What Seth Klarman Could Learn from Leo Strauss

Plus, Biden in Wisconsin; after fundraising in Greenwich and East Hampton, Biden bashes Park Avenue

A printout of Strauss’s remarks on the death of Churchill hangs on a wall in the editorial rooms of The Editors.

Money manager and philanthropist Seth Klarman offered this statement about President Biden, as reported in the New York Times. “The most important thing President Biden — and all of us who have supported him to date — can do is prioritize the defeat of Donald Trump in this election...I trust President Biden, who has been a truly great president, will continue to keep this at the center of every decision about the path forward.”

The line about Biden having been “a truly great president” made me smile and think of some comments by Leo Strauss, the political philosopher, scholar of Maimonides, and professor at the University of Chicago. Strauss is said to have delivered the remarks to his class in 1965 the day after the death of Winston Churchill. “We have no higher duty, and no more pressing duty, than to remind ourselves and our students of political greatness, human greatness, of the peaks of human excellence. For we are supposed to train ourselves and others in seeing things as they are, and this means above all in seeing their greatness and their misery, their excellence and their vileness, their nobility and their triumphs, and therefore never to mistake mediocrity, however brilliant, for true greatness.”