THE USE AND ABUSE OF LEO STRAUSS IN THE （列奥·斯特劳斯的使用和滥用）.pdf

THE USE AND ABUSE OF LEO STRAUSS IN THE SCHMITT REVIVAL ON THE GERMAN RIGHT— THE CASE OF HEINRICH MEIER By Robert Howse Professor of Law University of Michigan Law School, Ann Arbor Email: rhowse@umich.edu FIRST VERY ROUGH DRAFT REFERENCES INCOMPLETE COMMENTS WELCOME Introduction The Schmitt revival has generated many interpretations of Schmitt—some on the left, others on the right—and has brought forth, as well, a variety of views about the relationship of Schmitt’s Nazism and Anti-Semitism to the core of his political thought. But Heinrich Meier occupies a unique place in the new Schmittean canon. Before coming to Schmitt as a scholarly preoccupation, Meier was apparently working on “Biosozialismus” at the Carl Siemens-Stiftung, a form of social Darwinism supporting the thesis of “natural” human inequality (while leaving the racist implications to be drawn by others). This was one of many interests of Armin Mohler, the director of the Siemens Stiftung at the time, Meier’s mentor and whose successor he would eventually become: Mohler is often considered a central intellectual figure of the post-war extreme Right in Germany (among his many works is one that contributes to Holocaust revisionism, Der Nasenring ). 1 When Meier turned to Schmitt, he found a unique angle for his scholarship, one that had been neglected by the right wing of the Schmitt revival; this was Schmitt’s relationship to the Jewish thinker Leo Strauss, who left Germany shortly before the Nazis came to power, never to return. In re-establishing Schmitt’s respectability and deflecting concerns about his Anti-Semitism, the fact that the great Strauss—a reverential student of Maimonides and his Greek masters—took Schmitt seriously and actually shared Schmitt’s enmity to bourgeois liberalism might obviously be of some help. Before Meier, Stephen Holmes, a liberal American political theorist, had pointed to certain remark