UC Irvine

434 Pages·2014·1.82 MB·English

by  Bron Tamulis

UC Irvine
UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Title
Louis Althusser, Leo Strauss, and Democratic Leadership
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4cr249vp
Author
Tamulis, Bron Cohen
Publication Date
2014

Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation
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University of California
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA,
IRVINE
Louis Althusser, Leo Strauss, and Democratic Leadership
DISSERTATION
submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in Political Science
by
Bron Cohen Tamulis
Dissertation Committee:
Associate Professor Keith Topper, Chair
Associate Professor Kevin Olson
Professor John H. Smith
2014
© 2014 Bron Cohen Tamulis
DEDICATION
To
Political Scientists
of all kinds,
but especially to my Committee,
without whom this work would not be,
and to my family,
who endured it.
But also to the White Dragon Noodle Bar,
who taught me the answer to that pestering question: “why?”
And lastly,
to all those who refused
to forget and who thus
deserve to be remembered.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv
CURRICULUM VITAE ix
ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION x
INTRODUCTION: Political Leadership in the Twentieth Century 1
CHAPTER 1: Reasoned Humility: Strauss, Neoconservatism, and Us 21
CHAPTER 2: Pre-Modern Lessons For a Post-Stalinist Age: Leo Strauss on Machiavelli 72
CHAPTER 3: In Defense of Contemplation 133
CHAPTER 4: Dictatorship, Democracy, and Political Leadership 178
CHAPTER 5: Hearing the Call: Machiavelli, Althusser, and Us 253
CHAPTER 6: Out of Utopia: Althusser’s Solitude 316
CONCLUSION: Navigating the Theoretical Turn 386
BIBLIOGRAPHY 398
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When I entered graduate school in Fall of 2007, I left behind a full time, well-paid vocation
as a Jaguar technician. As a teaching assistant I earned a $17,000/yr salary, but during this time I
had the privilege of interacting with, and sometimes teaching, hundreds of young students at the
University of California, Irvine. Unlike the various engines, compressors, and brake systems that
I was used to encountering on a daily basis, my students were dynamic, engaging, and
unpredictable. Before it was all over I also met and married my wife, Samantha, and fathered
two children, Sydney and Kiriaki. While I was undergoing serious changes, so too was the
world. The so-called financial crisis of 2008, the largest prison expansion project in the history
of the world (in California), the unrest of the “Arab Spring,” the revelations of Bradley Manning
and Edward Snowden, the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States, and the
current standoff with Syria and Russia represent only a handful of the most memorable events
that would shape my graduate career. Politics has not stopped while my nose has been buried in
many, many books.
But the reason that I decided to switch vocations, to enter the tumultuous world of academia,
was that I felt like there was a serious need to develop a better apparatus with which to
understand the often perplexing reality we encounter every day. In taking up the vocation of the
political theorist, I embarked upon a journey that brought me in contact with a profoundly
inspiring lineage. I searched through countless books for components, bits and pieces, of a
machine that would help me understand the complexities of the world. That need is as great as it
was in 2007. I have resisted the urge to say that it is needed “now more than ever” because that
is something that everyone seems to say, especially after such high-profile crises as we have
experienced over the last few years. As I have learned more and more about the history that
undergirds our constantly changing present predicament, the need to sharpen analytical tools, to
reforge concepts and shape discourse, is one that is never going to be diminished by whatever
academic exercise I might undertake. Indeed, this terrain is where the discourse of the future is
constructed. It is no surprise, then, that it came to be the topic of my dissertation.
The history of the 20th Century has been one of constantly recurring crisis—providing ample
material for an eager graduate student searching for dissertation topics. As an undergraduate at
the University of Massachusetts, Amherst I majored in Social Thought and Political Economy
(STPEC), a unique interdisciplinary major in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.
