OpenDemocracy has an interview with anti-Straussian Shadia Drury . Drury’s obsession with Strauss seems to have been about as damaging to her good sense and judgement as that of the pro-Straussians has been to theirs. Hence the following absurd rheorical question:
How could an admirer of Plato and Nietzsche be a liberal democrat?
How could an intelligent person of any political persuasion not admire Plato and Nietzsche?
Sir, I think you misunderstand Drury’s intent.
The full passage reads:
“How could an admirer of Plato and Nietzsche be a liberal democrat? The ancient philosophers whom Strauss most cherished believed that the unwashed masses were not fit for either truth or liberty, and that giving them these sublime treasures would be like throwing pearls before swine. In contrast to modern political thinkers, the ancients denied that there is any natural right to liberty. Human beings are born neither free nor equal. The natural human condition, they held, is not one of freedom, but of subordination – and in Strauss’s estimation they were right in thinking so.”
Unfortunate choice of words then, when she uses “admirer” instead of “adherent”. What I think she meant to say was that no adherent of the political philosophies of Plato and (arguably) Nietzsche can be a liberal democrat.
To illustrate, take Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. In it, he professes the utmost admiration for Plato’s brilliance. Yet he disagrees profoundly with Plato’s political philosophy, and saw him as the arch-totalitarian - a poisoner of minds - whose social ideology had to be urgently combated. For it is precisely by virtue of his greatness (a greatness recognized and admired) that Plato lent credence to the idea of the noble lie, political Guardianship and elitism, and the philosopher-king, among other things.
Hopefully it was just laziness but you can hardly blame Chris for pointing it out. You can tell what she was driving at the moment you read the sentence but you would think she would be a bit more careful with her language than that.
It’s also not clear that she doesn’t think you can only admire someone who’s views you agree with - which is a bit silly.
As pointed out alread this was a bit of a cheap shot against Drury. One can certainly admire both Plato and Nietzsche, even though any “intelligent person” can put forth good reasons to despise them as well - that’s a matter of taste, I guess.
But unless you want to establish a Stalinesque police state or a fascist empire both Plato and Nietzsche as political philosophers are useful as examples of bad political philosophy only, dangerous if unsuspecting undergraduates are treated to their texts without proper commentary. From the context it is clear that Drury mentioned both philosophers with their political writings in mind, and I really cannot see that anybody interested in discussing politics in the 21st century would be missing out on much, should he choose to just skip Plato’s and Nietzsche’s political writings.
The clarifications offered on the Plato/Nietzsche point are well taken, but Chris’s larger point is worth considering: that Drury’s “obsession” with Strauss and the Straussians has clouded her judgment. She has done a great deal over the years to expose the real (and loony) underpinnings of Straussian thought, but her determination to explain virtually the whole of Bush administration policy as a consequence of Straussian influence is lamentable. Too often it takes the form of a dubious syllogism:
Straussians encourage political leaders to lie;
Bushies are Straussians;
Therefore Bushies are liars.
All three clauses are either simplistic or misleading. And Drury’s insistence on making her case airtight leads to other reductive statements. For instance, when she wants to discredit Strauss’s claim that in the Republic Thrasymachus represents Plato’s view, she says, “In Plato’s dialogues, everyone assumes that Socrates is Plato’s mouthpiece” — everyone except Straussians, we are led to infer. But this is simply wrong. Dozens of scholars, most of whom hold no brief for Straussianism, have shown that the straightforward equation of Plato and Socrates is untenable, and often needs to be nuanced.
Again, let me make it clear that I think the Straussian way of reading, with its claims to special illumination, is dangerous and unjustifiable. But Drury shows us how a scholarship driven largely by opposition to someone else’s scholarship, and someone else’s politics, has its own pitfalls.
There is nothing either simplistic or misleading about “The Bushies are liars.”
As a practice in intellectual history, it might be worth not just thinking about “Straussian” as consistently-applied-doctrine, but also about the particular milleus (in Chicago and elsewhere) in which these sorts of ideas predominate(d). I share the suspicion that Straussianism harbors a streak of deep intellectual dishonesty. The important question for me is: what sorts of institutional spaces allow dishonest ideologies (of either the right or left variant) to flourish? And why? Is the toleration of this sort of nonsense an Achilles’ heel of liberal democracy? It’s not the masses we can’t trust, it is the intellectuals.
