The reader of Bret Stephens latest what to name it?
University administrators sometimes ask how their institutions can best serve democracy. For decades, many believed that their role was to serve as instruments of social change. Diversity, equity and inclusion programs, especially in hiring and admissions, were one part of the tool kit. Politicized academic departments, often with the word “studies” attached to them, were another.
A new report from a committee of Yale professors takes a different view. The purpose of the university, it says quite simply, is “to preserve, create and share knowledge.” The method is academic excellence. To the extent that universities are supposed to serve democracy, it’s by becoming considerably more meritocratic.
Editor: Reader explore Mr. Stephens’ educational portfolio via Wikipedia
Bret Stephens was educated at the University of Chicago, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts (BA) with honors in 1995, and the London School of Economics, where he earned a Master of Science (MSc). He attended boarding school at the Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts.
Editor: Reader be sure to read McGeorge Bundy’ reviews of Buckley’s ‘God and Man at Yale’ from November 1951, as a kind of model that Stephens might have attempted to model his latest diatribe: except his political/intelectual ignorance got in his way!
The Attack on Yale
“God and Man at Yale, written by William F. Buckley, Jr., is a savage attack on that institution as a hotbed of ‘atheism’ and ‘collectivism.’ I find the book is dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory, and a discredit to its author.”
Editor: M.F. Burnyeat supplies to the reader, of the political present, in the New York Review of Books of 1985, Stephens political precursors… that even such a fellow traveler as Francis Fukuyama has abandoned ship for ‘Liberalism’ ?
Editor: M.F. Burnyeat eviserats the Strasssian Cadre, from October 10, 1985Q
Glad as I am to have helped Professor Cropsey understand the book he edited, I beg to remind him that not everything written in code deserves the effort, be it large or small, of deciphering the author’s meaning. The intention of being profound is not the same as a profound intention.
Likewise, while the effort which has been devoted to translating Strauss into various languages is evident from the (incomplete) listing in the bibliography to Studies in Platonic Philosophy, this effort has not been rewarded by the emergence of a following, let alone a cult like that which Strauss and Straussian teachers have managed to create in the US. For example, Strauss in Italian has been received with sustained and often hostile criticism, which is documented by P. Taboni in Studi Urbinati 48 (1974), pp. 191–220, and G. Giorgini in Il Mulino 33 (1984), pp. 396–416. In fact, the hypothesis of “Mr. Strauss’s charisma” (a phrase to be appreciated by initiates who have read Strauss on Weber) seems to be amply confirmed by Professor Jaffa’s letter.
Let me then assure Professor Jaffa that, whatever the historical genesis of his belief in the meaningfulness of the great questions, there are lots of non-Straussians who dispute the fact-value dichotomy and who have never even been tempted by the historicist fallacy as he describes it. What has Jaffa been reading for the past forty years? He illustrates non-Straussian political philosophy by quoting one statement from a book published in 1922 and inventing for it a positivistic meaning which, in its context (p. 277), it does not have. He surely has had time to catch up with the 1942 reprint of Becker’s book, whose preface states that the brutalities of Nazism have enabled men once more to believe that “liberty, equality, fraternity” and “inalienable rights of men” are phrases that denote realities.
Becker was interested in the conditions which make certain beliefs possible (a worthwhile and important inquiry, which need not lead to relativism). He meant that in 1942 it had become possible to return to a faith that the nineteenth century had lost. In his humane, gentlemanly way he would perhaps have wondered at the intellectual environment and educational influences which enabled Jaffa in 1959 to write that the differences between Lincoln and Aristotle on the justice of slavery are more apparent than real, on this basis commending to his twentieth-century readers the proposition that in circumstances of economic scarcity it could be just to sanction the ownership of slaves (Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided, Doubleday, 1959, pp. 342–346). So much for Jaffa on natural right as “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.”
