For social science in the United States after World War II, the encounter with Leo Strauss was doubly unsettling. Strauss insisted on reopening debate on the nature of social science, a question thought settled by the dominant behavioral movement, and in doing so he provoked that disquiet, vexation, and even hostility which arise when settled views are disturbed.
The social science that Strauss confronted was sure of several things: that the scientific enterprise was something distinct from philosophy; that its task was to explain actual behavior by close attention to facts and their causes or correlates; that moral judgments had no proper place in the theory required to explain behavior; and that its new approach promised results far superior to those that earlier philosophic inquiry had achieved. Some small space was grudgingly allowed for antiquaries to investigate the history of political philosophy but merely as a discredited tradition whose study could illustrate the perils of a defective logic or, at best, suggest hypotheses for scientific testing. Strauss questioned these certitudes and insisted on restoring political philosophy as the comprehensive social science.
In formulating its new methodology, mid-century social science drew heavily from positivist writings in the philosophy of science. It believed that this methodology’s key assumptions about knowing or meaning had been validated by post-Humean philosophy. Thus when Strauss maintained that positivism’s flaws were fatal and that German historicism represented much the stronger philosophical force, social science was incredulous. Strauss seemed very much the ill-informed old fogy who had failed to keep track of the latest philosophical currents. The irony was that Strauss, while still a student in the early 1920s, had wrestled with positivism and historicism in their most powerful forms. Having studied Max Weber—a writer to whom he would return in the 1940s—he attended the Freiburg lecture course of Martin Heidegger, who at the time was an unknown young man in Edmund Husserl’s entourage. Strauss would soon report to Franz Rosensweig that “compared to Heidegger, Max Weber, till then regarded by me as the incarnation of the spirit of science and scholarship, was an orphan child.”1 Heidegger’s thought was largely unknown to American social science in the 1940s, when Strauss came on the scene, but later its force would become visible to all as Nietzschean and Heideggerian “postmodernism” swept through American universities. Positivism’s collapse as a philosophic school or movement took social science largely by surprise, but Strauss’s readers could have predicted it.
Strauss’s explicit critique of social science positivism appears in writings from On Tyranny (1948) to Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968)—a period that coincides roughly with his tenure on the political science faculty at the University of Chicago (1949-1968).This critique is intended to serve as a gateway to the serious study of political philosophy (the critique of historicism is also part of this gateway). It aims to show Strauss’s readers that the reigning methodology prevents them both from seeing political things as they are and from addressing questions that are of fundamental concern in political life. Once they have overcome current prejudices against serious inquiry, Strauss invites them to enter into open-minded dialogue with the great political philosophers, to approach them as thinkers from whom they might learn the truth about the nature of political things and the good or just political order.
Strauss’s critique of social science positivism is highly complex, as we see in his searching examination of Weber’s thought,2 but its design is sketched clearly in a terse paragraph near the end of the Introduction to The City and Man.3 What follows is commentary, drawn from Strauss’s various writings, on key sentences (italicized) from this paragraph.
The paragraph begin: “One can come to doubt the fundamental premise of present-day social science—the distinction between values and facts—by merely considering the reasons advanced in its support as well as the consequences following from it.” As we see, Strauss regarded the fact-value distinction as “the fundamental premise” of the social science of his time, even though he acknowledged that some rejected this distinction by holding that social scientists must practice “sympathetic understanding,” i.e., actually embrace the values accepted by the societies or individuals that they study.4
Doubts arise about the fact-value distinction when we consider (1) the arguments for it, and (2) its consequences. Arguments for the fact-value distinction draw on the idea that social science must be modelled on natural science: scientific objectivity is said to preclude moral evaluation. At the root of such arguments, however, is a claim about the limitations of reason, namely, the claim that “conflicts between different values or value-systems are essentially insoluble for human reason.”5 As regards the merits of this claim, Strauss insists that no one has yet provided the critique of reason that would be required to prove it.
