Month: May 2022

21. Finnegan, Barbarian Days (9 Oct 2017)

by kurto

A robust telling of the author’s surfing from Bohemian youth through expatriate life to escapades from New York. Finnegan grew up in northern Los Angeles and the east side of Oahu in the 1950s and 60s before heading to UC Santa Cruz, then dropping out to surfari in Hawaii, the Polynesian islands (where he discovered Tavarua), and Australia. All along, he read and wrote extensively while learning to interview locals, developing an approachable, conversational style and a leftist worldview. In Cape Town, he parlayed a chance post teaching black students into ‘frontline’ journalism, substantially launching his career. Most relatable is four years during the mid 80s in San Francisco among the ‘Doc’ Renneker crowd. But frequent surf-induced delinquency, as well as his partner’s ambitions, induced his move to metropolitan New York to become a full-time writer for the

    New Yorker

— relegating surfing to big-wave sojourns in Madeira and smash-and-grab trips around the Tri State area. Finnegan writes lucidly and patiently about wave features, making the book accessible to novices. I disagree with the assertion that surfing paradoxically combines desire to be alone with desire to perform — solace or at least friendship wins out — but enjoy the idea (attributed to Norman Mailer) that exercise without excitement, competition, or danger doesn’t strengthen the body but wears it out. Not because my own experience of exercise is weariness but as I have enjoyed training with a purpose.

22. Jones, Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism (22 Oct 2017)

by kurto

A problematic monograph studying Edmund Burke’s establishment as founder of British conservatism. Burke’s supple yet vociferous politics left the Georgian / early Victorians to decide whether he was a great statesman and who were his heirs: neither the Whigs nor the Tories could claim the whole of him, Peel and Disraeli making no overt appeals to his legacy. So too were they unsure of his Irish heritage. By mid century, however, in part because his contrasting the English constitution with French tumult, he was seen as a conservative genius — the author ignores Blackstone or Bagehot! — while Matthew Arnold and others acclaimed him a literary prodigy. Later, he became generally fashionable as an aphorist, a kind of Mark Twain. Amid constitutional reform of the 1860s, Liberals couldn’t accept his prior opposition; however, revisionist appraisals by Leslie Stephens and especially John Morley helped bring him into the Irish Home Rule debate of the 1880s. Gladstone was his foremost Liberal supporter, the Liberal Unionists used him the most. The author asserts Irish conflict, in combination with the Unionists transition to the Tories, was the turning point. When it became evident the Liberals would not reconcile, the question of who truly succeeded Burke reached its final phase, ironically echoing the split between Fox and Burke over the French Revolution. Yet there were two additional dynamics at work. Burke’s oeuvre was reduced to body of political theory, notably by Hugh Cecil, son of Lord Salisbury, in which he was recognized as a pioneer of applying historical method in deriving just politics. Separately, he was widely studied in schools as a paradigm of English rhetoric as well as the English state (in contradistinction to the French Revolution). Sensibly organized but poorly written and occasionally conceptually muddy, the work is irredeemably undermined by both a rushed ‘epilogue’ citing a David Bromwich quote as evidence Burke is not in fact at conservative at all, and more importantly failing to deliver on the title’s promise, British political conservatism being nowhere treated in the whole.

23. Meacham, Destiny and Power (7 Nov 2017)

by kurto

A political biography of George HW Bush, emphasizing his ethic of public service, conciliatory politics, and establishmentarian approach to foreign affairs. Bush was a decent man and more effective than contemporaries recognized. The biography portrays his Connecticut family’s blue blood, in which sports was a measure of character, and points up his unusual pursuit of becoming a naval aviator prior to attending college. But details of his largely independent success as a Texas oil man are sparse, as the author rushes onto Bush’s nascent political career. Reaching Washington’s upper echelon over the course of the 1960s, Bush was loyal to Nixon as he would be to Reagan — even though he was seen as a good loser. (How significant really was his rivalry with Donald Rumsfeld?) As president, he is credited with skillfully managing the Cold War’s denouement, the Iraq war, and the coup against Gorbachev. Yet despite tick-tock details supplemented by deep access to primary materials — diaries and interviews — Meacham unsatisfactorily characterizes the political revolution of 1981-92. Therefore he is less skillful in attributing the cause of Clinton’s surprise electoral win: was it poor campaigning, sociopolitical change, or something more? (The irony of Clinton’s draft dodging, in comparison with Bush’s service, is unremarked.) Ultimately, the work reads as a consensus view of America’s (Democratic) establishment from the safety of a quarter century.

24. Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century (20 Nov 2017)

by kurto

A dense yet lively account of the United Kingdom from 1815-1918, identifying the overarching themes of piecemeal reform, the political economy in the world’s first industrial power, and the rise and fall of Liberalism. Key points:

Reform
• Political reform followed significant economic change, and was initiated by Parliament-appointed commission
• The 1832 Reform Bill was the first big event, although it maintained the ascendancy of property over population. Over the long run, industrial concerns won ground at the expense of landowners, while religious disabilities were continually eased
• Implementing the new Poor Law (of 1834) and criminal justice (police work) catalyzed elected local bodies (municipal councils) and simultaneously built conduits for central (Parliamentary or Whitehall) direction
• British government was transformed in the 1840s: ordinary citizens gained civil and economic rights, sacrificing some freedoms
• Gladstone’s first ministry (1868-74), which simplified taxes and also government finance, laid the basis for the 20th-century state by reforming the civil service, military, and judiciary through introduction of competitive exams
• The schools reform of 1870, which the author says was required by continuing extension of the vote (furthered in 1884-85 and reaching full suffrage by 1918), set up local boards to monitor quality and attendance of public schools
• The curtailing of the House of Lords, the arrival of Labour as the Conservatives’ principal opposition, and the suffragette movement together heralded a more violent politics
• Poor relief transformed into demand for ‘social security’, notably through the 1909 Beveridge report, the Insurance Act of 1911, and the establishment of a Labour ministry in 1916

Political Economy
• Toward the start of the century, Commoners came to be the cabinet equals of peers, while Radicals were coequals with Liberals (Whigs) and Conservatives (Tories), through the limited franchise delayed Parliamentary recognition
• Durham’s response to Canadian riots presaged the Commonwealth and allowed for ‘responsible government’ while binding the colonies to the metropole
• Palmerston represented a pre-reform (of 1832) outlook, and acted as a brake up to 1865
• Trade unionism gained momentum after 1870, when economic growth was checked by the US (hitherto expanding westward) and united Germany. The balance of trade was now negative, most food was imported, and money once invested (and reinvested) in colonial enterprises now became vital domestic income
• Britain opted out of the de facto international system in the first half of the 19th century, largely avoiding foreign wars, but could not halt the convergence of Ottoman and Habsburg decline and the dynamics of the German naval race

Liberalism
• Social hardship entered public consciousness when it was no longer taken for granted
• Britain’s sovereign Parliament was more adaptable than continental monarchs
• Each of the Victorian era’s three phases grappled with rapid, broad changes in the country’s political economy. Mid-Victorian complacency (Palmerston, Macaulay, Russell) produced its own reaction (Dickens, Arnold, Carlyle). But reformist zeal sometimes produced overbearing results for the working classes — loss of freedom
• Bentham’s ‘greatest good’ principle animated each era of reformers. Although associated with Liberalism, there was no intrinsic connection. Separately, Liberalism viewed the state as a negative force: laissez faire worked so long as the economy was expanding
• ‘Socialized liberalism’, a fusion of archetypal utilitarianism and an activist state, took root after the panic of 1873
• Reforms often came not from Liberals but Radicals or Tories. Liberals focused on ‘adequate’ moral values; Christianity checked Victorian complacency. The Liberals sought to promote voluntarism and Radicals vied for better elections (faith in democracy); the Tories were paternalistic
• Britain’s sense of historical community and faith in its institutions was challenged in the last phase, most obviously by Home Rule, as progress through conflict turned to a zero-sum worldview
• Yet the Liberal residue in latter-day socialism tempered confrontational instincts — Marx and Engels played little role in England — and set it apart from the continent

