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I'm writing a book!

Even more than the happy personal news I announced here last month, about my forthcoming move from the Philadelphia suburbs to Center City Philly, I’m thrilled to let my subscribers know that over the next two years I will be writing a book for Princeton University Press!

Secrets of the Sphinx: Leo Strauss and the Hidden Truths of the American Right (my current, and possibly temporary, title) is a book I’ve been talking about for a long time. In fact, I’ve been under contract for nearly ten years to write it for another university press. But that’s actually not quite accurate. The Strauss book I originally proposed was quite different than the one I will begin writing this summer.

That’s because these have been an unusually eventful ten years in both conservative intellectual life and American politics.

Straussian Perplexity and Puzzle

When I first proposed writing a book about Leo Strauss, it was going to avoid talking very much about his influence on American conservatives. I’d mention the controversy that swirled around his legacy circa 2003, when many in the press decided he was the philosophic guru who persuaded a faction of conservative intellectuals to advocate for deposing Saddam Hussein in Iraq. But I’d quickly dismiss such charges as nonsense—because they were. And then I’d focus on Strauss’ ideas and keep my focus there. I wanted to make an argument about him reviving and championing an ancient form of philosophical skepticism. (I adapted my original proposal into an early two-part Substack post, in case you want to get a taste of what that book would have been like.)

I landed that original book deal in early 2016, which turned out to be a pretty big year in American politics. It didn’t take long for me to notice that while certain of Strauss’ acolytes (William Kristol for one) strongly opposed Donald Trump’s run for the presidency, others (like Michael Anton) ferociously backed it. Once Trump won, that initial trickle of Straussian support turned into something bigger. Not exactly a flood, but certainly a stream.

In addition to the Straussians with close ties to the Claremont Institute (like Anton), there is Darren Beattie, who studied with Straussians at Duke University and has gone on to work for the first and second Trump administrations; Michael Millerman, who studied with Straussian Clifford Orwin at the University of Toronto and has become Aleksandr Dugin’s primary translator into English; and Costin Alamariu (aka Bronze Age Pervert), who studied with Straussian Steven Smith at Yale while working on his Ph.D. and has ended up as a leading influence on the fascist-adjacent far right. (I’ve written posts that touch on all of these people.)

This left me perplexed. How could everyone listed above—as well as Irving Kristol, Allan Bloom, and many other center-right Straussians of an earlier generation, not to mention the center-left Clinton administration alum William Galston—be decisively influenced by the same thinker and writer? These days William Kristol and Anton agree about almost nothing. Yet they both revere Strauss and see themselves as following his intellectual example. How is this possible?

I spent much of the first Trump administration and a good part of the Biden administration pondering this puzzle and wondering how I should approach my book in light of these troubling developments in the Straussian world. Could it be that I’d gotten the man wrong? Strauss is widely known to have been sympathetic to fascism in his youth. The canonical story of his intellectual evolution has it that he moderated around the time he arrived in the United States, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany (by way of France and England). Once he was teaching in his adoptive homeland, he considered himself, if not a liberal, then at least a friend of liberalism, which is what he remained for the rest of his life. (He died in 1973.)

But is it possible this was a ruse? Strauss is famous for claiming that philosophers from the time of the ancient Greeks on down to the mid-18^th century concealed their true and very radical views beneath layers of rhetorical misdirection that made them sound like they affirmed much more conventional beliefs that placed them in close proximity to accepted assumptions from the times in which they lived. Might Strauss’ expressions of admiration for liberal democracy have been disingenuous, while beneath the surface he remained some form of far-right figure whose pedagogical influence produced something like intellectual sleeper-cell agents that had only now been activated?

The answer, I ultimately decided, was no. But then what could explain the lurch to the right among some members of the youngest cohort of Straussians?

Strauss’ Secret Teaching

Strauss, I will show in my book, was not a closet fascist hoping to revive in the United States the virulent political antiliberalism of the Weimar Republic. Yet he did develop an elaborate and highly original diagnosis of distinctively modern moral and intellectual maladies. He also proposed a two-stage cure, the first stage of which involved what one Straussian has called a process of “becoming naïve again” about moral, religious, and political matters through the close reading and study of classical texts. The second stage of the cure was far more skeptical, involving a dialectical critique of such naivete. But Strauss was much cagier about this second part of his philosophical education, leaving it at rhetorical hints, gestures, riddles, and other textual subtleties.

A few Straussians—those temperamentally and intellectually closest to Strauss himself—pursue this education all the way to the end, subjecting classical and modern moral, religious, and political opinions to searching critique and viewing this philosophical activity as the highest and most fulfilling human pursuit. Most of these Straussians look on contemporary politics from an ironic distance, preferring to teach and write about philosophy instead of seeking influence in Washington D.C. I will spend some time in the book laying out how they see the human condition and their own intellectual activity.

But I will also show how and why the more politically engaged Straussians comport themselves as they do. Drawn to Strauss in the first place by his promise of access to eternal moral, religious, and political verities, and lacking in the skeptical doubt required to push beyond the naivete the initial stage of his education instills in them, these Straussians either become or remain conservatives. And since they are incapable of or uninterested in continuing on to the more critical side of Strauss’ pedagogical project, they associate the “philosophy” Strauss so often venerates with throwing themselves into the politics of the right—regardless of what the right is trying to achieve at any given point in time.

In the mid-1960s, engaging in right-leaning politics meant supporting Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. In the 1980s, it meant joining the right side of the culture war unfolding on university campuses. In the early 2000s, it meant contributing to the War on Terror and ridding the United States of a (supposedly) major threat in the Middle East. And in our own moment, it means contributing to the postliberal project of fashioning a coherent right-populist ideology for the political era Trump inaugurated in 2016.

I will conclude that nothing in Strauss’ work advocates for advancing any of these political positions. Yet his thought nonetheless serves as a precondition for all of them. This is the “secret of the sphinx” I refer to in my title (which is an inversion of the polemical headline affixed to highly critical essay about Strauss by British classicist Miles Burnyeat published in The New York Review of Books back in the 1980s: “Sphinx Without a Secret”).

By turning his students and readers into conservatives and obscuring the path that would lead them beyond it, Strauss ended up (perhaps inadvertently) creating a nursery for right-wing intellectuals who would forever be tempted toward putting their educations to practical use in the political worlds in which they happened to find themselves at different historical-political moments.

A Plan for the Next Two Years

So that’s the project I’m going to be working on between now and the spring of 2027, with the resulting book hopefully appearing early in 2028. I will do my very best to keep up my productivity around here during these roughly 24 months, though I’m sure there will be times—especially during semesters when I’m also teaching two classes, and in the final push to finish the manuscript—when that will prove impossible. I hope my readers will understand and permit slowdowns in my newsletter writing at such moments. Rest assured, such pauses will be temporary and brief, and I will always vow to resurface at times of major news and events, no matter how busy I am with the book.