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371 at the Start of His Celebrated Book the Liberal Imagination, the Literary

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371 at the Start of His Celebrated Book the Liberal Imagination, the Literary Book Reviews 371 John Bloxham, (2018) Ancient Greece and American Conservatism: Classical Influence on the Modern Right. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. x + 284 pp. $99.00. ISBN: 9781788311540 (hbk). At the start of his celebrated book The Liberal Imagination, the literary and social critic Lionel Trilling announced that ‘liberalism is not only the domi- nant but even the sole intellectual tradition’ in the United States. According to Trilling, ‘the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas’.1 Many scholars investigating conservative thought demonstrate Trilling-esque dismissiveness. Andrew Hartman’s recent history of the culture wars of the late twentieth century, for example, pillories right-wing ideas so relentlessly that the book seems less an analysis of societal feuds than a continuation of them.2 In this intellectual atmosphere, John Bloxham’s Ancient Greece and American Conservatism is especially welcome. Far from a typical exercise in political partisanship, Bloxham’s book, in origin the author’s dissertation in classical studies at the University of Nottingham, never lapses into polemic and always treats its subject seriously and analytically. It traces recourse to ancient Greek ideas in the works of various American conservative luminar- ies from the mid-twentieth century to the present. After providing some brief methodological prolegomena in the introduction, Bloxham includes chap- ters on major movements and thinkers in American conservative circles from the period in question. The first focuses on the ‘New Conservatives’ writing in the years immediately following World War II, especially Richard Weaver and Wilmoore Kendall. Bloxham’s characterization of Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (1948), a seminal tract in American conservative thought, is a particular highlight. He argues that Weaver, eagerly clinging to Platonic meta- physics as the proper foundation for a healthy West, shunned Aristotle, despite the fact that many of Weaver’s political judgments fit with Aristotle’s worldview better than with Plato’s. Bloxham’s Weaver, with his resolute and occasionally muddled disdain for relativism, helps set the stage for the book’s later analysis. Much American conservative thought, Bloxham shows, has rallied around a search for such absolutes. 1 Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1953), p. 5. 2 Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/20512996-12340219 372 Book Reviews Bloxham analyzes the work of Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin in chapter 2. Here his examination of Strauss’s take on Xenophon’s Oeconomicus stands out: Bloxham spies both genuine insight and wishful thinking in Strauss’s ‘esoteric’ reading of Xenophon. In general, he underscores the complexity of Strauss’s appeals to the ancients, demonstrating the difficulty inherent in using Strauss’s ideas as the launching point for any political movement. Always even-handed, Bloxham’s exegesis has the great merit of disproving much conspiratorial hokum written about Strauss and his followers in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, while remaining critical of anti-historicism and other ideas key to Straussian thought. It is in the analysis of such rich and com- plex thinkers that Bloxham’s book really shines. A chapter on first-generation neoconservative intellectuals proves less compelling. Despite his careful assessments of thinkers such as Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell, Bloxham ultimately does not find much ancient Greek influ- ence on incipient neoconservatism. Discussing conservative thought in the 1960s and 1970s more generally, in fact, Bloxham is compelled to conclude that ‘uses of the classics were apparently minimal during this period’ (p. 130). Kristol deemed Strauss (along with Trilling) a major influence, and neoconservative social scientists such as James Q. Wilson occasionally nodded to Aristotle. But that is about it. One wonders whether Bloxham felt compelled to include the chapter because of the obvious importance of neoconservatism to the later history of the American right. For strictly on the basis of their negligible engagement with ancient Greek thought, first-generation neoconservatives do not appear to warrant much mention. The chapter on William Bennett, Allan Bloom, and the conservative attack on American academia in the 1980s provides far more fodder for Bloxham. He justly characterizes Bennett as a conventional moralist beholden to a ‘Great Books’ narrative of Western history, whose nods to ancient Greece are typically generic and sanitized. In some cases, Bloxham shows, conservative recourse to the Greeks seems like little more than window-dressing, an attempt to grant chronological and cultural authority to a variety of preconceived notions. But this is not the case with Bloom’s thorny best-seller The Closing of the American Mind (1987), which, Bloxham argues, demonstrates many of the tensions and equivocations detectable in the work of Bloom’s mentor Strauss. Whereas conservatives often lauded Bloom’s jeremiad, Bloxham shows that there was much with which they should have been uncomfortable. The Closing of the American Mind, after all, can be read as providing a captious take on modern America, with its dull and trivial consumerism. Although Bloxham concludes that Bloom’s tome was lively and ‘well written’ (p. 151), it remained sufficiently Polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek AND ROMAN Political Thought 36 (2019) 347-417.
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