Nicholas Xenos writes about the teaching and life of Leo Strauss in Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror. You may be interested in Shadia B. Drury's book The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss which discusses his theories in detail.#

Xenos describes Strauss' attitude about the truth: there is a definitive truth, but it is not open to all, only to the philosophers.#

In an oral presentation entitled "A Giving of Accounts," recorded near the end of his life, he said, "I arrived at a conclusion that I can state in the form of a syllogism: philosophy is the attempt to replace opinion by knowledge, that opinion is the element of the city, hence philosophy is subversive, hence the philosopher must write in such a way that he will improve rather than subvert the city." That is, the philosopher has to conceal what he is actually doing.

In other words, the virtue of a philosopher's thought is a certain kind of mania [inspired frenzy], while the virtue of the philosopher's public speech is sophrosyne [discretion or moderation]. Philosophy is as such transpolitical, transreligious, and transmoral, but the city is and ought to be moral and religious. . . . To illustrate this point, moral man, merely moral man, the kalosgathos in the common meaning of the term [that is, the good man], is not simply closer to the philosopher than a man of the dubious morality of Alcibiades.[iv]

The suggestion here is that philosophy always has to go underground, to conceal itself in some way because philosophy deals with truth while society is based on opinion and truth subverts opinion. This is the basis of what Strauss calls a "philosophic politics."

More on this division of capabilities--the vulgar, the gentlemen, and the wise (or the philosophers.)#

In this context, an Op-Ed piece written by William Bennett in the Wall Street Journal in September 2002, entitled "Teaching September Eleventh," is worthy of note. Bennett wrote, "An appropriate response to September eleventh begins with a kind of moral clarity, a clarity that calls evil by its true name, terms like evil, wrong, and bad were rightly put back into the lexicon. September eleventh also requires that we point to what is good and right and true. The dark day was pierced with rays of courage, honor, and sacrifice and they should be upheld for all to see, they too are enduring lessons." That kind of reliance on courage, honor, these are pre-bourgeois, aristocratic kinds of categories and they fall into Strauss's whole framework of the way "gentlemen" behave. Strauss saw the world divided up into three layers: there are the vulgar, there are gentlemen, and there are the wise. And honor and courage are the virtues of the gentleman; the virtue of the wise is wisdom. The wise need the gentlemen to be governing. And the gentlemen, this elite, do not operate with the categories of wisdom, but with the "simple virtues" that they are able to grasp and assert.

And finally, Nicholas explains the third thing he sees as most abhorrent about Straussians--that they do not concede democracy as the most noble and perfect form of governance.#

Despite Strauss's effort in 1948, it is only now that tyranny has entered the speechwriters' lexicon, and it seems clear that it is the work of Strauss's descendants.

This is the most complicated part of Strauss's thinking and the most important in terms of understanding the current political situation. In the passage quoted above, Strauss referred to an ancient teaching on tyranny with which he contrasted a problematic modern tyranny. In the ancient teaching, which is the teaching with which he wishes to identify himself, it is possible for the wise man to move a tyranny toward its best possible form. That is, there are tyrannies and there are tyrannies; there are really bad ones and relatively good ones. The good ones are ones in which the tyrant rules beneficially for his subjects, but does so beyond the law. And Strauss says in his book, through the words of Xenophon, the author of the Hiero, that the rule of a good tyrant is better than misrule under law, so that tyrannical rule can be superior to constitutional rule or to the rule of misguided political elites. It is simply not the case that Strauss is entirely hostile to the notion of tyranny; he is hostile to the modern notion of tyranny, which is articulated in the passages already cited and then is further articulated by Strauss in his response to Alexandre Kojève's review of his book.

In Strauss's post-Nietzschean view, the modern form of tyranny leads necessarily to a flattening out of experience, to the so-called "last man." Society eventually becomes uninteresting when it is permeated by technology and science and a generalized level of education, the flattening out of experience that Tocqueville partly anticipated for democratic societies and which Nietzsche railed against. Strauss held out the hope, under those circumstances, for some rebellion, for acts of courage or honor to reverse this trend, this so-called tyranny. For Strauss, tyranny is a problem in the modern sense, not in the ancient sense, and I would suggest that his admiration for Churchill and Lincoln is because they actually mirror, to some degree, the ancient notion of the tyrant, especially Lincoln, who sidestepped the Constitution during the Civil War.