But the Bushies are liars…
And put me down as a non-admirer of Nietzsche…
However, I hope we can agree that “Bushies are liars because they are Straussians” is at least an oversimplification.
I am always mystified by the lumping of Nietzsche w/ these ideas. Yes, his writings were used by proto-nazis and the nazi party to justify their political points of view, first by his sister and her husband. Most of his writings were directed at personal development … many of his critiques of art, artists, government and religion were directed at how institutions subvert the personal development of the individual. He was most concerned w/ the full development of individual potential, which is a profoundly liberal idea. There are ample reasons to argue w/ his points, but more care should be given to dividing his points of view from the misinterpretations used by others to justify a political agenda.
Stimulated by the interview Chris cites, I read Drury’s Leo Strauss and the American Right yesterday. I thought it was excellent and persuasive. It makes sense of people like Bennet and Bork and Wolfowitz. The famous interview with Wolfowitz where he casually says that WMD was never the real reason for going to war, just what worked to get support - this is consistent with a Straussian conception of politics, anyway, where the leader tells whatever lies need be told to get the sheep on board for what he knows to be the right thing to do. If Wolfowitz is a Straussian, moreover, the idea that his goal in Iraq is to create a liberal democracy would be another lie. That was actually the only rationale for the war I accepted.
I’ve never been persuaded that Republic is in earnest a socio-political blueprint. The discussion of a properly ordered republic was engaged as a metaphor for the properly ordered soul. To so literally focus on certain ideas in Republic out of context—for instance, the “noble lie”, the guardian class, etc.—seems to me to be astonishingly simple-minded.
Likewise, many of the vulgar (mis)readings of Nietzsche; and, for that matter, Machiavelli.
True, I’ve encountered a frighteningly large number of people who claim significant familiarity with these writers but who have only read secondary sources.
Anyway, this is of personal interest to me as The “Great Books” connection between Chicago and St. John’s College goes back to its origin as an educational reform of the thirties. And while the overlap between the two schools was/is significant, including Strauss’s connection with both schools1, it seems to me, as a johnnie, that Strauss’s cryptography polluted the Chicago program. Allan Bloom took a veiled swipe at SJC in “Closing of the American Mind” when he ridiculed schools that present the “great books” without the necessary guidance. Bloom was profoundly Straussian and, I think, the elitist esotericism is telling of an entire worldview implied in Straussianism, including its reactionary conservativism. These things are not, however, inherent in University of Chicago in general, St. John’s College, the so-called “canon”, or, even, specifically, Plato and Nietzsche.
And I’m with Chris on this: how can any intelligent and informed person not admire Plato and Nietzsche?
[1] And I mentioned this when it came up here in the past; but Strauss was a close friend with a St. John’s College tutor, Leon Kass. (By the way, Strauss also became a tutor emeritus at the college later in life.) I heard secondhand from a tutor that knew them both that a big difference between Strauss and Kass was that Strauss had and encouraged “disciples”, while Kass discouraged them. To my mind, that exemplifies the difference between Straussianism and the ethos at St. John’s.
I am of the opinion that no one in the administration has yet publically stated the real reasons and strategies behind the war. FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt), jingoisms and misplaced benevolence are not the basis for a foreign policy. I certainly hope they have been feeding us noble lies, otherwise, we are really in the soup…
Oy vey. One of Strauss’s statements is that philosophy must be careful among the masses because the masses aren’t very thoughtful or intelligent. He also said that this was doubly the case with the partially educated as they were liable to overvalue their incomplete schooling. This blindingly obvious statement has a very long pedigree. Strauss never said that rulers can lie at will. He was thinking about the political use of religion by men such as Romulus and Moses.
Speaking of lies, this is one:
“The famous interview with Wolfowitz where he casually says that WMD was never the real reason for going to war, just what worked to get support…”
Apparently repeated debunkings have no effect on people who want to believe this sort of thing badly enough. But here’s a link:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/05/30/wolfowitz.vanity.fair/index.html
“I’ve never been persuaded that Republic is in earnest a socio-political blueprint. The discussion of a properly ordered republic was engaged as a metaphor for the properly ordered soul. To so literally focus on certain ideas in Republic out of context—for instance, the ‘noble lie’, the guardian class, etc.—seems to me to be astonishingly simple-minded.”
For me, the Republic as metaphor for the soul raises the question: what the heck was Aristotle up to in his criticisms of the text?
