“Straussian” scholars often stand accused of ill-disguised elitism. Paul Eidelberg disguises nothing, providing a candidly “aristocratic” account of the American regime and of politics generally. Yet Eidelberg is not really a Straussian.
He is unquestionably a Strauss-influenced scholar. Having attended Strauss’s graduate courses at the University of Chicago, where he received his advanced degrees, Eidelberg never fails to pay his respects to his teacher. But he does not hesitate to disagree with Strauss and Strauss’s students on the character of the American regime and on the enterprise of political philosophy. He positions himself against Martin Diamond’s “democratic” interpretation of the regime, and he opposes the tendency of many Straussians to trace the regime’s principles to the political philosophy of John Locke. In the latter stance, he resembles Harry V. Jaffa. However, whereas Jaffa gives a richer account of the explicit theoretical underpinnings of the regime—as an exegete of the Declaration of Independence, he is nearly unrivaled in the twentieth century—Eidelberg concentrates first on the regime’s structural dimensions and then moves to a consideration of the statesmanship of the Founders. He first comes to sight as an “institutionalist” political scientist, never wholly satisfied with the political philosophy that originated in ancient Greece. His turn, in mid-career, to an emphasis on Judaic studies and Israeli politics, puts him forthrightly on the side of “Jerusalem,” not “Athens.”
In America, Eidelberg is best known for contending that the American Founders intended to establish not a democracy but a mixed regime, a regime that would provide natural aristocrats, like the Founders themselves, with a strong voice in public councils. He differs from “institutional” political scientists in his emphasis on statesmanship, the application of principles to action. The Founders “constitute a class of their own, a class of politicians,” a class of men animated by the “aristocratic” passion for honor and fame.1 How do such men deliberate? To consider the deliberations of statesmen is to transcend both the reductionism of materialists like Charles Beard and the conventionalism of institutionalists.
Pointing to the Founders’ adherence to the doctrine of popular sovereignty and to the lack of a stable, European-style class system that might be directly expressed in political institutions, Diamond classifies the American regime as a democratic republic. The regime is “undemocratic” only in the sense that it features strong safeguards against “direct” and “participatory” democracy. Representation, separation, balance of powers, and federalism merely mitigate democracy, protect it against demagogues and mobs, make it decent.
Eidelberg replies that mitigations of democracy by definition must be non-democratic. They may or may not be antidemocratic. For example, although the United States Senate as originally designed appears democratic in contrast to the English House of Lords, in contrast to the Council of Athens in Aristotle’s day it looks quite oligarchic (P: 22). Without a careful analysis of exactly how the Founders modulated popular sovereignty, no easy classification of their regime is possible. Eidelberg proceeds inductively, deriving the ends of the regime primarily from its structure, the institutions the Founders designed.
He begins with the House of Representatives, intended to be the “grand depository of the democratic principle” in the national government (P: 53). The short terms of House members make rapid turnover possible. James Madison’s celebrated “pluralism,” however, made feasible by the extension of the sphere of one government over a large population, is precisely a divide-and-rule strategy intended to restrain the democracy in order to make the democratic principle operate in a responsible manner in the government. The device of representation allows the national government really to govern, not merely to reflect, mass opinion. Madison’s republic is unmixed in that it makes no formal, institutional recognition of separate classes. Instead, Madison envisions “a de facto distribution of power comparable to that which existed in mixed regimes of the classical variety” (P: 73).
The Senate is in one sense a clearly oligarchic institution, affording each state equal representation regardless of population. This was more than a mere compromise between large states and small, inasmuch as (for example) New York voted for equal representation, whereas smaller South Carolina voted against it. As for its class composition, the Senate’s “oligarchism” is mitigated by the members’ election by state legislatures, “whose composition [was] only partly aristocratic” (P: 84) and was, in some cases, quite democratic.