25. Wapshott, Keynes and Hayek (3 Dec 2017)

by kurto

The preeminent argument of 20th-century economics, regarding the political utility of marco- and microeconomics, took shape in the interwar rivalry between John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek. Keynes, a Cambridge don and Bloomsbury intimate, was a ‘public intellectual’ wile Hayek, an Austrian emigre who found a home at the London School of Economics, was a theorist who only later turned to polemics. Keynes held the economy could be managed, primarily on the demand side, and rejected conventional belief in the necessity for equilibrium between savings and investment. The 1936 publication his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money transformed Western economic and political consensus, predominating through ~ 1980. Surprisingly, his rival made no reply, in contrast to his dogged challenges to Keynes’ earlier works. Hayek, defending the laissez-faire view of Alfred Marshall and Ludwig von Mises, contended that to manage demand is to manage prices, which is the individual’s role, and thus to court either inflation or contraction; further, when the stimulus is removed, increased consumption will collapse. The amount of money and speed of its movement is key to understanding an economic system. Yet improved ability to measure and calculate did not substitute for qualitative understanding: individual decisions can never be anticipated or planned. (In this respect, he agreed with Keynes that the economy rarely comes to rest, the classical equilibrium.) Keynes, later accused of being a socialist fellow traveler — not unfairly due to his Fabian associates — shrugged off planning as the route to totalitarianism, contending tyranny results from collective sociopolitical choice. Keynes began to recover ground with the 1949 founding of the libertarian Mount Pelerin society and his decamping for America. More important, at the University of Chicago, economists led by Milton Friedman, though accepting the macroeconomic premise of laissez-faire as an inadequate policy, embraced prices as core to understanding. Subsequent ‘freshwater’ economists determined inflation to be the main objective of public policy (unlike the ‘saltwater’ view of unemployment as paramount) and gave rise to supply-side economics embraced by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Moving faster than in the years of the Keynes-Hayek rivalry, the author sketches the decline of Keynesian economics over 1970-2000s. Ultimately, however, Wapshott’s history of ideas is a polemic in its own right: the Bush administration’s response to the Global Financial Crisis is portrayed as necessarily Keynesian, rather than the preliminary moves of an outgoing administration, and the last word is given by the Keynesian John Kenneth Galbraith against the now straw-man Hayek, without reference to the supply siders.

1. Himmelfarb, Past and Present (4 Jan 2018)

by kurto

A collection of essays treating giants in the history of ideas from the Victorian era forward, often with a view to present applicability. The underlying theme thus runs against historicism. One of the most enlightening chapters shows how Matthew Arnold’s stance against philistinism (i.e., belief in cultural equality) grounds opposition to the anarchy of multiculturalism. In contradistinction, to democratize culture is not to treat all forms as equal but to make the better forms available to all. William James is praised for observing that truth comes not from logic or science but experience and reflections, building on Lionel Trilling’s view that the search for truth, though likely to fall short, is undertaken as a point of intellectual honor – and the probability that something good may come of it. As to Thomas Carlyle, the role of the prophet is to criticize not to construct. In transition to politics, the author welcomes TA Eliot’s view that the field is more important for the pursuit of moral perfection than physical easement; Einstein’s ‘rationalism’ may have been a scientific triumph but can be shown a political failure. The recovery of morality in politics will entail less government so that value-driven participants can act on their beliefs. At the outset, in a chapter on Strauss, Himmelfarb writes that while Thucydides preceded Machiavelli and Hobbes in seeing politics as struggle for power, contra Plato, his view that justice holds a central place distinguished the Greek historian from the modern political scientist.

