asserted by some to be the father of neoconservatism. it starts now on booktv television for serious readers. >> i am now happy to introduce you to tonight's guest speaker. he's been a visiting professor at the monitor institutions,

harvard law school tel aviv university, the hebrew university of jerusalem and the university of paris. his books include the regulation of international trade, the wto system, law, politics and legitimacy. the professor has been a frequent consultant or advisor and the international development bank. the professor is also a member of the board of advisors of the center for law and philosophy. he serves on the editorial advisory board of the london review international law, the journal of world investment and trade him a transnational legal theory and issues of economic integration. he's cofounder of the new york city working group on international economic law and is a former resident. please join me in welcoming the

international house. [applause] thanks very much. it is a pleasure to be here at the university of chicago to talk about man of peace. this is the university where he taught and his mature years and where he gave many of his most famous lectures and many of his famous books. so, a week ago a man named tom coughlin was elected to the united states in arkansas and he is an unreconstructed neocon and it turns out that 19 or 20 years of age he was quoting leo strauss and the newspaper at harvard. a week later i'm here to try to convince you today that despite

attracting accolades were latter-day acolytes leo strauss was in fact a man of peace and not of war and he he be lead international law and legality and more generally should restrain political violence and that he was critical of imperial ambition and skeptical of any project which would pose on another society a different ideological political or religious system. so congress to vote on it to give you the sense of what i'm doing and about i am doing in the book i think i should give you an answer as to why i've been able to discover this about strauss despite the reputation he has has which you can find very easily just by googling and you will come up you'll come up with hundreds of references to

the neocon leo strauss or the inspiration of the neocons or the intellectual inspiration for the iraq war. so why are all those people wrong to characterize strauss in that manner and how am i able to show that that's a misreading of him? i focus on several different features of my own intellectual journey to understanding leo strauss. one advantage that i had which is a very rare one in north america much more so in europe or israel is that i first encountered the law before i ever met a straussian or ever heard of straussianism. in high school i came across some of his writing on the

medieval jewish philosophy and i was quite immediately gripped by a sense of tension come intellectual drama, the contest of reason and revelation. but in a sense i heard his voice unfiltered by the enemies of the straussianism and i think overall the subsequent years, something about that stuck with me even as i came to struggle with my experiences in studying with straussian and the kind of orthodox view of strauss and the orthodox view of everything that they tend to want to impose on their students come us that's the first thing in a different way that most people do by studying a with a professor

first, second, third generation of college. second and this is a feature of the book that has been widely noted and emphasized for example in the wonderful review by the political theory stephen smith i read extensively the lectures and seminars and listened to the recording was read as many of the transcripts as i could get my hands on and that was a remarkable entry into strauss's voice as a teacher and there are ways that it differs from his voice as a writer and i'm going to talk a bit about that because of course transcripts of classes are a very different kind of source for interpreting a

thinker than an artifice book. but the lectures and seminars confirmed in many respects the interpretations that i was developing particularly for example that strauss didn't have a political interpretation but actually an interpretation that gives a very subtle understanding of the relationship between power and right in international relations and for example, in his reading he deals with international law much more favorably than any other interpretation i know of. most interpretations place a lot of emphasis on the dialogue where there is the famous power political statement that the strong take what they can and a

week bear with what they must. strauss, however, emphasizes and this comes through even more in his wonderful seminar fan dan in the very short and extremely compact essay in the city on the importance of the treaties and the law in greece and indeed as he puts it the importance to any civilization and therefore the importance of trust that the countries or powers to powers that sign treaty selectively obey them and you can see how far that is from the neocon attitude towards international law. so the experience with the lectures and seminars was imported and let me give you a few examples of some of the things he says that gives a very different sense of his voice

then the sense that you would get either from his disciples were his enemies. for example, he says in one class on the political writer and the general a man who is concerned with power is someone no one can respect and who cannot respect himself. again, to go back to the seminar he says that vindictive justice cannot be that hard of the foreign-policy and he says the genuine wisdom also issues a gentleness. so, that is the importance of seminars to my evolving understanding of strauss. third, i've come to a particular view of how he actually wrote and this is a matter of great controversy because one of the most important contributions to

the scholarship was exploring the idea that thinkers in the past who were subject to the threat of persecution wrote in a hit in manner in order to avoid oppression by the religious or political authorities and some people are very hostile to him and have suggested that strauss himself wrote in that way in his published books are indeed quite difficult and to some some of them do have elements of obscurity. so it's not surprising that there would be some interpreters who would read into his historical thesis of the philosophers ought to think and write today and indeed of the

clue to his own manner. now in the book i maintained this is simply not true the surface of thing is the heart of things and when he says that this manner of writing was intrinsically connected to persecution, he meant what he said and it's very clear from his lectures and seminars that he did not belief that he was under the threat of persecution in the united states. he referred to the united states in one lecture as the freedom and he said that in the united states there was virtually complete freedom of expression and an essential coming to the conclusion that a thinker is right in between the lines of the persecution. we know from what he taught he

