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Paul Gottfried's critical engagement with political correctness is well known. The essays in Revisions and Dissents focus on a range of topics in European intellectual and political history, social theory, and the history of modern political movements. With subjects as varied as Robert Nisbet, Whig history, the European Union election of 2014, and Donald Trump, the essays are tied together by their strenuous confrontation with historians and journalists whose claims about the past no longer receive critical scrutiny. According to Gottfried, successful writers on historical topics take advantage of political orthodoxy and/or widespread ignorance to present questionable platitudes as self-evident historical judgments. New research ceases to be of importance in determining accepted interpretations. What remains decisive, Gottfried maintains, is whether the favored view fits the political and emotional needs of what he calls \"verbalizing elites.\" In this highly politicized age, Gottfried argues, it is necessary to re-examine these prevalent interpretations of the past. He does so in this engaging volume, which will appeal to general readers interested in political and intellectual history.

This book offers an original interpretation of the achievement of Leo Strauss, stressing how his ideas and followers reshaped the American conservative movement. The conservative movement that reached out to Strauss and his legacy was extremely fluid and lacked a self-confident leadership. Conservative activists and journalists felt a desperate need for academic acceptability, which they thought Strauss and his disciples would furnish. They also became deeply concerned with the problem of 'value relativism', which self-described conservatives thought Strauss had effectively addressed. But until recently, neither Strauss nor his disciples have considered themselves to be 'conservatives'. Contrary to another misconception, Straussians have never wished to convert Americans to ancient political ideals and practices, except in a very selective rhetorical fashion. Strauss and his disciples have been avid champions of American modernity, and 'timeless' values as interpreted by Strauss and his followers often look starkly contemporary.

The atrocities and mass murders committed by Josip Broz Tito's Partisan units of the Yugoslav Army immediately after the Second World War had no place in the conscience of Socialist Yugoslavia.More than once, the annual Croatian commemoration of the Bleiburg victims was subject to attacks carried out by the socialist Yugoslav state.

This book offers an original interpretation of the achievement of Leo Strauss, stressing how his ideas and followers reshaped the American conservative movement. The conservative movement that reached out to Strauss and his legacy was extremely fluid and lacked a self-confident leadership. Conservative activists and journalists felt a desperate need for academic acceptability, which they thought Strauss and his disciples would furnish. They also became deeply concerned with the problem of 'value relativism', which self-described conservatives thought Strauss had effectively addressed. But until recently, neither Strauss nor his disciples have considered themselves to be 'conservatives'. Contrary to another misconception, Straussians have never wished to convert Americans to ancient political ideals and practices, except in a very selective rhetorical fashion. Strauss and his disciples have been avid champions of American modernity, and 'timeless' values as interpreted by Strauss and his followers often look starkly contemporary.

Is there Political Philosophy?Political theory in the Academy is often labeled as “political philosophy.” The two terms are sometimes used interchangeably. If a political science faculty wants to hire a “theory person,” then a self-described “political philosopher” may fit the bill. I myself have corrected colleagues when they tell me that what I am writing is “political philosophy.” Despite my objection, the interlocutor will persist in describing what I do by the term I try to avoid.Whereas it may be hard to undo this semantic practice, there is instructive value in tracing its genealogy. The concept of “political philosophy” is fundamental to the work of Leo Strauss, and it lives on through his well-placed disciples, who treat their studies of political texts as philosophical activities. Thomas L. Pangle introduces his anthology of Strauss’s writings on “classical political rationalism” by stating that his subject focused on the philosophical content of political theory. Strauss found in Plato and Aristotle two precursors for his approach to political thought and philosophy, who also saw them as related facets of the examined life.

A Variety of CriticsThe critics of Strauss and his followers can be easily divided into three groups. The first consists of those whom Strauss’s devotees are more than willing to address and who would seem to be their most formidable opponents. Shadia Drury, Anne Norton, Alan Wolfe, Nick Xenos, and John McCormick are all anti-Straussians we are meant to respect. It is they who arouse the combative energy of Michael and Catherine Zuckert, Peter Minowitz, David Lewis Schaefer, and other movement adepts. Although Strauss’s apologists do not coddle these critics, they consider some of them to be pesky but “brilliant” adversaries.It is also the case that Straussians can counter most of these foes without working up a sweat. They have effectively taken on Drury, Xenos, and Wolfe for closely linking Strauss to Carl Schmitt and other right-wing thinkers without adequate proof. They have had no trouble disproving the charge that Strauss cultivated fascist friends because of his long-standing friendship with Kojève, who visited Carl Schmitt at his home in Plettenberg.

