New article: Willmoore Kendall’s ‘McCarthyite’ Socrates in conservative free speech debates of the 1950s and 1960s

Latest article out in the March 2018 International Journal of the Classical Tradition (volume 25, issue 1):

Willmoore Kendall’s ‘McCarthyite’ Socrates in conservative free speech debates of the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract: Sennator Joseph McCarthy and the ancient Athenian philosopher Socrates occupied opposing ends of a freedom spectrum in the 1950s: one became a byword for repression and the other is remembered as a fearless seeker of truth and opponent of tyranny. This paper explores the reaction on the Right created by liberalism’s appropriation of Socrates to attack McCarthyism. Focusing on works by Willmoore Kendall, an influential right-wing populist who came to embrace Leo Strauss’s elitist emphasis on classical Greek thinkers, it examines how the resulting populist/elitist synthesis justified McCarthyism using Socrates’ trial and death at the hands of the Athenian democracy. Kendall’s Socrates, based upon a close re-engagement with Plato’s Apology and Crito, may actually be closer to the figure seen through our sources than the liberal version. However, this apparent accuracy requires sacrificing the reader’s ability to judge events for themselves.

Coming Soon... AMPRAW 2015

And now for something completely different...

Call for Papers

Fifth Annual Meeting of Postgraduates in the Reception of the Ancient World

14th-15th December 2015

University of Nottingham

Abstracts deadline: 31st August 2015

It is with great pleasure that we announce the fifth Annual Meeting of Postgraduates in the Reception of the Ancient World. AMPRAW 2015 will be a two-day conference aiming to provide both UK and international postgraduate students from all disciplines with the opportunity to present their research to the growing academic community focusing on classical reception.

This year's conference will be held from Monday 14th to Tuesday 15^th December 2015 at the University of Nottingham.

We will build on the successful trend of recent AMPRAWs, and this year the focus will be “Orthodoxy and Dissent”. This theme relates to many aspects of reception studies, and will further widen the scope of AMPRAW into the areas of material and visual culture, translation studies, and political thought.

We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers (with a subsequent 10 minute discussion) that engage with the following key questions:

•       Has there been and is there still an orthodox view(s) of the ancient world?

•       How have dissenters challenged this picture?

•       Is dissent against orthodoxy essential for art?

•       Do issues of orthodoxy and dissent help to highlight or shroud issues of contemporary discourse?

•       In what ways have the ancient world and its artefacts been used to reinforce or challenge authority?

•       Is there an ‘orthodox’ way of teaching Classics today?

Thus far, a wide range of abstracts have been submitted, testament to the breadth of opportunity that classical reception offers. We would encourage abstracts focusing on any aspect of the ancient world and how it has been received in any context since.

In addition to this year's panels, AMPRAW 2015 will feature a keynote lecture, and practitioner-led workshops from visiting speakers. Our exciting agenda already includes a keynote speech by Dr. Gideon Nisbet, whose latest work has focussed on reception of epigram (including a translation of Martial), and a workshop by Clare Pollard, the poet who recently published a contemporary verse translation of Ovid’s ‘Heroides’. Further details and panel topics are to follow in due course.

Evening entertainment is to be arranged for Monday 14^th December, and will be in conjunction with the Centre for Ancient Drama and its Reception (CADRE). Bursaries may be available to conference-goers and speakers alike, thanks to generous funding offered to us. Confirmation and details on how to apply for this will follow in due course.

Please send your title and a 200-300 word abstract (including your name, affiliation and level of study) to ampraw2015@gmail.com, by the 31st August 2015.

For up-to-date conference news and further details, please visit our website:  ampraw2015.wordpress.com and get involved on twitter @AMPRAW2015.

We look forward to receiving your abstracts!

Sincerely,

The AMPRAW 2015 Organising Committee

Legacy of Greek Political Thought in America

Classical Association Conference 2014: Legacies of Greek Political Thought in America panel, 11-14 April 2014

Working on behalf of the Legacy of Greek Political Thought group, I recently organised a successful panel for the 2014 Classical Association Conference. The challenge was to provide a narrow enough focus that the four papers provided an integrated and coherent narrative, while still appealing to a varied audience of classicists. With that in mind, the panel was focused upon American receptions of Greek political thought, and its aims were to examine and challenge the links between ancient Greek political thought and its modern invocations in the United States.

The Great Seal of the United States (reverse)

The reverse of the Great Seal of the United States is a reminder of the Founding Fathers’ ambition to create ‘A New Order of the Ages,’ unlike any previous society. Yet correspondence between the Founders shows a keen awareness of and engagement with past societies. In ‘Is there space for a Greek influence on American Thought?’ Nicholas Cole (Oxford) considered the American revolutionary period and addressed this paradox head-on. Nicholas argued that Greek history and thought made important contributions to American thinking, and that these help to explain the development of American thought in the early republic. But historians need to move beyond the narrow debate on political borrowings towards an appreciation of the wider multiplicity of ways that early Americans engaged with Greek thought.

Aesop Said So, Hugh Gellert

Vaulting forward to the twentieth century, Sara Monoson (Northwestern) explored contrasting attitudes to antiquity in ‘Classical sources and the promotion of literacy in radical critique: Diego Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads (1933) and Hugo Gellert’s Aesop Said So (1936).’ Her paper focused on the presence of classical imagery in 1930s expressions of radical critique by visual artists.   In his controversial mural for the Rockefeller Center in New York, Diego Rivera used the imagery of damaged yet formidable classical statuary to suggest the corrosiveness of weighty traditions and to question the value of harking back to antiquity. Though sharing his political viewpoint, Hugo Gellert challenged that view of antiquity. He produced books that combine text and illustrations to find other narratives in the sources (chiefly, the figure of Aesop as a view ‘from below’) that were, to him, able to inspire class consciousness and a sophisticated examination of problems like the greed and corruption of the high and mighty.

In the first of two papers looking at the conservative thinker Leo Strauss, Liz Sawyer (Oxford) presented ‘Leo Strauss, in context: Classical Literature as Political Philosophy in 1950s/1960s American Universities.’ She examined how Strauss’ use of classical literature, especially Aristotle, Plato and Thucydides, fitted within the broader context of how political philosophy and Western literature were taught in the 1950s and 1960s. By studying Strauss’ writings in the light of the educational methodologies of his time, Liz demonstrated how Strauss’s legacy as the ‘founding father’ of today’s neoconservative movement developed. In the final paper, ‘The original neoconservative? Leo Strauss’s version of Xenophon’s version of Socrates,’ I argued that Strauss’s interpretations of Xenophon have been overlooked by political commentators seeking to praise or malign the (exaggerated) Straussian influence on American politics. Using Strauss’s commentary on Xenophon’s Oeconomicus as a case study, I argued that Xenophon, a much more deeper and more nuanced thinker than often portrayed by classicists, rather than Plato or Thucydides, is the classical key for unlocking Strauss’s political ideology.

The focus on Greek thought in America gave the panel coherence, whilst differences in the subject matter and methodological approaches of the speakers ensured variety. Each of the other papers gave me fresh insights into my own work, and the discussions which followed were almost as fruitful as the papers themselves (and gave no indication that any audience members might have over-indulged at the previous night’s gala dinner). Having spent the build-up to the conference worrying about my own paper, which passed in a flash, it is only in retrospect that the real benefits of attending a conference like this became apparent – the unexpected connections and the perceptive and creative conversations with fellow delegates made attending this CA conference an enriching experience.