Capítulo 3: Diseño y desarrollo de solución
3.3 Desarrollo del Diseño
3.3.4 Desarrollo del programa informático
The story that the conservative writer Russell Kirk told was that Frank Meyer, an ex- communist free market intellectual, had approached the head of the right-wing Volker Fund. Meyer pitched the executive an idea for a project but was turned down. Recovering, Meyer, “apparently on previous suggestion,” proposed to “attack Kirk.” In his cups, the executive announced, “I’ll buy that” and accordingly gave Meyer a small grant.1 Whether this story, which Kirk heard from one of his “secret agents,” is true or not is unclear. The story, and the article that Frank Meyer wrote, show that during the early- to mid-1950s, the New Conservatives and
writers like Kirk had rehabilitated the concept and language of conservatism and conservative identity, but that this discourse was not universally accepted by other intellectuals on the right.
At the time, Kirk and his allies-turned-rivals among the New Conservatives were formulating a language of postwar conservatism which included proponents of alternative traditions of right-wing thought that intersected with the newly rehabilitated discourse of conservatism. This chapter primarily follows two right-wing critiques of the prevailing conceptions of liberalism, especially as they connected with Russell Kirk’s career and with conservatism and rival non-liberal critiques, namely “Straussianism” and “individualism”. “Straussianism”, refers to the work of Leo Strauss and especially his American students who wrote about the United States for an exclusively academic audience during the 1950s. They
critiqued liberalism as philosophically void and frail in the face of tyranny. More popular than the elitist Straussianism, “individualism” promoted an unreconstructed, pre-Depression, small government philosophy against the “statism” of the era. Both traditions were deeply anti- communist and represented different types of right-wing thought. The advocates of both traditions worked to ground their ideas in the wider American political tradition. It is
anachronistic to call these traditions “conservative.” They were distinct traditions of thought more accurately described as critiques of midcentury liberalism. Although both engaged with the concept of conservatism, they kept it at arm’s length. The sometimes-bitter disagreements
between these right-wing intellectual traditions and the Straussian and individualist
dissatisfaction with the language and precepts of conservatism shows that in the mid-1950s, conservatism was not a unifying discourse or identity.
The final third of this chapter discusses Henry Regnery and Russell Kirk’s fraught effort to establish a journal as a way of influencing American culture and as a tool to shape the
meaning of conservatism. Kirk’s struggle to launch Modern Age and his ultimate break with it suggests that his moment as a defining voice of conservatism came and went fairly quickly in the 1950s as he was replaced with new and more potent spokesmen and organizations that acted as effective sites of identity construction for the American right.
What does it mean to be on the Americam right or right-wing? The spatial metaphor derives its meaning from the seating pattern of the French National Assembly before and during the French Revolution. It is typically envisioned on a continuum and thus smuggles in numerous assumptions about the proximate relationships between different political positions – between
left and right, between far left and far right, an implication of parity, and so on.2 As far as
defining right-wing goes, for my purposes, right is in opposition to-, or the antithesis of- the left. If we take the left to mean a general drive toward egalitarian emancipation, the right is to
criticize or oppose these movements. The political theorist Corey Robin calls the right “a meditation on—and theoretical rendition of—the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.”3 The right, in Robin’s formulation, is a justification of hierarchy, inequality, and even domination and a reassertion of threatened privileges. Despite his claims about the right’s underlying drives, Robin recognizes and is justifiably intrigued by the sheer variety and complexity of right-wing thought.4
Robin’s framework has considerable merit, but its emphasis on power and domination does not reflect the lived experiences of many on the American right. It also appears to create demands about deep-seated motives and social, political, or economic status that can be difficult to show about specific thinkers. By abstracting out his definition with such a focus on anti- leftism, Robin also, perhaps, gives short shrift to the sincerity of right-wing thinkers and true believers. At the other end of the spectrum, the historian George Nash defines, in this case, conservatism as “resistance to certain forces perceived to be leftist, revolutionary, and
profoundly subversive of what conservatives at the time deemed worth cherishing, defending, and perhaps dying for.”5 In other words, the right is opposition to leftism in defense of higher values. The political scientist George Hawley offers a similar definition: the right encompasses
2 Steven Lukes, “Epilogue: The Grand Dichotomy of the Twentieth Century,” The Cambridge History of Twentieth-
Century Political Thought, ed. Terrence Ball and Richard Bellamy, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 606-7.
