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UC Irvine UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC Irvine UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Louis Althusser, Leo Strauss, and Democratic Leadership Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4cr249vp Author Tamulis, Bron Cohen Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Louis Althusser, Leo Strauss, and Democratic Leadership DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Political Science by Bron Cohen Tamulis Dissertation Committee: Associate Professor Keith Topper, Chair Associate Professor Kevin Olson Professor John H. Smith 2014 © 2014 Bron Cohen Tamulis DEDICATION To Political Scientists of all kinds, but especially to my Committee, without whom this work would not be, and to my family, who endured it. But also to the White Dragon Noodle Bar, who taught me the answer to that pestering question: “why?” And lastly, to all those who refused to forget and who thus deserve to be remembered. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv CURRICULUM VITAE ix ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION x INTRODUCTION: Political Leadership in the Twentieth Century 1 CHAPTER 1: Reasoned Humility: Strauss, Neoconservatism, and Us 21 CHAPTER 2: Pre-Modern Lessons For a Post-Stalinist Age: Leo Strauss on Machiavelli 72 CHAPTER 3: In Defense of Contemplation 133 CHAPTER 4: Dictatorship, Democracy, and Political Leadership 178 CHAPTER 5: Hearing the Call: Machiavelli, Althusser, and Us 253 CHAPTER 6: Out of Utopia: Althusser’s Solitude 316 CONCLUSION: Navigating the Theoretical Turn 386 BIBLIOGRAPHY 398 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS When I entered graduate school in Fall of 2007, I left behind a full time, well-paid vocation as a Jaguar technician. As a teaching assistant I earned a $17,000/yr salary, but during this time I had the privilege of interacting with, and sometimes teaching, hundreds of young students at the University of California, Irvine. Unlike the various engines, compressors, and brake systems that I was used to encountering on a daily basis, my students were dynamic, engaging, and unpredictable. Before it was all over I also met and married my wife, Samantha, and fathered two children, Sydney and Kiriaki. While I was undergoing serious changes, so too was the world. The so-called financial crisis of 2008, the largest prison expansion project in the history of the world (in California), the unrest of the “Arab Spring,” the revelations of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States, and the current standoff with Syria and Russia represent only a handful of the most memorable events that would shape my graduate career. Politics has not stopped while my nose has been buried in many, many books. But the reason that I decided to switch vocations, to enter the tumultuous world of academia, was that I felt like there was a serious need to develop a better apparatus with which to understand the often perplexing reality we encounter every day. In taking up the vocation of the political theorist, I embarked upon a journey that brought me in contact with a profoundly inspiring lineage. I searched through countless books for components, bits and pieces, of a machine that would help me understand the complexities of the world. That need is as great as it was in 2007. I have resisted the urge to say that it is needed “now more than ever” because that is something that everyone seems to say, especially after such high-profile crises as we have experienced over the last few years. As I have learned more and more about the history that undergirds our constantly changing present predicament, the need to sharpen analytical tools, to reforge concepts and shape discourse, is one that is never going to be diminished by whatever academic exercise I might undertake. Indeed, this terrain is where the discourse of the future is constructed. It is no surprise, then, that it came to be the topic of my dissertation. The history of the 20th Century has been one of constantly recurring crisis—providing ample material for an eager graduate student searching for dissertation topics. As an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst I majored in Social Thought and Political Economy (STPEC), a unique interdisciplinary major in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. STPEC taught me something quite rare in today’s educational environment: to think critically about myself, my society, and my world. When I entered graduate school after spending seven years “working for a living,” I was eager to actively engage the world and change it. Naturally, this eager attitude affected my writing. I expected to be working to help make the world a more equitable and just place to live and work, and to use my knowledge in pursuit of these lofty goals. My graduate advisors patiently encouraged me to downplay my polemical attitude iv because they wanted to help me to get a job in what has been by all accounts the worst academic job market in anyone’s memory. But, lucky for me, I did not enter the Political Science department solely in order to get job training. I was after a vocation.1 I centered my sights on understanding the previous century and its profound effect on the world. I became active in the union, helping in the struggle to fight against the draconian measures of austerity that gripped the state of California throughout my time there. I worked to help bring democracy to the day-to- day functioning of the union, even as I kept up my studies. I did, though, come to question what it means to be partisan on the terrain of ideas, what it means to be a committed intellectual in a world that seldom waits for discussion and contemplation. Amidst the bargaining table and the seminar room, I slowly discovered a new version of myself, and thus a new world. Although I did not yet realize it, I had found the perfect place for me. The “ivory tower” is supposed to be aloof from the everyday concerns of mundane beings, but I quickly found out that it was shot through with privilege, ideology, and contradictions. Ideology, though, is like a finely-tuned clock that tells the wrong time—if you ask it to do what it says it is supposed to do—tell the actual time— then it can really unsettle all those folks who have adjusted themselves to the incorrect reading. I asked the University to do what it said it was supposed to be doing—to teach me to understand the world and thereby help me achieve the best possible version of myself. I asked many questions and settled for few answers. In a graduate cohort awash with uncertainty and self-doubt, such noble aspirations were met with quizzical stares or even downright hostility. Some professors took such aspirations as a personal challenge to the discipline and their careers. One went so far as to inform me that plenty of my kind were to be found driving cabs in New York City. Silently, I wondered what was wrong with driving a cab—at least this was a paying job that performed a discernible good for society. Many of my peers seemed bound for desk jobs with the government or adjunct positions with no security and modest wages. With the power of the market reaching unprecedented encroachment upon all aspects of human life, prospects for gainful employment seemed grim indeed: if tenure seemed unlikely then being a public intellectual was more like impossible. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that within the first month of classes I heard more discussion of what jobs were out there than I did about the course readings. My department required its first-year graduate students to take a course in the Foundations of Political Science with Professor David Easton. I found the course stimulating, exciting, and absolutely essential: surely every political scientist would want to know about where the discipline comes from, how it has changed over time, what mistakes have been made, right? Surely everyone would want to clarify the language and terminology that we use so haphazardly—essential concepts like “the state” or “politics.” No. Discussions about such “theoretical” questions were met with frustration and anger amongst my peers. How was this going to help them get a job, they 1. What it means to be a political theorist is, naturally, the subject of much concern to those who allege to practice the profession. I would like to show my appreciation to Sheldon Wolin, in particular for his piece “Political Theory as a Vocation,” The American Political Science Review 63 no. 4 (1969): 1062-1082. In my own small way I hope that I have enlisted myself in the ranks of those who “those who believe that because facts are richer than theories it is the task of the theoretical imagination to restate new possibilities” (1082). I also thank John Gunnell, who wrote: “My immediate concern is with the authenticity of an activity that fails to confront the fact that speaking academically about politics is not the same thing as speaking politically” (“Political Theory and Politics: The Case of Leo Strauss,” Political Theory 13, no. 3 (1985): 340). v wondered. Shouldn’t they be learning methods? Where was the data? I was shocked: why on earth would anyone go looking to academia if they wanted to get a job? Wasn’t this supposed to be about the process of learning—about bettering ourselves and living a monastic life of the mind? Weren’t we absolutely privileged to be as insulated as possible from the forces of the “market?” But, as I quickly found out, my naïve beliefs were out of place.
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