Reckless Politics and the Universities
Blaming the academic left for Hamas-leaning statements of some professors and students, the right comes with far from clean hands
The horrific massacres perpetrated by Hamas fighters in Israel on October 7th have not passed without notice in the universities. It turns out that there are some professors and students who try to defend, justify, excuse-and in the worst cases, cheer on-Hamas’s atrocities. The American right has wasted no time to publicize widely these shameful statements, and to blame the alleged domination of the left over the American academy. My friend Peter Berkowitz, in Real Clear Politics, suggests: “the costs of the transformation of American higher education into boot camp for extreme progressive social transformation were thrown into sharp relief by students’ and professors’ obscene apologetics for Hamas’ 10/7 atrocities.” Peter, to his credit, is careful to affirm that such speech is “protected, both as a matter of constitutional law and as a requirement of liberal education.”
The issues of free speech and academic freedom at play have been explored in an excellent recent piece by another friend, Nadine Strossen, writing with Pamila Paresky in the Free Press. Here, I am concerned with a different matter-the thesis that extreme progressivism in American higher education is the route cause, or the real source, of irresponsible political speech in the academy.
A good place to turn to achieve a deeper understanding is Mark Lilla’s fine book, The Reckless Mind. Lilla shows how a variety of thinkers who became and in some cases remain very influential in the academy were politically committed to fascism or Soviet Communism. Rage or disgust at the world as they saw it in their times, and the urge to destroy that world, led these thinkers to accept even the most extreme forms of political violence. But unlike Peter Berkowitz, Lilla is prepared to acknowledge that this pathology has deep roots in the right as well as the left.
The two thinkers on the right of most concern to Lilla are Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger. Both Schmitt and Heidegger remain big presences in the academy. Schmitt was a law professor and political thinker who joined the Nazi Party and became a senior legal official in the Third Reich, however briefly. There is a renaissance of interest in Schmitt; on the German right he has been resurrected by Munich professor Heinrich Meier, who also holds a visiting teaching position at the University of Chicago. Schmitt has many followers on the left also, including among law professors, as I discuss here. Heidegger, whom many regard as the 20th century’s greatest philosopher, was appointed by the Reich as Rector of Heidelberg University in 1933: he gave an infamous speech justifying the Nazi movement in the existentialist language of his philosophy. After World War II, Heidegger never unambiguously repudiated his connection to the Nazi movement. Schmitt came close to being tried at Nuremberg but in the end was allowed to go about his business in Germany, albeit without a university chair. He never gave up his anti-Semitism nor his general hatred for everything American or liberal. His influence in the universities is perhaps greater than ever.
During the 60s and 70s it is true that much of the romanticization of political violence in the universities originated with elements of the left- their sympathies for among others the Baader Meinhof gang, Che and Fidel, the Viet Cong and the Black Panthers. But the right is far from coming to the debate about reckless intellectual politics with clean hands.
In his Tel Aviv speech after the Hamas attacks, President Biden warned Israelis: “While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.” Among those mistakes would likely be the inhumane excesses perpetrated by Americans at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. These were not the product of rage alone; for example, a law professor working in the Bush Administration manufactured the tendentious legal arguments that served as justifications for loosening longstanding domestic and international restraints on the use of torture.
The same law professor, John Yoo, has more recently opposed legal limitations on targeting civilians in war. While noting that often targeting civilians may not serve military objectives, Yoo and his co-author Jeremy Rabkin, argue that armies should be free to do so in those situations where it serves the goals of the war. This even extends to collective punishment; depriving civilians of food and shelter, their means of survival. To those who care about human lives, Yoo and Rabkin say that targeting civilians will be balanced by fewer collateral civilian deaths due to hitting military targets with more precise high tech weapons!
Rabkin, also a professor, belongs to a circle of right-wing Straussians, devotees of the thought of the German-American Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss who (wrongly, as I argue in my book on Strauss)1 seem to attribute to him an idealization of warrior morality and a contempt for humanitarian restraints on political violence. Somehow, though more tangentially, connected to this circle is the notorious Paul Wolfowitz, architect of the Iraq war, a student of the Dr. Strangelove-type figure Albert Wohlstetter, who enjoyed flirting with the idea of limited nuclear war.
The endorsement of violence by scholar intellectuals Yoo and Wolfowitz does differ in one important respect from the handful of Hamas-sympathizing statements in the university world after the October 7 attacks. While the Hamas apologists are likely to have zero impact on the operations of Hamas, Yoo and Wolfowitz, as serving government officials, opened the door to torture and killing in the real world.
I am not here making an argument that the excesses of the intellectual right justify or somehow cancel out the recent Hamas-leaning statements. Rather, we should recognize that the problem of reckless minds is a problem for both the right and the left.
The answer to this problem is not simply to denounce the recent statements (though they are surely worthy of denunciation), and it does not lie either in firing professors or discipling students, which may intimidate some but will persuade none. The first step is to understand the deep roots of intellectuals’ romanticization of extreme political violence.
As Leo Strauss, then an emigre professor at the New School in New York, wrote about the young Germans who were enthusiasts for warrior morality and disciples of Heidegger and Schmitt: “If we want to understand the success, not of Hitler, but of … writers [such as Heidegger and Schmitt] we… must cast a quick glance at their opponents who were at the same time the opponents of the young nihilists. Those opponents committed frequently a grave mistake. They believed to have refuted the No by refuting the Yes, i.e. the inconsistent, if not silly, positive assertions of the young men. But one cannot refute what one has not thoroughly understood. And many opponents did not even try to understand the ardent passion underlying the negation of the present world and its potentialities.”
Understanding does not in any way mean excusing or accepting. Rather, through understanding, one can proceed to what is the sole effective remedy to this kind of political irresponsibility, which is not denunciation or punishment but political and legal education. Only by preserving academic freedom will we be able to protect or enable the conditions of intellectual openness required for such an education.
In fact, Rabkin has published a highly emotive attack on my book, perhaps not surprisingly as I challenge the use of Strauss as an authority figure in the glorification of violence.