“Besides, the end he says his city-state should have is impossible, as in fact described…I am talking about the assumption that it is best for a city-state to be as far as possible all one unit: for that is assumption Socrates adopts. And yet it is evident that the more of a unity a city-state becomes, the less of a city-state it will be. For a city-state naturally consists of a certain mulititude; and as it becomes more of a unity, it will turn from a city-state into a household, and from a household into a human being. For we would surely say that a household is more of a unity than a city-state and an individual human being than a household. Hence, even if someone could achieve this, it should not be done, since it will destroy the city-state” (Politics, Book 11).
A vulgar misreading? or perhaps an accurate reading toward a simple-minded end (ie, it really is about the individual soul but it shouldn’t be, because we’re supposed to be talking about the polis here)? or perhaps an elaborately esoteric inside joke?
This is all fascinating, but I’m not quite up to speed. Can anyone recommend a few books or articles that would get someone started on:
(1) Who Strauss was and what he said and did, preferably including something tolerably accessible by Strauss himself, and
(2) The Straussians as a self-aware group, what they are about and their relationship, if any, to Strauss himself?
Thanks.
I assume there’s a name for using “Plato” simultaneously to mean, possibly, the historical person with grudges and virtues and all; or, possibly, the writings of the historical person w.r.t. his times; or, possibly, the writings of the historical person as a system with views about our or all times.
The only term I can come up with is “the Chinese Room”, though. What’s Drury’s view on Searle?
rmh:
Is Nietzsche really primarily concerned with the development of the individual, an exponent of classical German bildung, a teutonic version of Mathew Arnold? I think the key move that Nietzshe makes is to reduce all judgments and modes of justification to aesthetic judgments and justification. The world as a whole and the individual within it are to be justified solely as an aethetic phenomenon. This would also apply to the genealogy of institutions. The “death of God” is also the death of the ego, specifically of the forms of logical unity that the ego putatively imposes upon the world. Thus the aestheticist solution to this crisis confers no distinctive value on the individual qua individual per se, but rather results in a dissolution of the individual per se. This is, I think, the point at which Nietzsche is vulnerable, though against his will, to his fascist co-opters.
I think Nietzshce has to be read in relation to Kant. The “will-to-power” is the transcendental synthetic unity of apperception, the “uebermensch” is the transcendental ego, and “eternal recurrence” is the categorical imperative gone beserk. It is Nietzsche’s special cachet to blurt out all those half-truths that are repressed by the austere, four-square Kantian construction of rationality and he develops a method of historical criticism that reads against the grain the ideal of progress, a counter-Enlightenment of the Enlightenment. But the problem with this is that once one eliminates the differentiated infra-structure of rationality, in which aesthetic judgments have their place and mode of justification, aesthetic judgments themselves lose their rationality: it becomes impossible, other than as a arbitrary assertion, to distinguish good from bad taste. Perhaps Nietzsche accepted this in his recourse to the “will-to-power”, but I should think that it renders his basic move self-undermining.
It strikes me as very strange to lump Nietzsche and Plato together. Nietzsche disagreed with Plato on almost everything. I would imagine that Plato and Nietzsche came to their political views for very different reasons. I have always found it strange that people are interested in Nietzsche as a political philosopher.
“…How could an intelligent person of any political persuasion not admire Plato and Nietzsche?…”
It’s easy. The one was a proto-Fascist and the other was a lunatic. Plato (foul though his ideas were) should be read, for the insight he gives into his time and place; Nietzsche lacks even that excuse.
Once more I come to the Straussians’ rescue, sort of. Plato’s authoritarianism came from his horror at some of the acts of the Athenian direct democracy, which was really impulsively murderous at times. You don’t have to accept his solution, but “democracy” shouldn’t be used as a slogan to obscure the real criticisms of bloody Athenian practice.
Likewise, Strauss thought of Hitler and Stalin, not as aberrations or throwbacks, but as ever-present possibilities of the modern age. His anti-populist authoritarianism was directed against their kind of modernity.
When Strauss came to the US he was in a terrible bind. The high German culture he was devoted to, and from which he got his authoritarianism and his belief in heierarchy, was in the process of self-destructing in an extraordinarily spectacular way. He came to the US for shelter — a place for which his sort of German had only the most condescending respect. [Yeah, that’s historicist and relativist. So sue me].