What “consequences” of the fact-value distinction lead Strauss to doubt it? Here we must distinguish between theoretical and practical consequences. The chief theoretical consequence of the fact-value distinction is to prevent its adherents from seeing social or human things as they are. Evaluation is indispensable to understanding social phenomena, and social science positivism, by attempting to purge scientific inquiry of so-called value judgments, makes the study of the important phenomena impossible. Even positivistic social science attests to the indispensability of value judgments by bringing them in through the back door. Strauss holds, contrary to positivist dogma, that the “Is,” properly understood, does imply the “Ought.” In defining something, in saying what it is, we necessarily imply some understanding of the proper shape of that thing, i.e., what it ought to be.6 Positivism eventually undercuts itself as a theoretical position. Compelled finally to admit that modern science is merely “one historically relative way of understanding things which is not in principle superior to alternative ways of understanding,” it “necessarily transforms itself into historicism.”7
The ultimate practical consequence of the fact-value distinction is nihilism, which Strauss defines broadly as “the view that every preference, however evil, base, or insane, has to be judged before the tribunal of reason to be as legitimate as any other preference.”8 Nihilism manifests itself as the belief that since “our principles have no other support than our blind preferences, everything a man is willing to dare will be permissible”9 or, less boldly, as “a state of indifference to any goal, or of aimlessness and driffing.”10 Although the social scientist might affirm the fact-value distinction, typically he does not take it to heart or live by it: “His ‘ethical neutrality’ is so far from being nihilism or a road to nihilism that it is not more than an alibi for thoughtlessness and vulgarity.”11 In other words, the social scientist in fact embraces “democratic values,” but thoughtless or uncritically, so as to overlook inherent dangers that liberal democracy’s greatest proponents have warned against: ”Social science positivism fosters not so much nihilism as conformism and philistinism.” 12 Nevertheless, for liberal democratic societies at large, value relativism can lead to aimlesssness and drifting. When “self-evident truths” about natural justice or natural rights are reduced to “ideology,” a civilization guided by those truths will find itself in crisis: “The crisis of the West consists in the West’s having become uncertain of its purpose.“13 The new social or political science, however, is oblivious of the crisis of the West: “it fiddles while Rome burns.“14
Having observed that the fact-value distinction constitutes the fundamental premise of present-day social science, Strauss now maintains that “the issue concerning that distinction is part of a larger issue,” namely, how social science stands in relation to the pre-scientific or common-sense understanding of political life. The fact-value distinction “is alien to that understanding of political things which belongs to political life but it becomes necessary, it seems, when the citizen’s understanding of political things is replaced by the scientific understanding.”
One is reminded here of Strauss’s early teacher, Husserl, who argued that by a process of “sedimentation,” the modern sciences had lost touch with their experiential base in pre-scientific understanding and thus with the insights and questions that originally had animated them.15 Following Descartes’s path, positivistic social science defines knowledge in such a way as to depreciate all knowing that is pre-scientific. Consequently it forgets the questions most relevant to political life itself and comes to be preoccupied with the scientific proof of things known well enough, or better, to ordinary understanding. In abandoning the citizen’s understanding of political life, social science loses sight of what it is that forms societies into wholes, i.e., the regimes. Political science, as the architectonic study of regimes, is now replaced by a plurality of social sciences with no intrinsic order.16
“The scientific understanding implies then a break urith the pre-scientific understanding, yet at the same time it remains dependent on the pre-scientific understanding.” Positivistic social science is unable to carry through its attempted break with what can be called the common-sense view of political things. Unavoidably it takes distinctions vital to common life for granted, most notably, the very basic distinction between humans and non-humans.17 While priding itself on a wholesale liberation from opinion, it ends up embracing opinions uncritically. Social or political science, properly understood, treats opinion as its “basis or matrix.” It has the character of an ascent from pre-scientific opinions about things to a more consistent and complete understanding than opinion can provide.This dialectical ascent begins by taking the citizen’s perspective very seriously, even though it goes on to treat that opinion critically.18
The paragraph concludes: ” Classical political philosophy is the primary form of political science because the common sense understanding of political things is primary.” Strauss suggests two reasons why social or political science must treat common-sense understanding as primary and try to recover it. First, as we have seen, the quest for political knowledge properly begins from this understanding, i.e., from civic opinion. Second, social science, to understand itself, must grasp the character of that prescientific understanding which it somehow modifies. Nevertheless, recovering the common-sense understanding of political things is now very diffcult, because we view political life through the medium of concepts inherited from a complex tradition of political philosophy as well as the medium of the new natural science that emerged in early-modern times. The best path to such a recovery, Strauss concludes, is a return, albeit tentative or experimental, to classical political philosophy:
Classical political philosophy attempted to reach its goal by accepting the basic distinctions made in political life exactly in the sense and with the orientation in which they are made in political life, and by thinking them through, by understanding them as perfectly as possible.19
The Greek Socratics—Aristotle, Plato, Xenophon—enjoyed a “direct relation to political life” that we can recover by returning to their writings.This is why classical political philosophy must be regarded as “the primary form of political science.”
