personal memories revolutionary states and indian ocean migrations

The rest of the argument will have to be
judged on its own merits. Even though
it is not possible for me to defend
William Kristol’s position on any
political issue of the day, opponents of
neo-conservatism will find little to
applaud in the attack set forth in this
chapter.
Chapter Eleven is quite
interesting and certainly very timely.
Anne Norton focuses on the William
Kristol and Robert Kagan edited
volume, Present Dangers to argue that the
neo-conservatives are taking the US on
a new imperial route – one that runs
counter to the route Straussians
previously preferred, given their former
reading of Thucydides. The argument is
clever, but incorrectly makes neoconservatives
into Straussians. Norton
also criticizes Wohlstetter harshly for
traveling too much and trying to teach
without adequate preparation. To be
sure that the charges stick, she repeats
them almost word for word. But what
does that have to do with the larger
argument? Similarly, when she casts her
net wider, Norton commits a mighty
anachronism: Joseph Cropsey, Herbert
J. Storing, and Nathan Tarcov were not
all together at the University of Chicago
when Wolfowitz was beginning his
political career (p. 183). Indeed, Storing
was dead before Tarcov ever came to
Chicago.
Those interested in the Arab
and Muslim Middle East will do well to
read the last two chapters of Norton’s
book attentively. In Chapter Twelve,
she focuses mainly on the way
Straussians, not-named except for
Carnes Lord, recast ideas today so that
Muslims are the hated people and thus
fall prey to a new kind of anti-Semitism.
She notes, correctly, that this was not
the way Strauss understood such matters
and speaks about his essay on Hermann
Cohen. But that essay does not address
the issue. Unfortunately, those
Straussians like David Schaeffer who
have taken upon themselves the task of
refuting Norton (see Interpretation 32/3,
http://web.mit.edu/cis/www/mitejmes/
83
Summer 2005, 283-306) richly confirm
her charge. Chapter Thirteen could
have served as a marvelous tribute to
what Leo Strauss sought to do with his
own studies of medieval Arabic and
Islamic political philosophy and how he
sought to promote it, but she gets
simple facts terribly confused. Yusuf
Chahine’s film, Destiny, is not about
Avicenna (p. 223), but Averroes. The
Lerner-Mahdi Sourcebook on Medieval
Political Philosophy does not contain
anything on Alghazali, nor did I write
anything in it (p. 225).
These last points are surely
most telling. Above all, no one remotely
acquainted with the medieval Arabic and
Islamic tradition would group Alghazali
among the philosophers. No one who
had looked carefully at the Lerner-
Mahdi Sourcebook would claim they had
included Alghazali in it, and anyone
wanting to write about it must look
carefully at it – as at any other writing
described or cited. Such a false
attribution shows how little attention
Norton pays to detail and how much
she relies on vague impressions.
Sympathetic as a reader like myself –
who considers himself a Straussian – is
with an attempt to show how others
who consider themselves Straussians
have allowed their political opinions to
carry them far afield from our common
interest in political philosophy and in
the perennial questions to which we
seek answers by its pursuit, Anne
Norton’s purported exposé is ultimately
less than persuasive. In sum, this final
instance of careless attribution is on a
par with her opening reliance on an
anecdote from one of Strauss’s sworn
enemies to attempt to belittle a man of
inestimable intellectual greatness.