2. Davies, History of Wales (15 Jan 2018)

by kurto

A sociopolitical chronicle of Wales from the Roman era to the early 21st century, emphasizing its loss of nationhood and reasons why the Principality failed to recover it during the age of nationalism in the 1800s and 1900s.
Offa’s Dyke separated Brythonic Welsh from Britons, but there were no significant racial distinctions in the British Isles. The Saxons seized the lands most Romanized, but Celtic culture and language proved durable. Unlike Ireland, Welsh high culture to ~ 800 developed in isolation, and the ‘kingdom’ united through marriage not conquest. Welsh law was based on custom not statute, aspiring to order among the clans (not punishment); inter-marriage weakened the clans. The acceptance from 871 that Alfred had claims on Welsh lands set subordination well in motion. The Norman conquest connected the British Isles to feudal Europe through the Latin church and the 12th-century Renaissance. The Welsh were equals to the Normans, especially after the death of William II in 1100. Llywelyn the Great (d. 1240) won Gwynedd’s primary among the Welsh regions; son Dafydd ap Llellwyn was the first to call himself Prince of Wales; Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was acknowledged by Henry III in 1267’s Treaty of Montgomery. Thus Wales had all the elements of statehood but not independence. Edward I, the most powerful medieval English king, executed Dafydd ap Gruffudd and destroyed this Wales in 1282-83. The country needed time to jell; it fell not inevitably but through a combination of contemporary events. Though English law subsequently replaced the Welsh code, poetry remained; English focus on Wales helped Scotland to persist.
In the 14th century the Welsh Marcher lords were seen as lawless. Owain Glyndwr’s rising of 1399 was a peasant revolt backed by clerics. Penal laws against the Welsh church created a power vacuum filled by the gentry, perpetuating belief in hierarchical society. In the 15th century coastal trade including with Ireland expanded while peasants of the valleys returned to the southern lowlands. With the passage of 1536’s Act of Union (followed by adjustments in 1543), an act of aggrandizement, Wales became an ‘internal colony’ for the next 250 years (to approximately 1770). The Counter Reformation failed; this was the height of the gentry’s reign. Renaissance Wales was a conservative culture, uninterested in humanism, ‘behind’ the continent, lacking centers of wealth (i.e., towns). The upper class began to learn English, especially as its sons sent to English universities, often to study law, since they were no longer welcome in Europe’s Catholic schools. The ‘squirearchy’ supported the Stuart monarchs, conscious of Welsh coasts being open to invasion (ship money) and averse to Puritan theology. The gentry was anglicizing by marriage, whereas Nonconformism was Gaelic. The Welsh Bible saved the language.
In the election of 1713, only 4 of 27 Welsh seats at Westminster were won by Whigs: the party of the Hanover court was opposed by the Welsh country gentry. The population numbered 500,000 in 1770, and was to grow to 1.1 million by 1850, much more quickly than the doubling over the previous 12 centuries. In a striking assertion, the author contends industrialization turned more on new sources of energy and transport – copper for ironworks such as steam engines and railways – than on the factory system. Following centuries of dependence on English trade, the 18th century opened the northwest ports to new markets. In the south, Merthyr Tydfil’s iron was to become the main resource of modern Welsh growth, supplemented by coal, limestone, timber, and water. Industrialization pulled populace to Glamorgan and Monmouth, thereby realigning the country’s hitherto equal distribution. Swansea, Neath, Cardiff, and Newport were all connected to the coalfields by 1800 by canal or railway; Cardiff, the 25th biggest Welsh town in 1801, grew to 4th by 1880. Railways equally served to break down the isolation of rural communities. The Gaelic speakers were typically Methodist; the urbanites were Baptist or Independent. Therefore rural areas favored hierarchical presbytery, while industrial regions were congregational, meaning the latter never achieved a national moral authority. By the end of the 19th century, the erstwhile even distribution of populace had become 2 of 3 Welshmen living in the coal valleys or the coastal cities; but the country’s values remained rural. Many churches were built, promoting Gaelic. But from 1830 the Welsh chanceries were absorbed into English system, making the courts expensive and effectively out of reach of Welsh farmers. The Rebecca Riots, evidencing hatred of toll roads raising the cost of bringing crops to market, were a kind of rural Chartism. Faint-hearted Welsh nationalism in the 19th century reflects succumbing to English Victorian virtue: the Welsh were too concerned with respectability. Simultaneously, Nonconformism and the Welsh language couldn’t find common cause, particularly as British initiatives to expand schooling also anglicized (the so-called Treachery of the Blue Books). In the 1870s English speakers surpassed the Welsh.
