ABSTRACT
We learn from Weber that under certain conditions Ideas can 'co-determine' the course of history (Weber 1952, 80) (Weber 1957, 249). Leo Strauss's critique of Max Weber could be said to have co-determined our present world. That critique was the sharp edge of the wedge that went through America, foreshadowing the lurid bipolarities of our current culture and politics. Strauss's misgivings about liberal democracy included an accusation that modern social sciences, infused as they are by liberal Weltanschauung, are incapable of declaring the allegedly self evident truth of superiority of the Western culture. This contention briefly reverberated in Allan Bloom's dark prognostications (Bloom 1987) 2 and then rode the cultural transmission belt to inform the crusade against 'political correctness,' 'multiculturalism' and the current campaign against academic un-Americanism. 3 Telling it like it is—politeness to the ultramontane barbarians and protected minorities be damned—became the battle cry of angry white men leaning out of the cultural windows of the eighties and nineties. Not that the left's infantile ideological language games, rigid orthodoxies and divisive social engineering regime didn't have this puncturing of its multicolored balloons coming. One day the liberal left must ask what made all those angry white men so angry ... what turned Dr. Michael Alan Wiener into a 'Savage?' But that is a different discussion.