STPEC taught me something quite rare in today’s educational environment: to think critically
about myself, my society, and my world. When I entered graduate school after spending seven
years “working for a living,” I was eager to actively engage the world and change it. Naturally,
this eager attitude affected my writing. I expected to be working to help make the world a more
equitable and just place to live and work, and to use my knowledge in pursuit of these lofty
goals. My graduate advisors patiently encouraged me to downplay my polemical attitude
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because they wanted to help me to get a job in what has been by all accounts the worst academic
job market in anyone’s memory. But, lucky for me, I did not enter the Political Science
department solely in order to get job training. I was after a vocation.1 I centered my sights on
understanding the previous century and its profound effect on the world. I became active in the
union, helping in the struggle to fight against the draconian measures of austerity that gripped the
state of California throughout my time there. I worked to help bring democracy to the day-to-
day functioning of the union, even as I kept up my studies. I did, though, come to question what
it means to be partisan on the terrain of ideas, what it means to be a committed intellectual in a
world that seldom waits for discussion and contemplation. Amidst the bargaining table and the
seminar room, I slowly discovered a new version of myself, and thus a new world. Although I
did not yet realize it, I had found the perfect place for me.
The “ivory tower” is supposed to be aloof from the everyday concerns of mundane beings,
but I quickly found out that it was shot through with privilege, ideology, and contradictions.
Ideology, though, is like a finely-tuned clock that tells the wrong time—if you ask it to do what it
says it is supposed to do—tell the actual time— then it can really unsettle all those folks who
have adjusted themselves to the incorrect reading. I asked the University to do what it said it
was supposed to be doing—to teach me to understand the world and thereby help me achieve the
best possible version of myself. I asked many questions and settled for few answers. In a
graduate cohort awash with uncertainty and self-doubt, such noble aspirations were met with
quizzical stares or even downright hostility. Some professors took such aspirations as a personal
challenge to the discipline and their careers. One went so far as to inform me that plenty of my
kind were to be found driving cabs in New York City. Silently, I wondered what was wrong with
driving a cab—at least this was a paying job that performed a discernible good for society. Many
of my peers seemed bound for desk jobs with the government or adjunct positions with no
security and modest wages. With the power of the market reaching unprecedented encroachment
upon all aspects of human life, prospects for gainful employment seemed grim indeed: if tenure
seemed unlikely then being a public intellectual was more like impossible.
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that within the first month of classes I heard more
discussion of what jobs were out there than I did about the course readings. My department
required its first-year graduate students to take a course in the Foundations of Political Science
with Professor David Easton. I found the course stimulating, exciting, and absolutely essential:
surely every political scientist would want to know about where the discipline comes from, how
it has changed over time, what mistakes have been made, right? Surely everyone would want to
clarify the language and terminology that we use so haphazardly—essential concepts like “the
state” or “politics.” No. Discussions about such “theoretical” questions were met with
frustration and anger amongst my peers. How was this going to help them get a job, they
1. What it means to be a political theorist is, naturally, the subject of much concern to those who allege to practice
the profession. I would like to show my appreciation to Sheldon Wolin, in particular for his piece “Political Theory
as a Vocation,” The American Political Science Review 63 no. 4 (1969): 1062-1082. In my own small way I hope
that I have enlisted myself in the ranks of those who “those who believe that because facts are richer than theories it
is the task of the theoretical imagination to restate new possibilities” (1082). I also thank John Gunnell, who wrote:
“My immediate concern is with the authenticity of an activity that fails to confront the fact that speaking
academically about politics is not the same thing as speaking politically” (“Political Theory and Politics: The Case
of Leo Strauss,” Political Theory 13, no. 3 (1985): 340).
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wondered. Shouldn’t they be learning methods? Where was the data? I was shocked: why on
earth would anyone go looking to academia if they wanted to get a job? Wasn’t this supposed to
be about the process of learning—about bettering ourselves and living a monastic life of the
mind? Weren’t we absolutely privileged to be as insulated as possible from the forces of the
“market?” But, as I quickly found out, my naïve beliefs were out of place. Anxiety, depression,
and pernicious guilt were the norms of academic life—for the grad students. True, the professors
seemed relatively happy—those that had tenure, anyways. Overworked, underappreciated, and
often underutilized in doing mundane bureaucratic tasks, but relatively happy. A few even
encouraged me along my path and actually believed in me. Thanks are due to them.
I did find other wayward souls who took the task of education seriously, and I latched onto
them like a drowning sailor clings to a barrel in the ocean. In the larger discipline of political
science, it seemed, political theorists were the only ones who took questions of history and
method, epistemology and discourse, seriously. I thank the faculty who guided me through this
tenuous period of my career, even as I wonder why the discipline is still unsettled by such
questions. There are many who think that political science must be “unified” along the
methodological stance that they profess to be appropriate, that other forms of inquiry are not
forms of knowledge. I learned about the “Perestroika” revolt in political science, and the strong
undercurrents of change that had been eroding the attempts to unify the discipline. I gradually
found myself comfortable with the label of “political scientist” and I re-learned my awe for the
aspirations of science itself, when combined with political understanding. I undertook to
understand the history of the discipline so as to be able to situate myself within it better. I read
like mad, taking up whatever I could find that might help me from philosophy of science to
histories of the discipline, to Marxist debates about history, to post-structuralism and feminism.
It took me three years to come to grips with the knowledge that I could not read all that I had
to read—that there was always more to do and that no paper that I might write would ever be
definitively “done” like the installation of a new set of brake pads could be “done.” I realized
that this was of fundamental importance toward understanding why it is so foolhardy to attempt
to unify the discipline, and to empathize with those who try so hard to do so: it is surely in the
anxiety that comes from knowing that one cannot read all there is to read under the heading of
“political science” that one can find the reason for the sometimes violent attempt to trim away all
the “clutter” that surrounds the “true” discipline. Slowly, with great attendant suffering and
angst, I realized that I had been thinking about everything in the wrong way. Nobody had
answers to the kinds of questions to which I urgently needed answers. It dawned on me that I
had to make the answers, that I had to engage with history and place myself within its embrace.
I had been thinking like the eager and good-natured, yet slightly annoying, undergraduate who
asks “is this going to be on the test?” I was looking outside of myself for a dissertation topic, for
the answers to the test, rather than accepting my responsibility in discovering and creating them
for myself. This process was an absolutely necessary one, and it is the foundation of an actual
career in academia—one must be self-motivated, persistent, and not looking for the answers to
the test.
It was a great burden to drop at the side of the road, and it took a while to unpack the
suitcase and remove all the deadweights. But I realized that all the pressure I had been feeling
was an imposition made possible by the fear of failure. Such fears drive mundane work and
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boring dissertations. They impel students to write for the market, as they perceive it, rather than
to do work that impassions them. Besides, I was after something far more elusive, far more
intangible than that mythical unicorn called “tenure.” I was searching for a way to understand
the incredibly complex and multifarious world that we collectively call home. I took Karl
Marx’s 11th Thesis as my guiding light rather than dwelling on the question of which journal
would publish my work. I stopped updating my CV and I went to fewer conferences. I put faith
in my ability to problem-solve and read critically and voraciously, following my nose rather than
the canon. I didn’t send any of my “work” out to journals—neither top-tier nor fly-by-night. I
took very seriously the idea that I had a lot to learn before I could be so bold as to think I had
something new to offer the world of academic discourse. I developed a mantra: “If you think
you have thought of something new then your bibliography isn’t good enough.” To resort to an
ancient analogy: I went back into the cave to practice seeing.
What I saw was not always pleasant: I came to see many of my peers as jealous gnomes,
each trying to best the others by polishing up an old rock found in some dusty drawer. As the job
market worsened and spirits flagged, many fell by the side of the road. I kept on. I kept true to
my working class background, never once taking for granted that I was being offered such an
amazing opportunity to think and read, discuss and learn with some of the most keen and erudite
minds in California. How many of us get to take a seminar with Angela Davis? Or with Étienne
Balibar? As the recent passing of David Easton has brought home, I had been given a truly
exceptional, and all too ephemeral, opportunity to see the discipline of political science as he saw
it. I realized that to be learned wasn’t to hold an encyclopedia between one’s ears, that judgment
was more important than critique, and that knowledge was the product of a vast, intricate
machine and not the bright, Romantic spark of genius. The production of knowledge has become
the political terrain that defines academia. But the machine has its limits; the market has yet to
completely infiltrate the halls of academia, a fact which I exploited for all it was worth. Where
else can one withdraw from the world for a period of several years, in contemplation of the
world, the self, the institutions and practices of which one has been a part? The market tries very
hard to influence this process, and for most students it inevitably does so in “guiding” them in
selecting their research topic, their advisor, their summer reading. But graduate school is unique
in the contemporary United States in that all of these factors are external pressures and they can
be held off for a time. One can create a temporary, well insulated bubble in which one can safely
undergo metamorphosis. Or, perhaps a more apt image, one can create a vessel that can
withstand the journey and storms ahead.
