Leo Strauss was one of the most significant refugees from Nazi Germany who arrived in the United States in the 1930’s. We are commemorating the centennial of Strauss’s birth in 1999. Strauss’s intellectual influence on the study of the American regime has been enormous. Since his death in 1973, Strauss has been both revered and reviled. Some see him as a savant for the perplexed leading them out of a contemporary liberalism devoid of purpose and a sense of duty, while others, often acrimoniously, view him as an elitist leader of a “Straussian” cult bent on containing the relativists and nihilists, and questioning contemporary forms of American egalitarianism and democratic practice.
Strauss considered modern liberal democracy to have abandoned the classical meaning of the good life and good society. At the root of modernity is the view that there is nothing independent of humanity which is superior in dignity to human artifice; the design of politics is rooted in human freedom and not divine or natural necessity. Though Strauss respected his modern American haven, he taught that contemporary American liberal democracy was losing its original sense of purpose and entering a modern condition of crisis. He was keenly aware of the alteration of the natural rights tradition in contemporary American law and politics, the pandering of political leaders to public passions, technological domination of the economic and political processes, and growing moral relativism. Compared to all other contemporary available alternatives, the American regime was decent but flawed. The best possible regime in our time is a liberal democratic regime which attempts to balance and disarm political tensions, and is cognizant of its inability to eradicate them.1 Human beings will never create a society which is free of contradictions. Strauss’s friendly criticism of modern American liberal democracy seeks, therefore, to give it a backbone as it struggles to harness the severity of political passions, sustain dialogue and intellectual diversity, and house the philosophic enterprise. Strauss’s friendly criticism of American liberal democracy also recognizes that the American regime was rooted in three faiths in tension drawing sustenance from modern natural rights theory, from premodern beliefs in the Judeo-Christian God, and classical republican virtues. His great concern was that since 1950 the American commitment to modern natural right, shorn of strong religious counterbalance, has led to a greater emphasis on relativism and a corresponding loss of a moral compass.
The decay of an earlier American ethos of personal and social responsibility, a decline in moral education and the absence of statesmen capable of reviving a sense of public dedication have made it difficult for the American political process to contend effectively with such problems as delimiting the role of technology in the public and private realms, distinguishing the problems of discrimination in the public and private realms and countering the influence of perfectionist or liberationist ideologies that pose a threat to the conservation of limited government. According to Strauss, “True liberals today have no more pressing duty than to counteract the perverted liberalism which contends ‘that just to live, securely and happily, and protected and unregulated, is man’s simple but supreme goal’ and which forgets quality, excellence or virtue.”2
Leo Strauss’s writings present a number of themes which have profoundly influenced his many students and followers when they consider the health of American liberal democracy. These political themes include: the question of natural right, the significance of the founders’ texts and the importance of constitutional form, the seminal role of statesmen, liberal education and liberal democracy, the fecklessness of the American political science profession, religion and the city, and the vocation of the political philosopher in a liberal democratic regime.
The problem of natural right is an inquiry concerning whether humans have fixed natures that are not subject to fundamental change. For Strauss, though there may be a universally valid hierarchy of ends, there is no universal set of valid rules for action. Natural right is changeable and one must be prepared for extreme, dangerous and complex situations. The human being’s attachment to one’s own also makes a naturally just regime impossible. Politics requires an appropriate mixture or balance between wisdom and consent. As Strauss puts it, “The political problem consists in reconciling the requirements for wisdom with the requirement for consent.”3 Strauss distinguished the classic view in which wisdom takes precedence over consent from the modern view in which consent takes precedence over wisdom. The perennial challenge of politics is working out the tension between wisdom and consent or justice and law. For Strauss, the political is understood to be more than expediency, deference to decency or public safety. The best approach to politics is to develop a moral sense to the full “experiential amplitude of one’s culture/political context.”4 Judgment is moral reasonableness which accepts the irreducible ambiguities and tensions of the human condition especially the tension between our bodies and souls and our own good and the common good. Given the complexities and irreducible ambiguities of the human condition, Strauss was dedicated to keeping alive the quarrels between classical and modern natural right (the Ancients and the Moderns), reason and revelation, and the philosopher and the city. Strauss does not give his followers a “philosophical kit” which enables them to solve all problems. Rather, he equips them with a set of fundamental alternatives challenging them and subsequent generations to explore the morally serious differences and relationships between the tyrant and the statesman, rights and duties, and constitutional form and political exigencies. Whether or not there is cosmic support for rights and justice, Strauss taught that certain actions or decisions are likely to be destructive to those individuals or nations that indulge in them. Strauss’s students have engaged in considerable controversy about a number of political questions. Are there truths now, or have they ever been, self-evident in the Declaration of Independence? Is the equality of man one of those self-evident truths? What would be the political consequences of denying the equality of man? Such followers of Strauss as Harvey Mansfield and Harry Jaffa approach with great seriousness the matter of human equality.They also have disagreements as to whether the principle “all men are created equal” is indeed self-evident and the surest foundation for the rule of law.
