anything by Strauss, particularly Persecution and the Art of Writing, the text my chapter on Strauss focuses on. In that book, Strauss imagines the history of philosophy as one giant conspiracy theory. Philosophers such as Plato, Machiavelli, and Locke offer surface messages to the masses, Strauss contends, but encode secret messages to other philosophers. Strauss "cracks" this code through projecting special meaning upon the first and last words used in books and book chapters, counting up the number of paragraphs contained in a chapter, or finding implied contradictions in a text.

This is, of course, just a dressed-up version of what would later be called deconstructionism. Why conservatives, who attack similar crackpot methods when employed by leftists, would applaud those on the Right who use such means, is not so mysterious. Strauss, they believe, serves conservative ends--just as many leftists believe Derrida serves leftist ends. Why criticize one of our guys? Well, that's the point of the book: ideology--Left or Right--blinds intellectuals to reality. No one seems to explicitly criticize this thesis. It's only when the thesis is applied to intellectuals with political outlooks similar to the reviewer that the reviewer objects.

I must object to the implication that I have not read any Strauss. I have indeed read some of his work, and I think I have a handle on his method of reading philosophers. I devoted a whole paragraph in my review to defending that method -- or at least, to arguing that it is plausible.

Flynn does not much care for Strauss's ideas about "secret writing," and he provides some vivid examples of the strange lengths to which Strauss and his students have pursued these ideas. But Flynn does not account for why these ideas have gained such purchase among scholars. To use the example of Locke again, it is a fact that we did not possess a satisfactory text of his Two Treatises of Government until the mid-twentieth century. It is also a fact that for hundreds of years the Second Treatise was thought to have been composed after the first, when, as we now know, the reverse is probably true. The "philosopher as detective" method of reading (in the Straussian formulation), though fraught with peril, is not without merit, for the profound reason that one of the largest problems in philosophy is discerning what a given philosopher actually meant to say. To admit this is not to descend into postmodern incoherence, of the kind Flynn ably describes in various chapters, but merely to confess the severe limitations of the human intellectual condition.

There is no question that the esotericism of Strauss has been misused; there is no question that it is a perilous instrument indeed, placed in the hands of ambitious minds. But there is, nonetheless, something to it.

Strauss may have "deconstructed" the texts in question, but he did not deconstruct them so as to demonstrate that they are meaningless; but to demonstrate that they are very meaningful indeed.

Willmoore Kendall explained the heart of this method pretty well, I think: When we encounter what appears to be inconsistencies in minds of the caliber of a Machiavelli or a Rousseau, much less a Plato, our reaction should not be, "Well, he must have been a rather confused fellow," but rather, "I didn't read him carefully enough." Perhaps, upon further study, the inconsistencies will remain unresolved, and we will conclude that X philosopher's teaching is indeed sloppy or overrated (Kendall concluded precisely that with Locke); but it might be that a more careful reading will show a manner of resolving the inconsistencies that seems unmistakeably deliberate on the part of the philosopher.

Again, this is treacherous stuff, but it cannot be dismissed out of hand.

Paul: what book, in its entirety, have you read by Strauss?

His books were mainly compilations of essays or lectures. I have read a number of his essays: the lengthy essay on Plato, which appeared in both The City and Man and History of Political Philosophy, his final essay on Machiavelli, and several shorter ones on other thinkers. Moreover, I have read a good portion of the "Purple Bible" as Straussians (a little creepily) call the History of Political Philosophy.

I don't claim to be a Strauss expert; nor do I claim to be a Straussian. Most of my knowledge of him comes through Willmoore Kendall, whom I regard as a more trustworthy writer. Kendall wrote extensively on Thoughts on Machiavelli, What is Political Philosophy and Natural Right and History, as well as several other Straussian texts (Jaffa, Berns), when they first appeared.

My disagreement with you is over whether there is merit in the Straussian method, a question which you seem to answer in the negative. I would just ask you: If the Straussian esoteric method is irredeemably flawed, what, then, are we to make of the inconsistencies that appear in various important philosophical texts? What, say, are we to make of the difference between the Rousseau of The Social Contract and the Rousseau of The Government of Poland?

Paul, you claimed in your review that my treatment of Straus was "superficial" and spent nearly half the review criticizing my take on Strauss. But it turns out you haven't read a single book by Strauss. That is really, really weak.

Regarding Rousseau, can't we just say that he was a brilliant, crazy, inconsistent person? It's an intellectual type -- he has flashes of half-baked insights but doesn't have the discipline to really think them through. Think of the way he dealt with women and his children: he was passionate but undiciplined. And the way he dealt with Hume: he was fickle, paranoid and just (I think) insane.

Why must I run with Strauss's absurd axiom that if I find an inconsistency in Rousseau then I must assume he is sending us, the elect, some type of secret message?

Finally, note the irony that Starussians sell their method to conservatives by appealing to the limitations of human intelligence and knowing: be humble! Then they say that the way to be humble is to assume that a jack-idiot like Rousseau was so utterly intelligent that we can't assume that any flaws we or others find are mistakes...No they are clues! What happened to the limitations of the human condition?

