Abstract
This article argues that an engagement with the political philosophy of Leo Strauss is of considerable value in International Relations (IR), in relation to the study of both recent US foreign policy and contemporary IR theory. The question of Straussian activities within and close to the foreign policy-making establishment in the United States during the period leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq has been the focus of significant scholarly and popular attention in recent years. This article makes the case that several individuals influenced by Strauss exercised considerable influence in the fields of intelligence production, the media and think tanks, and traces the ways in which elements of Strauss’ thought are discernible in their interventions in these spheres. It further argues that Strauss’ political philosophy is of broader significance for IR insofar as it can be read as a securitising response to the dangers he associated with the foundationlessness of the modern condition. The article demonstrates that the politics of this response are of crucial importance for contemporary debates between traditional and critical IR theorists.
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Notes
The play, entitled Embedded, was written and directed by Tim Robbins, and was staged in Los Angeles, New York, London, Chicago and elsewhere. It featured parodies of members of Bush's war cabinet chanting and proclaiming their allegiance to Strauss (see Minowitz, 2009, p. 20).
The documentary, The Power of Nightmares, was written and directed by Adam Curtis and enjoyed a good deal of publicity, including a screening at the Cannes Film Festival in 2005.
He continues: ‘it is equally important not to over-estimate the influence or the specificity of the Straussian position … [because] the roots of neoconservatism are broader than Straussian philosophy alone’.
Such a conflation is demonstrated, for instance, in Jim George's reference to ‘Straussian inspired neo-conservatives’ (2005, p. 174).
Whether or not such a sustained engagement with Strauss’ political philosophy is the necessary condition for inclusion in the category ‘Straussian’, or indeed the only or principle means by which Straussian influence is possible, is itself an important question. I would submit that the dissemination of Straussian ideas has been pervasive in ways other than direct engagement with his writings; as the article will show, textual study is by no means the only way in which Strauss’ ideas have been in circulation within the neo-con movement and beyond. However, claiming such indirect influence remains highly contentious, and the surrounding difficulties adequately demonstrating it are frequently appealed to as part of rebuttals on the part of those sympathetic to Strauss and the Straussians. This is part of the reason why this article restricts itself to a focus on those who can more directly be said to have been influenced by Strauss and be shown to operate in light of his teachings.
For a fuller exploration and defence of this claim regarding Strauss’ conceptualisation of justice, see Aggie Hirst (forthcoming). For a sense of how centrally this conceptualisation resides in the Straussian worldview, see the introduction to Harry Jaffa's introduction to Crisis of the House Divided, in which he states that it was ‘not meant to be a book about American History, except incidentally. It is in the form of a disputed question, itself a form of the Socratic dialogue. It was born in my mind when I discovered – at a time when I was studying the Republic with Leo Strauss – that the issue between Lincoln and Douglas was in substance, and very nearly in form, identical with the issue between Socrates and Thrasymachus’ (1982, p. v).
At stake here is an interesting and important issue relating to the question of liberalism's relationship to the War on Terror. The critical interventions of Prozorov, Odysseos and Mouffe, among others, are focused upon highlighting that, in the latter's terms, ‘Bush's war against terrorism is presented as the direct implementation of a Schmittian understanding of the political. To avoid the “clash of civilizations” to which this type of politics is leading, we must come back to the liberal approach and work towards the establishment of a cosmopolitan world order’ (2007, p. 147). While I am certainly sympathetic to this challenge to the totalising tendencies of (neo)liberal orthodoxy, I am not entirely sure that Schmitt offers the best means by which to advance this critique. For further discussion of this question, see Aggie Hirst, Leo Strauss and the Invasion of Iraq: Encountering the Abyss.
That enemies need only be ‘potential’ is noteworthy here. It suggests that the political defined in these terms relies upon a sense of constant possible threats and dangers rather than constant struggle against a particular enemy. The function of such an amorphous yet ever-present threat is not to orient society in a constant condition of conflict but rather to situate and thereby contribute to rendering it a coherent social group by reference to an outside or otherness that threatens it.
For further discussion of the question of Strauss’ understanding of the constitution of subjectivity, see Aggie Hirst (2010).
Although other Straussians could be identified, a detailed study of these individuals demonstrates significant connections between Strauss’ thought and their activities, and satisfies critics’ demands for specificity.
The degree to which Wolfowitz can be described as a Straussian has been a point of contention. While critics such as Drury (1999) and Norton (2004) identify him as belonging to this group, and Jeane Kirkpatrick stated in 2002 that ‘Wolfowitz is still a leading Straussian’ (Mann, 2004, p. 28), Minowitz claims, in contrast, that according to Francis Fukuyama, Wolfowitz ‘never regarded himself as a Strauss protégé’, and that he was ‘much more heavily influenced by Wohlstetter’ (2009, p. 25), his PhD supervisor. According to Solomon (2007, p. 13), Wolfowitz himself asserted on the matter: ‘I don’t particularly like the [Straussian] label, because I don’t like labels that much’. Whether this implies a dislike of the Straussian label in particular or labels more generally is unclear. Minowitz concedes that he can be identified as a ‘Straussian “in recovery” ’ (2009, p. 25) and that he ‘exited early in the journey’ (2009, p. 250) to becoming a Straussian. That he may not have realised the entire process does not entail that he was not influenced by it, as the exploration later affirms.
All three were involved in the early 1990s in the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence's Working Group on Intelligence Reform, a group established explicitly to reform intelligence practices that met over a period of 2 years, indeed Schmitt was the Group's Co-ordinator and co-edited the book publishing its findings. Schmitt is also a former executive director of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a position to which he was appointed by Reagan in 1984, and has been involved in the activities of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Shulsky held a position as a senior scholar at the National Strategy Information Centre (NSIC), as well as working for the RAND Corporation. He was also active alongside the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the 1980s, and Director of the Office of Special Plans from its inception in 2002. Wolfowitz was a member of the Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the US Intelligence Community in the mid-1990s.
The question of the OSP as the appropriate name for the office within which interventions were made has been the subject of some debate. The Department of Defense's 2007 review concludes that the ‘term Office of Special Plans has become generic terminology for the activities of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, including the Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group and Policy Support Office’. The term will be employed in this generic capacity in what follows not least because those calling for the DoD inquiry, as well as the popular and scholarly debate surrounding the affair, have done so.
This is not to suggest that such methods are themselves unproblematic nor that they should not be subject to critique. Rather, it is to highlight the problems associated with the deliberate removal of practices intended to promote the reliability of information.
The connection made here between the activities of Straussians in the sphere of intelligence and those involved in producing the Weekly Standard is noteworthy, and will be explored later.
These Straussians have considerable institutional affiliations: Jaffa is Distinguished Fellow at the Claremont Institute; Schmitt, Mansfield and Wolfowitz are connected to the American enterprise Institute; Shulsky has worked for the RAND Corporation; Kristol is closely connected to the Carnegie Endowment; Shulsky, Schmitt and Wolfowitz have had dealings with the NSIC.
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Larry George, Maja Zehfuss, Angie Wilson and Chris Rossdale for their engagement with this article and the broader project from which it is taken. Thanks are also extended to Rob Howse for informative discussions relating to several issues raised in it, and to an anonymous reviewer.
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Hirst, A. Leo Strauss and International Relations: The politics of modernity's abyss. Int Polit 49, 645–670 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2012.23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2012.23