Leo Strauss has been a significant participant in some of the most important debates in contemporary political theory. His presence is obvious in the quarrel between the ancients and moderns and in debates about philosophy and politics. However, he has been largely missing in the heated and sometimes acrimonious debate during the past quarter century in the United States that has pitted liberals and communitarians against one another. This essay seeks to place Strauss in this debate.
Ignited by John Rawls’ theory of justice,1 liberals, whether agreeing with his basic argument or offering a replacement for it, defend the proposition that the integrity or rights of individuals ought to be our first concern and ought not to be depreciated in favor of other goods. Whether they turn to their own canon, as Rawls does with Kant, Nozick with Locke, or Hayek with Adam Smith, or whether they leave canonical texts behind, liberals make the individual the center of their concern. Sometimes, their commitment is expressed in the language of rights; sometimes discussion revolves around the dignity and worth of each individual; sometimes it emphasizes equal regard and respect for each person. Whatever their specific gammer, liberals assume not only the essential equality of persons but also sufficient rational capacities for each person to determine what is best for that person. Working with these premises, contemporary liberals ask for “neutral” institutional practices that assure equal treatment for everyone.
Communitarians recoil at these constructions. It is not that they want to jettison liberty or freedom; rather they seek to make room for other goods that they see ignored or discounted in liberalism, and they respond to what they discover to be defective in contemporary liberal society. Michael Sandel finds liberal agents are unencumbered, Alasdair Maclntyre holds they are emotive, and John Pocock sees them as civically lethargic.2 However much communitarians specify different problems, they find that contemporary society is a loose arrangement of self-regarding individuals interested in satisfying their own interests or desires and, most alarming for these critics, assigned responsibility for defining the good for themselves. The reason, communitarians argue, is that modern liberal society has no moral core except to privilege individuals. With no recognized center which can convince, each individual fills the void with personal preferences about what is good, true, and appropriate. In such a society, on the communitarian gloss, we encounter relativism and loneliness. Communitarians want other goods to stand at the center of their project because they believe that liberty can only be achieved in a solid community.
For his part, Strauss detects much that is deeply disturbing in modern society, and his arguments frequently parallel communitarian ones.3 He finds “no reminder of duty and exalted destiny” today but a “sham universality.” This is a time when “the danger of universal philistinism and creeping conformism” threatens to overwhelm everything.4 In modern society, bereft of any settled moral standard, Strauss holds that each person is given leave to decide how to apply that power. This reflects “the uneasiness which today is felt but not faced,” that is, relativism.5 Because many of the defects that Strauss observes in contemporary America have been noticed by many communitarians as well, his unique contribution to the debate will not be found in his critiques of the insistent privileging of rights over duties, the secularism of the age, or the depreciation of a liberal education.6 His arguments about the nature of the crisis and how to think about responding to it is what makes Strauss a unique contributor to the debate but an unlikely partisan of any particular position.7
One of the distinguishing features of Strauss’s writings centers on classical “natural right.” On his account, natural right enables us to think about the good, to ask hard questions about justice, and to recognize nature is the center, not the abstracted individual or the ideal community. “Natural” must be distinguished from “what is human, all too human. A human being is said to be natural if he is guided by nature rather than by convention, or by inherited opinion, or by tradition, to say nothing of mere whims.”8
For Strauss, there is a difference between the good and the pleasant. Today, we are said to emphasize the latter which is “connected with the satisfaction of wants” and, given our relativism, we do not distinguish among different wants. This is a mistake for Strauss who holds that the variety of wants is “not a bundle of urges; there is a natural order of the wants.”9 Some are biologically necessary, but some are higher, and Strauss seeks to keep the wants in a natural or “hierarchic order” which supplies “the basis for natural right as the classics understood it.” A life stuck on necessity or the pleasures of the “brute” is defective and the life devoted to the highest human potentialities is “well-ordered or healthy.” For Strauss, this means that “The life according to nature is the life of human excellence or virtue, the life of a ‘a high-class person,’ and not the life of pleasure as pleasure.”10
Strauss contrasts his understanding of classical natural right with modern natural right, and the latter is found not only to be lacking but dangerous. Its menacing character comes with its historicity and relativism (and therefore its opposition to permanent principles of morality); its reliance on science and the ways science can be applied (and therefore its opposition to contemplation and dialectics); its bid for certainty, particularly political certainty (and therefore its blindness to the inherent tensions Strauss sees between philosophy and the conventional); and its search for perfectionism (rather than to struggle against such efforts).