I recommend reading the article in full and if your interest is piqued, check out my piece on Strauss, then get some books.#

Arnold Kling writes about popular democracy.#

When it comes to popular democracy, count me as one of the skeptics. I once wrote, "In my view, the genius of our nation's founders was not that they gave people the opportunity to vote. It was that they created a Constitution with limited government." Earlier, I had written,

It seems to me that someone who "trusts the people" must fall into one of two categories:

• Skillful demagogues, in which case what they really trust is their own ability to manipulate popular opinion.
• Ivory tower professors, in which case what they really trust is their expectation of never having to deal with "the people" face to face.

When it comes to exercising political judgment, I trust neither the people nor the elites.

Dr. Ron Paul writes on the 9/11 Commission Report.#

Our nation will be safer only when government does less, not more. Rather than asking ourselves what Congress or the president should be doing about terrorism, we ought to ask what government should stop doing. It should stop spending trillions of dollars on unconstitutional programs that detract from basic government functions like national defense and border security. It should stop meddling in the internal affairs of foreign nations, but instead demonstrate by example the superiority of freedom, capitalism, and an open society. It should stop engaging in nation-building, and stop trying to create democratic societies through military force. It should stop militarizing future enemies, as we did by supplying money and weapons to characters like Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. It should stop entangling the American people in unholy alliances like the UN and NATO, and pledge that our armed forces will never serve under foreign command. It should stop committing American troops to useless, expensive, and troublesome assignments overseas, and instead commit the Department of Defense to actually defending America. It should stop interfering with the 2nd amendment rights of private citizens and businesses seeking to defend themselves.

More than anything, our federal government should stop deluding us that more government is the answer. We have far more to fear from an unaccountable government at home than from any foreign terrorist.

James Surowiecki writes about the Google IPO.#

The problem with the current IPO system isn't just that companies end up leaving billions of dollars on the table when they go public, but that select mutual-fund and hedge-fund managers (as well as well-connected individuals) are handed what amounts to free money. In a traditional IPO, the investment bank underwriting the offering controls the allocation of shares. In the late 1990s in particular, that allocation process became a way of doling out favors and securing future business. For instance, if you were a mutual-fund manager who funneled a lot of trades through an investment bank -- or who agreed to do so -- then you were more likely to get a hefty allocation of IPO shares.

This made money managers look a lot smarter than they were -- even if you set the bubble aside, there are lots of fund managers whose returns from the late nineties need an asterisk next to them -- and it wrecked the price-setting process, since there was no real attempt to let the price reflect the real demand for a stock. It also sabotaged one of the best things about capital markets, which is that in theory they aggregate the opinions of anyone with enough capital and enough risk tolerance to participate, and not just the opinions of those with the right connections. (There should be no velvet ropes in capital markets: if you can pay, you can play.) Google turned all this around: the only way to get shares in the Dutch auction was to do the valuation work and make a reasonable bid. The traditional IPO relies on the power of cronyism. Google's IPO, flawed as it was, relied on the power of markets. Bad for the Street, good for everyone else.

Grant on the economics of the gaze.#

Cynthia Rockwell on the movie black hole in We Don't Live Here Anymore.#

The other actors were working their asses off, but she just had nothing to bring to the table. In a film that relies so heavily--perhaps solely--on acting for its power, this film is evidence that one weak link can break the chain. She was so bad that in every scene she was in, she made the other actors look ridiculous. Like they were playing house. But magically, when she wasn't there, the other actors were phenomenal.

James D. Miller defends the electoral college.#

Currently, not even Michael Mooreish Democrats worry about fraud in Texas's 2004 Presidential vote. Because Bush will win a majority of Texans' votes, and since under the Electoral College it doesn't matter by how much he wins in Texas, politicians have zero incentive to add votes fraudulently to Bush's 2004 Texas tally, so even conspiracy-obsessed Democrats can't whine about how Bush is planning to steal Texan votes.