It is well known that Strauss taught that each text had to be approached on its own terms. One’s own preconceptions must not be imposed on the text. Strauss’s followers specializing in the American Constitution emphasize the dignity of the Constitution against contemporary liberal, behavioral, rational choice, and postmodern theorists. George Anastaplo, Ralph Lerner and Walter Berns are excellent examples of Strauss’s students who read the texts of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as if they are great works of political philosophy As Anastaplo puts it, “. . . there is a sense to the whole of the Constitution that the document can be thought about, part by part as well as in terms of the relations among parts. This thinking about the Constitution—the very insistence that it can be thought about—is critical.” 5 Harvey Mansfield insisting on the importance of constitutional form has been concerned with the fact that many political and constitutional commentators display a “willful disillusionment with a government that works.” Mansfield claims that “Postmoderns do not as a rule recommend more democracy, claiming it to be a good even in unlimited amount; rather, they attack every obstacle standing in the way of popular will.”6 Because of their defense of the importance (but not absoluteness) of constitutional procedure, Strauss’s students of the American constitution have often been referred to as constitutional fundamentalists, or, as Sheldon Wolin unfairly characterized their position, “misplaced biblicism.”7
Martin Diamond, one of the most sympathetic of Strauss’s students to the Framers’ texts still understands them as lowering standards (in comparison to classic natural right). The American regime is a political system founded on the pursuit of interest—a “low but solid standard.”The American regime is grounded in the first wave of modernity (Hobbes and Locke) and could very well begin to experience the second and third waves of modernity (Rousseau and Nietzsche). Even Diamond, the most committed Straussian to Madisonian teachings, recognized the risk that the regime could become engulfed by “the selfish, the interested, the narrow and the crassly economic.”8
Other Straussians, though they may identify the American constitutional regime as a best possible one among available alternatives, emphasize the inherent “tensions” in the Constitution—namely the concern of the many for security to pursue private interests and the need of the few to pursue honor and fame. Joseph Cropsey describes the conflict within the American regime—between aspirations for greatness and for self-preservation—as “energetic tension.” This “energetic tension” generated by the Founders can be found in the competition between the president and Congress over power.9 Sometimes this tension produces prosperity and sometimes it produces corruption. The American Constitution, for Mansfield, is founded on both restraints on government and leadership that must keep the people secure. Strauss himself argued that “even good laws are harmful from the fact that they cannot see.”10 He claimed that what we need is responsible rule from leaders and at times “an active forbearance from governing” from the public.11 To be sure, this position has been vigorously castigated by many scholars such as George Kateb when he refers to the Straussian position as “the authoritarianism of moral elitism” and a threat to democratic legitimacy leading in the end to a form of paternalism.12
Strauss wrote a candid letter to Karl Löwith concerning his own political convictions: “I really believe . . . that the perfect political order, as Plato and Aristotle have sketched it, is the perfect political order.”13 The best regime is based on the teaching that human beings are unequal from the point of view of their perfection. The wise are better suited to rule over others. The realization of the best regime depends on the “chance” appearance of princes friendly to philosophy. The modern regime becomes the best regime possible by eliminating chance through a lowering of standards in which there is a compromise between wisdom and unwisdom, tyranny and consent. The best possible regime includes the rule of law under which the state entrusts its administration to “gentlemen.” The gentleman is sufficiently wealthy, well-bred and public-spirited to be involved in noble pursuits.The gentleman is “a political reflection or imitation of the wise man.”14
Strauss distinguishes between two different standards of human excellence—the virtue of the citizen best embodied in the moral excellence of the gentleman (the ruler or founder) and the excellence of the philosopher or the wise man. The outstanding statesman and founder possess practical wisdom, the proper ordering or synthesis of the moral virtues. By following the course of the mean (finding balance or moderation) is to grant each good thing its due whether it concerns the care of the body or the cultivation of the mind. This gentleman, founder or statesman lives by a rational principle signifying some order or hierarchy of goods in promoting the common good. There are no fixed rules in statesmanship; there is practical wisdom. The statesman is concerned with his own good which embraces the good of the community He facilitates the coordination of the diverse purposes and pursuits of private persons. The unity or order that is achieved contains the mark of his own character. Strauss observes that the authors of The Federalist Papers clearly express some of these teachings, most especially “that diversity and inequality in the faculties of men which shows itself in the acquisition of property” (Strauss’s “summary” of Madison’s position). He also presents a rather positive view of Hamilton’s teachings in Federalist #35. In a modern republic, says Strauss, Hamilton is quite right to teach that the best we can expect is an electorate not depraved who will elect as its representatives—landlords, merchants and members of the learned professions “‘who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of society,’ or those who are most outstanding by ‘merits and talents,’ by ‘ability and virtue.’”15
According to Thomas Pangle, Publius does project the need for statesman devoted to virtue and the common good. “Like Hume and Machiavelli before him, Hamilton dares to declare openly what the classical theorists only wondered about with caution: The noblest men, those who are presumably most familiar with the beauty of the moral virtues, are not ruled by the love of those virtues, but by the love of the reward they may bring.”16 Service in the three branches of government, especially the presidency, would provide opportunities for the “gentleman” to gain reputations for wisdom, patriotism and the love of justice.