Strauss’s view of science highlights how far he sees the modern age departing from classical natural right. He finds that modern science is offered as a replacement for classical natural right, promising “that it would reveal to us the true character of the universe and the truth about man.”11 However, it fails to keep its pledge. One reason Strauss wants to pay attention to science is that he sees it as pretentious, making claims it cannot deliver. In shattering classical natural right, Strauss sees science creating a void which leaves the modern world rudderless.
It goes without saying that a science which does not allow of value judgments has no longer any possibility of speaking of progress except in the humanely irrelevant sense of scientific progress: the concept of progress has been replaced by the concept of change. . . . Furthermore, science. . . admits that it is based on fundamental hypotheses which will always remain hypotheses. The whole structure of science does not rest on evident necessities.12
Strauss finds that science and technology have fractured the classical telos which had given purpose, coherence, and direction to the world.13 Today, the scientific emphasis on the empirical and its predilection of methods of verification signal what is considered to be important and true. Experimentation and mathematical processes displace the dialectic as the way of approaching the truth. However, Strauss finds these scientific methods are incomplete, ignoring the central features of the human condition. For this reason, he argues that “Man’s humanity is threatened with extinction by technology.”14 One reason is that science has increased the power available to human beings, but modern science “is absolutely incapable of telling men how to use that power.”15 As Strauss understands matters, “The fundamental dilemma, in whose grip we are, is caused by the victory of modern natural science. An adequate solution to the problem of natural right cannot be found before this basic problem has been solved.”16
Strauss sees science disrupting the natural order. Having plucked bits and pieces from the cosmos to examine and explain, scientists do not know how to return the material they have analyzed to the natural order which is now fragmented and disconnected.17 For many, however, this presents no problem because science is said to enable us to master the bits and pieces of the cosmos.18 Strauss wants to challenge this confidence, insisting that “mastery leads, if its ultimate consequences are drawn, to the ultimate degradation of man. Only by becoming aware of what is beyond human mastery can we have hope.“19 He is also concerned about the lack of control modern men and women have over their science. As he sees it, the
essential difference between our view and the classical view consists then, not in a difference regarding moral principle. . . .The difference between the classics and us with regard to democracy consists exclusively in a different estimate of the virtues of technology.20
On this account, when we abolish the “moral and political control” of technology, we invite “disaster or the dehumanization of man.”21 For all of its problems, Strauss notices that there are positive elements to modern science. For example, it provides more people with more leisure (something available to only a few in the classical world) that he sees necessary for a liberal education. “An economy of plenty,” he reasons, removes the restrictiveness that accompanies economies “of scarcity.” Unlike some who can see only the benefits of increased productivity, Strauss recognizes a dark side which cannot be tamed in the modern world.22
The prominence Strauss gives to science distinguishes his critique of the crisis from communitarians who do not contend with how the modern world is organized by science nor ask whether science has undermined the goods and practices that communitarians value. In making science part of his critique of modernity, Strauss means to challenge answers that he finds simplistic or utopian. For him, efforts to revive a “tradition” that does not pay attention to a world that has been reconstituted by science is an effort bound to fail and is often dangerous.
For many, what is ordinary about ordinary persons is they care about themselves and their attachments; they love their spouse, parents and children, attend to their property and livelihoods, and are loyal to their friends and community. In their ordinariness, they practice not the great but the small virtues which, together with their attachments and the conventions of their society, give them purpose and direction. Indeed, these are the things that most ordinary men and women live for (and sometimes fight and even die for).