So his doctrine of secrecy had an immediate function, helping him to find a niche for himself in this strange land. His niche was among the elite of anti-communist (anti-populist) afministrative liberals — who later cut deals with free-market ideologues and religious nut cases.
His followers, notably Bloom, adapted Strauss’s ideas for U.S. consumption — Bloom accepted the Enlightenment, which Strauss probably didn’t. He sort of had to, because American institutions are almost all Enlightenment-based.
The weird thing for me is that Wolfowitz really seems to have developed into an democratic imperialist. The Straussian definition of democracy is anti-populist and procedural, but Wolfowitz seems to believe that we will be able to turn Iraq into one. A highly unconservative belief.
Your point is well taken with regard to Nietzche’s insistance on the importance of aesthetic judgement into ordering ones life and choices. However, aesthetics should be injected to balance w/ rational learning and thought. A fusing of the Appolonian and Dionysian. Music w/ passion, as well as precision. Science pursued w/ joy as well as logic and rigor. The death of God becomes the rejection of the mere acceptance of outside justifications for one’s choices and actions and a call to accept the rewards and consequences of those same.
His insights are not a rejection of enlightenment, but rather a rejection of the western conceit of continuous progress. Lessons get lost, then regained, from generation to generation.
When I wrote: “I’ve never been persuaded that Republic is in earnest a socio-political blueprint”, I chose my words carefully. I agree that it’s undeniable that Plato took his model city state seriously—its elaboration alone makes that clear. But there’s a gap between that and the view that sees Republic as being primarily a political blueprint and completely disregards the moral philosphy which provides the context. The latter seems to me to be a suspicious elision that indicates a narrow special-interest reading of Republic. The casual and intentionally toxic labeling of Plato as a “proto-fascist”, as Mr. Wilhoit exemplifies, is a rhetorical gambit, not legitimate intellectual discourse. This is also true of Drury, as far as I can tell.
Throughout Republic, Socrates warns that this isn’t a practical blueprint for a republic. At the outset of its discussion, he says that since this is intended as a metaphor for the well-ordered soul, then the discussion needn’t be limited by any sort of practical consideration of constructing and organizing a republic. And he repeats this many times, averring that many details are obviously impractical.
Even in its details and taken earnestly, its supposed “proto-fascist” nature is unclear to me. The guardian class was a meritocracy whose members were drawn from all other classes, male and female alike. They were denied material possessions and the ability to have children. This corresponds to fascism how, exactly? I agree it’s not democracy, but it doesn’t look like fascism to me, either. (I’m sure that Popper makes a more sophisticated argument. I haven’t read it; I’ll reserve judgment.)
I also find it extremely odd that Drury and others are so quick to connect Plato, Strauss, and the Bush neocons given that Plato’s specific criticism of democracy was that it is too easily (or, actually, inevitably) corrupted by power accruing to wealth and becoming a plutocracy. An apt criticism in the contemporary context, isn’t it? And one quite unfriendly to the Bush administration. (Of course, it should be noted that the Bush plutocrats and the neocons are probably distinct and somewhat hostile factions with the Bush administration.)
I don’t recall that passage from Politics, but I think it is very amusing. It doesn’t seem to me to be “an elaborately esoteric inside joke” but rather a simple and manifest inside joke. In any event, as I said, I was not arguing that Republic wasn’t at all a political blueprint, but that reading it as that exclusively is simple-minded.
C.J. Colucci, a Google search on “Leo Strauss” will result in a lot of material on Strauss, both pro- and con-. You should take much of it with a grain of salt. For example, straussian.net identifies some tutors I knew personally at St. John’s as Straussians, and as far as I can tell, that claim is false. Some may be, of course. But the Straussians and the anti-Straussian camps cast pretty wide nets for convenience’s sake.
“Plato’s authoritarianism came from his horror at some of the acts of the Athenian direct democracy, which was really impulsively murderous at times.” —zizka
And obviously the chief example of this, for Plato, was the trial and death of Socrates. It seems to me that Plato was a hair’s breadth away from Churchill’s formulation: “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”. Churchill’s observations is profoundly pragmatic; and when Plato discusses actual forms of government, he is similarly disapointed. Unconstrained by practical considerations, however, he esteems the philosopher king and a similar republic. But he’s clearly quite frustrated with the reality of things. I mean, good lord, Plato was Plato. He’s the western prototypical idealist. It’s a profound misundertanding of Plato to see Republic in primarily practical, rather than idealistic, terms. I don’t think Plato especially cared about the practical reality of organizing a city state. He was primiarly a moral philosopher and an epistemologist. He certainly wasn’t a social engineer.