Harry Jaffa also places great emphasis on the salutary role statesman can play in choosing to present what is “high” in American life such as Lincoln’s teachings and rhetoric about the Declaration of Independence. Jaffa’s presentation of Lincoln as a great statesman is an example of the tension between nature and convention in statesmanship—in which “the highest ambition can be concerned only in the highest service, that egotism and altruism ultimately coincide in that consciousness of superiority which is superiority in the ability to benefit others.”The Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln, prescribed equality and consent of the governed obligating a statesman to include popular opinion in his political calculus—a principle grounded “in that consciousness of freedom which is also a consciousness of self-imposed restraints”. Statesmanship, for Jaffa, at its profoundest “is the vindication of the people’s cause on the highest grounds which had hitherto been claimed for aristocratic forms.”17
Leo Strauss observed that “the classics had no delusions about a genuine aristocracy’s ever becoming actual.”18 They would be content with a regime in which the gentlemen share power with the people thereby empowering the people to elect the magistrates and the council from among the gentlemen and holding them accountable for their actions at the end of their term of office.19 He argued that the responsibility of the people is “the most obvious crux of modern republicanism.” Those called upon to be the people’s representatives are to be prepared by a liberal education in “good breeding.”20 Strauss claimed that “Our present predicament appears to be caused by the decay of religious education of the people and the decay of liberal education of the representatives of the people.”21 Liberal education gives those who are receptive and willing to hear some examples of human greatness to found an “aristocracy within democratic mass society” by contributing qualities of dedication, of concentration, of breadth, and depth to democratic practice.22 Strauss raises the possibility that the liberally educated could be heard in the marketplace.
Strauss is certainly very well known for his dauntless and spirited defense of the great books as central to liberal education. The great books were written by those who are no longer pupils—the greatest minds. In liberal education these great books are to be studied “with the proper care.” A great book is not simply part of a canon. These books challenge us to pursue an adventure in self-discovery and an inquiry concerning the fundamental alternatives. A serious study of the great books, then, enables us to engage in a conversation and in disagreements in which we become aware of the inclinations toward these alternatives and the opposing positions. A liberally educated person displays both Socratic ignorance and an openness to the possibility of truth. A liberal education cannot provide a simple defense of natural right or refutation of historicism. For Strauss, it may be necessary to live in a tension between “natural right” and “history” in which we neither adopt natural right or the opinion that historical fate has superseded it. Rather, liberal education can contribute greatly to a person’s struggle toward whatever knowledge that would come by transcending these alternatives. Natural right is a problem, not a doctrine.23 Strauss calls upon others to hear themselves recreate in themselves this conversation or dialogue that is often suppressed in modern liberal democracies.
