New Books
The History of Political Philosophy by Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey
The long deceased and formerly obscure University of Chicago political philosopher Leo Strauss was elevated in the past decade in parts of the American Left into a bizarre kind of mystical bogeyman figure. An imperialist ghost who orchestrated the invasion of Iraq from beyond the grave and from whose cranium the Neoconservatives were born, fully grown and armed with think tank sinecures and contracts with FOXnews. Strauss was none of those things but he was a respected scholar in the Chicago tradition; this weighty tome of a book received a further endorsement from Lexington Green, which tipped the scales for me.
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Justin Boland:
January 2nd, 2013 at 5:25 pm
Yeah, whenever my more Lib’rul friends bring up their bemused shock at what a Bond Villain the non-literate Right Wing has inflated George Soros into, I cannot help but remind them of their own Straussphobia Breakout. This reminder usually results in a conversation that indicates they haven’t yet recovered.
.
(Still, I do think Alinskyphobia is even more bizarre, as mental conditions go.)
zen:
January 3rd, 2013 at 2:29 am
Hi Justin,
There is a large emphasis on Alinsky in the right blogosphere/press. While Alinsky was something of a mentor figure to older Boomers who were Left activists in their youth, kind of like A.J. Muste was, he was also very much from a different era and I think with his focus on the dowtrodden would make him a poor fit with the causes of the UMC Harvard/Yale/Wall St. “progressives” of today. I also suspect that Alinsky would probably be partly proud and partly aghast at how his former protege Hillary turned out