# The Straussian View — reading pack Page: https://gautsch.org/research/the-straussian-view/ ## How to use this pack Help the reader explore this rabbit hole. Start by asking what caught their attention, then discuss one question at a time. Explore the strongest counterargument and what remains uncertain. Distinguish the original speakers' claims, Adam's question, the site's research commentary, and your own interpretation. Do not treat the commentary as a transcript or assume Adam endorses every claim. Preserve corrections and uncertainty; do not invent sources or pretend to have opened links. This pack contains the page's current research text, references and figure text. Related rabbit holes are linked, not included. It is a reading companion, not an independently verified source. ## The short version Leo Strauss (1899–1973) argued that philosophers throughout history wrote on two levels: a surface teaching safe for general readers, and a hidden one for those who could handle it. "Straussian" has since come to mean any position holding that some truths are socially destabilizing and are better left unstated. Cowen's *"we want to cover up the role of the elite to some extent, right?"* is that move applied to this conversation: **maybe elite rule is fine, and the thing to manage is that people notice it.** Acemoglu's one-word joke — *"if you cover it up really well"* — is a refusal, and the substance follows. ## Relevant transcript excerpt Source: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/daron-acemoglu-2/ Annotated transcript: https://gautsch.org/research/#a09 COWEN: But we want to cover up the role of the elite to some extent, right? [The Straussian view.](https://gautsch.org/research/the-straussian-view/) ## Research commentary **Adam asked:** *"Go deeper into what the Straussian view would be and why"* and *"Cover it up? Explain this concept"* --- ## Strauss's actual argument In *Persecution and the Art of Writing* (1952), Strauss argued that philosophers living under censorship — Maimonides, Al-Farabi, Spinoza — developed a technique of **esoteric writing**. The text carries an orthodox surface meaning; careful readers detect a contrary teaching in the contradictions, the odd omissions, the deliberate errors. Two claims are bundled here, and separating them matters: 1. **Historical:** philosophers did this, because they'd be killed otherwise. Defensible, and about specific texts. 2. **Normative:** they were *right* to, because some truths corrode the beliefs societies need to function. Far more contentious, and the source of the word's modern political charge. Strauss's followers extended (2) into the idea of the **noble lie** — from Plato's *Republic*, where the guardians propagate a founding myth to hold the city together. Whether Strauss himself endorsed this or merely described it is genuinely disputed. What is not disputed is that "Straussian" now means it. ## What Cowen is actually proposing Read his setup again, in order. First he lays out his own view plainly: > *"There's an educated elite in most countries. They decide who gets a Nobel Prize, who at MIT gets tenure… I think for the most part they know best. Other parts of the working class need to feel included enough not to bring the system down. But actual outcomes and policies, we do as much as possible want to be decided by the educated elite."* Note the phrase **"feel included enough not to bring the system down."** That is already the Straussian structure: the reality is elite decision-making; the management problem is public perception. Then he makes it explicit — *"But we want to cover up the role of the elite to some extent, right? The Straussian view."* Cowen is doing what he often does: stating the uncomfortable version of a widely-held position out loud to see whether his guest will own it. ## Why Acemoglu won't take it His answer works on two levels, which is a nice irony given the topic. **The joke:** *"Okay, well, if you cover it up really well."* — i.e., the strategy only works if nobody notices, and everybody has noticed. The cover-up has already failed. Populist politics across the West is the evidence. **The substance:** he immediately reframes to the problem he does care about — *"how do you utilize and respect expertise without creating the wrong kind of technocracy that is insular and too self-confident and, frankly, looking down upon the rest?"* That distinction is his real position, and it is not anti-expertise. He is a Nobel laureate at MIT; he says so — *"I am also very committed to expertise, obviously, given where I am."* His claim is that **expertise and technocracy are different things**, and that liberalism's crisis came from conflating them: the educated elite became "both much more powerful and more numerous," and a philosophical shift gave it more authority. His earlier line is the strongest statement of it: > *"We cannot have true freedom and true flourishing of a population when there is a clear hierarchy, whether it is by education, it is by race, it is by income."* ## The connection Cowen doesn't make The Straussian worry appears **twice** in this interview under different names. Here, and earlier as [Henry Sidgwick](https://gautsch.org/research/henry-sidgwick/) — whose utilitarianism generated the charge of "government house utilitarianism," the idea that an enlightened elite might rationally teach the public a simpler morality than the true one. Same structure, different century, different vocabulary. Acemoglu declines it both times. ## Reading - Strauss, *Persecution and the Art of Writing* (1952) - [SEP: Leo Strauss](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strauss-leo/) - Plato, *Republic* III, 414b–415d — the noble lie itself - Melzer, *Philosophy Between the Lines* (2014) — the best modern defense that esotericism was real and widespread --- ## Working notes **The reading of Cowen here is mine and is somewhat uncharitable-adjacent** — he may be probing rather than endorsing. But "they know best" and "feel included enough not to bring the system down" are his own words in his own voice, and he prefaces the whole thing with "that's close to my view." I don't think I'm overreading it. **Draft 2 could add:** Cowen's public writing on elite competence and on "the great forgetting" would either confirm or complicate this. That's a research task, not a lookup. **Checked against the book, which cannot settle this** — it is a page about Cowen's view, and Acemoglu's book has no Strauss, no esoteric-writing discussion, and no treatment of elite competence in these terms. Two things in it do bear on the substance, though, and both cut against the Straussian reading: Chapter 2 identifies the abandonment of liberalism's pillars with precisely this posture, *"as the college-educated acquired more social power and started favouring a top-down, technocratic outlook"*; and Chapter 10 makes non-denigration a principle rather than a courtesy — liberal society may argue for its values *"without indoctrination, imposition, and denigration."* Whatever Acemoglu thinks of Cowen's frame, his book has an answer to it. The draft-2 task above is unchanged: it needs Cowen's own writing, not Acemoglu's. Checked against the audiobook edition (Penguin Random House Audio, narrated by John Lee), machine-transcribed; references are by chapter. **Related:** [Working-Class Liberalism and Community Elbow Room](https://gautsch.org/research/working-class-liberalism-and-community-elbow-room/) · [Henry Sidgwick](https://gautsch.org/research/henry-sidgwick/) --- Research page built in conversation with Claude.