Further, in Alexander Hamilton’s opinion, the relative lack of artificial class distinctions in America does not prevent natural distinctions between the few and the many. Such natural classes are not stable—two geniuses may bring forth a brood of dunces—but the natural aristocrats who will arise must be given scope for their abilities. In practice, “superior acquirements” will be afforded by wealth, in the form of superior education (Hamilton, quoted in P: 120).The vices of the rich—avarice, ambition—on balance favor the prosperity of the country, and partake less of moral depravity, than the vices of the poor. The rich also have a particular interest in defending the rights of property, rights that citizens of all classes need, but that the poor are too ready shortsightedly to sacrifice. The more the rich are threatened by the poor, the more the rich will make extra-legal arrangements to protect themselves. Rich and poor must have a place—hence the need for a mixed regime, “a true political union” (P: 135). Such a union would provide institutional support not for the sake of “capitalism” but for politically determined national purposes.
Madison emphasizes natural aristocracy more than wealth but does not diverge fundamentally from Hamilton with respect to the function of the Senate. Senators should be “men noted for wisdom and virtue,” aristocrats, who will check and balance the more democratic House (P: 146). Operationally, popular sovereignty will be limited in the sense, as Madison famously writes, that the reason of the people, not their passion, will be made to prevail. Property rights originate in human faculties; government’s “first object,” though not its only object, is to protect those faculties and thereby protect property rights, among the other natural rights. American republicanism “imposes certain limits on the principle of equality” (P: 154). Justice is not some simple, across-the-board equality, but “a mixture of democratic justice and oligarchic-aristocratic justice: (P: 155), of natural equality—that each person enjoy equal protection under the laws—and protection of natural inequalities—that each person, in enjoying equal protection, be allowed to excel, sustain himself, or fail, and to rule or to defer.
The Senate will take particular interest in the rule of law because the Senators’ long terms of office will help to ensure continuity in law, in accordance with the Aristotelian and Madisonian teaching that too much reform is bad for any regime. Stable laws engender reverence—a popular passion, admittedly, but a counterweight to the destabilizing popular passions of envy and resentment. Reverence fosters deference, a habit democracy by itself lacks, self destructively. The rule of law makes community possible, giving reason the authority it otherwise would have only “in theory.”
“[T]he secret of Madison’s rhetoric lies simply in this: it seeks to promote aristocratic ends under a facade of democratic arguments” (P: 162). Madison differs from Hamilton in his willingness to let the Senate remain co-equal with the House. Hamilton wanted the Senate to take the legislative initiative, with the House merely checking the oligarch-aristocrats when they overreach. “Hamilton wanted the political ”—meaning, finally, the aristocratic, the “thumotic,” those souls preoccupied with ruling—to be the ruling principle of the whole. “He wanted the government to govern” (P: 164). He “loved liberty, but liberty with grandeur of purpose” (P: 165). Madison, by contrast, wanted “the soul of the American citizen” itself to be “in tension,” pulled between aristocratic and democratic ends. He wanted this tension reflected in the American national legislature.
The president will preserve the balance between the two legislative branches, owing his election to neither the few nor the many. The electoral college as originally designed kept the presidential appointment insulated from popular voting. A national, popular election is “a most dangerous means of providing public education” (P: 189), as it makes the presidency a prize for demagogues and spoilsmen. The electoral college also insulated the appointment from corruption by the rich, who would have great difficulty buying votes in conventions held in each of the states, rather than in one place, where things could be more easily “managed.”Thus the electoral college enabled the president to be “monarchic” in the Aristotelian sense: sufficiently independent to rule reasonably. The electoral college made possible a jointure between wisdom and power.
The unitary executive can unite reason and spiritedness, prudence and the passion for fame, in a manner that makes him responsible to public opinion, the deliberate sense of the community. Armed with independence sufficient to resist the rush of political passions, the president can give “the enlightened and respectable members of the community time to exert their influence on society at large” (P: 197), to moderate and elevate public discourse when some great issue is at stake. The president even has the independence needed gently to reprove the people, “expos[ing] error and vice” (P: 201). No president, under this system, need practice a politics of compassion, pretending to feel the very pains and sorrows of the people. An American president can safely “endure without resentment the resentment of others,” and “pursue noble ends though they be unpopular” (P: 201). Magnanimity, not compassion, will characterize the greatest presidents.
