Paul Wolfowitz and the Straussians

There’s been a lot of blather about the so-called neocon/Jewish conspiracy that has supposedly taken over the US administration. It is said that the “Straussians,” followers of the late political philosopher Leo Strauss, are leading the conspiratorial charge and that Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense, is its main agent. Wolfowitz was the main proponent of the invasion of Iraq shortly after 9/11.

Much has been written on “Wolfie’s” intellectual influences, especially of his graduate studies at the University of Chicago where he took a couple of classes with Leo Strauss. In a 2003 interview with Vanity Fair, Wolfowitz said that he took a class on Montesquieu, where he learned the importance of the US constitution, and one on Plato’s Laws. There he told the interviewer:

The idea that this has anything to do with U.S. foreign policy is just laughable.

A recent article goes into Wolfowitz’s time at Cornell, where he met Allan Bloom, one of Strauss’s most famous proteges and author of the 1987 “Closing of the American Mind,” which criticized the soft relativism of the American (and Canadian) academy. While Bloom, and his Straussian followers, were a big presence, the article finds that Wolfowitz’s background made him quite a bit more intellectually independent of Bloom and others than previously recognized. One of the reasons for this was his father, Jacob, a famous math professor who mentored his son and had hoped he would himself become a great math professor. Jacob also had a strong sense of social justice as a result of the Holocaust, which was reflected in Wolfowitz’s leftish political leanings that brought him to hear MLK’s “I Have a Dream Speech.” Another influence was Frances Perkins, who had served as FDR’s Secretary of Labor and was teaching at Cornell at the time:

Diminutive, proper, and a living link to the vigorously interventionist Democratic Party that the Wolfowitz family so admired, “Madame Perkins” proved to be an inspiration of a different sort. “Paul was deeply impressed by her,” says Bolotin; Norman Brokaw recalls that the two forged a “special bond.” When she died at eighty-three on May 17, 1965, just weeks before his graduation,Wolfowitz served as one of her pallbearers.

Whatever the ultimate causes of Wolfowitz’s outlook, one must recognize that there are many. His upbringing in the Rooseveltian faith in interventionist government reminds me also of the connections between his boss, George W. Bush, and the idealism of Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy.