Neoconservatism

"This book focuses deeply on the ideas behind one of the most important political movements of modern day – neoconservatism. Like all of the books I have chosen here, the concern is for how ideas affect human action, and how ideas will lead them to make certain wilful decisions. What Thompson and Brook do is to dissect neoconservatism in terms of its fundamental ideological source, and to trace out the consequences of those ideas. This book ties the neoconservatives to Professor Leo Strauss, a professor at the University of Chicago. It takes his ideas apart layer by layer, shows their connection to neoconservatism, and exposes the true meaning of the neoconservative movement. The nature of this movement is not pretty. This is a very complex issue so I will name one important factor here: the idea, drawn from Strauss, that there are certain truths available only to an intellectual or political elite (the esoteric meaning of a text), and that these truths must be presented to average people in terms they can grasp (the exoteric meaning of a text). Therefore if you read an ancient text such as Plato’s Republic with Straussian premises, it never quite means exactly what it says. Its real meaning is only available to these elites. When applied to political governance, these elites have a right to lie to the population if this is the way to get them to do what the all-knowing elites want. Thompson and Brook decimate this movement intellectually. They show how the neoconservative veneration of nationalism leads to a foreign policy of perpetual war overseas, through the sacrifice of the population to the ‘nation’."