In sum, social science must return from inherited constructs and methodologies to social reality, i.e., it must “look at social phenomena primarily in the perspective of the citizen and statesman.” But this is not all. It must then view that reality “in the perspective of the citizen of the world, in the twofold meaning of‘world’: the whole human race and the all-embracing whole.”20 This means, however, that social science must be developed as a branch of philosophy, understood as “quest for universal knowledge, for knowledge of the whole.” Political philosophy—the inclusive social science—is the branch of philosophy “which is closest to political life, to non-philosophic life, to human life.”21 As regards the all-embracing whole, a question crucial for social science is whether man is a distinctive part of that whole who can be viewed as a being sui generis. Positivistic social science follows the path laid out by modern science, which is to deny essential or irreducible differences and to view things in terms of their genesis or conditions. This means, “humanly speaking, to understand the higher in terms of the lower: the human in terms of the subhuman, the rational in terms of the sub-rational, the political in terms of the sub-political.”22 Strauss acknowledges that a new approach to social science must eventually be supported by a non-reductionist science of nature:
Social science, as the study of things human, cannot be based on modern science, although it may judiciously use, in a strictly subordinate fashion, both methods and results of modern science. Social science must rather be taken to contribute to the true universal science into which modern science will have to be integrated eventually.23
Strauss’s discussion of social science has a constructive side as well as a critical side. That constructive side, which has yet to receive the attention it deserves, consists of proposals for reconstituting social science so as to make it truly empirical in character as well as properly reflective. Strauss’s reexamination of the classics is intended to illuminate and advance those proposals.What direction would social science take, if it were reconstituted along the lines that he recommends?
Strauss can agree with positivists that social science should be grounded in experience, but he objects to their narrow way of defining human experience. Sense data, whether given immediately or filtered through scientific constructs, cannot disclose the social or political things. Such realities come to presence in speech, i.e., in the ordinary discourse of everyday life. Social or political things would not be visible at all if people did not talk about them. Since it cannot profitably get behind speech to unarticulated experience, social science must begin from speech, or from the opinions expressed in speech. More precisely, political science, as the comprehensive social science, begins from the opinion of citizens, especially the best-informed and most active citizens, and from the laws that formulate opinion authoritatively.24
In holding that political science properly begins from opinion, Strauss does not mean opinions of the kind elicited by scientific polls or questionnaires. He has in mind political opinion as voiced in its primary context, which is controversy over issues vital to the community’s well-being.The chief issue, though often a latent one, in such controversies is how the community will be governed, or who will enjoy the full privileges of citizenship, or what type of human being will rule. In the political arena, citizens press rival claims, in the name of justice, that raise, directly or indirectly, the question of who should rule. By attentiveness to such debate, political scientists come to see that the choice of regimes is the most fundamental decision that a community can make. A community’s way of life, its dominant patterns of thought, and its manners are shaped by its regime or ruling part. Political science is the study of regimes, and it is first among the social sciences because social phenomena cannot be understood apart from the regime that shapes them. In line with this principle, Strauss himself interprets American phenomena in light of our democratic regime. That regime today exhibits strong pressures towards permissive egalitarianism that initially were held in check by liberalism’s founding principles or by older moral traditions, and these pressures shape all aspects of American society—our laws, our manners, our educational arrangements, our tastes. Even our social science is, in this respect, quite American. In characterizing positivistic social science, Strauss emphasizes its “democratism,” i.e. the unavowed regime commitment that controls its analysis of social phenomena. The “tacit presupposition” of its data and its methodology is a highly permissive form of liberal democracy, and even its allegedly “value-free” stance can be seen to reflect the premise that all values or desires are equal.25
By starting from civic debate, political science comes to recognize not only the priority of regimes to other social phenomena, but also the existence of a variety of competing regimes.The classical writings in particular afford the broad perspective on civic debate that moderns need in order to glimpse the main types of regime—monarchy, aristocracy, democracy oligarchy, tyranny along with mixtures thereof—and their distinguishing characteristics. Central to any regime is some view of the best life for human beings, of the virtues that convey title to rule, and of the principle of justice by which goods are to be distributed. Having forsworn “value judgments,” positivistic social science is unable to make distinctions of morality or justice that are required if one is to see regimes as they are. It is blind not only to the character of liberal democracy, but also to that regime’s main competitor at mid-century: “. . . 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.”26 Lacking a sense of “the essential differences or the heterogeneity of regimes,” positivism tries to understand political life in terms of variables present in all systems or else in terms of the subpolitical, e.g., laws of sociology or of experimental psychology.27