The manner in which Jaffa commends his proposition about slavery can be compared to the manner in which Strauss commends to his readers the proposition that the just citizen is one who helps his friends and harms his enemies: by exegetical pleading rather than by independent argument. We are not given reasons why we should believe these propositions true, only reasons why Lincoln/Aristotle/Xenophon’s Socrates should be thought to have believed them true. Disturbing recommendations with far-reaching political consequences are to be accepted on the strength of nothing more than a systematic misreading of “old books” (Jaffa’s understanding of Aristotle is abysmal). No wonder Jaffa appeals to the tablets of law brought down by Moses from Sinai. But no wonder also that my review, when considering the enormous influence of Strauss and his ideas in the US, should call attention to the presence of a Straussian on the National Security Council, which directs the work of the CIA and advises the President on his dealings with “enemies.”
The point, as I expressed it, was that “something more than an academic quarrel is taking place” when Strauss defends his eccentric views. His misreadings of old books are not merely influential. They could have consequences in the real world of politics. If I had been writing a critique of monetarism, showing it to be an ill-conceived theory derived by special pleading from data inadequately grasped, it would not, I submit, be McCarthyite to note the presence of a leading monetarist among the President’s economic advisers.
We need not debate “the precise sense” of the term McCarthyite (that rhetorical flourish merely reveals the imprecision of the writer’s sense). For Professor Bloom’s letter is itself a prime example of Straussian hermeneutics. The idea of a Straussian political conspiracy was hatched in Bloom’s mind; it appears nowhere in the text of my review. Nor did I argue, “Carnes Lord served in the National Security Council, therefore he lacks scholarly integrity.” (For the record, Lord’s published work shows him to be a better scholar in the field of ancient political philosophy than either Strauss or Bloom.) Would it be McCarthyite to add that Bloom’s systematic misreading of my text is designed to have practical consequences?
The saddest feature of Bloom’s response is his apparent inability to distinguish between criticism and persecution, irony and malice. Rather than give a reasoned reply either to my essay or to Charles R. Kesler’s calmly argued critique in the National Review, he immediately divides the world into friends and enemies of the Straussian truth. The same “paranoid logic” (to borrow Bloom’s precise phrase) is evident in Professor Cropsey’s letter. Never mind that my review was gentleness itself compared to the scorn and derision with which Strauss reviewed Collingwood, for example, or Eric Havelock. The Master must be sacrosanct; he is too serious a thinker for reasoned discussion, not to mention David Levine’s cartoon.
It is all so unlike Strauss’s hero (and mine) Plato, who believed that the essence of philosophy is to be found in argument and discussion infused with irony and playful levity, and who surrounded himself, in the Academy he created, with men who disagreed with his ideas and did their best to refute them. That is why I put quotation marks round the word “philosopher” as it occurs in Straussian writings. Cropsey may be indignant but Strauss’s conception of what a philosopher is stands so far from Plato’s that it would be misleading to appear to accept that they are talking about the same thing. For the same reason I am happy to acknowledge that I belong to the “conventional establishment” consisting of readers of Plato since the fourth century BC who have found in the expressed meanings of Plato’s dialogues the paradigm of great philosophy.
This brings me to the arguments of Professors Weinrib, Pangle, and Orwin—and all honor to them for replying with arguments, at least on questions of interpretation—about the role of the philosopher in Plato’s Republic.
Weinrib’s argument supposes that one can derive or discern a general principle or definition of justice from a single example of just action. This is a mistake; a mistake, moreover, of a type which Plato’s Socrates is constantly correcting (e.g., at the beginning of the Euthyphro). The philosophers’ undertaking to rule the ideal city does fall under the principle of helping one’s friends and harming one’s enemies, but it also falls under thirty-one other principles, including Thrasymachus’s definition of justice as serving the interests of the stronger. Thus the nonphilosophical majority is the largest and so the strongest group in the city, and Socrates has already shown how their interests will be best looked after if they are governed by philosophers. By parity of reasoning Weinrib should conclude that Thrasymachus’s definition “remains decisive” despite being the main target of Socrates’ criticism both in Book I and in the remainder of the Republic.
The truth is that to discover what principle of justice motivates the philosophers to rule it is necessary to read Plato rather than Strauss. In the context we are considering Socrates does not simply say that it is just for the philosophers to undertake the tasks of government. He explains why it is just, as follows:
It’s not the concern of law that any one class in the city fare exceptionally well, but it contrives to bring this about in the entire city, harmonizing the citizens by persuasion and compulsion, making them share with one another the benefit which each person is able to bring to the community. And it produces such men in the city not in order to let them turn whichever way each wants, but in order that it may use them in binding the city together.