The lives of ordinary men and women are marked by both pleasures and pains as well as by their ideas of right and wrong. Their reality is not only grounded in their attachments and experiences but also in the standards of their society. The ordinariness of life, as I read Strauss, acts as a force of gravity which continually draws ordinary persons back to the earth.23 As such, Strauss’s ordinary persons do not see what the philosopher as philosopher sees.24 They are said to be attached to what is perishable while the philosopher is dedicated to the eternal.25 For this reason, the knowledge of ordinary persons and the knowledge of the philosopher are radically different. The philosopher “alone knows what a healthy or well-ordered soul is. . . . The good order of the soul is philosophizing.”26 Summarizing Xenophon with approval, Strauss writes,
Chiefly concerned with eternal beings, or the “ideas” and hence also with the “idea” of man, [the philosopher] is as unconcerned as possible with individual and perishable human beings and hence also with his own “individuality,” or body, as well as with the sum total of all individual human beings and their “historical” procession. He knows as little as possible about the way to the market place to say nothing of the market place itself, and he almost as little knows whether his neighbor is a human being or some other animal.27
The ordinary men and women whom Strauss surveys live in a cave, away from the bright sun. There, they take pleasure in the ordinary things of life and look for purpose, something found in the shadows they see in the cave. As Strauss sees them, ordinary persons are not inherently mean-spirited but they can be. This can occur if their world of illusions, their life in the cave, is threatened by the philosopher who tells them that the things they want most as ordinary people are ephemeral and that they have been staring at the shadows of real happiness. They do not want to be told real happiness means forsaking their illusions about family, children, property, possessions, security, and conventional purpose. Not surprisingly, the revelations of the philosopher are unwelcome. Rather than treated as a liberator, the philosopher is condemned, like Socrates. For this reason, Strauss finds “The conflict between the philosopher and the city [dominated by ordinary men and women] is inevitable.”28 Strauss finds no solution to the conflict in part because the philosopher and ordinary persons are radically different.
The philosopher is immune to the most common and the most powerful dissolvent of man’s natural attachment to man, the desire to have more than one has already and in particular to have more than others have; for he has the greatest self-sufficiency which is humanly possible. . . . Since he fully realizes the limits set to all human action and all human planning (for what has come into being must perish again), he does not expect salvation or satisfaction from the establishment of the simply best social order. . . . He will try to help his fellow man by mitigating, as far as in him lies, the evils which are inseparable from the human condition.29
Strauss’s philosophers are said to be able to do this because they are not burdened by interests as ordinary men and women are, that is, as contemporary voters are. Rather than being directed by their attachments, Strauss’s philosophers are disinterested participants, guided by their search for the eternal.30 This reading of the detached philosopher, of course, is resisted in modern philosophy; beginning with Hobbes, the modern temper assumes the universality of interests and argues that individual attachments cannot ever be completely discarded by anyone. Moreover, Strauss’s distinction between philosophers and ordinary persons finds no comfortable home in the modern world, dedicated as it is to the principle of equality. For his part, Strauss wants to keep the distinction between the philosopher and ordinary persons because, if it is lost, he fears that all that remains is the mundane and we stand powerless to resist the merely pleasurable.
Many communitarians have drawn materials from the cannon, both to argue against the individualism and hedonism that they see in liberalism as well as to offer alternative frameworks and practices of the good community. Some, such as MacIntyre, look to Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas; others turn to Rousseau, and still others find Machiavelli offers the strongest argument on behalf of civic virtue and duty.31
Although communitarians often disagree with one another in their commentaries on Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Rousseau, most communitarian glosses of canonical texts share an important outlook. These commentaries generally assume that a fit, however loose, can be tailored between canonical constructions of the good community and the capacities of ordinary men and women today. In this way, canonical texts are said to supply reliable and applicable guides for today. Such guides are said not only to inform us about the causes of the crisis but also to provide the materials to build a community where a sense of civic duty is robust and the incoherence and relativism of modern society is overcome.