The civic debate that brings the salience of regimes to light also serves to orient political science and give direction to its inquiries.What Strauss says here about the classical approach is crucial for understanding his own political science. Whereas today’s social science favors the posture of a detached observer, the classics adopted the practical orientation that is inherent in political life itself. Mindful that communities are divided principally by disputes about regimes, the classics proposed to resolve such disputes “in the spirit not of the partisan but of the good citizen, and with a view to such an order as would be most in accordance with the requirements of human excellence.”28 As civic-minded arbitrators or umpires, they hoped to restore peace among warring factions by settling the most fundamental of all political controversies, the question of the best regime. Recognizing that regimes are matters for legislation, or for what we now call constitution-making, the classical political scientists addressed their teachings above all to legislators, i.e., to lawgivers undertaking to establish new regimes or to improve existing ones.They knew that improvement must be guided by some understanding of the form of rule that is best in itself, but at the same time, they saw that the conditions required to establish the simply best regime are seldom if ever present. Thus their teachings about the best regime were highly flexible and not at all doctrinaire. Besides considering what is simply best, they also gave attention to what is generally best for most communities, or best given available materials, or best where the aim is only to improve a regime without changing its basic form.29
For Strauss as for the classics, the guiding question of political science is “a subject of actual political controversy carried on in pre-philosophic political life,” namely, how the community should be structured or who should rule it.30 The classical teaching on the best regime addressed and attempted to resolve this controversy in a public-spirited way. To determine what form of rule is best, the classics were compelled to explore the question of what moral qualities best equip human beings to rule, or what virtue is. Starting from moral distinctions as made by decent people in everyday life, they concluded that the community should be ruled by “good men,” namely, those who are wise and virtuous and who will prefer the common interest to private interests. This means that aristocracy, or rule of the truly virtuous, is the best regime. All regimes are to be measured by this standard and where possible brought closer to it, perhaps by some admixture of the aristocratic principle. Strauss reminds us that the classics’ preference for true aristocracy was shared by the great minds who initiated modern democracy. Democracy was expected to broaden into an aristocracy as all or most men, through universal education, became virtuous and wise, or at least to provide for the selection of what Thomas Jefferson called the “natural aristoi” into offices of the government.31 Today, with the degeneration of modern democracy into “mass culture,” liberal education becomes “the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society.”32
In sum, Strauss would have us recover the direct relation to political life that classical political science had enjoyed. Our political science should adopt the orientation that is natural to political life, along with the moral distinctions and the articulation of questions that such an orientation implies. Nevertheless, Strauss points out that political science, as a philosophical endeavor, must finally transcend the citizen’s or statesman’s horizon. By contrasting Socratic or Platonic political philosophy and Aristotelian political science, he shows us that different views are possible as to the integrity of the political horizon and the manner of transcending it.
According to Strauss, Socrates conceived of the whole in such a way that each part, including the political sphere, is somehow open to the whole. This means that the dialectical quest for political knowledge, which begins from opinions about political things, cannot be pursued independently of quest for knowledge of the whole. In transcending moral opinion, Socrates’ dialectic depreciates it, so that the “good man” becomes the wise man or philosopher and right practice is made to depend on theoretical knowledge of the whole, or on cosmology. Aristotle, by contrast, separates the quest for the best political order from cosmology. He upholds the dignity of moral virtue, as it is exhibited in the life of the gentleman, and the capacity of moral virtue to illuminate the principles or ends of action. Refusing to make good practice dependent on theory, he maintains that practical wisdom or prudence, in pursuing ends of action disclosed by moral virtue, is sufficient to guide political action. By thus remaining within the limits of the gentleman’s understanding of the moral life, Aristotle becomes the founder of political science as a distinct discipline. Of course, Aristotle’s own understanding transcends the horizon of those to whom his political science is addressed. His broader understanding of the nature of things permits him to articulate, augment, and correct the gentleman’s perspective and point beyond it to philosophy as the truly good and happy life, yet he does not depreciate that perspective in the Socratic way.33 A full account of Strauss’s political science would require us to consider whether he stands closer to the Socratic or to the Aristotelian position as regards transcending the political horizon, but such an undertaking lies beyond the scope of the present essay.
