Peter Thiel - The Straussian Moment

Peter Thiel argues that the September 11 attacks show the need to reexamine modern political thought, which he says rests on economic models of human nature that leave out people motivated by glory, God or country. He contends that development-era wealth transfers did not contain violence, noting that bin Laden, an upper-middle-class Saudi with an inherited fortune estimated at $250 million, was not a poor man driven by poverty. He traces the modern abandonment of questions about human nature to the Enlightenment, and links it to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which followed the Thirty Years' War.