did not regard himself as any sort of persecution and therefore based upon his own is an error to come to the conclusion that he himself was writing a satirically between the lines but his writing of his writing was unusual because if you take a book like machiavelli which is one of his famous books and also more difficult it's clear after reading five or ten pages of it but it is not a conventional work interpreting and author in the history of ideas and there are some scholars that have written off the book because it seems to remove the scholarship in the history of ideas. now what is he doing in these works that seem neither to be straightforward historically

informed of the thought of the past nor and he straightforwardly presents his own normative positions on different political and sociological questions. and so what i believe he's doing and i explained in my book he is doing a new kind of philosophy and what he is trying to do is to set up and construct the intertemporal dialogues dialogues between the fingers of different periods where, for example, aristotle gets the opportunity to reply to or to answer machiavelli's view of the limits of the virtue and political life and plato gets to respond to the importance that attaches to the suffering and cruelty in their relation to

human greatness and so appreciating how he writes these books, you have to appreciate that he is in fact doing this new kind of philosophy where we are the judges and we construct and participate in peace dialogues between the fingers of different periods and see how they disagreed and try to understand those disagreements with the view alternately that thinking for ourselves about what are the best or the most reasonable answers to the fundamental questions. and it seems to me that strauss does actually indicate that this is exactly what he is doing and it is a new kind of philosophical dialogue that he is constructing on these works and i just want to read you a passage from his liberalism and

modern education. he says the greatest minds on her dialogues. we must transform the monologue into a dialogue. they are side-by-side into it together. the greatest minds that are the monologue either when they break the dialogues. when we look at the platonic dialogues, we observe that there is never a dialogue among the mind of the highest order. all platonic dialogues are dialogues between a superior man in. to him. plato felt one could not write a dialogue between the two men of the highest order. we must then do something which the greatest minds were unable to do. since the greatest minds contradict one another regarding the most important matters, they compel us to judge them the monologue and we cannot take on the trust to what anyone of them says. on the other hand we can hope that notice we are not competent to be judges. so, basically this is the task

of the philosophy in the era it is really to construct the dialogues to create a new openness and a new way of understanding the agreement between the philosophers of the first world order in the past and therefore trying to illuminate and to try to understand where we could perhaps find elements of the agreement and also which disagreements are likely to be permanent features of an endless philosophical conversation. so once we understand that this was the character of the writing and some of his most important books i think that we can explain elements that may seem obscure passages that may seem

suspect in the sense that one might think otherwise for example that strauss is using nokia valley for his own view and some people have read him that way. instead he is presenting this philosophical position. he's very subtle because as he says in the judging the debates, one must be modest as a teacher. one must lead the way in constructing the dialogue but one must not impose on those who are one particular view of what emerges from these constructive conversations between the fingers and the mature writing these are the voices of

different thinkers. the finally and perhaps most controversial and my rating of strauss has to do with another feature that has led some people to come to the conclusion that he is a warmonger or machiavelli in and so this is the fact and this is ignored by the people who basically portrayed him as one political violence after he left. it was as the theory but in many of his works he actually states the right-wing positions, military positions with great force and intensity.

on the other hand this is been accompanied by a subtle critique or deconstruction of these positions that is often very persuasive because in some cases it has to feature of an eternal critique and to give you a great example i would refer to the tierney which is a debate of the philosopher so he writes about the tierney and what is the basis for the legitimate political rule. he says the best rule would probably be a form of absolutism if you believe that the title to rule is based on wisdom, so here anyway he is indirectly responding to that decision. but then when you think through

the basis of the example to what is best for everyone in the society we've actually come to a critique or a reversal of the case for the absolute rule because what you realize is that he takes you through these various steps of the argument that the people who are likely to want to be absolute rulers are unlikely to be wise people and they are not the kind of trade that produce ambition for absolute rule. so if you belief in the absolute rule based on the only possible legitimate justification for the absolute rule which is the person ruling is wise or unknowing, then you would have to have a significant rethinking of whether it wouldn't be better to have constitutional rule if the presumption that you are

likely to get an absolute ruler that is why it turned out to be false. so we start with you know what seems like the case for absolutism for tierney said that they are interpreters of the position in the of the books that say that he is favoring tierney because they read two or three pages it seems like he's setting up the case for absolutism. but then he sets it up and demolishes it in a particularly brilliant way. to understand how brilliant the demolition is you have to understand the arguments for the absolute rule or the decision by people like carl schmitt. so why is he doing this. they are with the neocons or the extreme right and then somehow deconstructing him and here comes the controversial hypothesis. after the age of 30 i do think

that he was attracted. as it was described in any way diagnosed in 1941 in the lecture that he gave at the school in new york called german and i al-isam and it was around the age of 30 that he started turning away from this point of view when he had a critical engagement with schmitt that resulted in a short essay that he would describe much later in his life as the first expression of the quote on quote change in orientation and that came from being sickened by and disillusioned by the pre- wimax and the realization that to really understand the crisis of the modern civilization when we need the plaintiff view less