A word must be said finally about the rhetoric that Strauss employs in treating American social science, for this, too, reflects his understanding of the philosophic life. Strauss’s critique of social science positivism may fairly be characterized as intransigent and caustic, although he is conciliatory toward that large body of social or political scientists who wish simply to investigate social phenomena but feel obliged to defer to positivism on methodological issues. If the positivist response is harsh and dismissive, it is also true that Strauss seems to go out of his way to be provocative. He does not attack the luminaries of American social science by name or directly review their works, but even this is belittling, for it underscores his judgment that Max Weber remains “the greatest social scientist of our century.”34 Strauss’s critique of social science provides a rare instance where he claims to understand writers—and this includes Weber—better than they understood themselves. In most controversies that he reopened—reason vs. revelation, ancients vs. moderns, even historicism vs. natural right—it is difficult to say with certainty where Strauss himself stands (witness the interpretations that place him on both sides of these controversies), but so emphatic is his rejection of positivism that no one seems to have placed him in that camp. One wonders, however, if the very force of this rhetoric might not disguise some sense of kinship, some hope for rehabilitation.
To decide why Strauss chose to attack social science positivism so severely, one must first raise the more general question of why philosophers should wish to involve themselves at all in controversies of the day, if their primary concern is quest for knowledge of the eternal order. Strauss himself points out that many philosophers, in order to pursue their inquiries safely and without distraction, not only refrained from openly criticizing prevailing opinions, but even gave the appearance of adopting them. Why then do philosophers leave their secluded gardens to enter the marketplace and even involve themselves in political debate? Strauss rejects Alexandre Kojève’s contention that the desire for recognition draws philosophers into public life, offering instead the following explanation. The natural attachment that human beings feel for each other, arising from the needs of the body, is felt too by philosophers, if in lesser degree than by non-philosophers. This leads philosophers to try to help others, to do what is possible to ameliorate their condition, even to advise lawgivers on how to establish good regimes or improve existing ones. Moreover, philosophers assist the political community by defending salutary opinions, as well as prudential judgments and sound practices, against challenges arising from misguided or pernicious theory. By serving this way as good citizens, philosophers also benefit themselves and, more broadly, the cause of philosophy itself by allaying suspicions that philosophic inquiry endangers the political community. Beyond this, philosophers are drawn into the marketplace by their admiration for well-ordered souls and their desire to produce good order in the souls of the best young people—the potential philosophers—through education. Philosophy is forced to become “political” both to protect and to perpetuate itself.35
Strauss’s critique of social science positivism is designed to carry out these perennial tasks of philosophy, as they presented themselves under the circumstances of his time. In the manner of a good citizen, he refutes theories that undercut or demoralize liberal democracy by insisting that its core “values” or founding principles lack rational grounding. He defends the integrity of prudential statecraft against positivism’s radical depreciation of pre-scientific knowing. He advances liberal education by showing that the fundamental questions of ethics or moral philosophy are not in fact “meaningless,” but should of be of the utmost concern to us.
The severity of Strauss’s critique is calibrated to the depth of the current crisis of the West, which engulfs liberal democracy and poses an unprecedented threat to the philosophic enterprise itself.36 His critique proceeds from a calculation that the cause of philosophy and good government will best be served under current circumstances by a bold offense, not by stealth and indirection. Despite the intransigence of Strauss’s attack on social science positivism, one may suppose that he was not unmindful of some common ground with that position, namely, a desire to uphold the possibility of scientific truth. Perhaps he judged that a bold assault might open the eyes of positivistic social scientists—if not the captains then their trusting followers—to the way that science itself was now imperiled and thereby force an alliance against a common foe that denied the possibility of objective science altogether. To some degree such an alliance did emerge in American political science following the turmoil of the 1960s.
Strauss’s students and followers are not divided over the merits of Strauss’s critique of mid-century social science, but they are at odds on what stance now to take towards the social sciences, especially political science, where many are housed. One group holds that political science remains positivist at heart, destructive of liberal democracy’s moral foundations, and fundamentally antagonistic toward political philosophy, so that the uncompromising assault undertaken by Strauss must continue. It is wary in particular of apparent concessions that purport to honor Strauss or seem to make room for political philosophy Another group insists that political science, in recent decades, has changed in important ways: positivism has lost its grip; increasingly the character of scientific knowledge and its relation to practical wisdom are treated as open questions; inquiry about the good or just life is accorded greater respect; Strauss’s students have assumed positions of leadership and distinguished themselves through professional awards and achievements; and the importance of Strauss’s own contribution is increasingly recognized. We do not propose to enter into this controversy here, but this point can be made: Strauss’s example of relentless critique is not necessarily conclusive for us, since circumstances change and none of us is Leo Strauss.37 Strauss’s own account of the nature of the philosophic life indicates that one’s proper stance towards political society and its intellectual currents cannot be settled apodictically, once and for all, but must be determined prudentially, here and now, with a view to what advances philosophy and in full appreciation of the uncertainty and variability of human affairs.