Eidelberg sees the danger of carrying this “aristocratic” or “thumotic” motif too far. Government must have limits. Because, in this model, the people cannot readily supply those limits—as they can in Thomas Jefferson’s model—there must be a feature of the government itself that sets limits. Limited government means government that “restricts the legislative (but not only the legislative) power by fixed or permanent laws” (P: 203); constitutional laws. Against Jefferson, Eidelberg argues that the Supreme Court is the only branch of government that can serve as the arbiter on questions of constitutionality.
Eidelberg admits that the only real restraint on the Court is the prudence of its members and that the intended scope of judicial review “does not admit of being clearly ascertained” (P: 214). Jeffersonian popular sovereignty cannot solve this problem in principle. Popular sovereignty is not coterminous with the principles of natural justice, which bind men “not in virtue of having been willed but in virtue of their universal (or general) validity,” their authority over men as men. Nor can popular sovereignty justly overturn what Eidelberg classifies as the “civilizational” components of the Constitution—checks and balances, division of powers. These components would fail if applied in a barbaric society, but they are both needed and workable in a civilized one. Eidelberg goes so far as to claim that the Tenth Amendment implies that the powers delegated to the federal government by the people are thereby divested; they are irreclaimable sovereign powers (P: 317, n. 36).This means that Jefferson’s favored means of the expression of popular sovereignty, the authority of the states’ governments, has been permanently curtailed with respect to the exercise of “civilizational” and natural rights with respect to the operations of the national government. Eidelberg even more emphatically rejects Jefferson’s claim that all three branches of government must engage in constitutional interpretation and review. This “political monstrosity” would quickly reduce to an appeal to popular sovereignty (P: 236). At best, Jefferson’s approach would allow the legislative branch to predominate, making the regime more purely Lockean than originally intended.
Does the Constitution then mean whatever the Supreme Court justices say it means? Eidelberg denies this. The Constitution, he argues, is hardly an amorphous statement. Judges cannot flagrantly contradict the Constitution—maintain, for example, that it means “tyranny is good.” They should not legislate. They should provide exegesis and application of the intentions of the Founders and of the authors of the constitutional amendments, in accordance with their oath to uphold the Constitution. The Court must exercise prudence, “the wisdom of present decision,” guided by philosophy—particularly by civilizational and natural justice—mediated by law (P: 224). Only a prudent and law-abiding Court can reinforce the noble prejudice among the people in favor of the Constitution and its defenders. Without that prejudice, the people will be prey to the endless flux of egalitarianism /relativism, the synthesis of opinion and mere passion.
Because “the Supreme Court is without material power,” it is “safe to entrust it with the function of judicial review” (P: 237). But this safety is only immediate. Long term, the Court’s every decision has the potential effectively to modify the Founders’ intentions, that is, to corrupt them. Eidelberg responds in two ways to this danger. First, he observes that an openly capricious, “activist” Court would undermine its own authority. “[I]f the judicial interpretation of the Constitution were simply to reflect the changing opinions of popular majorities, the Supreme Court might as well be a temporary body chosen by the people or by the people’s representatives” (P: 241).
Second, he actually endorses “creative interpretation” of the Constitution, cautioning that this requires “judgment of a most wise and subtle kind” (P: 245, 246). But this also requires a more extensive civic education than the Founders provided, if not a more extensive civic education than the Founders wanted. Eidelberg does not mean that such an education would sufficiently improve the citizens at large, transform them into vigilant Jeffersonian yeomen. If “government is to control itself” and “not be controlled by the governed”—as the un-Jeffersonian Eidelberg would have it (P: 258)—then the “aristocratic” dimension of the Founders’ mixed regime must be rehabilitated and strengthened, first and foremost among the natural aristocrats.