3 Robin, The Reactionary Mind, 3.
4 Robin, The Reactionary Mind.
all ideologies that “while not necessarily rejecting equality as a social good, do not rank it at the top of the hierarchy of values” and opposes left-wing ideology when equality impinges on its preferred good.6 If Robin overemphasizes privilege and power, Nash is vague about what constitutes left and Hawley, I think, is too willing to take conservative intellectuals at face value regarding the principles and social goods they prioritize. Although as general practice, it is valuable, empathetic, and intellectually honest to understand right-wing men and women as they understood themselves, at times right-wing incoherence and inconsistency belies their appeals to higher values and this must be reckoned with.
The Italian jurist Norberto Bobbio provides what I think is the most useful framing of the right-left dichotomy. Like the others summarized here, Bobbio treats the left as an emancipatory and egalitarian project. To the left, inequalities are “social and as such can be eradicated.” The right, however, holds that inequalities in some form or another “are natural and cannot”, and should not, “be eradicated.”7 This formulation captures the theme, consistent in American
conservative discourse, that the right is opposed to some form of equality on the grounds that it is unnatural and attempting to create it with state power is tyrannical. It places less emphasis on power than Robin, although this is a dynamic worth paying attention to, and it is less willing than Nash to accept right-wing rhetoric without corroboration through action. What made
individualists right-wing in the 1950s was their belief that equality went against the natural right of liberty they believe to be embedded in American culture and institutions. For Straussians, their emphasis on a type of philosophy and justice incongruent equality put them on the intellectual right.
6 George Hawley, Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism, (Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 2016), 12.
7 Norberto Bobbio, Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), quotes on 67-8.
The traditionalist or “metaphysical conservatives,” represented by Russell Kirk’s circle, Straussians, and individualists were not the sum of right-wing traditions in America in the 1950s. But I have focused on these groups because of their engagement with the language of
conservatism and the concept of the American political tradition. I have focused on respectable and elite or near elite thought that shaped, reinforced, and sometimes provided cover for rougher political rhetoric. In doing so, I discuss the relationship between high intellectual conservatism, racism, and white supremacy which is often couched in abstract terms and downplayed by their defenders.8 This chapter could have instead focused on transatlantic academics and intellectuals engaged in rehabilitating (neo)liberal economics, although this group is touched on here and elsewhere.9 I have preferred a more indigenous expression of libertarian thought.
Straussian Critiques of Liberalism and Tradition
Kirk met Leo Strauss in May 1956. He called the German “a remarkable scholar, and good and courageous man.” Kirk was amused to find that Strauss was “much relieved” to find Kirk “was not the towering, wrathy, ferocious figure he had imagined.” Laughingly, Kirk reported Strauss had confessed “I’m rather small, myself, and I had feared…” when they first met.10 The two were very friendly and Kirk admired the elder man deeply.11 At the time, Strauss was a relatively obscure but well-regarded and well-pedigreed scholar. He held a Robert M.
8 Some of the scholarship of race and white supremacy that intersects with conservatism includes Hustwit, James J.
Kilpatrick; Murphy, The Rebuke of History; MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry; Crespino, In Search of Another Country.
9 See for instance Burgin, The Great Persuasion; Jones, Masters of the Universe..
10 Russell Kirk to William T. Couch, May 29, 1956, 399 in the William T. Couch Papers #3825, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (hereafter Couch Papers).
Hutchins Distinguished Service professorship at the University of Chicago.12 Despite being largely apolitical in the conventional sense, through his dynamic teaching of political philosophy, Strauss taught a generation of scholars who decisively influenced the conservative understanding of the American past.