“A Giving of Accounts” with Jacob Klein, The College (St. John’s College at Annapolis and Santa Fe), 22 (April, 1970): 3; Compare The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1989): 27-28.
Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953): 35-80.
See Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964): 11-12.
The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 8-9.
Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1959): 22; Natural Right and History, 64-74.
What is Political Philosophy?: 21-22, 259; “An Epilogue” in Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics, ed. Herbert J. Storing (New York : Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962): 325.
What is Political Philosophy?: 25-26;Today this conclusion is embodied in the widespread view that modern science is unavoidably “Eurocentric.”
Natural Right and History: 42
Natural Right and History: 4-5.
What is Political Philosophy?: 18-19.
What is Political Philosophy?: 20.
What is Political Philosophy?: 20.
The City and Man: 3.
“An Epilogue”: 327.
See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970); and Strauss’s survey in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press): 29-37.
What is Political Philosophy?: 17, 23-25, 34; “An Epilogue”: 318-19; Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: 4-5.
What is Political Philosophy?: 23-24; “An Epilogue”: 314-16.
What is Political Philosophy?: 23-25.
What is Political Philosophy?: 79-80; Strauss qualifies this statement somewhat by acknowledging that classical political philosophy in focusing on the internal structure of the city, abstracts from two vital concerns of actual cities: “the omnipresence of War” and “the concern with the divine”; see The City and Man: 239-41; What is Political Philosophy?: 84-85.
The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: 8.
What is Political Philosophy?: 10-11.
“An Epilogue”: 311.
The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: 8.
“An Epilogue”: 314-16; What is Political Philosophy?: 11-12,24-25; The City and Man: 19-21.
“An Epilogue”: 326-27; What is Political Philosophy?: 20, 24; The City and Man: 34-35; The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: 5-6.
On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (Revised and Expanded Edition: New York: The Free Press, 1963): 23.
“An Epilogue”: 319-20.
What is Political Philosophy?: 90; stated differently, the classics’ viewpoint was not that of “the ordinary partisan, but that of the partisan of excellence” (The City and Man: 47).
What is Political Philosophy?: 28, 33-36, 83-87; The City and Man: 45-49.
What is Political Philosophy?: 84.
What is Political Philosophy?: 84-86; Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968): 3-25. Strauss notes that “modern democracy would have to be described with a view to its intention from Aristotle’s point of view as a mixture of democracy and aristocracy” since offices are filled by voting for candidates, as distinguished from election by lot (The City and Man: 35).
Liberalism Ancient and Modern: 5; Cf. What is Political Philosophy?: 36-38; The City and Man: 31.
The City and Man: 13-49; What is Political Philosophy?: 38-40.
Natural Right and History: 36. Here Strauss observes that “no one since Weber has devoted a comparable amount of intelligence, assiduity, and almost fanatical devotion to the basic problem of the social sciences.”
“Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero,” in On Tyranny: 196-206; What is Political Philosophy?: 90-94.
Since the crisis of the West arises more from liberal democracy’s demoralization—its loss of its original sense of purpose and its permissivist drift—than from the external danger posed by Communism, this crisis would not, from Strauss’s standpoint, be ended by Communism’s recent collapse. Strauss indicates just how deep that moral crisis is by declaring, for example, that “Rome burns” (“An Epilogue”: 327) or, as regards prospects for upholding liberal education and human excellence within mass democracy, that “we must realize that we must hope almost against hope” (Liberalism Ancient and Modern: 24).
In 1962, a young doctoral student presented Strauss with a prospectus for a dissertation on David Hume that began with a harsh indictment of positivistic social science. Strauss advised the student to tone that part down, whereupon the student, wishing to show his unswerving loyalty and courage, reminded Strauss of his own example. “Yes,” replied Strauss in his often colloquial manner, “but I have one foot in the grave.” On the larger issue raised here, consider Strauss’s account of the form of rhetoric that Socrates chose to employ at his trial, including the prudential considerations governing that choice and the intended lesson for his followers; see Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy: 51-54, 65-16; and Xenophon’s Socrates (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972): 124-26, 129-40. To be sure,“one runs little risk in taking issue” with positivistic political science (“An Epilogue”: 307), as compared to the grave danger of bodily harm that philosophers have faced in openly questioning some political or religious dogmas.