A Discourse on Statesmanship addresses this need to ensure that enlightened statesmen be at the helm more often than they have been in the recent past.2 The book’s “primary purpose” is to foster a “comprehensive political science” that synthesizes Aristotelian structuralism with Whiteheadian natural science—that is, with a biology that has assimilated Nietzschean thought (D: 145-146). Eidelberg focuses on statesmanship as “the coordination of political theory and political practice” (D: 3); he intends his new political science to be architectonic/constructive as well as descriptive/analytical. The deconstructive and constructive tasks of the statesman involve “bring[ing] certain interests into the foreground while retreating others into the background” (D: 10). By “modify[ing) the moral and intellectual horizon of his audience, the statesman contributes to the constitution of the character of the people” (D: 11). To avoid mere assertion of the will or arbitary creativity, Eidelberg has recourse to the criterion of comprehensiveness, including the good of the whole.
Unfortunately, Eidelberg argues, statesmanship has gone unappreciated by contemporary political scientists “Left” and “Right.” Marxists, with their materialist reductionism, make statesmanship seem ineffectual, “epiphenomenal.” Straussians, with their exaltation of political philosophers at the expense of political men, make statesmanship seem petty. To redeem statesmanship from such critics, Eidelberg adopts and adapts Aristotle’s quadrimodal political science, with its discussion of the best regime in theory, the best in practice, the best in a given set of circumstances, and the best means of changing or of preserving a regime. Eidelberg associates Aristotle’s political science with Aristotle’s natural science, specifically, the theory of quadrimodal causation (teleological, formal, material, and efficient, respectively). The statesman prudently employs these regime criteria, thereby participating in the larger natural order they reflect, and does so in terms consistent with that order. In so doing, Madison-like, he “enlarges the role of reason and virtue in public life” (D: 53).
This framework enables Eidelberg to enunciate a critique of what has been called “postmodernism”—and to do so in advance of that phenomenon’s popularization in the United States (D: ch. 2, especially p. 67).The yoking of Nietzsche and egalitarianism makes no sense. Autonomy requires a self.Yet postmodernists typically want to dissolve the self—while still insisting on individual autonomy or the self-defined “identity” of a social group. The radical democracy of“postmodernism” remains within the Hobbesian horizon, wherein reason is subordinated to the passions. Reason is therefore prey to the Hobbesianism political settlement, which is nothing like the democracy favored by many “postmodernists.”That is, “postmodernism” only gives the wheel of modernity another spin.
Acting very much like the scholarly equivalent of his statesman, Eidelberg brings certain interests into the foreground while retreating others to the background in order to effect a synthesis of ancient and modern political science and to employ this synthesis in redeeming the American regime from critics reductionist and high-toned, alike. He brings out the aristocratic peroration of the Declaration, in which the Founders pledge to each other their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. Honor, an aristocratic motif, links the ancient political philosophers with the moderns via the thought of Francis Bacon, Eidelberg claims (D: 94-95). The highest form of honor, the permanent honor the Founders called fame, can only be won by attachment to the public good. Although in no way contradicting the natural or species equality asserted in the Declaration’s preamble, this natural inequality, founded upon the inequality of human faculties among individuals, and upon the inequalities of external property often resulting therefrom, forms a reasonable foundation for deference, reverence for law, education in accordance with the rule of reason, and the greatness of individuals and the nation governed by such individuals.
In institutional terms, what the Founders call “democratic” is not especially democratic at all, in light of Aristotelian criteria. Further as the Philosophy argues, the Constitution sets strict limits on democracy, even as defined by the Founders. Although Straussians contend that the Founders’ new science of politics rests on the low but solid ground of self-interested passion, Eidelberg denies that the Founders were bourgeois/utilitarian types. Their Locke was not anti-Christian, and they upheld a “classical sense of honor” among their fellowmen, whom they held to be naturally social (D: 116).
