I can usually hardly wait until the NY Times Book Review comes to my house on Sunday mornings.  It is overwhelming with too many books on too many subjects and written for minds much more facile than mine.  However, my friend and mentor on things scientifically political has on occasion written his diatribes on Leo Straus and has thus left me wondering what he is talking about.  From his computer to mine was the first intelligence about Leo Straus and his followers that I had ever heard.  After all, my mind has been in utopian constructs and other science fiction romance about what the world should and could be like.

Two new books about Leo Straus from his center in the University of Chicago purport to explain his influence on the current “neo-conservatives” who have shown up in significant places within the Republican Party. These are the “war” pundits who seem to distrust democracy and drive my usually dry and didactic friend into frenzied rants about the hotbed of neo conservatives who have turned against reason to push weak minded moralists into militants.

I do not know enough about this man or his creed.  I do know that at times across academia some ideas become more important than others. The problem with these ideas is that they favor the slavish imitation of converts and “born agains” who wish to change the world into a “neo” conservative image.

My background in preparing to be a teacher was built upon a public school education in Newark, NJ, one of the best school systems in the United States, and went on to include History as taught by B-u Burns and B-y Byrnes at Rutgers with some inclusions by Sidney Ratner on economic history. I also had terrific instruction in Philosophy by Mason Gross who became President after I left. I should also cite David Cowen who was the first history professor I encountered in a World History course I took in the Newark School of Pharmacy outlet at night that Rutgers had to set up to absorb the veterans pouring out of service. I do not think, nor do I remember taking a political science course as such. As a consequence I have not been sensitive to the philosophical storm that built up around the person and ideas of Leo Straus.

I checked the internet and came up with some succinct phrases about Professor Straus but little or nothing about the warring factions engendered by his ideas about “NEO” conservatism.  I liked the old definition where you very carefully studied changes before you accepted parts (and very few of those) of radical programs.  At one time, Conservatives cherished the past and feared the future.

The Straus Waltz is whirling us into deep dark waters of an unknown future.