empty and brutal than the point of view of what he would call eventually the german and i al-isam and services the point where it is starting to seriously focus on the middle ages above all. but i think that this comes a lot from the germans and strauss was very concerned that he had been tempted by what he called the german nihilism and that by setting up these positions and defend deconstructing them he was trying to provide an education to others who might have also had these temptations. and i suggest in the book that this was a kind of philosophical form of shiva that there is a transgression at least a transgression and then the move of the return not through the

piety or express of repentance but through a philosophical purging as it were of this temptation and in the previous discussions in the book one at harvard and one over the last week we have had very good debates and exchanges about whether this really counts as a shoebox in the poll or the antithetical religious sense and possibly it doesn't. but it might again be more of a substitute for it. but it is i think it kind of explanation of what seems at first to be a very suspicious or offputting way of proceeding to actually state or restate forcefully these kind of extreme positions but then engaged in a very intricate and often partly internal critique.

but that's what i think he's he is actually doing. so now you would say all this is true and he's a man of peace and he's not the nasty inspiration for the neocons and the salon. find that maybe he is just not interested. so why write a book just to kind of corrected a misreading of the thinker who when you actually do understand what they're up to doesn't seem to be particularly compelling or interesting and here i have to say to you why i think that he is an interesting and compelling thinker for a time. first of all, i do think that this way of doing philosophy by setting up the intertemporal dialogue is a very promising avenue for thinking in the postmodern era because in some

ways philosophical questions and political questions come and go in importance. we are back in the period of time where the relationship of religion and politics for example has become a very acute issue and that recedes in the background in the more recent font but it's such a crucial issue for the range of older thinkers and by setting up these different positions and relating them to each other and understanding the different agreements about the philosophers into the relationships between the religion and politics i think we can illuminate questions and dilemmas of contemporary political life, global political life that maybe are not so illuminating if you stick with the array of the 20th century early 21st century political

theory. so that's one claim and a second time he is notable for the extent to which he actually addressed the question of the political and social responsibility of thinkers and intellectuals. recently we have had for example the release of the notebooks and the issue of the political responsibility or the irresponsibility of the philosophers and intellectuals is still a very lifeline for many of us and strauss said that while nietzsche wasn't a non- c. and would have dominated everything anyway that's not the us some stood for, that nietzsche still indirectly paved the way for fascism because he ruthlessly attacked all

responsible and political options that existed at the time without assuring his readers any way to a new alternative and responsible politics. also strauss's thesis about writing between the lines was an argument about the responsibilities of the philosophers and thinkers in times where there was persecution but also times of political and social instability where an intellectual philosopher would have to be worried about their thoughts might be misused by the wrong people and you can see that whole experience must have been very much in their mind. but to my view this is a very important time in china for thought and relatively few philosophers of the late 20th

century really address this question directly, they often address it in directly but they rarely make it a fundamental problem for their thinking and this is something that strauss did. the question is did he succeed on his own terms otherwise you might say here is a thinker that is actually reflective upon the dangers of a philosopher or thinker's ideas being misused in a socially and politically irresponsible way. but this whole book is premised upon a response to exactly this kind of misuse of his own ideas and writings. so it might be that he wasn't a particularly good example for his own demand about philosophers and thinkers and

how they should write and speak in such a way as to be socially and politically responsible which means that in such a way to at least the extent that is feasible in the relatively free society to prevent the misuse of their ideas by people who are political extremists or with extreme political agendas. so on that somewhat critical note i think i'm going to end and invite what i'm sure will be a very lively and rich discussion. thank you. [applause] >> [inaudible] -- to rethink the position. i thought that your discussion with the kind of new philosopher and discussing him as kind of a

genre innovating philosopher with others is insightful and what else was insightful is the fact that he studied these to show he wasn't attacking the european union or the radicalism and then the other thing that i thought was a possibility as a cosmopolitan or metrosexual. i want to accept your thesis and there's part of me that is satisfied with what you per trade here but i think that there's this other development that i think is politically significant in the united states but i'm not sure if you discussed his role in nurturing it which is i would say probably the claremont conservatism and so the new school of strauss in 1948 and 50, what role did he have in the education, how do we get from 1964 where you have been educating very goldwater?

i think the portion that you per trade and that he painted here is a critique of the foreign-policy. there is another aspect here in the way that they would say with the domestic policy and so the specific fee that i think you haven't discussed is that i think he was fighting hofstetter's american political tradition which is a progressive book that said it is a dangerous leftist experiment. do you think that he played an important role in developing an interpretation of the american political tradition characteristics of the claremont conservatism in the expression of 64 and 1980? >> first of all, having read hundreds of lectures and a seminar discussions i would say that he doesn't say much about

the american political tradition. he praises the extent to which there is freedom of expression in america. he liked the supreme court outlawed. he liked the idea of the judicial review and something that seems to haunt him is how quickly the nazis but of course the help of carl schmitt had been able to destroy the look out at the end of the rule of law at the end of the republic. republic. so this idea of the supreme court that's respected by the other branches of government can be a guardian of the constitution that was an element of the political culture that he liked a great deal. but he doesn't talk to -- also generally come of the separation of powers. but he doesn't take what i would call any particular ideological

spin on the american political culture or the american political tradition. in his letters to the somewhat crazy conservative drunk, he complained about the extent to which he felt that they were starting to influence public life in america and i think that he rather unfairly considered of john f. kennedy to be an example of that. not i think a well picked example, but he had real concerns about that aspect, but relatively recent aspect of american political culture and the sort of tv oriented and soundbite oriented and so on. but that's -- none of this seems to me to point to anything like you described as the claremont

conservatism and after all, i believe he will be spent a year or two. i'm not sure the exact dates. he was merely one albeit a very peculiar and very loud student of his. so i am not sure but i find it much of himself that would account for that kind of view of the american quality. >> you said your initial interest was in the medieval jewish philosophy where you could read that in some ways as an interest has an interest in certain conceptions of the order. he was involved in dialogues with those that are very concerned with order. and i'm wondering if the roman catholic terrorists had the arcs or a neoconservative chronologies come if they would

say there's something about the way that he thinks about order that is constant with the kind of claremont conservatism. do you think that there's something about vista does tip for this or thinking about the order? >> one of the great soundbites is the aim to produce a regime that governs his order without oppression and freedom without license. so i think that anyone who witnessed the destruction of order in the republic and its general consequences as well as the consequence for the jewish people and be concerned with order or what happens to a society when order breaks down and politics becomes polarized

between extreme groups prepared to take the measures necessary to cease power. so i think that it is a border but not oppression which means the preference of separation of power and revealing the letter that strauss wrote to a german law professor in the 1960s and i mentioned him in the book he sent a copy of the book that he'd return on carl schmitt and he says that he might have been right about the democracy that wasn't right about the liberal democracy as such and in other words, the concerned that the society had exploded, but model of democracy that was very weak

that had a very weak center and legitimacy of institutions like the court and so on later in life he had experienced another democracy that he found to be strong to combine a measure of stability that a great deal of freedom. first of all england and already you can see that a history of the democracy was turning when he wrote i can't remember i think it was to his friend jacob that he had attended the house of commons and that of the exchange between baldwin and churchill reminded him of the roman senate or it was as brave. he found something noble in the british liberal democracy and in part it was as he said as he liked to say he always got these

expressions slightly wrong and the british never throughout the baby with the bath. of course he meant with the bathwater but i think that what he meant is that, you know, that stability and order are necessary in creating the political regime and he agreed with montesquieu that liberty and security are not unrelated. one of the definitions of liberty and montesquieu thank's view is the security. and so, then again you can see that what he took from that respect. but guess there is a confirm of stability, security and order. but the example of the anglo-american liberal democracy suggests that this in fact could be combined with freedom and

indeed social justice. >> [inaudible] questioning the traditional characterization as being a supporter of the right. could you provide a definition of the right and the left? >> maybe i the >> maybe i can start from his own definition or attempt to define the difference between the right and left and he does this in a couple of places and lectures he gave why would describe as liberal. first of all he says that right and left did mean something rather different and this is the historical meaning that elephant

in all of europe. the forces of the french revolution and so on. he says that it's difficult in the american context to totally differentiate conservative from progressive positions. now, one of the aspects of the book that is generally conservative and i do talk about this and e. had a distrust in the progress. not a dogmatic distrust but more precisely, he questioned the dogma of the progress which was so dear at least to the time and maybe it is still today in the perhaps more moderate form to the liberals and it's the very word, progressive. so, what was the basis of the doubt about progress plaques it wasn't every change as for the good is that he criticized the

dogmatism of the forms of liberalism or progressivism that just make an assumption that all changes change for the good in on the other hand he also said that there is an equal error of conservatives to assume the change is likely to be for the best. that is equally baseless of an assumption that all changed is likely to be for the good. it's just that when the dogma and the favor of progress was much more of the dominant position or prejudice in the academy and so he was more remarkable for questioning that dogma than the office of the conservative dogma which is that we should generally have a presumption against change or that change is going to make things worse or change is going to come out and unacceptable costs. so, i think that's how he

envisions himself and his own views of conservativism and progressivism. in one of his lectures he said he wasn't surprised to find himself mentioned i gather in a positive way in the nation and those of you that know the nation, it was a progressive publication back then and it's a progressive publication now. an interesting fact is that the editor, i have a twitter feed about leo strauss where i have a post with 4,000 followers and i to eat regularly things that he said in his lectures and seminars because i want to show his actual voice and that it's not a voice of what we would regard as the right. anyway, katrina van hubel has been a follower of the editor of the nation from a come a follower of a twitter account among other people who are also certainly progressives but to get back to his own remarks, he said he wasn't surprised to find

himself mentioned positively in the nation because in one matter, he was with them, to progressives. it was with justice on with the progressives. what does that mean? where was he with the conservatives? he was with the conservatives because even though he was in favor of justice and of the time he said that the search of a meant civil rights and also probably elements of the great societies and social redistribution that he had doubts about using social engineering to achieve the much greater a quality or justice in the short term and this goes also to his technological pessimism and doubts about social science as a technique -- >> we are going to leave this program to go live to the u.s. senate for a pro forma session but no legislative business expected.

the president pro tempore: the senate will come to order. under the previous order the senate stands adjourned until 10:00 a.m. on thursday, february 19 2015. the senate is on a break and we'll return on thursday february 19 at 10 a.m. eastern. also for a pro forma session. we now return to booktv in progress on c-span2. book booktv, television for serious readers. >> -- to learn something and then shifted away. can you tell us something about what it was in the nature and whether it was the same thing or something else when he shifted away from it?

what was his exception of nature in the early years? >> my sense is that part of it is that he offered a compelling you know, diagnosis of what at that point was the sweetest decline of the classical intellectual culture in germany but in the european world more generally and the rise of what one could call mass or popular culture with the accompanying kind of degradation of society. and so, that i think he bought into to some extent and indeed, as i say, my thesis is when he wrote german nihilism coming his

diagnosis of the german nihilism was in a way it kind of self diagnosis of what he was like when he was quite young. it's complicated because i'm the one hand he says he really is leaves everything that he understood up to the age of 30. on the other hand if you look at the writings in the 20s he's also struggling with different positions within the movement. so it's very complex. another thinker of the time is walter. if you look at his intellectual development after the first world war at times he seems to be a track or two that kind of thinking and times he's going back to the earlier jewish thought and the bible and at times he seems to be very much towards a new version of marxism. this was a time of great intellectual disorientation. but also great intensity after

the first world war. these were thinkers who were young jews in germany influenced by multiple allegiances and very different kinds of contradictory intellectual sources and temptations and so you don't get a really coherent view from at least the published writings of two around the time he's 30 but there is a revealing statement in a letter that he writes which to my mind is the first very explicit account of his turning to the classical plot away from nietzsche and what he says is what he has discovered is the great overvaluation of the current or manliness.

and why is that? because it's a reaction to the downgrading of courage or resolved in liberal thought to the supposed easy-going mass of the liberal or democratic thought and so to react against that he gives a great way to to the pure oil worker age or resolved and when you turn to plato, he acknowledges courage but it's the lowest virtue and it's placed under the guardianship of moderation and wisdom. so that to my mind that one passage in that one letter almost shows the character of

the orientation if you take the passage and read it through the lens of what i think it's a self diagnosis of himself as a young man in the german nihilism. i'm not sure if i've answered your question. >> you spoke about how strauss flirted with these ideas of nihilism in the earlier time and then changed and you also spoke about how he thought about the philosophy so i was wondering if you could say something about lessons public intellectuals could draw and i realize that's not really so much the theme of your website with my sense one might take from his wife and how he conducted his methodology in a way that he the way that he was able himself to use these other thinkers in order to change because so much emphasis today is on adhering to a

position, frowning and flip-flopping on taking in the new political realities and rethinking and it seems to me that you are putting forth the view that suggests for strauss that there is a possibility of turning away and of achieving greater wisdom so i was wondering if you could say something to that. >> there is but i what i think of as a desirable and attract it kind of openness, reopening questions and the nature of the disagreements between the different fingers out how to answer those questions and therefore, permitting the possibility of thinking for ourselves. but what about the lessons? i get one lesson at the end of the book and strauss famously said of philosophy should try to

be edifying but it is intrinsically edifying. so strauss is very admirable not engaging in too much explicit preaching, but i think the lesson in his own experience despite himself holding what he viewed as a high standard of the social and political responsibility for the misuse is that he perhaps was too willing to let his thoughts be claimed by others and what they mean by this is that he did not himself publicly express a lot of clear political views. he was reticent and those that were distant from the classroom chair of chicago and therefore in a way it was not that difficult to misuse his ideas during the lifetime.

what was that reticent about? i've often thought that i would write a book about the meaning of exile for different fingers. he would be one and i think that there was a very particular meaning to the experience of exile which was that a resistance to the assimilation. whether that resistance to assimilationist a sense of fidelity, not at the level of the simple belief that another level to the traditional i don't want to be misunderstood. he was not an observant jew. but he was deeply connected to judaism. his own daughter wrote in "the new york times" that he wasn't very good looking. he was a small rather fragile

man and he was in bad health and his wife was in bad health for much of the time after he was 50-years-old. so a variety i think of personal psychological circumstances were considerations contributed to this renaissance to become a public figure and it's very easy to take the writings of the very complicated difficult writings of someone who may have a lot of brilliant thoughts in those writings and then turn them into a figure they themselves have been reticent or appear to be speaking in different voices about different issues but if you're out there and you speak clearly and publicly about your views then it's great to be harder for people to misuse your path to support other views.