I would like to offer thanks to several specific people who have contributed to the
construction of this vessel. First, to Keith Topper, whose facility with language and sharpness of
mind are exemplars of all that is good in the discipline. Thanks also to Kevin Olson, the one
constant in a sea of many variables, whose advice and suggestions have consistently challenged
me to keep thinking. And to John H. Smith, whose brilliant seminars on German philosophy
introduced me to my wife, Samantha, and whose feedback was always blazingly prompt and
unerringly precise. I would also like to thank David Easton, too late, for his Socratic example
and his dedication to the craft. I am also grateful to Étienne Balibar, for the conversation that
encouraged me to pursue the thoughts that have lead me to this final product. And to Warren
Montag, whose generosity is unmatched. Many thanks are due to the various colleagues and
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friends that encouraged me along the way, a list of whom will always be incomplete: thank you
to Daniel Brunstetter, who showed me firsthand that it is possible to get tenure with integrity, and
who always came through in the pinch; to Claire Kim, whose support kept me going at a time
when I needed it most; to Jane O. Newman for much more than the title of chapter two; to Shawn
Rosenberg, for encouraging me to keep the mind in mind; and to John Sommerhauser, for his aid
in navigating the vast and often inscrutable labyrinth of the University. Raul Fernandez gently
and wisely steered me on this path at critical moments. Lev Marder, Megan McCabe, Ryan
Sauchelli, and Diren Valayden all provided valuable feedback during the writing process. Diren
even sat up far too late with me, helping me to understand what it was I was trying to say; his
friendship and solidarity are vital components of the final product. I would also like to thank
Roberto Alejandro and Sara Lennox, who gave me an early start on what has proven to be an
incredible journey. David Clooney was also there from the very beginning, pushing the limits
and reminding me that fortitude is a special kind of quality. Existential thanks are certainly due
to Jeannette Murphy, who bid farewell to the convent and thus gave birth to the world as I know
it. Samantha Tamulis unceasingly renews that world even as she has given birth to new ones. I
would also be remiss not to thank my parents and my family, my friends and colleagues, all those
who I have neglected to mention by name. They are not forgotten. And, lastly, I would like to
thank Russell Dalton, who propelled me along in ways he probably never intended.
It has been a constant struggle, as anyone who aspires to think can appreciate—the
ideological impositions are deep and they constantly re-intrude on even the most alert and
tempered mind. But the truth about the University is that, in today’s grant-seeking,
entrepreneurial culture those with capital decide what is an interesting research question—and
what methods are respectable— resulting in a situation where what gets funded gets published
and those who get funded get jobs. A job is a placement in an economy; it is a task that fits into
this larger system of division of labor. This division of labor has a history, and that history is
bloody and strewn with the corpses of those who threw themselves in front of the encroaching
machine. The discipline of political science has a history that is integrated with the birth of the
social sciences, the political institutions of the United States, and the world politics that have
defined the previous century. And though we should remember our history, we are encouraged at
every turn to forget. We are constantly on the run, breaking with the past to discover a new
gadget, a new truth, a new fashion. In order to be ourselves, it seems, one has to forget and to
contribute to the forgetting of history, of struggle, of domination and violence. One has to close
off the theoretical imagination, one has to forget that writing academically about politics is not
writing politically. One has to ignore the fact that politics defines political science rather than
vice versa.
I refuse to forget these things.
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