Relevant and Irrelevant CriticismsA major legacy of Leo Strauss’s life and scholarship was a distinctive way of reading texts. Despite Strauss’s attempt to assure Hans-Georg Gadamer in 1954 that his “hermeneutic experience is very limited and excludes the possibility of a universal hermeneutic theory,” his assertion is not to be taken uncritically. Strauss pioneered a way of studying political classics that his students took over and disseminated. Once created, this method was carried from Strauss’s redoubt at Chicago into departments of political science and political theory across the United States and Canada.One can identify Strauss’s hermeneutic by how its adherents examine texts and by the political thinkers they interpret. Plato, Averroes, Maimonides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Tocqueville – and less often Aristotle, Burke, and Hegel – are thinkers whom Strauss and his disciples have considered worthy of scrutiny. By contrast, they care less (except for the Catholic Straussians) about any distinctly Christian political heritage. This disinclination may come from the belief that the best political thinkers are thought to have been religious skeptics. Some Straussians have also claimed to find concealed skepticism about religious or political authority in medieval writers who are conventionally considered orthodox Catholics.

A Jew in ExileAmong the defining aspects of Leo Strauss’s early life, three seem to stand out: that he was born a Jew, in Germany, at the end of the nineteenth century. Strauss’s being born to Jewish parents in Germany in 1899 may tell more about the rest of his earthly existence than would other biographical details – for example, that he was born in the village of Kirchhain, in the Prussian administrative province of Hesse-Nassau, that his father, Hugo Strauss, operated a livestock and farm supply business with Leo’s uncle, or that his mother Jennie’s maiden name was David. Most biographical sketches of Strauss indicate that his family were conventionally but not zealously orthodox Jews. In his youth he was sent to the local Volksschule and later to the Gymnasium Philippinum, which was a preparatory school for the University of Marburg, an institution that had been founded in 1527 by Philip of Hesse, one of the early champions of the Protestant Reformation and a protector of Martin Luther.From 1912 until his graduation from the Philippsuniversität in 1917, Leo boarded at Marburg with the local cantor and, in this setting, came into contact with the students of the Jewish neo-Kantian philosopher (1842–1918) Hermann Cohen. A celebrated professor at Marburg, Cohen was then defining Jewish religious practice in a way that fitted Kant’s notion of a rationally based ethic. Harmonizing an inherited legal tradition with a rationalist ethical system was a task of some importance for Jewish neo-Kantians in the early twentieth century. But Cohen also engaged other projects. His extensive study of Maimonides was partly as an attempt to find a distinguished Jewish precursor for his ethically based religion. Perhaps even more relevant for Strauss, Cohen linked Maimonides to the Muslim scholar Averroes (1126–1198), who first enunciated the concept of the double truth in his commentaries on Aristotle. Cohen – and later Strauss – took from Averroes the notion that philosophy and religion teach seemingly incompatible truths that could only be reconciled in God’s mind. And although Strauss did not appropriate Cohen’s Kantian theory of knowledge, he did espouse a “classical rationalist” approach to philosophy, a mode of thinking that was not alien to Cohen’s work.

Defending Liberal DemocracyThe study of political theory among Strauss and his disciples does not begin and end with reflections on dead white thinkers. Their studies have mandated political commitments, and it would be hard to ignore the transition from theory to practice already evident in the movement’s founder. In the 1960s, Strauss engaged in a prolonged, bitter battle with the American Political Science Association and his colleagues in the political science profession. He accused them of shirking their responsibility to defend the United States during the Cold War. In a controversial epilogue to Essays on the Scientific Studies of Politics (1962), edited by his student Herbert J. Storing, Strauss excoriates his profession for eschewing the struggle against Soviet totalitarianism: “The crisis of liberal democracy has become concealed by a ritual which calls itself methodology or logic. This almost willful blindness to the crisis of liberal democracy is part of that crisis. No wonder that the new political science has nothing to say against those who unhesitatingly prefer surrender, that is, the abandonment of liberal democracy, to war.”In his epilogue, Strauss famously distinguishes the “new political science,” which refuses to take sides against Soviet tyranny, from the “old political science” that had preceded it. The old political science recognized a “common good” and “what is required for the good society,” but it was supplanted by a new one, as it succumbed to certain moral acids, particularly the fact-value distinction. “The denial of the common good presents itself today as a direct consequence of the distinction between facts and values according to which only factual judgments, not value judgments, can be true and objective.” This rapidly spreading relativism swept away even the minimal “public reason” that was present in modernists like Hobbes and which allowed them to see a common interest beyond that of the isolated individual. In the new political science, not even this limited, material standard of the good could prevail. The most political scientists could now offer an individual was to show how his or her “preferences” could be satisfied by paying attention to certain objective facts.

Great Contemporaries is a collection of 25 essays about eminent personalities, whom Churchill evaluates with humour and understanding. These characters range from the good to the evil, the foolish to the wise, including political heavyweights (Balfour, Hitler, Trotsky, Roosevelt, Asquith); military commanders (General Haig, Lawrence of Arabia) and non-political Britons (Baden-Powell, King George V). With hindsight this book implies Churchill’s absorption of these lessons in leadership and greatness, ready for the moment when he himself was to step forward as a great leader in his own right.