not impossible and i don't think any can be 100% responsible for the abuse of their ideas after they've passed away. so that was the kind of along the lines of a response and i hope it is helpful. anything else clicks yes. >> what is your view on strauss's view of a quality and when you discuss it i wanted you also to talk talk about the view that you don't think that -- the two things i think are very tightly related and if there is a totem pole of reason that he talks about in the lowest level it is persecution. he makes that quite clear. >> you are correct to say that it doesn't apply.

but if he belief that there is fundamental inequality among the people into the wisdom and their ability to understand and also to misunderstand because one of the topics you talked about is how he has been abused and misunderstood and that is inevitable. there is is no think are nothing during the philosophy who has not been fundamentally misunderstood misconstrued and misused in many ways. so somehow the issue of rising as soon as you become to doing that in public there is the issue of being misunderstood. so part of a -- i would say maybe perhaps the most important reason for the a satiric writing is to try to minimize the damage that you might do. some damage is an affordable when you take a public stance and whether you lecture or teach

you will have students but misunderstand you and someone asked a question about jaffa. if you do anything in public you are likely to be misunderstood so your view of the question of inequality is a question of a -- esoterics. >> i certainly think that strauss suggested that in any society including a free society one should write in such a way as to minimize the possibility that one's ideas would be misused or will have impacts that are socially and politically irresponsible. but i don't think that that's what he means by the acer terrorism. he definitely tried to practice it but he also was very explicit

about certain matters that a thinker that wanted to hide the teachings that could be either subject to or get them forget them subject to persecution or even to the social program and hide. so i don't think that he practiced the acer terrorism or acts of terrorism but i think that he practiced restraint and the irony is that restraint sometimes can lead to other kinds of risk of irresponsible misuse and that's why i said in response to the previous question that i think that speaking loudly can sometimes be an answer. so how did he not get a

reputation of being an inspiration for the neoconservative? it's what we would call the cold war liberal. and if you look at the people around the united states often these are people that are also attractive to a vision of the conservative and he gets quoted and published in translation and publication since publications and so on one of his leading followers and friends is also a student of strauss a catholic conservative but yet it is clear that he was a cold war liberal and that with respect to the soviet union cdb within the welfare state and the lead in personal freedom and so on. there are very few interpretations that get it wrong that he was actually basically a conservative because

he opposed soviet stand opposed french marxism and one reason is that there's a huge record. they had hundreds of newspaper articles and where he stood with respect to conservativism and liberalism and marxism is very clearly defined by a large body of journalism that is of an extremely high intellectual level but still quite accessible to people who are educated and other journalists into someone who are the people that often are most influential in forming the public reputation and constructing the public meaning of a major thinker. so that's the contrast i would make. on the question of a quality,

strauss i think believe that most forms of social equality were unjust. on the other hand social inequality excuse me were unjust. on the other hand, he saw the great difficulties in the eliminating the certain forms of social inequality as they put it forms of social engineering. ..

will be viewed as largely arbitrary and questionable. and so i suppose that you know, in no way of that view basically it is like socrates and his appropriate punishment should be to be paid to think and talk by the people of athens. they should take his food and lodging and so one. so ultimately, excellences about thinking in those activities that most resemble our thought

and philosophical discussion. then as they say, the conventional inequalities and social outcomes are sending highly questionable. they are not justified because they are not based upon an evaluation of people against what is really excellent for human beings. but again as i say there is a caution about how far you can go using the technology of the modern era craddick and welfare state to actually correct a lot of these conventional inequalities and in a reasonable timeframe. >> so i assume questions about chapter three, which i think is very significant because it seems to me what you are doing is trying to understand the

ground-level stress subject into a homogenous state or world safe and seems passionate subjection and one way he do that is to look at expiration of its nihilism in the characteristic of an homogenous state tiered services significative for discussion of the european union today. in light of that the thing you want to distinguish them from today as i was very surprised that you didn't discuss pierre manon in this context are written in the book the case who spoke 2000 world young politics and the forms he discusses there has come extraordinarily influential and elsewhere. i am wondering because you didn't discuss it in the air if you could clarify what you see is the relationship between

stress objection and how that relates to peer manon today. >> well i was a couple things. first of all it is certainly clear and i'm saying nothing that manon would disagree with. it is a conservative you of catholicism and that is a route that is completely alien to that way of thinking. there is a sense in which quite explicitly a lot of this is not channeling strauss, but channeling a different influential tradition. secondly, and actually in the manuscript i did have a discussion and contracting manon with another french student who is much more of a cosmopolitan liberal and that they go in different directions.