(Republic, 519e–520a; Bloom’s translation, with corrections)
This implies that the claim on the philosophers arises from the impartial justice of a set of social arrangements which requires everyone, without exception, to contribute what they are able to contribute to the good of everyone else. (If the philosophers are able to contribute more than other people; so be it: they will be the first to recognize that it is only just that they do so.) This principle of everyone doing what they are best suited to do to the benefit of everyone else is the principle established in Book IV of the Republic as constitutive of the justice of the ideal city. We have no alternative but to accept it as Plato’s answer to Weinrib’s question “Under what principle of justice is it just for the philosophers to rule?”
Besides, from Plato’s point of view Weinrib’s answer has the priorities the wrong way round. The citizens of the ideal city do not benefit each other because they are friends; rather, they are friends because they benefit each other (Republic 462a ff.)
So much for the question whether the philosophers can be induced to rule in the ideal city itself. Professors Pangle and Orwin are quite right that the passage under discussion presupposes the ideally just city already in existence. In a state which is not run for the benefit of all but only for the mutual advantage of some group of “friends,” there is no social justice to make claims on the philosopher to participate. Accordingly, I did not argue, as Pangle and Orwin imagine, that the passage shows that the ideal city can come into existence. I argued that, when correctly understood, the passage does not show, as Strauss imagined (The City and Man, p.124), that the ideal city cannot come into existence. I was rebutting Strauss’s contention that the ideal city is intrinsically impossible, because the philosophers could not be induced to rule. Pangle and Orwin appear to agree with me, against Strauss, that they could be induced to rule if the ideal city is already in existence. In which case we have to look elsewhere in the Republic to decide whether Plato means us to think that the ideal city could not come into being.
Socrates says emphatically at 499d that it is not impossible that somewhere, sometime, a divine inspiration should give those in power a passion for philosophy or that some necessity should constrain one or more philosophers to take charge of a city; perhaps it has already happened far away or in the distant past. As in the passage discussed above, Socrates insists that a philosopher will take part in politics only with reluctance and from necessity, i.e., because he sees compelling reasons to do so. The compelling argument will be different from the argument from social justice which constrains the philosophers who have been educated within the ideal city, but that difference provides no basis for impugning Socrates’ sincerity when he asserts here, as elsewhere, that it is possible for Utopia to get started. The ideal city will get started by one argument and continued by another: there is no logical absurdity in that, merely the difference between an argument about preserving justice and an argument about bringing it into being.
If Pangle and Orwin reply that the passage they quote implies that it would actually be unjust for philosophers who have not been educated in the ideal city to take part in the launching of Utopia, the answer is that the original Greek implies no such thing. There is a difference between the philosophers’ not having a duty to take part in politics and their having a duty not to take part. Bloom’s translation, used by Pangle and Orwin for the second sentence of their quotation, may suggest the latter, but the former would be more adequate to Plato’s Greek. This is not the place to discuss the nuances of a translation (where Bloom writes “has justice on its side,” Plato is not using his normal word for justice but a more archaic one, appropriate to the situation he is describing in which social justice does not yet exist), but the substance of the point I am making is confirmed at 496d, where Socrates gives as the reason why a philosopher will keep out of the present-day politics of actual cities the lack of “an ally with whose aid one could safely champion the cause of justice.” The consideration is conditional. It would lapse if an ally was found with enough power to help make justice real. (I wonder whether Weinrib believes that a Platonic philosopher would find many such allies in the present administration of the US.)
Weinrib, however, has a more general argument for supposing that Plato does not mean what Socrates explicitly says in the various passages we have now examined. He appeals to Plato’s Phaedrus and to the Seventh Letter as favoring Strauss’s approach to “the meaning” of a Platonic text rather than mine. Strauss had the same thought (The City and Man, pp. 52–54), though he wisely refrained from mentioning the Seventh Letter, which may be a forgery. But Strauss had to use Straussian hermeneutics on the Phaedrus to get that dialogue to justify using Straussian hermeneutics on other Platonic texts. An appeal to the Phaedrus does nothing to extricate the Straussian approach from the vicious circularity with which I charged it.
