http://toddseavey.com/2006/11/15/book-selection-of-the-month-natural-right-and-history-by-leo-strauss/ Conservatism for punks. Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:03:00 -0400 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 http://toddseavey.com/2006/11/15/book-selection-of-the-month-natural-right-and-history-by-leo-strauss/comment-page-1/#comment-4493 ToddSeavey.com » Blog Archive » Retro-Journal: Blooming of an American Mind Fri, 26 Oct 2007 07:49:05 +0000 http://toddseavey.com/2006/11/15/book-selection-of-the-month-natural-right-and-history-by-leo-strauss/#comment-4493 [...] As I headed back to Brown in early 1988 to finish my freshman year, I took inspiration from a winter vacation that included reading Allan Bloom’s Leo Strauss-influenced book The Closing of the American Mind (recommended to me by my high school friend Paul Taylor’s conservative dad, one of the numerous suggestions he gave me, Paul, and our friends Chuck Blake and John Hersh from high school whenever we’d all gather in Norwich during college vacation).  Bloom seemed to give a pretty decent diagnosis of what I’d experienced at Brown the previous semester, arguing as he did that higher education had become a hotbed of relativism, the idea that there are no truths and that everything is simply a matter of arbitrary perspective — which by some non-sequitur always implicitly means the Marxists or feminists win any argument (or in certain formulations, Marxists, feminists, and Freudians, though Freud’s prestige was declining). [...] [...] As I headed back to Brown in early 1988 to finish my freshman year, I took inspiration from a winter vacation that included reading Allan Bloom’s Leo Strauss-influenced book The Closing of the American Mind (recommended to me by my high school friend Paul Taylor’s conservative dad, one of the numerous suggestions he gave me, Paul, and our friends Chuck Blake and John Hersh from high school whenever we’d all gather in Norwich during college vacation).  Bloom seemed to give a pretty decent diagnosis of what I’d experienced at Brown the previous semester, arguing as he did that higher education had become a hotbed of relativism, the idea that there are no truths and that everything is simply a matter of arbitrary perspective — which by some non-sequitur always implicitly means the Marxists or feminists win any argument (or in certain formulations, Marxists, feminists, and Freudians, though Freud’s prestige was declining). [...]

]]> http://toddseavey.com/2006/11/15/book-selection-of-the-month-natural-right-and-history-by-leo-strauss/comment-page-1/#comment-16 ToddSeavey.com » Blog Archive » Book Selection of the Month: “After Virtue” by Alasdair MacIntyre Mon, 02 Apr 2007 04:25:24 +0000 http://toddseavey.com/2006/11/15/book-selection-of-the-month-natural-right-and-history-by-leo-strauss/#comment-16 [...] Alasdair MacIntyre’s a great philosopher and writer yet coy and elliptical enough to be a frickin’ Straussian (I notice he praises Straussian Harry Jaffa at one point, so perhaps he is — he’s a bit of everything else, so why not a Straussian, too?).  Reading the book becomes a bit like reading a mystery novel.  Normally, one doesn’t read an engaging philosophy book while wondering, with some tension, “Where the hell is this leading?!?”  Which is not to say it’s scattered, it was just hard to predict what the practical legal/ethical/culture-critical upshot was going to be at the end.  It turns out to be a defense of ancient, Greek-style virtues, concrete things like leadership and athleticism and friendship, as a more solid anchor for morals than modern theorizing and rationalism — though there are some surprising twists and turns along the way. [...] [...] Alasdair MacIntyre’s a great philosopher and writer yet coy and elliptical enough to be a frickin’ Straussian (I notice he praises Straussian Harry Jaffa at one point, so perhaps he is — he’s a bit of everything else, so why not a Straussian, too?).  Reading the book becomes a bit like reading a mystery novel.  Normally, one doesn’t read an engaging philosophy book while wondering, with some tension, “Where the hell is this leading?!?”  Which is not to say it’s scattered, it was just hard to predict what the practical legal/ethical/culture-critical upshot was going to be at the end.  It turns out to be a defense of ancient, Greek-style virtues, concrete things like leadership and athleticism and friendship, as a more solid anchor for morals than modern theorizing and rationalism — though there are some surprising twists and turns along the way. [...]

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