Page "Leo Strauss" Paragraph 46

Finally, responding to charges that Strauss's teachings fostered the neoconservative foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration, such as " unrealistic hopes for the spread of liberal democracy through military conquest ," Professor Nathan Tarcov, Director of the Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago, in an article published in The American Interest asserts that Strauss as a political philosopher was essentially non-political.

After an exegesis of the very limited practical political views to be gleaned from Strauss's writings, Tarcov concludes that " Strauss can remind us of the permanent problems, but we have only ourselves to blame for our faulty solutions to the problems of today.

" Likewise Strauss's daughter, Jenny Strauss Clay, in a New York Times article defended her father against the charge that he was the " mastermind behind the neoconservative ideologues who control United States foreign policy.

" " He was a conservative ," she says, " insofar as he did not think change is necessarily change for the better.

" Since contemporary academia " leaned to the left ," with its " unquestioned faith in progress and science combined with a queasiness regarding any kind of moral judgment ," Strauss stood outside of the academic consensus.

Had academia leaned to the right, he'd have questioned it, too — and on certain occasions did question the tenets of the right.