The formal requirement of government by election rather than by lot—particularly by elections that refine raw popular votes—makes possible a logothumotic politics, a politics of reason and honor—rather than a Machiavellian, thumoerotic politics—a politics of passion (D: 132). The modest compensation of elected representatives also tended to dilute the ambition of the indigent for public office, appealing rather to gentlemen.
In terms of function, Aristotle identifies three ruling elements of any government structure: the deliberative assembly, the magisterial offices, and the law courts. Eidelberg regards these functions to be roughly correspondent to the Founders’ legislative, executive, and judicial branches. He synthesizes the deliberative function of “ancient” assemblies with the legislative emphasis of the “moderns” through his above-mentioned epistemology of comprehensiveness and disciplined “creativity” or architectonics, whereby the statesman of greatness of soul as it were incorporates the public good into himself—making it part of “his own,” and thus something that will be defended by a thumotic man. For the Founders, George Washington was such a man, although Eidelberg mentions the examples of Hamilton and Madison more frequendy.3 The magistracy or executive is also a deliberative office, but deliberation for its occupant centers on commands and enforcement. As for the judiciary, officeholders there exercise reason forensically, determining not so much what is expedient or what is harmful, but what is just.
Materially, Aristotle does not argue that a mixed regime requires clearly defined classes, “each represented in insitutions constituted by wholly different political principles” (D: 196). A middle-class population with many and diverse kinds of property will serve quite well, as Madison sees. Such diversified property will not admit the simple classifications that the traditional mixed regime accommodated. But the new mixed regime is no less a mixed regime for that, only a more complex and subtly designed one.
With respect to the regime’s final cause, Eidelberg affirms, with Aristotle, that “monarchy”—the political symbol of the rule of reason—is the best regime in theory. The Founders “monarchize” most conspicuously with the office of the president. Significantly, three of the first four American presidents supported a national university; the other founded a state university; all supported the cultivation of the arts and sciences in order to establish a more perfect, i.e., a more rational union, the political equivalent of the statesman’s own greatness, comprehensiveness, of soul. Patriotism, or love of one’s own country, seeks the perfection of the beloved, while prudently recognizing that the best can be the enemy of the good if the unachievable best is misused to denigrate an achievable good. In this sense, patriotism would animate a national university where future statesmen would be educated.
The statesman’s “politics of magnanimity” (D: ch. 7, passim) rescues the principle of self-interest from contumely not merely by enlightening but by strengthening, enlarging, and articulating the self. Although caring more for the enlightenment of the many than did Aristotle, Madison and the other Founders cared no less for the enlightenment and the enlargement of the few. True self-interest is happiness, requiring “every necessary moral ingredient” (D: 247). “Contrary to the Straussian school, the founders never conceived of ‘institutional substitutes for virtue’” (D: 251)—only institutional guards against vice. In Aristotle as in Madison, the political man seeks honor, the esteem of his peers, not “for itself” but for “the confirmation of his own virtue or excellence, namely, practical wisdom” (D: 259). Moreover, wisely “promoting the public good is the articulation of his self” (D: 260). The statesman is neither selfish nor unselfish in the conventional sense, but comprehensive. Fame extends honor beyond the living to new generations.
The soul of the magnanimous statesman—Hamilton is Eidelberg’s preferred example—synthesizes the desiring, “erotic” virtues of the “ancients” with the sense of obligation demanded in the Bible. “This sense of obligation”—“which tempers [the statesman’s] love of fame”—“is not truly integral to classical political philosophy-I mean to the philosophical strata of classical wisdom,” which, while disinterested, cannot be described as altruistic (D: 263). Magnanimity or soul-comprehensiveness differs from Aristotelian-philosophic soul-completeness by being subject to change. There is always, for the human soul, a more perfect union, never a fully perfected one.