one of them is a catholic conservative. the other is superman and jewish exile. very different people. again now i think the editor rightly thought that it was just acted from the main argument of the book get this kind of work can easily blow up to 400 pages because you would be inclined to discuss all of these derivative debates. i didn't want to write that kind of book and the editors wanted either because i think there is a nothing here of trying to calm as i put it in the introduction reopen the case of strauss. start what i consider would be a sensible and awful discussion but also a critical one. but anyhow to get back to the objection, there is a dramatic

turn in the argument and in the restatement, a final repost of strauss to khrushchev where he goes through all this business about there being no longer warriors whose struggle and so on which sounds a lot like schmidt redux. but then there's a remarkable turn were perhaps it's not a struggle that constitute what it is. the final pages. in the final pages strouse reveals the real fundamental ground on which he objects to the universal homogenous state which is that if you have a universal political order, that

order can only survive through a universal ideology that legitimates. a universal ideology necessarily entails suppressing objections to that ideology and intellectual resistance to that ideology. so it means a real threat to freedom of thought. if you compare that line of argument to a liberal cosmopolitan sense in perpetual peace, it is essentially the same line of argument. he says i want a republican federation that have liberal democratic state constitutions. but i do not want a world state. why? the world state could result in soul despotism. in other words, the diversity of people as a protection against the kind of despotism that would

destroy the freedom of the human soul. to my mind, there is almost no difference between the objection to a world today and the one that strauss ultimately makes us is philosophically rounded or argued objection in the final pages of the restatement. i see no essential difference in that line of argument. that makes sense for the fact that i've seen noted it comes through that he was actually sympathetic to the project of the european integration. he didn't see european union or the european community as a kind of threat of a world state that would suppress diversity of opinion. unlike the criticisms of transnational integration who assume that any project that has

a cosmopolitan air base seeks to extend a governance or institution beyond the borders of a sovereign state is somehow it should be as undesirable based upon the kind of criticism of the world today that those people often a tribute. yes. >> the differential between right and left in terms of how they change is enacted. so from the last this change being crews say the government from the right been changed through private industry. and then i would hazard to take that a step further to say from the left perhaps change would eat for the poor, whereas from the right changes for the rich.

if that is true, wouldn't that put strauss as a thinker on the right? >> well i think your question is an excellent follow-up question. because that will help me to be clearer than i perhaps was in my initial response to you. so when distinguishing right from left one could distinguish innocent means. so there are people who are conservative who would say no it isn't particularly just to redistribute wealth because the market insurers people who have ability do while and why should those people have the obligation to give part of their wealth to other people who don't have the talents are the industry to do as well.

i don't want to caricature him, but my colleague, richard epstein has a libertarian view which often is also called a form of conservatism. people don't like that what country and don't want social inequality. it is somehow legitimate and 17 that's entirely up or read to preserve. another group of people like me who were middle-of-the-road and they do want more social quality. but i am concerned that certain ways of getting there could jeopardize economic growth or could undermine other social values. and so, you know, i think that this is sort of where strauss is coming from. he would say yes and his comment

about being quoted in the nation, you know eliminating unjustified or unjust conventional social equality is not a bad thing. it is a good day. then we have to ask him to get there. so what stress is often taken or in this maybe goes back to your question which i might answer even more fully in this little elaboration that strauss is not someone who admires social hierarchy for itself take. in his lecture, this comes out very clearly. he accuses nietzsche of snobby son and of liking the idea of rank were ordering or hierarchy for its own sake. but there is something inherently admirable in a society that is unequal and more people know their place. whether it's the top or the bottom. that is not at all stress.

in terms of the goal it is really greater social justice or equality, but what a great deal of caution about how we get there and what other values we might end up sacrificing by using certain masses to get there. that is a position that is very characteristic of a lot of people who would call themselves liberals today. we don't want to get rid of the market appeared some people who say they need to radically invent all of the institutions. capitalism. i respect those views. my view is that we need some of those institutions and therefore we need a sickly to be able to live with a certain amount of social inequality, which is the inevitable result of the institutions. but i would like to reduce the risk my social policy, smart tax policy and i don't see that it's

very different from the spirit of sybase own thinking on these kinds of questions. >> twice they are you talked about other social values that would be diminished by the right. what were you referring to? give me an example of what would be diminished. >> so, for example, you could have been i have been in some of these debates you know in situations of political transition. you could say that you could obtain social justice by radical redistribution of land. you know this goes to places like south africa, where you take land away from people who

wire you know, relatively privileged and give it to people who, you know who are poor, who are part of the oppressed group that can now finally achieved political power. now i actually think that one has to be very cautious about this. because there is a value to you know, the stability of property rights. it's not an absolute value. these people lived their whole lives on this land. probably it is the generation that didn't necessarily contribute directly or to put it differently, they might have not been the primary culprit in the social injustices. they might also be the people who acknowledge the work you need nne society that you don't want to necessarily force those people essentially into exile.

it is a complex set of trade-offs. you might say of course the fact that whites were the landholders, social justice now just reverse it not. so let's kick out not to give the land away cheated people who've been apprised. but you know again very directly in some of those debates you see the complexity of how you effect third parties some of whom might have some guilt, that might be another ways the image of the countries is now basing itself on the rule of law. so those are the kinds of trade-offs that you have to make. even if the goal of justice is an unquestionably desirable goal. but that is just one example and we could enter into, you know two other examples.

