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
Strauss appears here primarily as part of the intellectual genealogy shaping Peter Thiel's thought on politics and power, grouped alongside Carl Schmitt and René Girard as thinkers who influenced Thiel's approach to technology and society. The reading uses this connection to suggest that Thiel's involvement in founding social media platforms was not technocratic but informed by these political philosophers' ideas about conflict, mimesis, and state power. This establishes Strauss as a figure whose ideas about political philosophy indirectly shaped the ideological substrate of contemporary platform capitalism.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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