Allan Bloom and Thomas Pangle have applied and extended Strauss’s teachings on the role liberal education can play in providing some “philosophic guidance” for thoughtful citizens of American democracy and “opening” the American mind. Bloom and Pangle inquire about the natural hierarchy of the soul and the description of the soul’s pursuits by the institutions and culture of contemporary liberal democracy. Pangle, following Strauss, believes that “What most threatens us . . . is not unsettling skepticism, or revolutionary discord, or the excesses of passionate diversity, but the deadening conformism to a bloodless and philistine relativism that saps the will and the capacity to defend or define any principled basis of life.”24 The classical regime of Plato and Aristotle is considered impracticable by the Straussians; a small society ruled by the landed gentry is no longer feasible once technology, advanced weaponry, and acquisitiveness have been unleashed. Given that liberal democracy is the only decent regime “viable in our age,” it would be clearly imprudent to try to return to premodern conditions. Liberal democracy in giving freedom to all is giving freedom to philosophers. Liberal democracy, with its original commitment to the rule of law, freedom of inquiry and equal opportunity (in opposition to unjust privileges), must be now defended against the deadening conformism of mass culture, technical education producing “narrow and unprincipled efficiency,” “specialists without spirit” attempting to satisfy the desires of “voluptuaries without heart.” Strauss exhorted his students and others who have been influenced by him to be nuanced defenders of liberal democracy: “We are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely because we are friends and allies of liberal democracy”25 He urged them to use the freedom that exists in American liberal democracy to create “outposts” dedicated to excellence and liberal education.26
Strauss and his followers look upon liberal education as “the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant.”27 We judge the present day ills of American democracy by what democracy was “meant to be.” According to Strauss, “democracy was meant to be an aristocracy that has broadened into a universal aristocracy” Even though Strauss can foresee the broadening of the aristocracy under proper conditions, he does not view equality of opportunity as mandating equal conditions; liberal education “will always remain the obligation and the privilege of a minority.” In the final analysis, Strauss’s understanding of the principles of classical political philosophy obligates us to take the view that “wisdom cannot be separated from moderation and hence to understand that wisdom requires unhesitating loyalty to a decent constitution even to the cause of constitutionalism.”28 We need to accommodate our need for a constitutional democracy with the necessity to establish outposts of excellence in order that we be protected from the twin dangers of visionary expectations from politics and unmanly contempt for politics.29
A fair characterization of Strauss’s teachings on American democracy can be found in the following remarks of Horst Mewes:
We have, I think gotten the overall impression that he [Strauss] is not a genuine democrat. I think . . . that Strauss represented a type, and that is the Federalist’s democratic republic. The type of democracy that is essentially based on a representative republic governed by an elected, natural aristocracy of merit. Now I regard that to be a genuine type of democracy in the self-understanding of the founders. Whether it is or not, he is providing the most profound theory at the moment that is available for that type of democracy. Now, the fact that this is an extremely unpopular type of democratic theory right now is more than obvious. It is quite clearly a perfectionist theory as it provides a theory of human excellence.30
Perhaps we should change Mewes’ word “perfectionist” for the word meritocratic in his characterization of Strauss’s “democratic” politics.
Strauss began his career in the United States when the behavioral revolution in political science was in the ascendancy. His publications such as Natural Right and History and Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics (written in conjunction with a number of his students) were to become part of a counterrevolution seeking the renewal of interest in the pursuit of political philosophy. During the 1950’s most political scientists were writing about the death of political philosophy or that political philosophy should be consigned to the doghouse.
Strauss’s spirited rejection of modern political science is related to his view of the state of contemporary American democracy: “There exists a whole science . . . political science—which has so to speak no other theme than the contrast between the original concept of democracy, or what one may call the ideal of democracy, and democracy as it is.”31 Strauss’s critique of behavioral political science centered on the inability of its proponents to recognize the difference between the ideal of democracy and democracy as it is. For that matter, they could not make a principled distinction between liberal democracy and tyranny
Modern “value-free” political science has unreflectively accepted historicism and moral relativism in its denial of the human capacity to achieve objective knowledge about political things in a world devoid of moral purpose and moral responsibility. The historicist position reduces the study of political things to reflexes of the historical process. Any study of political things is simply based on social conditions, or the political state of affairs and is only relevant to a particular time, place or circumstance. For Strauss, this modern behavioral persuasion reduced human reasoning to a reflex of social and psychic structure.