In the 1880s Liberals sought Disestablishment only in Wales, on the premise of its nationhood. Conservatives were maneuvered into opposition, presaging the end of squirearchy. (By contrast, county government fell abruptly.) Freehold tenure grew rapidly since land, no longer the key to power were sold, and became the majority by 1950. Welsh nationalism, active at century’s end, peaked in 1900. There was no pronounced Republican element in Welsh Home Rule, only hopes for regional parliament: Radicalism was sufficient to win Conservative opposition but not worker allegiance. Emigration to Liverpool accelerated from 1880. The rise of rugby owed to physical labor creating taste for physical recreation. Employers believed organized games promoted organized workforce. Clubs in turn drew on communal tradition.
At 1900, at least one quarter of world energy trade originated in Wales, while the remainder of British coal was primarily for domestic use: Wales was geared to the world market. The coal towns fomented Welsh working class values, Nonconformist and socialist. The latter worked against nationalism because of proletarian solidarity; but the coalfields also promoted Gaelic, and the language was vital to nationalism because Welsh law had disappeared and boundaries were attenuated (in contrast with Scotland). But non-speakers also saw themselves as Welsh, defined by Radical politics, rugby, churchgoing and garrulous sociability. Neither model was relevant to the Marcher borders or northern seaside towns.
The religious revival of 1904-05 presaged the Liberal win of 1906, opposed to the 1902 Education Act, in favor of temperance. Miners were the only group to strike during World War I, going against Lloyd George, proof of its fundamental militancy. Postwar reforms brought socialism early to Wales but Labour nonetheless eclipsed the Liberals in by-elections. Amid the era’s ‘revolutionary spirit’ (e.g., Soviet Russia or Berlin), Welsh unionists opposed the Royal Coal Commission of 1919, which had declined to recommend nationalization. Over 1918-22, one quarter of Welsh land was sold, as land was no longer the sole source of power. Finally the estates were broken up; however the selloff was also an Anglicizing force because the English were the highest bidders, and promoted consolidation of farms, halving the number of them. Conversely, Welsh emigration now centered on London and the southeast, as the Merseyside was slowing down.
The long 20th-century depression began in 1925 with the initial decline of coal employment – the trend terminally accelerating in 1960s – due to the collapse of overseas markets. The improvement of Labour’s prospects at Westminster from 1922 undermined nationalism (though the Liberals polled credibly until 1938). The failure of the General Strike of 1926 persuaded union leaders to abandon syndicalism for Westminster. The Five in Llyn arson trial of 1937 renewed nationalism. Over the first two years of World War II, Wales received 200,000 immigrants, restoring its peak population. After its end, two thirds of factories were sponsored by Labour government; however, renewed iron and related industries served to forge ties with the Midlands. In all, it was the most socialist region of the UK, with 40 percent of the workforce in state bodies and 60 percent controlled by the state. But Atlee and Labour tended to see not Wales but regions for purposes of planning (with a second wave of coming in during 1958-64), while Bevan was keen on solidarity. By 1960 the boom-to-bust mining cycle was complete: workers accepted pit closures without regret. Nearly one quarter of Welsh lived in council houses.
Nationalism was spurred by Welsh awareness of higher living standards in England, while Conservative electoral success helped to promote Plaid Cymru, as did Cardiff’s continuing rise capped by the 1970 completion of the national stadium. The success of the Scottish National Party aided the tabling of the 1978 Wales Act, but Labour, government institutions, and the chattering classes were against and it polled just 25 percent in plebiscite. Kinnock’s 1983 ascension marked the first Labour leader from the coalfield, but Scargill’s 1984 strike received tepid support.
In the 1990s, the Welsh regional budget allocation grew to £7 billion from £1.7 in 1979. At decade’s end, in 1997, with Scottish devolution having succeeded one week earlier and the Gaelic speakers campaigning more effectively, Wales passed its home rule act, the choice now being either Wales or Wales-plus-England. The most important outcome of devolution (to date) has been re-introduction of Conservatism as a political force. The Internet has promoted Gaelic, while in the 21st century state support for a Welsh education system improved; the European Union also has been helpful. Rugby in the professional era rose and fell with the economy, important because the national team is the country’s primary cultural product. Welsh identity is primarily cultural and social, as compared with Scotland’s legal and constitutional presence.