Strauss will have none of this. It is not just that he offers a radically different reading of canonical texts; much more importantly, his reading reflects his own distinct understanding of philosophy and politics, particularly his resistance to claims that assume there is a neat solution to the problems which ail us today. Ambiguity and paradox, not fixity and stability, are the mark of politics for Strauss. It is helpful to consider briefly Strauss’s own readings of some of the canonical texts used by various communitarians in order to locate his larger argument. To do this, it is necessary to say a few words about why Strauss believes the ancient philosophers contribute something that later philosophers do not. As Strauss understands it,
Classical political philosophy is non-traditional, because it belongs to the fertile moment when all political traditions were shaken, and there was not yet in existence a tradition of political philosophy. In all later epochs, the philosophers’ study of political things was mediated by a tradition of political philosophy which acted like a screen between the philosopher and political things, regardless of whether the individual philosopher cherished or rejected that tradition. From this it follows that the classical philosophers see the political things with a freshness and directness which have never been equalled.32
Strauss’s classical philosophers are of the city, not apart from it; “they did not look at political things from the outside, as spectators of political life.” As such, they can challenge the “narrowness of the lawyer, the brutality of the technician, the vagaries of the visionary, and the baseness of the opportunist.” Classical philosophy, on this account, “is free from all fanaticism because it knows that evil cannot be eradicated and therefore that one’s expectations from politics must be moderate.”33
The distinction Strauss draws between classical philosophy and the modern political philosophers favored by various communitarians can be seen in his treatment of Machiavelli and Rousseau. Unlike readings that understand Machiavelli as a champion of civic republicanism, Strauss finds him to be “an evil man.”34 For Strauss, Machiavelli founds his republic on fratricide; for communitarians who look at his founding, Numa is the real founder of Machiavelli’s Rome.35 More importantly for Strauss, Machiavelli is “the first of a long series of modern thinkers who hoped” to establish a new politics “by means of enlightenment.” 36 On his account, Machiavelli introduces the modern presumption that reason can tame politics and refashion the human condition to make the illusive utopia into a reality.37
It turns out that the communitarian reading of Rousseau will not satisfy Strauss in providing an alternative to the dangers of modernity in spite of Rousseau’s return “to the world of virtue and the city.” Rousseau’s problem is that, in offering his general will, he “tries to guarantee the actualization of the ideal, or . . . to get rid of that which essentially transcends every possible human reality.”38
One reason Strauss would find canonical communitarianism to be inadequate to mount an effective challenge to the crisis is tied to his view of the intractable conflict between political philosophers and ordinary men and women. A more robust reading of Aristotle, an emphasis on Rousseau’s positive arguments, or a kinder and gentler version of Machiavelli are insufficient for Strauss. For him, it is necessary to retain the distinction between the perishable and eternal and notice that many communitarians make tradition into another form of convention, with all of its disabilities.
Strauss would also find that many communitarians seem to make convention, something which they often call tradition, the standard of the good. For him, however, there is no way to eliminate the conflict between the conventional and the good. Strauss’s position stands in sharp contrast to the way many communitarians approach the relationship between (an idealized) convention and the good regime. Pocock, for one, offers us patriotic citizens who sacrifice for the republic and Sandel gives us an encumbered person who freely accepts duties and responsibilities. The primary issue for Strauss is about neither sacrifice nor duty; it is about the good and an understanding how it is in tension with convention.
One reason Strauss would find communitarian thinking faulty, if not dangerous, stems from his views of virtue. From his perspective, both liberals and communitarians have made virtue small.39 None really reaches for the intellectual virtues but is interested in what ordinary people can deliver. Strauss, for one, does not mean to deprecate keeping promises or contracts or obeying the law, but he steadily refuses to make these the stuff of the highest virtues. What he finds abhorrent in modern readings is a relativism that accepts every claim to virtue as being as worthy as any other claim; what is missing in these accounts for Strauss is a discussion of a hierarchy of virtues which places the intellectual virtues at the apex.
One of the features of the liberal-communitarian debate that Strauss would find perplexing is its general silence about Nietzsche. Although MacIntyre takes up Nietzsche, it is to condemn him and then ask his readers to choose Aristotle over Nietzsche. MacIntyre’s Nietzsche does not expose the empty core of modernity, reveal that its proudest trophies (such as science and the modern state) are sterile, or show the ominous future of modernity leads to the relativism and nihilism of the last man. Strauss’s Nietzsche, on the other hand, assaults modernity in order to arrest the slide to nihilism but takes a wrong turn in looking to the overman rather than in reviving classical natural right as the solution. As Strauss understands matters, Nietzsche takes on a “great political responsibility” by exposing the reigning ideologies of the day as shams but, providing no direction, “he could not show his readers a way toward political responsibility. He left them no choice except that between irresponsible indifference to politics and irresponsible political options.”40
For Strauss, the post-Nietzschean era cannot be healed either by imposing modernist solutions or by pretending that the old order can be reconstructed. The debris of the late modern world cannot be used to give coherence and purpose. What is necessary, for Strauss, is to accept two kinds of limits in thinking about politics. One, reflecting his reading of natural right, concerns the continuing struggle between philosophy and the ordinary, the eternal and perishable, and nature and convention.The other has to do with the inability of moderns to talk about a telos or cosmological standard that flourished in the ancient world. What has been rent by modern science and philosophy cannot be made whole in the modern world, something Nietzsche knows but, apparently, most communitarians do not.