Strauss was defiant in his claim that American political science was so lacking in understanding that it was unable to recognize the worst tyrannies for what they were: “when we were brought face to face with tyranny—with a kind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imagination of the most powerful thinkers of the past—our political science failed to recognize it.”32 Modern political science finds itself unable to “speak of tyranny with the same confidence with which medicine speaks, for example, of cancer” and it “cannot understand social phenomena as what they are. It is therefore not scientific.”33
A “value-free” political science, declaring such judgments methodologically out of bounds, simply seeking to describe political situations, is feckless. The human world cannot be understood with “value-free” categories. Strauss observed that:
Political things are by their nature subject to approval or disapproval, to choice and rejection, to praise and blame. It is of their essence not to be neutral but to raise a claim to men’s obedience, allegiance, decision, or judgment. One does not understand them as what they are, as political things, if one does not take seriously their explicit or implicit claims to be judged in terms of goodness or badness, or of justice, i.e., if one does not measure them by some standard of goodness or justice. To judge soundly one must know the true standards. If political philosophy wishes to do justice to its subject matter, it must strive for genuine knowledge of these standards.34
Genuine political science is political philosophy; it is the quest to replace opinion with knowledge of the nature of political things. Thomas Pangle states that this quest does not mean that the scientific analysis of political data should be relegated to the sidelines; “but that study must understand itself to be subordinate to or under the guidance of and in service to a higher study, a civic art or true science of politics devoted to the pursuit of knowledge of justice, or the common good, of virtuous citizenship and far-sighted statesmanship.”35
Strauss taught that political atheism is a modern phenomenon which is simply incompatible with a stable and just order. When trust exists in a providential order to which one’s conduct conforms, the dignity of moral obligations is enhanced and duty is raised to the level of aspiration. Belief in the immortality of the soul along with eternal awards and punishments acts as a powerful support for morality. The law possesses a higher dignity if the universe is of divine origin. No other source of “modes and orders” could command such a great measure of assent and contribute to the stability of political life.36
Many students of Strauss claim there is a serious weakness in the American regime in its failure to provide for virtue. It “damps down” the highest aspirations of human beings, whether philosophic or religious. As Herbert Storing put it, “they [the Framers] took for granted a certain kind of public-spirited leadership, so they took for granted the republican genius of the people; but that cannot prudently be taken for granted.”37 Paul Eidelberg recognizes that “. . . the Constitution does not provide for the education of the rulers. And therein is the paramount failure of the Founding Fathers.”38 Wilmoore Kendall decries the fact that the Constitution fails to answer the question how the people will be kept virtuous thereby leaving the American polity unarmed before the threat of moral relativism.39
Martin Diamond ponders the question of how might Aristotle rank America. Is it a genuine political community with its own moral foundation nurturing in its citizens certain ethical excellences of what is advantageous and just or is it an association or place for the sake of compacts and trade? Or does America possess a unique ethos of ethics and politics?40 Diamond readily admits that the Framers’ new constitutional order removed the task of character formation from its “previously preeminent place” on the agenda of public life and perhaps above all they depoliticized religion relegating it to private discretion. The question Diamond and many other Straussians have asked Americans to consider is the following: is the novo ordo seclorum with its counterpoised use of ambitious interest as the principal security for the pubic good and its emancipation of acquisitiveness going to permit those with “better motives” to be able to attain their full natural height? Strauss’s own repeated answer was to renew the religious education of the people and the liberal education of the representatives of the people in order to moderate the excesses of American liberal democracy with “better motives” and to consider “thought of better or worse.”
These concerns have challenged a number of Strauss’s students to become scholars of the First Amendment especially the religion clauses. These scholars generally present the case for nonpreferential support of religion. They concentrate on the debates about the ratification of the First Amendment claiming that interpretation of the religion clauses should be guided by the majority consensus of those supporting religion on a nonpreferential basis rather than on Jefferson and Madison who tend to be strict separationists. Much attention is given to Article III of the Northwest Ordinance which states that, “Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and other means of education shall forever be encouraged.” Nonpreferential support for religion fosters in the citizenry self-restraint, social responsibility, reverence for the old, and an ennobling sense of self-restraining awe. The public practice of those virtues is particularly important for a society based on “ordered liberty.”41
An example of a Straussian nonpreferentialist view can be found in the work of George Anastaplo. Anastaplo is particularly concerned about the health of church-sponsored schools. Anastaplo advances the view that “considerable financial help will be needed if these schools are to continue to perform the services for the entire community they do. Costs are going up, especially as expenditures for teachers’ salaries and for equipment have to increase; tuition can hardly be expected to keep up with these costs.”42 Defending religious education for inner-city youths is an especially significant community benefit.Anastaplo argues that consideration should be given to “the Roman Catholic parochial schools in our inner cities, schools in which the student body can again and again be made up primarily of Southern Baptists. Poor minority students in inner-city parishes are subsidized by middle-class white parishes in the suburbs. How long can this be expected to continue? What may government properly do to help the considerable variety of sects that help make our lives civilized? It is short-sighted to try to provide for a community without being sensitive to the religious facets of most enduring enterprises.”43 Most Straussians consider the nonpreferential collaboration between “church and state” to be part of prudent statesmanship and sensible constitutional interpretation.
