"Would it not be strange if the constant defence of philosophy replaced the practice of philosophy that is not reducible to its own defence?" Leo Strauss taught his readers to return to old books and to ask whether their authors were right. The essays and lectures in this book take up that invitation and turn it back on Strauss and his school. Written for serious general readers, they leave their hardest questions open and send readers to the primary sources. The title comes from the book's final essay. Straussians repeat a small set of phrases to themselves and to each other: knowledge of the whole and knowledge of the part, the city and man, writing between the lines. The phrases are insightful and important, but repeated often enough they begin to do the thinking. Michael Millerman calls this self-bewitchment Straussian witchcraft, and his remedy is to cast some other spells. Jean Bodin, the sixteenth-century theorist of sovereignty, also wrote a treatise on witches, and in it he observed that a magus was once "nothing other than a philosopher." This book asks what it would take to restore philosophy to its magic, to its relation to the divine, to its words of wonder. Millerman works among three pillars he regards as equally necessary: philosophy, mysticism, and the political. They run through essays on Plato's cave and the education of the philosopher, technology and the conquest of nature, the implosion of the universities, Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed and Judah Halevi's Kuzari, Herodotus on oracles and dreams, Heidegger and natural right, Carl Schmitt, Peter Thiel and the end of the Straussian moment, the tarot as a map of political philosophy, and a personal account of an interest in mysticism that came before Strauss. An appendix follows Cantor's diagonal argument from set theory to the question of whether artificial intelligence can ever be contained. About the authorMichael Millerman holds a PhD in political science from the University of Toronto. He is the author of Beginning with Heidegger and Inside 'Putin's Brain': The Political Philosophy of Alexander Dugin, and has translated seven volumes of Dugin's work. He teaches the history of political philosophy at Millerman School.