rent stabilization is a complicated problem from the point of view as social justice or redistribution. in new york it results in quite a few people who are well off living in very cheap apartments and other effects in terms of generally driving up the price of housing. but then people say there are values in maintaining mixed neighborhoods and continuity of neighborhoods in someone and that has azygos social externality. again, if you have social justice or social equality, it is easy to say this is perverse. when you then build another kinds of human goods that may be affected by those of us sees it becomes a kind of complex trade-off. i am not saying that. some conservatives would say something like that to try and convince you to do nothing about it is complex.

there are perverse incentives. you might get more social justice here but creating other social costs air. i am not at all doing that. i am saying it is complex but we should still be advanced being the cause of social justice even though we have to be cautious and reflect their about how other values are even affected by the way in which we seek social justice. >> it is the purpose of politics is basically to produce order and security both domestically and in the world foreign policy and that is the purpose of government. so this is the kind of state view, 19th century view which sort of keeps coming back.

i haven't read everything written by any means but i haven't come across a discussion in which he would basically argue for more purpose of politics and basically security. he doesn't put the argument -- i haven't seen them put in the bold terms of 19th century liberals. but he seems to be arguing again and again in many of these votes that the situation of man is such so precarious so conditional and contingent and so open to the violence which can be released in politics particularly if the people get involved in politics that this is the most important thing to avoid which produces peace and

order. that is the thing. the other is secondary. am i wrong about that? >> well, i think you are partly right and partly wrong. certainly ,-com,-com ma when he was young, i have a sense that strauss did admire germany. in other words, as he put it in a talk he gave here in chicago there is a certain kind of order that was created. you know there was an enlightened civil surveys that advise the rulers. they prevented mass violence that did not happen for a long time. definitely he admired order when contrasted with mass violence

and radical insecurity including for jewish. but you know, his mature reflections on politics make it very clear that one reason he is very much inclined to the perspective of the classics is precisely because the tendency from the origins of modern political philosophy is perhaps to overemphasize or place almost an exclusive war overriding concerns on security. if you've read the chapter on class of natural right and history the brick you alluded to when you asked a question, you will see strauss presents the classical view is one that tries to cope with there being two roots of legitimacy. one is the goal of human perfection that political life ought to support people for

selling their highest capacities. and the need for order for basic stability or society. the solution of the political problem for at least as he articulates the position of the classics and natural right and history is precisely the balancing of those imperatives because there is a trade-off he recognizes in many situations. so when a situation where he societies under great read either internal disorder from civil war boyfriend before an enemy, there would be more of an emphasis on order unnecessarily and then sacrifice of the concern with human perfection. what strauss is very clear about is the orientation of political life towards human perfection requires freedom. his conception of freedom is a

little different from liberal conception of freedom. not all that different from alamance but it is a conception of freedom that is cannot did to the perceived need for freedom in order to pursue. so strauss is often viewed as being totally critical of democracy. if you read his lecture there is often praised of democracy. i remember one where he objects to democracy killed socrates and then send a reply as well, the fact is that they've disabled to live until 70 years of age and engage in the activity he did in cajun and if it weren't a democracy, that would not be so profitable. my sense is the thought you and

the regime in which the highest human activity for the highest human order which is the order of thinking as possible is something like a democracy. it is true that he explored more conservative options in his writing but this situation in the jewish and islamic middle east or in the cities has a little course on and to available political options in times that even now he articulated a kind of conservative politics it doesn't really ultimately i think determine fundamentally

his judgment on liberal democracy which is its emergence in the anglo-american world and evolution and go american world and perhaps also in the european community towards the end of his life. definitely said jess the most satisfactory way of combining the concern for human perfection for excellence on one hand with the concern for order and stability on the other. but yeah this is where stress is fundamentally non-imperialistic. he doesn't believe that this would necessarily be the regime that you would want to impose a crude legitimately impose on any other culture and society. there might be societies where, for example, religion would have a public road on characteristic of contemporary and go american liberal democracy. he might have to think differently about how freedom in order our balance, given a

function of religion and the mother society. one area where strauss is very modest or cautious is in the idea that one can explore the regime. one can explore general principles of politics such as that one could make politics are the highest human good to the extent possible with sensibility, but you cannot or should not ask for one formula for political regime around the world. [inaudible] thank you for coming home. we hope that you will sign books and many of you will purchase a book. thank you for coming tonight. >> just to say something about the boat. it turns out that cambridge has

sold out in north america. i actually had to bring a number of author's copies here tonight for sale. if you buy a copy command not only will it be autographed, but it will be one of the first that ever came off the printing press. it is going to be back in stock soon. they are reprinting up right now. this is a small hyenas. thank you so much. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

>> a look now at the current sla nonfiction books according to "the new york times."

>> pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist is next on booktv. he recalls the influx of nokia to enter the united states following world war ii and reports that many of these men were granted clearance by the u.s. government to employ them as scientists, intelligence officers, engineers and spies. this is about an hour. >> we're really fortunate to have with us this evening and experienced investigative reporter.