Born in Germany in 1899, Strauss’s intellectual formation was grounded in German philosophic trends and Jewish Talmudic scholarship. He studied or corresponded with major thinkers like Ernst Cassirer, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt.13 Living through the collapse of the Weimar Republic decisively shaped Strauss. He fled Germany, first for Paris in 1932, then England, and then in 1938 began his career in the United States where he spent the rest of his life. Scarred by the Germany’s descent into Nazism, Strauss became a lifelong critic of procedural liberalism that apparently lacked the moral and philosophical resources to oppose evil. Strauss was horrified by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. He revived the archaic term “tyrant” to describe modern strongmen instead of the legalistic “dictator.” This linguistic shift is illustrative of Strauss’s project. Influenced by Heidegger’s excavation of ancient philosophy to reconstruct modern ontology, Strauss closely read classical philosophy in order to rethink two thousand years of political thought.14
12 For a short memoir of Harry Jaffa’s relationship with Strauss, see Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the Strauss Divided:
Essays on Leo Strauss and Straussianiasm, East and West (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012), 1-39.
13 Steven B. Smith, "Philosophy as a Way of Life: The Case of Leo Strauss," in Political Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Authors and Arguments, ed. Catherine Zuckert (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 61-62; Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007), 97-122.
14 Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction, New York Review Books (New York: New York
Strauss’s American career began at the New School for Social Research in New York.15 There he taught one of his first doctoral students, Harry Jaffa, a Jewish Yale graduate who wrote a dissertation on Aristotelianism and Thomism. According to his students, Strauss had greater ambitions than his obscurity at the New School.16 In the late 1940s, the imperious president of the University of Chicago, Robert Hutchins, hired Strauss, reportedly after a single interview, on the basis of Strauss’s commitment to “Great Books,” the center of Hutchins’s pedagogical vision.17 The University was “at the height of its powers,” a Midwestern rival to the Ivy League, and by moving to Chicago Strauss gained a higher salary, better students, and the possibility to make a mark on the political science discipline.18 In 1949, Strauss moved to Chicago and arranged for an appointment for two of his students, Harry Jaffa and Joseph Cropsey, at the university.19 In the same year, he gave a set of Walgreen Lectures on the concept of natural right. These became the basis of Natural Right and History, published in 1953, a book that established Strauss’s English-speaking reputation and marked him as an apparent traditionalist and defender of natural right and natural law. This reputation brought him to the attention of Christian New Conservative scholars like John H. Hallowell.20 Swiftly after arriving at Chicago, Strauss
15 Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind, 43.
16 Harry Jaffa, Leo Strauss Center Interview Transcript, December 18, 2012,
https://wslamp70.s3.amazonaws.com/leostrauss/s3fs-public/interviews/pdf/Jaffa%2C%20Harry.pdf; Ralph Lerner, Leo Strauss Center Interview Transcript, January 14, 2013, https://wslamp70.s3.amazonaws.com/leostrauss/s3fs- public/interviews/pdf/Lerner%20interview.pdf.
17 Kersch, Conservatives and the Constitution, 41-2.
18 Stanley Rosen, Leo Strauss Center Interview Transcript, May 2011,
https://wslamp70.s3.amazonaws.com/leostrauss/s3fs-public/interviews/pdf/Rosen%252C%20Stanley.pdf; Jaffa, Leo Strauss Center Interview Transcript; Lawrence Berns, Leo Strauss Center Interview, November 2010,
https://wslamp70.s3.amazonaws.com/leostrauss/s3fs-public/interviews/pdf/Berns%2C%20L.%20interview.pdf; Lerner, Leo Strauss Center Interview Transcript.
19 Jaffa, Crisis of the Strauss Divided, 9-10.
attracted a circle of talented students from within the philosophy and political science
departments and the Committee on Social Thought. Drawn by Strauss’s intelligence, enthusiasm, methodology, and preoccupations, many of these students – “Straussians” – went on to
substantial academic or political careers.