Strauss teaches that there is a permanent and radical disproportion between philosophy and politics; there is always a “fundamental tension between the requirements of philosophy and the requirements of political society.”44 Political systems are closed—“the element of society is opinion.”45 In his autobiographical “A Giving ofAccounts,” Strauss tells us that “I arrived at a conclusion that I can state in the form of syllogism: Philosophy is the attempt to replace opinion by knowledge; but opinion is the element of the city, hence philosophy is subversive, hence the philosophers must unite in such a way that they will improve rather than subvert the city. In other words the virtue of the philosopher’s thought is a certain kind of mania while the virtue of the philosopher’s public speech is sophrosyne. Philosophy is as such transpolitical, trans-religious, trans-moral, but the city is and ought to be moral and religious.”46
Philosophy dissolves opinion, the element in which society breathes, and thus “endangers” society. Genuine philosophy “is animated by the spirit of social responsibility.” 47 It recognizes that not all truths are harmless, certain truths “must remain the preserve of a small minority . . . ”48 A cautious and discrete manner of writing and public speech is intended “to lead potential philosophers to philosophy, both by training them and by liberating them from the charms which obstruct the philosophic effort, as well as to prevent the access of philosophy to those who are not fit for it.”49
There can only be closed societies, that is states “with their distinctive perspectives and foundations.”50 The philosopher seeks to question and perhaps even destroy those perspectives and foundations by demonstrating that the laws of the city based on those perspectives are merely authoritative opinion or agreements that are not necessarily grounded in nature. The philosopher’s presence in the city is therefore problematic; it may even be dangerous. The true philosopher must be engaged, as we discussed above, in a politics of moderation—a politics concerned with securing the political conditions necessary for his own survival and for the philosophic life. Liberal democracy is the feasible regime best suited to provide those conditions which will permit the defense of philosophy Liberal democracy can be ennobled by a true philosophy that increases the number of individuals who are most lucidly alive to fundamental and comprehensive problems and does no harm. But doing no harm is not quite good enough. Victor Gourevitch puts Strauss’s position this way:
The philosopher will wish to participate in some way in the affairs of his city because, while agreeing with Strauss that a good man will not be a good citizen in a bad city, he also agrees with Socrates in holding that such a man is not as truly good as the good or excellent man who is a good citizen in a good city. He will then regard political action on behalf of his city and political action on behalf of his own good or excellence as converging on one and the same goal.51
For Strauss, the relationship between the philosopher and the city includes the tension between the philosophic enterprise and the care of the city. How does the Straussian political philosopher deal then with the question of American patriotism?
Strauss’s own teachings concerning patriotism and the American regime are as follows:
The United States may be said to be the only country in the world which was founded in explicit opposition to Machiavellian principles. According to Machiavelli, the founder of the most renowned commonwealth of the world was a fratricide: the foundation of political greatness is necessarily laid to crime. If we can believe Thomas Paine, all governments of the Old World have an origin of this description; their origin was conquest and tyranny. But the Independence of America [was] accompanied by a Revolution on the principles and practices of Governments: “the foundation of the United States was laid in freedom and justice, Government founded on a moral theory, on a system of universal peace, on the indefeasible hereditary Rights of Man, is now revolving from west to east by a stronger impulse than the Government of the sword revolved from east to west.”This judgment is far from being obsolete. While freedom is no longer a preserve of the United States, the United States is now the bulwark of freedom. A contemporary tyranny has its roots in Machiavelli’s thought, in the Machiavellian principle that the good end justifies every means. At least to the extent that the American reality is inseparable from the American aspiration, one cannot understand Americanism without understanding Machiavellianism which is its opposite.52
Strauss the political philosopher acknowledges the conflict between the American aspiration and the American reality. For him, Machiavelli “would not hesitate to suggest a mischievous interpretation of the Louisiana Purchase and of the fate of the Red Indians.”53 Strauss’s political analysis of the American founding accommodates the existence of the Framers’ moral theory the conflict between aspirations and realities, and the desire of Americans to re-assert the moral theory or ideals of their society against its inevitable disappointments or mistakes.
How do the followers of Strauss react to and develop Strauss’s political analysis of the American founding and American realities? What should be the proper approach to American patriotism?
