By so extensively discussing the relationship of the early work of Leo Strauss to the Weimar writings of Carl Schmitt in the final major chapter of this work, I intended to build a bridge between past and present, between interwar German fascism and post–World War II North American conservatism. Strauss continues to be an intellectual resource for conservatism in the United States long after his death in 1973. Strauss managed to exert a profound effect in American academia by inspiring a whole generation of intellectuals, often right-leaning, of whom the late Allan Bloom would be the most famous example. His influence is now also felt at the highest levels of American national politics in the recently reinvigorated Republican party, through the person of policy advisor William Kristol, an acknowledged “Straussian.”

Yet accompanying the Straussian appeal to “traditional values,” voiced by Bloom in the academy and Kristol in the broader popular culture, is a market-centered, futuristic, technoeconomic ideology of progress and “freedom” perhaps best represented by the views of the incumbent Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, but in no small degree inspired by Austrian political economist and Schmitt devotee Friedrich Hayek. The seemingly incompatible conjunction of “traditional” values and technological determinism is now the dominant motif of the conservative agenda in the United States. Just as in the Federal Republic of Germany, members of the right who had previously valorized technology in ecstatic positive or negative tones came to treat it after the war as a sober fact to which all demands for emancipatory policy must capitulate, the American Right now combines market-oriented technoeconomic progress with an active promotion of potentially regressive cultural policies.