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It is now commonly acknowledged that numerous key players in and around the Bush administration's planning of the Iraq invasion were connected through a common background in the political philosophy of Leo Strauss, a German-born University of Chicago professor who died in 1973. These Straussian ""neocons"" were held responsible for exploiting the September 11th attacks in order to further their own foreign policy agenda. Cloaked in Virtue is the first book to take a critical view of the political ideas of Leo Strauss himself by careful attention to his own writings before and after his emigrat

"It is now commonly acknowledged that numerous key players in and around the Bush administration's planning of the Iraqi invasion were connected through a common background in the political philosophy of Leo Strauss, a German-born University of Chicago professor who died in 1973. These Straussian "neocons" were held responsible for exploiting the September 11th attacks in order to further their own foreign policy agenda. Cloaked in Virtue is the first book to take a critical view of the political ideas of Leo Strauss himself by careful attention to his own writings before and after his emigration to the United States. The result is a critical examination of the political theory of Leo Strauss, lifting the veil of intentional obfuscation, and its influence on the neoconservative foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration."--Jacket

The Port Huron Statement was one of the most important manifestos of the New Left in the United States. A foundational statement of the theme of "participatory democracy," the text had an important influence on post-1960s politics and, arguably, on post-1960s political science. The recent publication of a new edition of the Statement is an occasion for reflection on its importance. And so we have invited a distinguished cast of political scientists shaped by the events of the sixties to comment on the impact of the Statement on their own way of envisioning and practicing political science.

David McNally styles this book as beginning in a polemic and ending in a "materialist approach to language" much indebted to the German critic Walter Benjamin. The charge is that "postmodernist theory, whether it calls itself poststructuralism, deconstruction or post-Marxism, is constituted by a radical attempt to banish the real human body—the sensate, biocultural, laboring body—from the sphere of language and social life" (p. 1). By treating language as an abstraction, McNally argues, postmodernism constitutes a form of idealism. More than that, it succumbs to and perpetuates the fetishism of commodities disclosed by Marx insofar as it treats the products of human laboring bodies as entities independently of them. Clearly irritated by the claims to radicalism made by those he labels postmodern, McNally thinks he has found their Achilles' heel: "The extra-discursive body, the body that exceeds language and discourse, is the 'other' of the new idealism, the entity it seeks to efface in order to bestow absolute sovereignty on language. To acknowledge the centrality of the sensate body to language and society is thus to threaten the whole edifice of postmodernist theory" (p. 2).