Here we find significant differences between the Straussians. Thomas Pangle argues that “our American tradition itself, and our authentic attachment to that tradition, compels us to re-enact within ourselves far-reaching debates over the most fundamental principles of political right.”54 Proper American patriotism, for Pangle, is a great challenge to the minds of citizens with no moral tests concerning “un-Americanism.” Quoting Leo Strauss in Natural Right and History, Pangle argues that the proper foundations of patriotism must avoid “fanatical obscurantism.”55 Those who seek to create “thin poetry” and “compromised scholarship” are creating myths. “Those who seek to maintain the myth are compelled to obscure, with feverish zeal, the true roots of the nation. But their task is hopeless; the obscurantist fever intensifies; and from the fever spreads the germ of nihilism.56
Pangle identifies Harry Jaffa and a number of his followers as purveyors of “thin poetry” and compromised scholarship by creating “the myth ofAmerica-as-heir-to classical philosophy.” Pangle is quite critical of Charles Kesler, one of those Jaffa followers, who attacks those who interpret America in the light of John Locke and the modern natural rights tradition as being “un-American,” thereby “running down” the country. Pangle asks rather provocatively whether those who subscribe to the Jaffa position approach the debate about ancient and modern influences on the American regime “as if it were a morality play, a tale of a fight between the forces of good and the forces of evil.” As Pangle puts it, “If—God forbid—Locke and his great [modern] predecessors were predominant sources of American principles, it would follow that American principles are ‘base’. It is as if to step off the pedestal of Aristotle to sink irretrievably into muck.”57 Pangle rejects the Jaffa call to a “patriotism that claims to find in our national tradition the fulfillment of every high standard proposed by the theological and philosophical wisdom of the ages.”58 Such a call is untrue to our tradition, and it will “earn the distrust rather than the allegiance of America’s best youth.”59
Harry Jaffa takes strong umbrage at being “denounced as the deceptive purveyor of‘a new mythic Americanism’ designed to subvert the truth about our origins as a nation.”60 Jaffa believes that he has an answer to explain the denunciation he has experienced, namely “I dared to contradict the assertion of Walter Berns (the doyen of Pangle’s school) that the Founding Fathers were not Christian. The issue reduced to its simplest form, is this: Pangle and Walter Berns are convinced that the thought of the Founding Fathers (and Lincoln as well) is to be derived almost wholly from the thought of John Locke. But the John Locke they recognize is not the one who quoted Hooker and who led—or misled—his readers into thinking that his doctrines were well within the framework of traditional moral philosophy and moral theology. Their Locke is the one who, in the immortal words ofJoseph Sobran, ‘gave his tongue to Hooker and his heart to Hobbes.’”61
Jaffa rejects the notion that all the Framers were disciples of a Hobbesian Locke thereby subscribing to atheism. Jaffa claims that “Pangle and Berns insist that Hobbes was an atheist, and Locke a Hobbesian, therefore the American Revolution was atheistic in its intention as the Bolshevik Revolution.”62 Jaffa criticizes Berns for claiming natural rights doctrine is incompatible with Christian doctrine as understood by modern political thinkers and the Founders. Jaffa rejects the notion that Madison, Jefferson, and Washington were enemies of revealed religion creating in its place a hedonist atheist and materialist political order. Contrary to Berns, Jaffa argues that Washington et al. were not wearing “masks of piety over the sneer of contempt.”63
Jaffa quotes Washington directly, who at the successful conclusion of the Revolution, declared that the greatest blessing we received was “the pure and benign light of revelation. “When laying his sword, Washington delivered the nation into the promised land of freedom, making it his “earnest prayer that God would have [us] . . . in His holy protection . . . and that he would most graciously be pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that charity, humility and pacific temper of mind which were the characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed religion, and without a humble imitation of Whose example we can never hope to be a happy nation.”64
Jaffa completes his rejection of the Pangle school’s teachings by stating that “the Founding Fathers had their own purposes: They took from Locke what they wanted, and they interpreted what they took in the light of a freedom—loving, but also a moral and God-fearing people. Materialism, atheism and hedonism although they have certainly become part of our culture—are no part of what Abraham Lincoln called ‘our ancient faith.’”65 The “essential elements in American patriotism” are to be found in what Washington spoke of in his Inaugural Address as “the rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained.”
As the above discussion of Pangle’s and Jaffa’s positions clearly shows, they are divided not only on the question of “true patriotism,” but also on the more fundamental issues of the nature and purpose of the American founding as well as the import of Leo Strauss’s teachings for understanding political philosophers and statesmen. We must still conclude that there is considerable consensus among the Straussians concerning Strauss’s legacy as they seek to comprehend the complexities of the American founding, the crisis of contemporary liberal democracy, the quarrel between ancient and modern republicanism, the problem of natural right, the centrality of religious education and liberal education, and the crucial importance of political philosophy within the discipline of American political science.We must also conclude that for good or ill serious fissures have emerged among Strauss’s followers which have produced a considerable amount of heat as well as light. This book will explore the consensus as well as the heat and the light.
Charles Larmore in his book The Morals of Modernity represents many mistaken critics of Strauss when he concludes his chapter on Strauss with this observation: “Strauss was a thinker of great learning and conviction, but his vision, historical and philosophical, was fundamentally flawed. The school of thought he founded, and which shows no sign of extinction, draws its inspiration, of course, more directly from the historical than the philosophical component of his thought. . . . No doubt, Strauss will continue to have faithful followers as long as the vogue of modernity bashing persists.They, too, will promise much and deliver little.”66 This book on Strauss’s influence on the study of American politics will challenge whether Larmore’s conclusions about Strauss and his followers are valid. Perhaps it is more sensible to approach Strauss and his followers as incontournable (to cite George Steiner’s use of this French term)—they are a presence and a provocation which one cannot avoid or circumvent in the study of the American regime.