Eidelberg’s magnanimous man is primarily a node of patterned and patterning energy, secondarily a perceiver of “external” reality. The classical philosopher, though by no means a passive observer—he understands that philosophy itself is an “interest,” in need of political defense—nonetheless lives in accordance with the opposite priority. To Eidelberg, by contrast, “the problem of the philosopher is to comprehend the whole by incorporating into himself and bringing into unity the disjoined and partial perspectives of men” (D: 315 [emphasis added]). Eidelberg’s statesman “rescues from mutual obstructiveness the diverse purposes and pursuits of men and thus facilitates their coordination and mutual intensification. But the richer unity he thereby brings into existence bears the impress of his own individuality” (D: 270). Reason as he uses it is both analytic and synthetic, deconstructive and constructive/architectonic. Unlike “modern” historicist reason, it is also noetic—the criteria for prudential judgment “are not simply imposed upon, or reducible to, the data” (D: 272). Noesis operates through an individual. So that such noesis is not prejudiced, crabbed, narrowly partial, or partisan, the soul of that individual must be large and well-articulated, comprehensive. The data perceived by the soul are “not susceptible to an infinitude of relationships” (D: 272, n. 30). This makes noetic perception and reasoning about perceptions possible. As for the passions, they are hierarchical in character, sometimes intensifying this noetic and deconstructive/constructive statesmanly reason, sometimes interfering with it. They are to be treated accordingly (D: 273). A political community founded upon such principles, well understood by statesmen, will achieve excellences surpassing those of any ancient polls and any existing modern state.
Woodrow Wilson took America on an entirely different course. With the constitutional amendments instituting the income tax, the direct election of Senators, and women’s suffrage, Progressives prepared the grounds for the political ascendancy of the New Deal regime. “Jefferson’s so-called ’Revolution of 1800’ was nothing in comparison with the second founding envisioned by Wilson; and more than Jefferson, Wilson was a disciplined and constructive thinker with whom, among American statesmen, one can only compare men of the caliber of Madison and Hamilton” (D: 281-282).
Wilson rhetorically sought the elevation of “the average man,” an elevation requiring the subordination of the oligarchs who had dominated the country since the 1870s. Elected government officials should depend upon the people: hence such Progressivist devices as initiative, referendum, and recall. “Government was no longer to protect the few from the many, so much as to protect the many from the few” (D: 291). Not Madisonian divide-and-rule but concentration of popular power would characterize Wilsonian democracy as reconstructed by Wilsonian political science. The president as party leader is a majoritarian instrument—although, as with all models emphasizing leadership rather than statesmanship, there is always some suspicion as to who is leading whom.
Wilsonian political science diverges from Wilsonian rhetoric as much as it diverges from the political science of the Founders. Wilson prefers the British constitution, whereby any law enacted by the legislature is automatically constitutional; the state, not the people, is sovereign.The additional feature of a (supposedly),nonpartisan, neutral civil service—in addition to a standing, professional, national military force—operating under the assumption that “technical men are more likely to be honest than party men” (D: 298), completes the apparatus of European statism. Political technicism forms one part ofWilson’s “German historicism” (D: 301). Wilsonian scientific technique and efficiency replace Hamiltonian prudence and energy.
To make his democratic rhetoric effective and to establish the rule of his neo-Hegelian political science, Wilson seeks to dissolve two popular prejudices: that the old is good (the practical basis of reverence for the Constitution) and that wealth has a reasonably close relation to merit and hard work (the practical basis for esteem for commerce). The theoretical basis of both republicanism and commerce is natural right; Wilson does not popularize an attack on it, although, as a historicist, he quietly discards it. In place of reverence for the old and esteem for the presumed merit of the wealthy, Wilson magnifies resentment and appeals to compassion. The late David Broyles, Eidelberg’s most careful reader, observes that Wilson’s politics of compassion redirects the thumotic passions.4 The newly authoritative thumocratic passions of envy and compassion are, above all, sustainable—difficult for any future statesman to counteract. Egalitarianism can be used to buttress a largely unelected state apparatus “fronted” by skilled rhetoricians. The mixed regime of the Founders becomes, on the rhetorical level at least, a democracy. “[C]ompassion and intelligence are to join in the task of alleviating the human condition by equalizing all conditions” (D: 347). A historicist, organicist, progressivism replaces the “Newtonian” balance of the Founders’ regime. Whiggish distrust of political power gives way to “German” leadership, with the president apparently on history’s leading edge. This is “nothing less than Caesarism, but of the profoundest kind” (D: 358)—a quasi-Nietzschean amalgamation or “gnostic union” of Caesar and Christ (D: 358). It may be a Caesarism more rhetorical than real, depending upon how effectively the “leader” can subordinate the supposedly neutral state bureaucracy.
