Jennie Strauss Clay piece in NYTimes on Friday

[Michael Eisenstadt]

Byron,

there are some weird things here. she thinks the
ONLY class of his she attended was on Xenopon's Cyropaidia?
thinks?

I had 8 or so transcripts of these classes (students
taped them) but unfortunately they burned in a fire
Madelon had in one of her studios (1980). i assume
she has copies likewise as well as his published books.
her scholarship definitely reflects Straussian influence:
she elucidates the ancient texts without bringing various
modern ideologies to the table to color her observationS.

she useta be married (maybe still is) to a classicist
named Diskin Clay whose scholarship if i remember aright
was lame and non-Straussian. i met her once at an APA
convention

Mike

-----

The Real Leo Strauss
By JENNY STRAUSS CLAY


CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.
Recent news articles have portrayed my father, Leo Strauss, as the 
mastermind behind the neoconservative ideologues who control United 
States foreign policy. He reaches out from his 30-year-old grave, we are 
told, to direct a "cabal" (a word with distinct anti-Semitic overtones) 
of Bush administration figures hoping to subject the American people to 
rule by a ruthless elite. I do not recognize the Leo Strauss presented 
in these articles.

My father was not a politician. He taught political theory, primarily at 
the University of Chicago. He was a conservative insofar as he did not 
think that change is necessarily change for the better.

Leo Strauss believed in the intrinsic dignity of the political. He 
believed in and defended liberal democracy; although he was not blind to 
its flaws, he felt it was the best form of government that could be 
realized, "the last best hope." He was an enemy of any regime that 
aspired to global domination. He despised utopianism — in our time, 
Nazism and Communism — which is predicated on the denial of a 
fundamental and even noble feature of human nature: love of one's own. 
His heroes were Churchill and Lincoln. He was not an observant Jew, but 
he loved the Jewish people and he saw the establishment of Israel as 
essential to their survival.

To me, what characterized him above all else was his total lack of 
vanity and self-importance. As a result, he had no interest in honors 
within the academy, and was completely unsuited to political ambition. 
His own earliest passion, he confessed, was to spend his life raising 
rabbits (Flemish Giants) and reading Plato.

He was first and foremost a teacher. He did not seek to mold people in 
his own image. Rather, he was devoted to helping young people see the 
world as it is, in all its misery and splendor. The objects of his 
teaching were the Great Books, those works generally recognized as the 
foundation of a liberal education. But that alone was not a sufficient 
reason for reading them.

He began where good teachers should begin, from his students' received 
opinions, in order to scrutinize their foundation. At that time, as is 
still true today, academia leaned to the left; hence such questioning 
required an examination of the left's tenets. Had the prevailing beliefs 
been different, they too would have been subject to his skeptical inquiry.

Among the received opinions of the time was an unquestioned faith in 
progress and science combined with a queasiness regarding any kind of 
moral judgment, or "relativism." Many young people were confused, 
without a compass, with nothing substantial to admire. My father's 
turning them to the Great Books was thus motivated not merely by 
aesthetic or antiquarian interest, but by a search for an understanding 
of mankind's present predicament: what were its sources and what, if 
any, were the alternatives? The latter he found in the writings of the 
ancient Greeks.

Furthermore, he insistently confronted his students with the question of 
the "good life." For him, the choice boiled down to the life in 
accordance with Revelation or the life according to Reason — Jerusalem 
versus Athens. The vitality of Western tradition, he felt, lay in the 
invigorating tension between the two.

IMPORTANT PARAGRAPH HERE:

My father saw reading not as a passive exercise but as taking part in an 
active dialogue with the great minds of the past. One had to read with 
great care, great respect, and try, as he always said, to "understand 
the author as he understood himself." Today this task, admittedly 
difficult and demanding, is dismissed in fashionable academia as 
impossible. Rather, we are told, each reader inevitably constructs his 
own text over which the author has no control, and the writer's 
intentions are irrelevant.

END OF IMPORTANT PARAGRAPH

The fact is that Leo Strauss also recognized a multiplicity of readers, 
but he had enough faith in his authors to assume that they, too, 
recognized that they would have a diverse readership. Some of their 
readers, the ancients realized, would want only to find their own views 
and prejudices confirmed; others might be willing to open themselves to 
new, perhaps unconventional or unpopular, ideas. I personally think my 
father's rediscovery of the art of writing for different kinds of 
readers will be his most lasting legacy.

Although I was never a student of my father's, I sat in on a class of 
his in the 1960's; I think it was on Xenophon's "Cyropaedia." He was a 
small, unprepossessing and, truth be told, ugly man (daughters are their 
parents' worst critics), with none of the charisma that one associates 
with "great teachers." And yet there was something utterly charming. One 
of the students would read little chunks of the text, and my father 
would comment and call for discussion. What marked this class was a 
combination of an engagement with questions of the highest seriousness 
(in this case, what is the best form of government) with the laughter of 
intellectual play.

It was magic. If only the truth had the power to make the 
misrepresentations of his achievement vanish like smoke and dust.

Jenny Strauss Clay is a professor of classics at the University of Virginia.