In Natural Right and History Strauss asserted that America was once dedicated to natural right by the Declaration of Independence but asked whether it had transformed and become like Germany. Strauss warned that the rejection of natural right, which he equated with nihilism, made societies vulnerable to tyranny. He critiqued two major criticisms of natural right, historicism and the distinction between facts and values – assumptions that dominated
contemporary political science. Most of the book, however, was an excavation of the concept of natural right, from its discovery at the beginning of philosophy, through its faulty modern formulations beginning with Thomas Hobbes who broke with the intellectual tradition of natural right, and into modernity. By showing that historicism emerged as a response in the crisis of the modern philosophical degradation of natural right, Strauss claimed to undermine the basis of historicism – that it arrived at the absolute moment in history.21
Natural Right and History established several major themes Strauss and his students’
would explore in their future work. It demonstrated the Straussian belief in the explanatory power of intellectual genealogies. Strauss had an extremely elevated idea of the “Western intellectual canon” across history. To him, historic thinkers were in a prolonged philosophical conversation with their forebears: they fundamentally shaped the thought-worlds of those who succeeded them. Strauss emphasized the intentionality of great thinkers, from Plato and Aristotle, through Maimonides, into modernity. Explicating the philosophical turns in the
21 Strauss, Natural Right and History; Will Herberg and John Hallowell, “A Review-Article,” The Christian
“Western tradition” explained the crises of modernity. Strauss drew a deep distinction between classical philosophy, characterized by a teleological view of natural right and belief in the
possibility of political philosophy about the nature of a good regime, and modern philosophy that lowered the aims of politics.22
Strauss’s project centered on returning to the ancient philosophers and recapturing their wisdom for, and perhaps in contradistinction of, modernity. As such, many of Strauss’s
published writings were commentaries on classic works. His classes also reflected this belief and were semester long studies of specific books.23 Strauss taught a method of reading key texts extremely closely. His most controversial innovation, or as he and his students argued, “rediscovery,” in this respect was the concept of “esoteric writing.”24 The concept of esoteric writing derived from Strauss’s insight that social persecution had profoundly affected
philosophical writing for most of history. The object of philosophy was the quest for truth, but truth often ran against the social orthodoxies of a given society. Great thinkers were therefore forced to present their deepest insights, the ones that cut against received belief, esoterically in a manner that would be overlooked by casual readers but grasped by perceptive close readers.25 On the one hand, this “reading between the lines” made explicit an intuitive concept already in wide use. On the other, it led Strauss and his students to sometimes employ unusual interpretive devices, justifying non-traditional readings of thinkers like John Locke and Maimonides, and,
22 Strauss reprised and sharpened this argument in “The Three Waves of Modernity” in in Hilail Gilden (ed.),
Political Philosophy: Sicx Essays by Leo Strauss (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975), 81-98.
23 Lawrence Berns, Leo Strauss Center Interview, November 2010,
https://wslamp70.s3.amazonaws.com/leostrauss/s3fs-public/interviews/pdf/Berns%2C%20L.%20interview.pdf; Lerner, Leo Strauss Center Interview Transcript.
24 Leo Strauss, “On a Forgotten Kind of Writing,” Chicago Review 8, no. 1 (1954): 64-75; Leo Strauss, Persecution
and the Art of Writing, University of Chicago Press ed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 25 Strauss, “Forgotten,”; Strauss, Persecution.
according to their critics, dodge evidentiary standards. These elements of Strauss’s teaching brought him and his students into conflict with elements of the political science profession. Strauss and his students became especially known for their criticism of behavioralism. Strauss imparted this combination of emphasis on ancient political philosophy, genealogical study, and close reading to his students who applied these methods and preoccupations to a variety of subjects, including America.
A few established political scientists engaged with Strauss’s work. In 1956, John Hallowell, a New Conservative political scientist at Duke University and a former student of conservative academic Gerhart Niemeyer, invited Leo Strauss down from Chicago to give a lecture.26 Despite Strauss’s “thin, high-pitched voice,” the lecture was a success.27 The two men struck up a correspondence and Hallowell encouraged Strauss to contribute to a journal he edited.28 To Hallowell and many other New Conservatives, Strauss was a potential ally against tendencies of modern liberalism in the political science profession and society writ large.29 Strauss’s students remember that in the 1950s he supported Adlai Stevenson, a Democrat and favorite son of Illinois, and this support for Stevenson placed him alongside many of the leading 26 John H. Hallowell to Leo Strauss, Nov 29, 1956, 4, Hallowell Papers.
27 Rosen, “Leo Strauss in Chicago,” 106.
28 John H. Hallowell to Leo Strauss, Feb 24, 1958; Leo Strauss to John H. Hallowell,, Feb 14, 1958; John H.