personal memories revolutionary states and indian ocean migrations

students.
Using only hearsay as evidence,
Norton claims in the first chapter of the
book that Strauss was close to Nathan
Leites and Albert Wohlstetter (p. 9).
Now it would have been difficult for
Strauss to have much to say to Leites, so
distinct were their manners of
perceiving politics and the course of
human action as well as thought.
Moreover, Leites was hardly ever at the
University of Chicago. His imaginative
understanding of how he might fulfill
his teaching obligations while residing in
Paris never quite found favor in the eyes
of university administrators and
prompted a mutually agreeable contract
termination only a few years after his
arrival. Indeed, of all those close to
Strauss during Leites’s tenure at
Chicago, I may well have been most in
contact with Leites. He never let on to
me that he had a close relationship with
Strauss. Many others have explained at
length how different Wohlstetter’s
approach to politics was from Strauss’s,
so there is no need to pursue that
theme.
The title of Chapter Two, “The
Lion and the Ass,” refers to Robert
Sacks’s commentary on Genesis.
Norton exploits some rather curious
tales about the way various students of
Strauss assisted Sacks during the writing
of this book to insist that they are
foolishly protective of certain writings.
The account reads well, as fiction most
often does. Her portrait of Leon Kass
will persuade no one who has any
acquaintance with Kass, and she
completely misconstrues his reluctance
to share with her a writing in progress
that a friend had asked him to critique.
Kass is well-known for his own
thoughtful interpretations of Scripture.
Moreover, from his own connections
with St. John’s College, he knows Sacks
well. So it is only reasonable for Sacks
to have shared the manuscript with
Kass. It is equally reasonable for him to
ask that it not be disseminated widely
until he thought it was ready.
http://web.mit.edu/cis/www/mitejmes/
81
Still, to Norton’s credit, she
does recognize that there was something
powerful about Strauss’s intellectual
appeal (as well as that of several other
professors at the University of Chicago).
But in trying to capture that of Strauss
in particular, she completely misses a
lesson he tried to pass on to students:
always teach as though there is one quiet
student in the class who is more
knowledgeable or more intelligent than
you are – in other words, always be
prepared (see pp. 28-29). To
understand the extent to which Strauss
followed his own advice, one must be
aware of how often Strauss turned down
invitations to dinner the evening before
class on the grounds that he had to
prepare for the next day. Not having
studied with Strauss, Norton is ignorant
of that important fact. Why her
informants seem not to have passed it
along must raise a question or two. No?
Similarly, Norton fails to
explain what drew Leo Strauss to focus
so deeply on good books or even what
such books are all about. For him, there
was no canon revered for itself (pp. 29-
31). That anyone one can readily see by
looking at books Strauss cites in his
various articles. Rather, the point of
reading good books is to try to learn
about the tradition of thought to which
we are heirs and to understand how its
unfolding has brought us to our present
opinions. That goal is valid whether one
speaks about our own Western tradition
or about some other tradition. (Here
things become complicated, for the
Eastern tradition has many strands; and
it is not clear whether we really want to
divorce the Middle Eastern tradition
from the Western one). But without
going into that problem, the salient
point is how Strauss insisted his goal
was to know the past well in order to
reflect intelligently upon the present.
Anne Norton’s account of
Straussian “truth squads” in her third
chapter and claim that Strauss sought to
take over the political science
department at the University of Chicago