Aristotle was more practical, I admit. But this use of Plato and Aristotle as a template for the practical organization of society (or a critique of such) to my mind has a strong taint of medieval neoplatonism—which was, I think, an alien culture’s deep (and convenient) misreading of them; and I wonder if that’s not what we’re really arguing about here.
Aristotle made a basic distinction between the ethico-political domain of practical reason and the metaphysical and scientific domain of theoretical reason, whereas in Plato the consideration of the metaphysical and ethical is undifferentiated and conflated. I think this is the point of the above cited quotation from Aristotle’s “Politics”, stated in the plain speaking manner of Aristotle. In general, I think it is a mistake to de-emphasize the continuities between Aristotle and Plato, for many of Aristotle’s “criticisms” of Plato amount to saying,” This is what Plato says, but I can do it better.”
But let me end, if I may, on Diogenes of Sinope, who was not looking for an “honest” man- that is a Victorian bowlderization. Diogenes, who was a well-known public character and on equal terms with everyone, walked through the marketplace in broad daylight with a lighted lantern held high, knowing full well that everyone would ask,” Diogenes, what are you doing?” “Looking for people”, he would reply. This is a satire upon the Platonic doctrine of the divine/natural light of reason and its alleged humanizing effect. But, like all well-crafted satire, it cuts both ways.
C.J.,
Start out with”What is Political Philosophy” by Strauss. It is polemical in many places but it is, by far, the most accessible of his works. The problem with Strauss is that he presupposes a great deal of knowledge so you may need to bone-up on your philosophy if it isn’t what it should be. If you don’t you will miss the obvious short-hand formulations and semi-hidden references. There is also the fact that much of Strauss’s work is on other philosophers so you will need to become familiar with them. Sorry, but there is no way around this. I still find stuff in Strauss which I missed the last time I read him. Good luck and be persistent. Like all things worth doing, it takes a lot of time.
On Plato’s banning of the poets: Homer (and the tragedians to a lesser extent) actually had a formal religious authority for the Greeks, like the Bible or the Koran. The Iliad and the Odyssey were scavenged for precedents the way people scavange the Bible, and Odysseus (in all his deviousness) provided a model for human behavior. So Plato wasn’t really banning a private pleasure; he was proposing that one model of intellectual authority (the epic) be replaced by another (reason, philosophy). Banning may have been extreme, but getting people to a place where a snatch of Homer didn’t count as a killer argument was a goal we can all endorse. (Havelock, Preface to Plato).
What I find unappealing in Aristotle and Plato and really the Greeks generally, and I think it extends to Strauss and the Straussians, is that for them philosophers and men of excellence are transcendant over their inferiors, who really have no rights that they can assert against their superiors. The Greek polisses were predatory, and sum sort of zero-sum state of nature seems to be taken as absolute, with the Straussians supporting the excellent vs. the rabble (Palestinians, the third world, the lower orders.)
“…is that for them philosophers and men of excellence are transcendant over their inferiors, who really have no rights that they can assert against their superiors.”
Well, that seems like criticizing the soup because it’s not a good book. I mean, using the language of “rights” is completely inappropriate in this context. The soup isn’t a good book. Yeah, well…so?
Yes, there are a great number of very important ideas that were central to the Greeks that we’ve inherited. But they were very, very different than us. Because of this legacy it’s easy to overidentify “western values” with “Hellenistic values”. But many of the things that appear to be the same are only superficially identical. I think this is well illustrated, for example, by the contrast between how the Greeks understood mathematics and how we understand mathematics.
My point is that were Hellenistic culture as alien to us as, say, Confucian culture (or whatever, maybe that’s a bad example), we’d not be so quick to evaluate it on the basis of things like its failure to recognize the “rights” of the rabble. But because it seems so similar to our culture, and yet has these notable divergences, we are inclined to judge it harshly. I think that’s a big mistake.