8. Cox, Other Oregon (26 April 2022)

by kurto

Synthesizes historical research and journalism to sketch the socioeconomic trajectory of Oregon east of the Cascades since 1850, observing the arid yet variegated environment shapes the populace but its communities have never managed a workable approach to land usage. Between 1845-70, some 400,000 settlers passed through on the way to Portland and the Willamette Valley. Some stayed, others came directly in pursuit of mining, lumber, livestock, and dry farming, especially wheat in the north/northeast. The author rejects the ‘colonial’ economic paradigm: while outside capital was often required, these were individual agents in pursuit of a better way of living. The federal government initially sought to manage Indian claims – calling into question ‘Manifest Destiny’ as a policy. Later the Carey Act (1894), concerned with irrigation, the Taylor Grazing Act (1934), and others aimed to restrict and proscribe ‘exploitive’ land usage. Though Carey generally failed its purpose, it reshaped central Oregon, particularly Redmond and Bend (Oregon’s Jackson Hole, no longer belonging to the high desert paradigm). Indeed there is substantial evidence of Progressivism’s shortcomings: outside experts simply weren’t, but only another self-interested party. Late 19th-century railroads shaped regional economic development, but in the 1920s and 30s state-managed highways did more to enlarge eastern Oregon’s worldview, surprisingly including commodity export. In the postwar era, birds not the broader conservation movement drew in outside nonprofits, yet conflicts broadened into local defenders of property rights pitted against external, self-styled land managers. Cox devotes a large part to more recent controversies in the easternmost counties such as Grant, noting the state is deemed to evidence America’s highest degree of county autonomy. Detailed with personal anecdote and descriptive but not quite analytic, Cox leaves one yet searching for a balanced polity encompassing external actors.

3. Millard, Hero of the Empire (19 Jan 2018)

by kurto

Narrates Winston Churchill’s Boer War capture and escape, which launched the immodestly ambitious young man into his Parliamentary career. Following an election loss, Churchill secured a journalism commission but acted as a (very brave) combatant during a Natal reconnaissance mission. Held in Pretoria, his escape from the Transvaal countryside turned on the good fortune of seeking help from an English-born mining manager and smuggled transport in the rail car of a compatriot wool exporter. Although generalizations weigh down the outset, the main tale is well told and the book holds some insight into Churchill’s personality. However, the attempt to connect every thread is too ambitious – and Jan Smuts is left out!

4. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss (27 Jan 2018)

by kurto

Surveys the German-American political philosopher’s primary teachings:

On political philosophy
• Political philosophy, which aims to replace opinion with knowledge, paradoxically pits the organic wisdom against rational inquiry
• The terrible truth of philosophy is there’s no objective need for it – the only critical necessity is intrinsic to its practice
• One of Strauss’ most enduring themes is Athens vs Jerusalem: Each is obligated to open itself to the other’s challenge. The two sides agree the need for morality, which is core to justice (and thus law). Athens is steadfastly moral; Jerusalem is alive to the possibility of revelation
• Jewish political thought evidences the particular rather than the universal. The Jewish state is modified exile. Strauss showed outward fidelity to Israel, inward commitment to philosophy, in order to combat atheism while preserving truth in knowledge
• Political thought is the first of the social sciences because human experience is practical, borne of action for a purpose (i.e., to preserve or to change). Political opinion presupposes a structured way of life, codified by law, underpinned by a theory of governance
• Justice is a mixture of freedom and coercion, or virtue and persuasion
• Straussian ‘esoteric reading’ is not a doctrine but a process. The emphasis on close reading, which may reveal hidden ideas and emphases, was taken from Heidegger. Politics is implicit in every text because texts are sure to be read in their social context
• Strauss avoided ontology, the nature of being. Not everything is permissible – thus political philosophy, not ontology, is the bedrock of humanity
• It’s safer to understand the low in light of the high (i.e., the ideal), in order to appreciate the best of man’s political traditions
• The experience of history and daily affairs cannot override evidence of simple right and wrong, which is the bottom of natural right. The problem of justice in every context persists
• The distinction between philosophy and ideology is the regard for permanent conditions of human nature – which makes some things insoluble
• Statesmanship is the highest non-philosophical pursuit: the pursuit of freedom and justice through prudence transcends lawyers, technicians, visionaries, and opportunists
• The cultivation of friendship (with one’s opposites) is imperative to practicing the craft

