Eros, Wisdom, and Silence: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues
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Eros, Wisdom, and Silence: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues. James M. Rhodes. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Although his name and his disciples have dominated American political theory for the past thirty years and have even influenced American politics, Leo Strauss has remained somewhat of an enigma to specialists and generalists alike. Was he the classical philosopher who argued that democracy as practiced by the fifth-century Greeks was the highest form of civilization, the political thinker whose doctrine of natural right has influenced the thinking of the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration, or a closet Nietzschean engaged in a clandestine project of self-deification? Given the number of self-proclaimed “Straussians” who occupy the positions of political and intellectual power in this country — Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Harvey Mansfield, and the late Allan Bloom — the answer to the question is not merely an academic one but one that has serious and lasting political repercussions.
Eros, Wisdom, and Silence: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues
Eros, Wisdom, and Silence: Plato’s Erotic…
Eros, Wisdom, and Silence: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues
Eros, Wisdom, and Silence: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues. James M. Rhodes. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Although his name and his disciples have dominated American political theory for the past thirty years and have even influenced American politics, Leo Strauss has remained somewhat of an enigma to specialists and generalists alike. Was he the classical philosopher who argued that democracy as practiced by the fifth-century Greeks was the highest form of civilization, the political thinker whose doctrine of natural right has influenced the thinking of the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration, or a closet Nietzschean engaged in a clandestine project of self-deification? Given the number of self-proclaimed “Straussians” who occupy the positions of political and intellectual power in this country — Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Harvey Mansfield, and the late Allan Bloom — the answer to the question is not merely an academic one but one that has serious and lasting political repercussions.