I’m no professional scholar, and some of these books we’re discussing I’ve only read once and many years in the past. But my education involved a couple of years of homeric and attic greek, translations of portions of texts, reading and discussing a great many of these texts, and, you know, Euclid et al. There are times in Plato’s dialogues where these people seem deeply familiar and immediate. And in many ways they are deeply familiar and immediate because their legacy is ever-present in our culture. But, really, they were very, very different intellectually and culturally than us. It took awhile for this to become apparent to me, but it did.
I don’t know enough about the Straussians and their esoterica to judge; but it seems to me that the people that fetishize the canon assume a unity that simply isn’t there. They assume such a unity because doing so suits their ideological purposes. Just so with the canon’s foes. And the Greeks are almost always (mis)used as a crucial piece in this intellectual chess match.
Keith, let me mostly agree this one time. To the extent that the Straussians bring this over into the present, a criticism can be made, though.
Wolfowitz was booed at one right-wing conclave because he mentioned that the Palestinians rights and interests have to be taken into consideration too. He’s not a raving nutjob like the Armageddonists and warbloggers.
Paul Veyne said of the Romans, but it could be applicable to the Greeks just as well, something like “The difficult thing about understanding the Romans is accepting how incredibly different they are from us”.
“Keith, let me mostly agree this one time.”
Well, that’s a nice change, isn’t it? :)
I’m in many respects a Hellenophile. To me, they’re like teenagers drunk on the nectar of the “first love” of reason, earnest but not humorless, intellectual yet passionate. There are a lot of (false, in my opinion) dualisms that are deeply embedded in later western culture that are completely alien to the Greeks. Those are the traits we would do well to emulate.
Yes, there are numerous ways in which I would judge them harshly from a contemporary context. But that seems rather pointless to me. I prefer to just let them be what they were, on their own terms. And you’re completely right, as far as I can tell, that the Straussians implicitly (at least) violate this “rule” of requirement for appropriate context by the nature of their argument.
Nietzsche, by most scholars’ lights, is not a “proto-fascist.” Frank Wilhoit should at least make an argument to defend that claim.
No, rhm, I’m afraid you badly missed the point. Cognitive and moral/ethical judgments are to be reduced to the status of mere aesthetic judgments. This is Nietzsche’s slippery slope.
And a solipsistic taking of responsibility without regard to consequences? Yes, this is very Kantian. To me the very identification of freedom with autonomy, a deep legacy of the Western metaphysical tradition, needs to be called into question.
Yes, Nietzsche did not reject the Enlightenment out of hand. He bedeviled it.
As to those above who wondered what Nietzshe has to do with Plato, Nietzsche was an inverse Platonist, as I think he would admit. Strauss’ “Platonism” is actually an inverted Nietzscheanism. It was not remarked above how much Strauss actually owes to and imitates Heidegger.
Strauss was the first to admit that the influence of sitting in Heidegger’s lecture hall was the impetus for getting him to re-think his position on the ancient philosophers. See his talk with Jacob Klein called “A Giving of Accounts” or something like that. He can hardly be said to imitate Heidegger, however, as Heidegger ran roughshod over the surface of Plato to get at the “depths”. Unfortunately for Heidegger, this meant that the depths weren’t really there. His misreading of the “epikeina tes ousias” in the Republic is fascinating and challenging but thoroughly wrong. Heidegger read Plato through the eyes of Aristotle which had the net effect of erasing Plato’s rhetoric in favor of an almost Albinus-like position of the “theses of Plato” or whatnot. One need only read his essay “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” to perceive this. You’ll note that Strauss never wrote an essay entitled “Plato’s Doctrine of…” for Strauss didn’t believe that Plato had doctrines. The difference in these two positions is very important, though I will be the first to admit that Heidegger is the deeper thinker.
The guardian class was a meritocracy whose members were drawn from all other classes, male and female alike. They were denied material possessions and the ability to have children. This corresponds to fascism how, exactly?
Well, denying people material possessions and offspring sounds fascist enough. It just means that the fascism isn’t located completely in the guardians themselves. The rabble were denied other stuff - e.g., freedom of speech and religion - so there was plenty of suspiciously-fascist-like constraint to go around.
This isn’t unusual for working states with a guardian class; for instance the earlier Mamelukes, or the eunuchs of the East(?) Chamber in the earlier Ming(?) dynasty. (I have a really faint memory that at the height of Mameluke rule they didn’t personally own anything, though they were very rich collectively, like some religious orders.)
One certainly can’t say that because the members of the ruling class were denied some indulgences that the class as a whole was virtuous.
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