According to Strauss, the core of liberal democracy is revealed by Spinoza, “the first philosopher who was both a liberal and a democrat” and who “founded liberal democracy, a specifically modern regime.”41 Rejecting classical natural right, Strauss’s Spinoza frees the passions to roam in new places with new appetites. As Strauss sees it, liberalism invites individuals to give reign to their desires, elevates the mundane to the center, spawns relativism, depends on an undirected and unmediated science to provide more and more satisfactions, and promotes secularism.
Given his attack on modernity, his criticisms about various aspects of American society, and his critique of Spinoza, one might expect Strauss to find the United States laboring under the dark legacy of modernity. And in many ways he does. He asks, for example, about the “dangers threatening democracy, not only from without but from within as well. Is there no problem of democracy, of industrial mass democracy?”42 And his answer is yes. However, Strauss sees himself as a friendly, helpful critic who seeks to preserve what he takes to be best in the American regime rather than reject it because it does not measure up to an ideal that flourished over two thousand years ago. Because he recognizes the post-Nietzschean complications of restoring a fractured cosmos, he cannot be the kind of conservative who takes everything in the current arrangement as a good.
Why should Strauss be attracted to a regime which sponsors individualism, promotes materialism, disdains duties, and frequently equates the good with pleasure? The answer comes in the ways Strauss understands and reacts to the political consequences of modernity. One way has to do with how its rationalism, relativism, and utopianism can lead to moral catastrophe, something he finds in the emergence of Nazism and Soviet communism. The other has to do with how other modern regimes can approach a second best or acceptable polity even if it cannot embody what Strauss takes to be the best. For him, the tensions between politics and philosophy and the conflict between pleasure and truth are unavoidable in any good regime; indeed one of the marks of the thoroughly corrupt regime for Strauss is that these tensions have been obliterated. Such a regime has room neither for philosophers nor the truth.With this in mind, he argues that it is both possible and necessary to judge among regimes in order to avoid the decadent and promote the second best, something that is prudent and decent.43
One practice that particularly concerns Strauss in modern, liberal society is the way it values education. Unlike moderns, Strauss’s classical thinkers are preoccupied with the formation of a moral character that aims at virtue. Today, much education is a matter of “instruction and training.” More disturbing to Strauss is the proclivity of modern education to teach people to get along, to be good members of the group. As such, “Democracy has not yet found a defense against the creeping conformism and the ever-increasing invasion of privacy which it fosters.”44 Strauss expects that a liberal education guards against these dangers by speaking to those who can approach perfection. As he understands matters, “Not all men are equally equipped by nature for progress toward perfection, or not all ‘natures’ are ‘good natures’”45 To sort out differences in capacity in the modern world, he wants to see a robust equality of opportunity in place, but it is his own unique version. For him,
A society is just if its living principle is “equality of opportunity,” i.e., if every human being belonging to it has the opportunity, corresponding to his capacities, of deserving well of the whole and receiving the proper reward for his deserts. . . . In a just society, the social hierarchy will correspond strictly to the hierarchy of merit and of merit alone.46
How this will happen in practice, however, is something that is unclear. Strauss does not make the usual construction of equality of opportunity as played out in competitive markets his expression of equality of opportunity; rather he offers a form of meritocracy, one which is difficult to specify in practice.
Strauss’s opposition to liberalism is part of his critique of modernity and his defense of political philosophy, but for all his affinities with many communitarians, he proves to be ill-fitted to participate in their debate with liberalism. He would find that most communitarians carry too heavy a debt to modernity; moveover, when communitarians reach to the classical tradition Strauss finds that they leave its essential core behind. For this reason, what Strauss says of Carl Schmitt can be applied to most communitarians: “His critique of liberalism occurs in the horizon of liberalism: his unliberal tendency is restrained by the still unvanquished ‘systematics of liberal thought.’ The critique introduced by Schmitt against liberalism can therefore be completed only if one succeeds in gaining a horizon beyond liberalism.”47
Strauss would find many communitarians still mired in liberal thought, struggle though they may against what they take to be its worst manifestations. Why would Strauss find this to be the case? One answer, and the easy one, is that so many communitarians rely on modern thought to critique liberalism. For Strauss, liberalism is one manifestation of modernity, embodying many of its generic flaws. To save contemporary society with Machiavelli or Rousseau makes no sense to Strauss who sees both drinking from the same well as liberals. All deny classical natural right and accept a kind of relativism.
