Re: The weird men behind Bush's war

["James Daly" <james.irldaly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I found Leo Strauss's *Natural Right and History* (Chicago University
Press, 1953) illuminating and instructive when I first read it. It
supported Plato and Aristotle against the Sophists' relativism,
claiming that natural justice was something in its own right, and not
the result of compromise over the use of force between naturally
selfish and violent individuals. He also argued that the Hobbesian
enlightenment is a return to the Sophists. He criticised Weber's
relativism, for which ideals and values -- including "rationality" in
Weber's perverted sense according to which (though I don't think
Strauss noticed this) capitalism is "rationality" in economics -- are
only "demons" between which we have to make an irrational choice.

I found Strauss's later development and his followers' -- an
inconsistent mix of Aristotle, Locke, Nietzsche and Heidegger --
unintelligible, and the division of esoteric and exoteric
irrationalist and contrary to the universalism of philosophy and
rationality. His is a right wing anti-relativism. But there is a
leftwing anti-relativism -- and it is found in Marx. Those who
interpret Marx as a continuation of the relativism of the
Enlightenment forget that that sophistic relativism favoured the
employment of eight-year-olds in factories and mines. Marxist
progressivism, which rules out a priori any return to "the dustbins of
history" in which it would place Aristotle as a product of a
slave-owning society, is ignorant of the fact that Marx's own basic
thought is Aristotelian, and that he lavished as much praise on
Aristotle as he did on Hegel. Scott Meikle's *Essentialism in the
Thought of Karl Marx* (London, Duckworth 1985) was pathbreaking. Other
sources are found in George E. McCarthy (editor) *Marx and Aristotle*
(Savage, Maryland: Rowan and Littlefield, 1992). Meikle points out
that

"Marx ... can be identified as an Enlightenment thinker only with the
serious qualification (so serious that it casts doubt on the
identification itself) that in the analytical foundation of his
thought he is a very traditional European thinker, and draws for his
philosophical resources in evaluating enlightenment modernity,
capitalism, and economics, on the same pre-modern tradition of
Aristotelianism in philosophy which the Anglophone moderns from Hobbes
onwards were so passionately committed to ploughing up. It is a
paradox that of the most revolutionary thing about Marx is what is
most traditional about him". (Scott Meikle, editor, *Marx*, Ashgate,
Aldershot, page xix).

James Daly