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Not long ago, the actor and playwright Tim Robbins directed a production in New York and Los Angeles called Embedded. The play is strange, but nowhere more so than in one, infamous scene: a black mass in honor of the deceased political philosopher Leo Strauss, conducted by candlelight by advisers to President Bush in the run-up to the Iraq war. Characters who are transparent representations of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Condoleezza Rice masturbate with abandon, all the while yelping "hail Leo Strauss!" beneath an outsized portrait of his face. The scene reaches a climax with this verbal ejaculation from "Woof" (Wolfowitz): "I'm hard! I'm rock hard!"
So much for subtlety. The play is satire in its rudest guise, undertaken, Robbins later claimed, in the rebellious spirit of punk rock (the play is dedicated to "the Clash"). Whether it succeeded is doubtful. If anything, it unwittingly satirized a form of left-paranoia as much as its intended target of right-wing bellicosity. Still, the play was an intelligible, if extreme extension of the zeitgeist. It was merely the most radical and unnuanced version of a view of Leo Strauss that became common parlance in the popular press: that his neoconservative disciples looked to his philosophy for inspiration as they orchestrated the war in Iraq, and that they were correct to draw the conclusions they did.
The thesis as stated is implausible, and its advance generated a series of replies, ranging from the heated to the bewildered. Thomas Pangle has traced the origins of the argument back to Lyndon Larouche, who claimed to expose the truth of the "fascist philosopher Leo Strauss as the godfather of the neoconservative war party" in a dossier called "Children of Satan." 1 Guilt by association, however, does not in and of itself invalidate weaker versions of the claim: for example, that Strauss, in a series of misreadings, was retroactively mobilized by neoconservative intellectuals and their politically active students. A number of recent academic treatments accept just this possibility, whether explicitly or implicitly, insofar as they seek to disentangle the writings of Strauss's sober students from the work of so-called disciples. They include a two-part series of articles in the New York...