On the history of ideas:
• Like Burke, Strauss sided with the ancients because political thought is closest to the political community
• Classic political thought derives directly from the experience of newly conscious political society. Subsequent political philosophy was tempered by the traditions borne of the political context (i.e., the choices society made)
• According to the classics, honor is secondary to virtue and wisdom. Initiated by Machiavelli, the concern with virtu is shared by Strauss and also the ancients; but Machiavelli omitted the concern with moderation
• Plato’s Laws, Machiavelli’s Discourses, Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws put issues of ‘political education’ front and center, in an ‘institutional’ or regime-based approach
• Machiavelli broke with the ancients in 1) abandoning the concern for morality in society and justice in government, 2) elevating politics’ concern for security and consumption over ideals, and 3) positing nature (i.e., the environment) as something to be exploited by technology
• Machiavelli’s view that the means justify the ends eliminated morality and paved the way for tyranny. The modern American concern for freedom runs counter to Machiavelli
• Property unbounded from classic, medieval limits to acquisition is at the core of modern capitalism. Initiated by Locke, this was a big change in natural law: the central value of labor shifted the moral center of property from nature to creativity
• There are three waves of modernity: 1) Hobbes and Locke grounded politics in passion and self-preservation; 2) Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx shifted to historical processes, which are fixed (in contrast to malleable passions; 3) Nietzsche and Heidegger introduced radical historicism so as to reintroduce theology into politics. But the ‘accidental advantage’ of the ‘dead god’ enables the recovery of idealism
• The elasticity of Heidegger’s thought accommodates very bad political philosophy, ideology such as Nazism. Concern for being, versus for humanity, lead to indifference to tyranny. Thus Heidegger had dismissed ethics from the center of philosophy
• Strauss returns to the primacy of politics as a basis for criticizing Heidegger. Both held the West to be in crisis, Heidegger for its loss of culture – the spiritual decay facing Germany – Strauss because Western liberalism was being undermined by relativism and historicism
• Strauss recovered Plato as a source of modern liberalism, by showing Plato denied the possibility of a completely just city and by showing the dialogue as a vehicle of authorial intent – it’s the content that counts
• Natural Right and History seeks to restore natural right, in response to the inroads made by Heidegger’s relativism, to shore up liberalism’s defenses against tyranny. Natural right itself points toward admiring the excellence of the human soul for its intrinsic value, without regard for material conditions
• Strauss has been criticized for his focus on the end of a just society, which implies hierarchy (i.e., political inequality)

On liberalism and tyranny:
• The regime is core to classical political philosophy, both in a factual and a normative sense
• The completely open society will exist on a lower level than a closed society aiming at perfection
• Moral behavior arises from obligations to others, felt needs and strong attachments, not arbitrary commitments
• The Counter Enlightenment was an effort to save morality from determinism of reason. Divesting religion of its public character was a victory for the Enlightenment
• Liberal education is a ladder from mass democracy to ‘democracy of everybody’, but it is elitist and not egalitarian
• Liberalism entails a public-private divide. To abolish the liberal framework would be to pave the way to tyranny
• The contrast between core defense of personal liberty and agnosticism of personal liberty is symptomatic of the crisis of the West. The root problem is attenuated understanding of liberalism, triggered by Nietzsche and Heidegger, and refracted by Berlin
• From Carl Schmitt, Strauss learned to see politics defined as ‘friend or enemy’. A world without conflict would be conformist. When man abandons what is (seen to be) right in favor of comfort, he forsakes human nature
• Evil is ever present. Ideals require moral fervor but also political prudence. The revolutionary’s goal, post-Enlightenment, is to fix it now. The crisis of the West can be treated by prudence, by recourse to liberalism
• Social scientists haven’t recognized fascism and communism as modern tyranny
• The so-called fact-value distinction is at root of nihilism. Social science which can’t distinguish tyranny has no value
• Not only ideology but also science and technology (the conquest of nature) are instruments of social control. The path was blazed by Machiavelli, who sought to connect ‘virtu’ with the ancients albeit without moderation