Leo Strauss and Resourceful Odysseus: Rhetorical Violence and the Holy Middle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: In the context of the heated rhetoric surrounding the legacy of political philosopher Leo Strauss's thought in the United States, this essay illustrates that the roots of the polemic are found within Strauss's approach to political philosophy, particularly as it is grounded in his critical interpretation of modernity and his distinction between esoteric and exoteric writing. This essay is an examination of how Strauss's anxiety regarding the potential violence of “truth,” combined with his reaction against the limits of modernity and his celebration of a purer form of “classical” philosophy, contributes to the development of what Gillian Rose calls a “holy middle.” As such, the rhetoric of Strauss's critique of modern liberalism risks being overwhelmed by the ferocity of its own polemic. In the midst of the contemporary polarized “culture wars” in the United States, it is not surprising that the tone of Strauss's polemical attack against liberalism often usurps the issues his ideas intended to resolve.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".