Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
16 transcript-backed records
01 / evaluation
“President Trump is, in his way, more democratic than the rest of us, because he’s able to understand and to impress people who are not refined in their thinking and in their ways.”
02 / belief
“I think that their idea of spontaneous order is an idea which is intended to be a kind of form of rational control, and which can be seen in the original author of the rational control, namely Machiavelli.”
03 / belief
“” I think that is the danger now, that this part of human nature that men are different from women and want to be and need to express that is something that we need to hold onto.”
04 / belief
“I think that’s a fundamental principle of liberalism, which today is set forth more by conservatives than by liberals, that needs to be remembered.”
05 / belief
“Strauss treats an argument as if it were in a play, which has a plot and a background and a context, whereas analytic philosophy tries to withdraw the argument from where it was in Plato to see what would we think of it today and what other arguments can be said against it without really wanting to choose which is the truth.”
06 / belief
“On the level of the canon of great books, I guess I would say in the 20th century, Heidegger.”
07 / recommendation
“I don’t mean to be wandering back and forth, but I think you could learn something about American politics by reading Shakespeare and especially Macbeth.”
08 / evaluation
“They see the books that I assign and answer to my remarks and try to put their own lives in some kind of relationship to those great books. They don’t all become professors; most of them lawyers and businessmen, but they’ve found something that is valuable and will serve them the rest of their life, give them something to do in their spare time and give them a kind of guide for what they’re working at.”
09 / prediction
“That’s especially what’s involved, and it seems that technology must continue. It can’t really be stopped or reversed because one country always needs to protect itself against another country.”
10 / evaluation
“I think Strauss would have liked to introduce John Locke to Rawls and show him how Locke set up things better than he had, that Locke’s state of nature was a better picture of the fundamental principle of liberalism than Rawls’s original position.”
11 / evaluation
“If you make all your plans open and public, then I think whoever it is that you’re acting on, even if it’s a friend or a friendly power, will react and perhaps foil what you plan to do.”
12 / evaluation
“The understanding of knowledge as prediction really begins, I would say, with him.”
13 / evaluation
“I think maybe that ambition to write for other times—or Thucydides said, to write a book which is a possession for all times—has left us, and that the authors are not trying as they might have done to write that kind of book.”
14 / evaluation
“The effectual truth, he says, is what comes out of the truth, or what is the effect if you say to somebody, “I love you.”
15 / evaluation
“He wants to make a point of the dirty necessities of politics and of founding so that he doesn’t start with the Stone Age or even the Iron Age, but all the way to the Bronze Age, but still just as people are on the edge of beginning civilization.”
16 / prediction
“Since Strauss has shown what can be seen in those books, I think that will continue. It’s true that, in recent years, Straussian professors at the most prestigious universities have died or retired and not been replaced, but I don’t think that matters fundamentally, because people can always find it.”