Platonic scholarship urgently needs a decent understanding of what the Phaedrus means to say about writing. But that understanding will require literary methods more sophisticated than any that Strauss purveyed. Nor can it be assumed in advance that the Phaedrus aims to tell us how to read the Republic. One of the many objectionable features of the Straussian approach is the blunderbuss way it treats all dialogues alike. In place of the scintillating variety which Plato’s artistry created, Strauss puts “the Platonic dialogue” and a uniform Maimonidean recipe for decoding its hidden meaning. And yet, if Professor Gordis is right, this whole saga of misreading began with a misreading of Maimonides.
In considering this, the last but certainly not the least important letter, we should distinguish two Straussian claims:
(1)The Guide of the Perplexed is an example of “esoteric literature,” whose message is “written between the lines.”
(2) The message between its lines is that philosophy and religion cannot be reconciled.
I did not endorse claim (2), but wrote of Strauss “having, as he thought, discovered” that Maimonides meant the opposite of what he said; Gordis truncates the relevant passage in my review, omitting “as he thought.” Nevertheless, Gordis’s confirmation of my skepticism about claim (2) is a sufficient answer to Pangle and Orwin’s complaint that I neglected Strauss’s treatment of “the theological-political problem.” There is a limit to the number of confusions one can tackle in a single review.
As regards claim (1), however, I plead guilty. I was impressed with the fact that Maimonides does—Gordis seems not to deny this—instruct the learned reader how to gather his meaning from hints, indications, and deliberate contradictions. For example, the seventh cause of contradiction is the following:
In speaking about very obscure matters it is necessary to conceal some parts and to disclose others. Sometimes in the case of certain dicta this necessity requires that the discussion proceed on the basis of a certain premise, whereas in another place necessity requires that the discussion proceed on the basis of another premise contradicting the first one. In such cases the vulgar must in no way be aware of the contradiction; the author accordingly uses some device to conceal it by all means.
(p. 18 in the Pines translation)
Two pages later Maimonides tells us that contradictions from this seventh cause are to be found in The Guide of the Perplexed. Strauss certainly has more to go on here than he has with Plato. But I should be only too happy to have a critic like Gordis take me through the Guide explaining in detail how and where Strauss has got it wrong.
Meanwhile, readers who have found much of this polemic distasteful can recover their good humor by reading a short story by Oscar Wilde entitled “The Sphinx Without a Secret.”
Editor: As impressive as Mr. Stephens academic record appears, he is by his own admission not just a Zionist Loyalist, but former editor of the Jerusalem Post! Yet the reader arrives at Stephens expression of teped doubt framed as: But is it enough? I have my doubts. A wan pathtic riff on Martin Luther? Its hard to be patient with Stephens as diagnotician of the problems at Yale, that blossoms into Sebastian Venable’s Garden!
Editor: The final paragraphs of Stephens diatribe: The as if here is that Stephens, a newspaper columnist and perenial scold, somehow posses in great quantity the wisdom of the ages, that has eluded the Educators of the political present? Stephens possesses what these Educators do not, hubris!
Either those programs must change or universities should look more broadly for intellectual talent. The road to wisdom cannot lie in the indentured servitude of graduate-school education, capped by an unread (and frequently unreadable) dissertation.
Finally, universities will struggle to reform and improve themselves if they can’t recover a sense of what a university is for. That’s not just a credentialing agency — their de facto current role — or even a knowledge factory, which is the Yale committee’s aspiration. It’s something altogether deeper: a place where the universe of knowledge connects; where sustained engagement across multiple disciplines, enlivened by a genuine contest of ideas, nurtures the capacity for mature independent thought; where the rigor of a difficult education, enforced by a realistic prospect of failure, puts sharp young minds on a path to originality and self-understanding.
I doubt that the Yale committee would have been convened, much less produced its excellent report, if the decline in public trust hadn’t been matched by the Supreme Court ruling effectively ending affirmative action in college admissions, and by the Trump administration’s blunderbuss assault on universities. The first helped dismantle a bureaucratic infrastructure that, in practice, undermined academic achievement in admissions and hiring; the second put the fear of God in university leaders who had been afraid to rattle a campus consensus.
It shouldn’t take blunt political pressure to get universities to reform and redeem themselves. Here’s hoping they can act before they are acted upon.
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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