Leo Strauss, “Political Philosophy and the Crisis of Our Time,” in The Post-Behavioral Era: Perspectives on Political Science, George J. Graham Jr. and George W Carey (eds.) (New York: David McKay Co. Inc., 1972), pp. 22-23.
Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Foreword by Allan Bloom) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 29, 64.
Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1953), p.141.
Peter C. Emberley, “Leo Strauss: Machiavellian or Moralist,” The Vital Nexus, vol.1, no. 1, p. 57.
Cited in John A. Murley “Our Character Is Our Fate:The Constitutionalism of George Anastaplo,” The Political Science Reviewer, vol. xvi, p. 50.
Harvey Mansfield, America’s Constitutional Soul (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. ix-x.
Sheldon Wolin, The Presence of the Past (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 3.
Martin Diamond, “Ethics and Politics:The American Way,” in The Moral Foundations of the American Republic, Robert H. Horowitz (ed.), 3rd edition (Charlottesville: University Press of America, 1986), p. 95.
Robert Devigne, “Strauss and ‘Straussianism’: From Ancient to Modern Liberalism,” (unpublished paper), p. 21.
Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 76.
Harvey Mansfield, Taming the Prince (New York: Free Press, 1989), pp. 289-290.
George Kateb, “On the Legitimization Crisis,” Social Research (Winter, 1979), pp. 704-705.
Letter to Karl Lowith, 18 August 1946) “Correspondence Concerning Modernity: Karl Löwith and Leo Strauss,” Independent Journal of Philosophy, vol. 4 (1983), p. 107.
Op. cit., Natural Right and History, p. 142.
Op cit., Liberalism Ancient and Modern, p. 16.
Thomas Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the Founders and the Philosophy ofJohn Locke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 110.
Quotations cited in Thomas S. Silver and Peter W Schramm (eds.), Natural Right and Political Right: Essays in Honor of Harry V. Jaffa (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1984), pp. 6-7.
Op cit., Liberalism Ancient and Modern, p. 15.
Ibid., p. 15.
Ibid., pp. 15-16.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 5.
Op cit., Natural Rights and History. See the excellent discussion of these matters by Timothy Fuller, “Reflections on Leo Strauss and America,” in Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Émigrés and American Political Thought After WWII, Peter Graf Kielmansegg, et al. (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 72—76.
Thomas Pangle, Ennobling of Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 213.
Op. cit., Liberalism Ancient and Modern, p. 24.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 5.
Ibid., p. 24.
Ibid.
Op cit., Kielmansegg, et al., p. 189.
Op. cit., Liberalism Ancient and Modern, p. 5.
Cited in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (eds.) (New York: Free Press, 1991), p. x.
Ibid., p. 177.
Op. cit., What is Political Philosophy?, p. 12.
Op. cit., Ennobling of Democracy, p. 203.
Op. cit., What is Political Philosophy?, p. 229, and Natural Right and History, pp.152-154.
Herbert Storing, What the Anti-Federalists Were For (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1981), p. 73.
Paul Eidelberg, The Philosophy of the American Constitution (New York: Free Press, 1968), pp. 248-249.
Willmoore Kendall, Contra Mundum, N. Kendall (ed.) (New RocheBe:Arhngton House, 1971), pp. 399-402.
Op. cit., Diamond, p. 343.
See the excellent essay by Thomas Lindsay “Religion and the Founders’ Intentions,” in The American Experiment: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Liberty, Peter Augustine Lawler and Robert Martin Schaefer (eds.) (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Pub., 1994), pp. 127-130.
George Anastaplo, The American Moralist: On Law, Ethics and Government (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991), p. 451.
Ibid., pp. 451-452.
Op. cit., What is Political Philosophy?, p. 229.
Op. cit., Natural Right and History.
Leo Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts,” The College, vol. 22, no. 1 (April 1970), p. 4.
Op. cit., On Tyranny (Cornell edition), p. 26.
Op. cit., What is Political Philosophy?, p. 222.
Op. cit., On Tyranny (Cornell edition), p. 26.
Leo Strauss, “An Unspoken Dialogue,” Interpretation, vol. 7 (September 1978), p. 2.
Victor Gourevitch, “Philosophy and Politics I-II,” Review of Metaphysics, vol. 22 (1968), pp. 312-313.
Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), pp. 13-14.
Ibid., p. 14.
Thomas Pangle, “Patriotism American Style,” National Review (Nov. 29, 1985), p. 31.
Ibid., p. 32.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 34.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 36.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Cited in ibid.
Ibid.
Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 76.