‘Bring Me Some New Clichés'Leo Strauss and his student Harry Jaffa understood that once philosophical insights and political principles ossify into clichés, they are no longer meaningful.
By Glenn Ellmers
February 20, 2023
Recently I’ve been interested in understanding postmodernism, specifically the work of the prolific author and social critic Michel Foucault, who died in 1984. Reading his abstruse, jargon-filled writing isn’t fun. But I’m not studying him because I enjoy it. Unlike Foucault himself, I’m not a masochist.
Foucault and the other “pomo” writers of the late 20th century—e.g., Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Lacan—are important resources to help us understand our current political situation. That’s why I’m giving a presentation on Foucault at ISI’s Politics and Government Summit in Fort Lauderdale this week. My panel, “What the Right Can Learn from the Left,” includes Michael Anton speaking on Karl Marx and Hillsdale’s Kevin Slack on the New Left, with the Claremont Institute’s Ryan Williams serving as the panel’s chairman.
That paper will be published elsewhere. Here I want to focus on one minor but crucial point: People on the Right need to get out of their comfort zones and accept that we are living in a new reality—a reality described perceptively by the postmodernist writers of the 20th century. For better or worse (OK, worse, by far), our moral-political life today is shaped far more by Friederich Nietzsche than by James Madison.
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Nowadays, quite a few professors who teach the political theory of the founding acknowledge that those principles are mere slogans or banalities in our public life. This includes many conservative think tanks that monotonously invoke “the founders” in their fundraising boilerplate. Yet somehow, the recognition of this fact—that the principles of the Declaration have become widely rejected or forgotten—doesn’t seem to lead them anywhere or have any effect on the thinking or writing of these scholars. Unlike Strauss himself, who was genuinely radical in recovering a fresh understanding of political philosophy, these Straussians don’t seem able to break free from the mantras they have been repeating for decades. They go on mechanically teaching the theory of the founding as if nothing in our political life has changed.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/20/bring-me-some-new-cliches/
