Thiel’s connection to the late René Girard, his former teacher at Stanford, is well known but poorly understood. Most accounts of the Girard-Thiel connection have described the common ground between them as “conservatism,” but this oversimp…As we saw previously, Thiel was ruminating on Strauss, Schmitt, and Girard in the summer of 2004, but also on the future of social media platforms, which he found himself in a position to help shape. It is worth adding that around the same …
Leo Strauss
philosopher · 2 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Leo Strauss was a political theorist concerned with esotericism and the relationship between philosophy and political power, particularly relevant to understanding how esoteric intellectual traditions shape technological and policy elites. In the course readings, Strauss appears as a crucial intellectual reference point for understanding Peter Thiel's worldview alongside Girard and Schmitt—figures who together shaped Thiel's thinking about social hierarchy, hidden knowledge, and the role of exceptional individuals in guiding technological development. His presence in Thiel's intellectual genealogy helps illuminate how Pandaemonium Architecture itself (as a concept and practice) might inherit a Straussian suspicion of mass politics and embrace of elite epistemology.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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