John A. Bloxham - Ancient Greece and American Conservatism: Classical Influence on the Modern Right

John Bloxham is Associate Lecturer teaching Classics and Politics at the Open University. He received his PhD from the University of Nottingham in 2016.

John Bloxham's timely and original study of the engagement of postwar American conservatism with the ideas of ancient Greece will be essential reading for anyone interested in US political history or in the enduring influence of classical philosophy on the modern world.

Patrick Finglass, Henry Overton Wills Professor of Greek and
Head of the Department of Classics and Ancient History,
University of Bristol

John Bloxhams study of the reception of Greek political thought in the United States since World War II is a model of its kind. He offers a lucid and intelligent analysis of the use of antiquity by influential and important thinkers such as Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom as well as the place of Greek thought in the development of movements such as neoconservatism. His timely book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of modern American conservatism, in the politics of the American educational system, and in the reception of Greek historiography and philosophy.

Tim Rood, Professor of Greek Literature, University of Oxford

Published in 2018 by
I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
London New York
www.ibtauris.com

Copyright 2018 John Bloxham

The right of John Bloxham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

References to websites were correct at the time of writing.

Library of Classical Studies 20

ISBN: 978 1 78831 154 0

eISBN: 978 1 78672 394 9

ePDF: 978 1 78673 394 8

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

For Andrea

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project benefitted enormously from the assistance and encouragement of a number of people and organizations. The Classics Department at the University of Nottingham has always been a welcoming and stimulating environment, but I would particularly like to thank my supervisors, Stephen Hodkinson and Kostas Vlassopoulos, for their unstinting patience and wise counsel over a number of years. Their perceptive criticism has been invaluable, but I also owe them an intellectual debt for the examples both have set in their own work on political receptions of Antiquity. The PhD thesis on which this book is based was examined by Tim Rood and Patrick Finglass. Their recommendations, corrections and constructive criticism have immeasurably enriched the manuscript.

Thanks are also due to my former editor at I.B.Tauris, Baillie Card, for seeing promise in an earlier draft of this manuscript, and to my current editor, Tom Stottor, for his guidance and support during the long journey to publication. Two articles eventually formed the backbone of : Willmoore Kendalls McCarthyite Socrates in conservative free speech debates of the 1950s and 1960s (International Journal of the Classical Tradition, in press at time of writing) and Platos ideas had consequences: appropriations of Greek thought in the postwar conservatism of Richard Weaver (Classical Receptions Journal, July 2017, Vol. 9, Issue 3). I am also indebted to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for providing funding support during my PhD study, as well as funding to undertake a highly productive and immensely enjoyable research visit to the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.

Writing this book whilst looking after my young children would have been impossible without the warm and generous help of Dave and Pauline Geary, Annette Jackson and Tony Bloxham. Finally, for their stoic forbearance, even when I was at my most trying, I affectionately thank my daughters, Livia and Medea, and my partner Andrea.

INTRODUCTION

The thought of what America would be like

If the Classics had a wide circulation

Troubles my sleep

Ezra Pound, from Cantico del Sole (1918)

Despite Pounds would be like, the Classics have on some level always had a wide circulation in America, as a stroll around the neoclassical splendour of Washington, DC or a review of the contemporary debates surrounding the establishment of the US Constitution will quickly make plain. What Pounds narrator was worried about was that the wrong people might develop an interest in Antiquity and, when a wide circulation of the Classics has included the American Right, Pounds narrator was not the only victim of insomnia. Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic apportioned at least some of the blame for the Bush administrations apparent deception in its argument for the invasion of Iraq to the Greek philosopher Plato. In this version of events, a shady, elitist group of neoconservatives in the Bush administration lied about weapons of mass destruction because they were followers of Platos noble lie, obligating them to practise deceit upon the cerebrally-challenged masses. But it was not always the fault of the ancients. The American classicist Page duBois was in no doubt that conservatives of the 1980s and 1990s had subverted classical texts for their own nefarious ends, as her title made clear: Trojan Horses: Saving the Classics from Conservatives.

The objective of this book is nothing so partisan. Instead, the aim is to illuminate the history of ancient Greek ideas and examples used by American conservatives from the aftermath of World War II to the administration of George W. Bush. I will trace patterns in the appropriation of Greek thought, reading such receptions alongside Greek texts and analysing examples of selectivity, subversion and adaptation within their broader contexts. I concentrate attention on the ways that some conservative intellectuals have used classical Greek thought in different ways at different periods. This work is not an all-encompassing history of American conservative intellectuals, and even less so a comprehensive history of American conservatism. However, although not all conservatives turned to Greece, enough did, and their appropriations were so extensive that an examination of their engagement sheds considerable light on American conservatism as a whole. The questions underlying this investigation centre on the profundity (or otherwise) of the conservative engagement with Greece, why the Greeks were turned to so often, and how these appropriations can be valuable in building a richer understanding of American conservatism.

Methodology

In its approach, this book is indebted to the fields of classical reception studies, the history of the classical tradition and the study of intellectual history more broadly. The first two of these might require a little explanation for readers new to Classics. Classical reception studies has, over the past 30 years, advanced from its small niche in the discipline of Classics to become one of its most vibrant sub-disciplines. The history of reception theory is commonly traced back to radical literary theorists of the 1960s and 1970s. In Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory, Hans Robert Jauss outlined his intention to move away from literary approaches which privileged authorial intent and the discovery of the inherent meanings of texts. Instead, he argued for a history of reception which would focus upon the expectations of readers based on their pre-existing understandings of similar works. In reality, this belief in the unanchored nature of textual meaning could be traced back further and wider. Reception theory can be seen as another descendant, alongside deconstruction, post-structuralism, and post-modernism, of the relativist metaphysical turn taken by Friedrich Nietzsche and developed by Martin Heidegger. In this tradition, literary texts did not contain essential meanings which were simply waiting to be discovered. On the contrary, meaning is imposed by the reader who constructs their own interpretation, influenced by the interpretations of earlier readers.