Under the Electoral College's winner-takes-all approach (which for reasons this article won't detail doesn't entirely apply to Maine and Nebraska) voter fraud really only becomes practical in swing states where Republicans and Democrats get roughly equal shares of the vote in presidential elections. These states, on average, will be well represented by both Republicans and Democrats in their legislative and judicial branches and so will probably have many government officials well positioned to stop their party's candidate from suffering due to voting fraud.

Tyler Cowen describes what is valid about Marxism.#

Faré discusses force and his "Robot."#

Mindlessness is a fact. Mind is built atop mindlessness, neither without it, nor against it. Its purpose is to control the body and make decisions. It can abdicate, and let someone else choose instead of it, or let some mindless default choice prevail. But there is no way that mindlessness can be taken care of automatically; or rather, in as much as there is any automatism to control the mindless, the mind is this automatism -- it is done by the mind, and cannot possibly be done without it. I have to decide to prevail. I have to do what it takes to prevail. And then I have to decide to remain there. And I have to do what it takes to remain there.

It would be nice if the stupid could cancel each other without ever having to be taken care of. But that won't happen. If you let stupidity loose, you'll soon have to face violent fanaticism directed by mystics against all the rational things they hate. You have to face it, fight all those brutes who try domineer you, take over from them, and restore a proper order -- not one where you'll manage the mindless, you can't -- not one where you'll convert them, you can't -- just an order where justice will be enforced and peace will be preserved. Time will do the rest -- but this part it won't do. And that's how I reconcile Confucius and Lao Tse.

Eric Helland proposes the Global Positioning System as a prototypical public good.#

[It] is with some trepidation that I mention a candidate for the textbook public good. The Global Positioning System, GPS, which provides location information for both military and civilian uses, is currently provided by the US government at no direct cost to users. GPS was constructed to be non-rival and non-excludable. The way the GPS system works is that a series of signals allow a receiver to triangulate the user's location without the user needing to communicate back to the satellite. The military nature of the system means that users do not actually want to be found; hence GPS is designed for passive use only. It also makes it very difficult to charge end users for using the signals.

Jane Shaw wrote the article on Public Choice Theory in the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:#

Although public choice economists have focused mostly on analyzing government failure, they also have suggested ways to correct problems. For example, they argue that if government action is required, it should take place at the local level whenever possible. Because there are many local governments, and because people "vote with their feet," there is competition among local governments, as well as some experimentation. To streamline bureaucracies, Gordon Tullock and William Niskanen have recommended allowing several bureaus to supply the same service on the grounds that the resulting competition will improve efficiency. Forest economist Randal O'Toole recommends that the Forest Service charge hikers and backpackers more than token fees to use the forests. This, he argues, will lead Forest Service personnel to pay more attention to recreation and reduce logging in areas that are attractive to nature lovers. And Rodney Fort and John Baden have suggested the creation of a "predatory bureau" whose mission is to reduce the budgets of other agencies, with its income depending on its success.

Peter Needham translated the first Harry Potter book into Ancient Greek, then he wrote an article describing how that went.#

The natural world of the Mediterranean: this surfaces right at the start - there is no Greek word for privet as in Privet Drive, so I have had to substitute an equally uninteresting Mediterranean shrub - myrtle. (Nor of course did Greeks number their house or name their streets - the first sentence is the most problematical in the entire book!) Tawny and Snowy Owls are unknown in Greece - but they had a dozen or more words for owl which it's difficult to assign to particular species: the scientists call the Little Owl - the symbol of Athens - "Athene" in her honour. Hedwig is called[glaux], the commonest ancient word, which does probably apply to Athene noctua, the Little Owl (Athena is called [glaukopis] by Homer, meaning probably "owl-faced", rather than "grey-eyed" or "bright-eyed". A Little Owl might have caused the Muggles on the Underground less excitement!). Hedwig becomes [Hedyiktin] "sweet kite" which I quite like. There seems to be no word in Greek for "badger" - tough on the Hufflepuffs - they seem to have used the word [galea] indiscriminately for all small to medium size animals. And they don't distinguish between mice and rats - [mus] has to do for both (sorry, Scabbers!). There also seems to be a gender problem with some animals - all cats are masculine (as all bears are feminine) - which makes the surprise even greater when McGonagall reveals herself to Dumbledore. Mrs Norris' gender remains undisclosed (certainly not neutered!).