Eidelberg’s two shorter studies—On the Silence of the Declaration of Independence and Beyond Detente—reaffirm the teachings of the Philosophy and the Discourse.5 His later writings in the field of Judaic studies, complemented by a rich array of policy analyses and polemics on Israeli politics, in many respects form a logical extension of his “American” writings. His emphasis, in the latter, on the rule of law and the need for scope for the thumotic aspect of the human soul comport well with Judaism, as does his insistence—contra the Straussians—that reason and revelation do not contradict one another (D: ch. 7, passim).6 His insistence on the centrality of Jewish law reflects his sense that biology alone—even the philosophically informed biology of a Hans Jonas—does not provide a sufficient counterweight to German historicism, particularly in its Nietzschean and Heideggerian forms.
Eidelberg’s scholarship on the American regime has considerable relevance to several outstanding issues much debated by American political scientists now. In the late 1960s and early- to mid-1970s, his frankly “aristocratic” tone could not have been more untimely. Diamond’s “democratic” interpretation of the American regime surely had more appeal. But such questions as whether the regime is democratic, mixed, or oligarchic, and whether John Locke’s philosophy must be regarded as its theoretical foundation, remain very much with us. Eidelberg’s arguments on these matters remain stimulating. His argument on Wilson’s project has been seminal, at least among Strauss-influenced scholars. Perhaps more urgently, as mentioned previously, Eidelberg refutes the attempt to historicize American political science along German lines and refutes, more or less in advance, the various attempts to employ “German” epistemological motifs for democratic purposes. His own Nietzsche-influenced, but not Nietzsche-dominated epistemology is at once more compatible with the “aristocratic” character of Nietzsche’s thought, sensitive to the political implications of epistemology, and less vulnerable than Nietzsche is to tyrannical misuse. The “postmodernists”—who fail to understand the radically undemocratic character of their own epistemological presuppositions—might find an effective remedy in the consideration of what Eidelberg was writing a quarter of a century ago. If“Straussians” are to be classified among “postmodernists” in some very broad sense of that term,7 they will find in Eidelberg no correction with respect to the matter of democracy and tyranny, which they scarcely need, but perhaps an intelligent dialogic partner in addressing the perennial question of “Jerusalem and Athens.”
Paul Eidelberg, The Philosophy of the American Constitution: A Reinterpretation of the Intentions of the Founding Fathers (New York: Free Press, 1968), p. 17. Hereafter referred to as “P” along with page references in the text.
Paul Eidelberg, A Discourse on Statesmanship:The Design and Transformation of the American Polity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974.) Hereafter referred to as “D” in references in text.
A good example of this phenomenon in recent times is Charles de Gaulle, who explicitly identified himself with an “idealized” or ennobled image of France. For an excellent recent account, see Daniel J. Mahoney, De Gaulle: Statesmanship, Grandeur, and Modern Democracy (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996).
David Broyles, “American Politics: The Statesman’s View,” Political Science Reviewer 12, (Fall 1982), pp.129-165.
See Paul Eidelberg, On the Silence of the Declaration of Independence (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), and Beyond Détente:Toward an American Foreign Policy (La Salle: Sherwood Sugden, 1977).The “silence” of the Declaration of Independence is its aristocratic conception of human nature, discussed previously.
See Paul Eidelberg, Jerusalem vs. Athens: In Quest of a General Theory of Existence (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983), and Judaic Man: Toward a Reconstruction of Western Civilization (Middletown, N.J.:The Caslon Company, 1996).
See Catherine Zuckert, Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996).