Against Great Books Fetishism

By Surya Gowda

Saturday, September 26, 2026

 

A wise man once said, “Whatever passes for conservative thought in the American academy usually passes through the influence of Leo Strauss.” This was no less true in the 1980s, when Strauss’ student Allan Bloom published his smash hit The Closing of the American Mind, than it is today, when Costin Alamariu—known to his vast online following as Bronze Age Pervert—promotes Nietzschean philosophy through homoerotic physique-posting. (Alamariu, for those who are unaware, was a doctoral student of the Yale Straussian Steven Smith and wrote a dissertation that engages deeply with Strauss’ work.)

 

Who exactly was this Strauss fellow, you ask? In short, he was a political philosopher who lived and worked during the 20^th century and wrote major works on ancient and medieval philosophy and natural right, among other topics. A Jew who fled Germany shortly before Hitler came to power, Strauss wound up teaching in several American universities—most prominently, the University of Chicago—and influencing a few generations of students, known as Straussians, who more or less adopted his theoretical presuppositions and pedagogy. Strauss was a critic of both historicism, a method of understanding philosophies by examining the historical conditions in which they arose, and the modern social sciences, which analyze social phenomena through empirical research methods. In his view, both failed to fully grapple with fundamental questions about the nature of goodness, justice, and human excellence. Thus, Straussians’ preferred research method involves close-reading canonical texts in pursuit of timeless, esoteric truths.

 

I fell in with the Straussians when I arrived at UChicago nearly five decades after Strauss’ death. At the suggestion of a professor and dear friend, I entered into a Great Books major called Fundamentals: Issues and Texts, where most courses focused on a single author or major work in the Western canon. I took classes on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws and Adam Smith’s social and political thought and wrote essays on Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Carl Schmitt. The closest thing I took to a gender studies course was one where we read Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen, a comedy in which the women of Athens enact a sexual equality law that forces men to sleep with old and unattractive women before they can access young, beautiful ones.

 

Many conservatives today, whether they’re of the Straussian variety or not, champion the Great Books curriculum and would like to see it replace most of what passes for humanities and social science education in English, sociology, and various “studies” departments across the country. A rigorous classical education in the liberal arts can certainly seem like the antidote to the left-wing ideological excess that plagues many college campuses. But now, a little more than two years out from graduation, I feel I can say with some confidence that while a Great Books education provides innumerable benefits, it is not without shortcomings.

 

Reading the Great Books can be utterly enthralling, and studying historical works forces us to exercise our humility, as it reveals how few of our ideas, or even those of present-day “thought leaders,” are truly original. What are Peter Thiel’s ideas on creative monopolies being the drivers of capitalist progress, for example, if not a reformulation of Joseph Schumpeter’s arguments in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy? Informing ourselves of the historical antecedents of contemporary ideas not only impels us to notice certain enduring facets of human nature and social relations, but also allows us to spot these ideas’ strengths and weaknesses before we’re condemned to live out their consequences once more.

 

The problem with the Great Books approach, however, is that it risks treating the texts themselves, rather than the ideas they contain or phenomena they describe, as the sole objects of importance. I noticed that far too many individuals in Straussian academic circles were content churning out papers presenting ever so slightly different interpretations of Hobbes or Rousseau while disregarding or even disdaining historical work or empirical findings from economics, psychology, or political science that might’ve proved relevant to the topics at hand. In opening their minds to the insights of great thinkers from the past, they shut them to the treasure trove of knowledge and wisdom that can only be gained in the present. Moreover, the Straussians deemed a relatively small number of texts worth studying and didn’t stray far from Strauss himself in terms of the questions they asked about them and answers they entertained. Academic Straussians seemed to fetishize the Great Books rather than build on the big ideas they contained.

 

We should certainly attempt careful study of canonical texts—it’s worthwhile, for example, to decipher what Machiavelli really thought of Christianity and Roman paganism by drawing out subtleties in his works. But doing so should impel us to ask further questions: What does the historical record reveal about religion’s ability to produce civil obedience? And do contemporary findings show that the latter can persist without the former? We may then set out on the bolder quest of proposing our own explanations of the role religion plays within the polity.

 

The Great Books invite us to join a millennia-spanning conversation about foundational questions of social and political life, but they are not that conversation in and of themselves. The books do not call on us to be lovers of them; they call on us to be lovers of wisdom … that is, philosophers.