Ultimately, Staussianism is Masonry, and I find no more reason to buy Strauss's view of history than I do the Free-Masons'.

Oh. Paul asked a question: "If the Straussian esoteric method is irredeemably flawed, what, then, are we to make of the inconsistencies that appear in various important philosophical texts?"

Well, first, there generally aren't "contradictions" in great philosophical works. There are tensions, and occasional contradictions, usually because the people writing them are people. We also need prudence, when dealing with the first-rate Plato I am more aware of the significance of tensions than I would be dealing with third-rates like Rousseau or Locke. But I don't think that Plato contradicts himself in order to undermine in the subtext the claims he makes in the text.

What happens in fact is that Straussian scholarship devolves into attempts to find contradictions, turning every text into non-sense so that the Straussian scholar can show how the subtext fixes the problem. To the Straussian, every tension becomes a contradiction.

As someone who spends a lot of time with philosophical texts, I find this method not only impious, but productive of absurdly bad scholarship.

The Straussians are notorious for bad scholarship. I remember one Straussian who delivered a paper on Rousseau's _Confessions_ in which in examining the text he realized it would be helpful to go back in the history of philosophy for precursors and he jumped into an examination of Plato to elucidate the apparent contradictions in Rousseau's _Confessions_. During the question-answer period someone asked: "Since you are interested in understanding confessional writing as a form and looked at Plato as a precursor, why didn't you ever mention St. Augustine who is the direct model for Rousseau's text?" The Straussian answered, "well, I really don't know Augustine at all."

That is inexcusable as far as legitimate scholarly exegesis is concerned.

I think that what Paul should notice is that his description of Straussianism reduces it to the uninteresting and facile notion that one must read texts carefully, particularly philosophical texts. The Straussians, like the deconstructionists, at best amount to saying "we have to be careful as we go in understanding a text because misinterpretation is always a real possibility." This isn't groundbreaking, it is pedestrian. I prefer someone like Quentin Skinner or Pocock on these issues. (For example, Skinner makes the unremarkable claim lost to Straussians that sometimes a contradiction in a text reflects a contradiction in the mind of a thinker, that they have made a mistake). The problem is that characterizing Strauss (or deconstructionists) in this mundane and simplified form is a mistake because Strauss's method is much more exaggerated than you are suggesting Paul and it isn't just the fault of his students abusing his methods.

Dan, evaluating Strauss's method consists not so much in mastering his oeuvre, but in confronting the texts he interprets. It will do a critic no good to read carefully every word Strauss has written, if he does not also attend with even greater carefulness to the works under examination. This fact alone, whatever one may say of Strauss's interpretations, is reason in my mind for commendation. Brian describes the idea of reading texts carefully as "uninteresting and facile," but it was not so when Strauss began writing; and it is still not so among many in the academy.

Short dislikes and disparages Rousseau (and others). He is free to do so, and it may well be that Rousseau was "a brilliant, crazy, inconsistent person." But let us at least acknowledge that this is a minority view even among non-Straussian scholars. Irving Babbitt, for example, located Rousseau at the very heart of the modern project (to which Babbitt himself was opposed). "Rousseau merits the distinction," he wrote, "of giving the wrong answers to the right questions. It is no small distinction to ask the right questions."

This very discussion here is an illustration of Strauss's value: when serious men begin to consider the question of Leo Strauss, they are instantly, as it were, cast back into a discussion of the great questions of the great philosophers.

It is no small distinction to ask the right questions.

It is times like these that I'm glad I got a degree in mathematics (though my B.A. is in history). I saw your talk on C-Span2 last weekend and frankly I was embarrassed for the students at Colby College who showed themselves as close-minded as I remember my history department. But hey a feminist perspective of spoons of the 17th century is more important to the world than learning how to reason.

Back to the topic at hand, after seeing you on Cspan I checked you out on Amazon expecting that viewers who had never read your book would be trashing what you had said. I wasn't disappointed.

I say that Rousseau is "a brilliant, crazy, inconsistent person."

Paul says that Babbitt "located Rousseau at the very heart of the modern project" because R. "asked the right questions." Paul implies that what I say is inconsistent with what he and Babbitt say. It isn't at all. (See, Straussians are always seeing inconsistencies where they don't exist.)

First, I think Babbitt is overstating here; after all, modernity is well underway before R. and has several nonRousseauian strains. But I agree that Rousseau asks many good questions and is at the heart of one major stream within Modernity. But, second, Rousseau is still a third-rate philosopher with mental problems and also consistency problems.

Ultimately, Rousseau didn't have the disposition for precision, responsibility, and consistency over a large body of work, etc etc. This does not keep him from being brilliant or asking some of the right questions. Strauss's assumption of the infallibility of a great mind is therefore falsely applied to Rousseau, and Paul's question of how to make sense of Rousseau's contradictions therefore becomes ridiculous.