Bad News for a Noble Enterprise

Today's a bad day for my field. Political philosophy, the effort to think about political matters in moral terms, is among the more ambitious of intellectual enterprises. Many of the great figures of human thought have worked in political philosophy as a genre, including Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes, and Locke.

But political philosophy has its share of slimeballs as well. The German political thinker Carl Schmitt caddied for the Nazis. Likewise, Mihailo Markovic served the cause of Serbian nationalism under his brother-in-law Slobodan Milosevic. Now it turns out that Luis Echeverria, the former Mexican president was also a political philosopher. That would not be so bad except that Echeverria was responsible for massacres of Mexican students during the sixties. Today, the charges against him were reinstated.

The Shame!

Actually, it's worse. The Bush administration and their fellow travelers in the media have been loaded with people (actually men) with academic training in the right-wing views of Leo Strauss, a leading political philosopher at the University of Chicago after WWII. Key architects of Iraq invasion like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith were trained in Straussianism--the same with William Kristol.

My only consolation is that Bush administration Straussians might end up like Echeverria-- under arrest for their crimes against humanity.