“The Legacy of Leo Strauss After 50 Years”
Harvey C. Mansfield, Claremont Review of Books
Leo Strauss once cost me a job offer. I was meeting with a professor who had asked me to be his research assistant; I agreed and reached into my bag to grab a notebook. As I did so, my copy of Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing fell out. The professor noticed, and then, in a move so petty and melodramatic it could only have occurred within the confines of the ivory tower, said, “Oh. I didn’t realize I was speaking with a reactionary,” and revoked his offer. It’s safe to say, then, that Strauss’s well-deserved reputation as the gadfly of academia lives on. Few are more acquainted with that reputation than Harvey C. Mansfield—another noted gadfly of American political-science departments. Last year was the fiftieth anniversary of Strauss’s death, and Mansfield has taken the opportunity to reflect on the philosopher’s controversial legacy. As one of the few living men or women who can claim to have actually sat in the German’s classroom, Mansfield brings an invaluable perspective to the topic. For more on Strauss, look forward to Glenn Ellmer’s upcoming reviews of two new collections by the author in The New Criterion; for more on Mansfield, keep an eye out for Paul A. Rahe’s review of Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth.
“A new book looks at the past and future of copyright”
The Economist
Plato, as The Economist reminds us, was one of the world’s first victims of copyright infringement. His student Hermodorus is said to have copied the master’s writings and then sold them for a pretty profit in Sicily, much to the philosopher’s chagrin. There was no formalized law against this kind of thing at the time, nor would there be for another two-thousand-plus years until the Statute of Anne was enacted by Britain in 1710. The statute served as type of proto–copyright guarantor to authors, but was considered generally befuddling. A new book by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu, Who Owns this Sentence?, reviewed here by The Economist, makes the case that the copyright waters have only gotten muddier since.
“The man who got the West to fall in love with India’s sacred literature”
Christopher Harding, The Spectator
The above questions of rights and property and labor don’t bother the Supreme Lord, Krishna. He isn’t big on property rights: “You have the right to work,” he tells his servant Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, “but you have no rights to the fruit of your work.” The first English translation of the Gita appeared in 1785 and was completed by Sir William Jones. Jones’s motivation was, in part, aesthetic: he believed the alien imagery of the Hindu holy texts could revitalize the English poetry tradition. He was vindicated 137 years when T. S. Eliot wrote his concluding lines to The Waste Land: “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata./ Shantih shantih shantih,” Sanskrit words pulled from the Upanishads denoting generosity, compassion, self-control, and peace. The prescient Jones is the subject of a recent writeup by Christopher Harding, an expert on cultural exchange between the East and the West, for The Spectator.