The second reason Strauss would fault much of the communitarian gloss is that he finds it misunderstands political philosophy. He would take strong exception to communitarian efforts to drag liberal agents from the “unnatural” cave to the bright sunlight. For all of its problems, the “natural” cave has salutary characteristics compared with the “unnatural cave (into which we have fallen, less through the tradition than through the tradition of the polemic against the tradition).”48 For Strauss, any exit worth taking from the “unnatural” cave leads to the “natural” cave. Communitarians, like their liberal targets, on this reading, decline to see the limits of their thoughts and aspirations. Each fails to see the constraints inherent in the human condition. In their own ways, each imbibes the heady elixir of rationalism and science that defines modernity, and neither can shake the habit.
What, then, does Strauss have to say about our present discontents? What advice does he give to philosophers as political philosophers? It comes as the answer to his question, “In what then does philosophic politics consist? In satisfying the city that the philosophers are not atheists, that they do not desecrate everything sacred to the city, that they reverence what the city reverences, that they are not subversives, in short, that they are not irresponsible adventurers but good citizens and even the best of citizens.”49 Strauss’s recommendation is directed at preserving “what the city reverences.” Given that he does not reverence everything that liberal democracies reverence, what are we to make of this? The answer, I think, is that Strauss wants philosophers to act moderately and prudently, to work at the margins, and to be decent as well as encourage decency. One expression of this is to resist the temptation to think abstractly, what he takes to be one of the great errors of modernity because it moves away from the natural. Moreover, in attempting to apply its abstractions to the real world, modern theory makes the mistake of converting the real world into an abstraction.50 Modern political philosophers are said to do this when they take apart a once coherent, integrated telos to study and understand its pieces. In doing so, the modern temper fractures and fragments what was once joined together. Both modern philosophy and science generate knowledge about parts, not the whole. In making use of this knowledge, the parts have changed, not merely in the sense that we know more about them but, for Strauss, in the more important sense that they have lost the relatedness they enjoyed in the classical telos. Strauss has continually insisted that no “real” solution can reflect perfectionism and efforts to find one are dangerous, whatever their source. In the context of the contemporary debate in political theory, Strauss finds that this applies to liberal as well as communitarian solutions.
See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971) and Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). For alternative liberal views, see Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice and the Liberal State (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1980) and Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978).
Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1981) and J. G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). The best-known contribution by a Straussian to this literature comes from Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).
“If we look. . . at what is peculiar to our age or characteristic of our age, we see hardly more than the interplay of mass taste with high-grade but strictly speaking unprincipled efficiency” (Liberalism Ancient and Modern [New York: Basic Books, 1968], 23).
Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 31.
Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 35-36.
Nor does he offer a unique lament in criticizing public officials who pander to instrumentally driven voters. As Strauss sees matters, “The political man is characterized by the concern with being loved by all human beings regardless of their quality” (On Tyranny [New York: Free Press, 1963], 212).
See John Gunnell on the idea of crisis in political theory (Between Philosophy and Politics [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986]).
What is Political Philosophy? (Westport, Colo.: Greenwood Press, 1973), 28.
Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 126.
Natural Right and History, 127.
Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 32.
Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 33.
Some of Strauss’s critics misrepresent his position when they argue that his telos provides us with concrete answers. For his part, Strauss holds that the telos serves as a standard and through a philosophical, that is dialectical, inquiry we can understand how those standards might be approached in our own unique setting.
Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 42.
Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 32.
Natural Right and History, 8.
According to Strauss, “Philosophy strives for knowledge of the whole. The whole is the totality of the parts” (What is Political Philosophy? 39).
I discuss the relationship of science and the cosmos in Gandhi: Struggling for Autonomy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), ch. 4.
Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 43.
What is Political Philosophy? 37.
What is Political Philosophy? 37.
In Liberalism Ancient and Modern, Strauss holds that the ideals of classical natural right are often corrupted in practice in the ancient world, and the reason is often because of scarcity. He argues that the “demand of justice that there should be a reasonable correspondence between the social hierarchy and the natural hierarchy” is corrupted by ancient oligarchs who pretend they were not only necessary but also naturally the best. “With the increasing abundance it became increasingly possible to see and to admit the element of hypocrisy which had entered into the traditional notion of aristocracy.” In economies of plenty, it becomes possible “to abolish many injustices or at least many things which had become injustices” because we no longer accept the idea that social inequalities reflect natural ones. He goes on to argue that in many ways, we can work with several equality premises in an economy of plenty, such as equality of opportunity and basic political equality (Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 21).
For a different view than Strauss’s of ordinary persons, see Ronald Terchek, Republican Paradoxes and Liberal Anxieties (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 236-239.
One of the differences Strauss sees between the philosopher and ordinary persons is that the “attachment” of the former “to his friends is deeper than his attachment to other human beings, even to his nearest and dearest [that is his family]” (On Tyranny, 214).
“The philosopher’s attempt to grasp the eternal order is necessarily an ascent from the perishable things” (On Tyranny, 215).
On Tyranny, 215. Strauss’s ordinary persons seek comprehensive answers and do not know what Strauss’s philosophers know, namely that knowledge is destined to be incomplete and the knowledge we possess stands alongside of our ignorance. As Strauss puts it, “Knowledge of ignorance is not ignorance. It is knowledge of the elusive character of the truth, of the whole” (What is Political Philosophy?, 38).
On Tyranny, 212.
On Tyranny, 219. Strauss holds that “Every society regards a specific human type . . . as authoritative. When the authoritative type is the common man, everything has to justify itself before the tribunal of the common man” (Natural Right and History, 137).
On Tyranny, 214.
“While trying to transcend humanity (for wisdom is divine) or while trying to make it his sole business to die and to be dead to all human things, the philosopher cannot help living as a human being who as such cannot be dead to human concerns, although his soul will not be in these concerns. The philosopher cannot devote his life to his own work if other people do not take care of the needs of his body” (On Tyranny, 213).
On Aristotle, see MacIntyre, After Virtue; on Rousseau, see William Sullivan, Reconstructing Political Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); on Machiavelli, see Pocock, Moment.
What is Political Philosophy? 28.
What is Political Philosophy? 29.
Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958), 9. For Pocock, Machiavelli teaches republican citizens about subordinating self-interest in favor of the general good and warns about the danger of corruption, whether it appears in government or society. As Strauss sees it, Machiavellian “virtue is nothing but civic virtue, patriotism or devotion of collective selfishness” (What is Political Philosophy? 42).
Thoughts on Machiavelli, 13.
What is Political Philosophy? 46.
Pocock, for one, finds that Machiavelli is preoccupied by fortune and decay and finds that any Machiavellian republican settlement is fragile.
What is Political Philosophy? 51.
“For Plato, what Aristotle calls moral virtue, is a kind of halfway house between political or vulgar virtue which is in the service of bodily well being (of self preservation or peace) and genuine virtue which, to say the least, animates only the philosophers as philosophers” (City and Man [Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964], 27).
What is Political Philosophy? 55.
Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 16.
The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 31.
Strauss also finds the American political regime embodies important elements of classical natural right. He holds “liberal democracy. . . derives powerful support from a way of thinking which cannot be called modern at all; the premodern thought of our western tradition” (What is Political Philosophy? 98).
What is Political Philosophy? 38. Strauss goes on to argue that democracy can resist this if it is ready to “return to the classic’s notions of education: a kind of education which can never be thought of as mass-education, but only as higher and highest education of those who are by nature fit for it” (38).
Natural Right and History, 134-135.
Natural Right and History, 148. In market economies, merit is determined by the market; Strauss wants to deny its applicability. However, his conception of merit troubles those who have something different in mind than philosophizing abilities as well as those who want distributions to be attentive to a variety of needs that are unattended by conventional conceptions of merit.
Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, translated by J. Harvey Lomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 119.
Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1987), 112.
On Tyranny, 220.
On Tyranny, 220.