In “Will the Real Leo Strauss Please Stand Up?” (2006), Nathan Tarcov quoted from two unpublished lectures Strauss had given during World War II;1 unavailable to other students at the time, this marked a new development in Straussian apologetics. In the last paragraph of his article, Tarcov explained why Strauss’s “The Re-education of the Axis Countries Concerning the Jews” (1943) had caught his eye:
Furthermore, he [sc. Strauss] stressed the impossibility of imposing a lasting form of government through conquest, the obstacles to the democratic education of one people by another posed by differences of political tradition and intellectual climate, and the need for re-education toward liberal democracy to be the work of the people involved rather than of foreigners and exiles. And Strauss seems to have erred in the direction of underestimating, not overestimating, the prospects for the spread of liberal democracy—exactly the opposite fault from that with which he has recently been charged.2
Tarcov had searched for evidence that Strauss should not be blamed for the foreign policy of the Bush administration;3 he found it in Strauss’s pessimistic assessment of the prospects for liberal democracy in post-war Germany:
But I would be unfair to those Germans who did not waver in their decent attitude, if I did not report to you a remark which a German made to me the other day. He advised me to tell you his conviction that the mass of the Germans are simply ashamed of what has been done to Jews in Germany and in the name of Germany; and that, after the war, Germany will be the most pro-Jewish country in the world. If I were a German, if I had ever been a German, I might be prepared, or perhaps in duty bound, to have that hope. Perhaps these hopes are not unfounded: in that case, the re-education of the Germans concerning the Jews will be even superfluous. I shall not believe before I have seen.4
Given that Strauss was born in Kirchhain (Hesse) in 1899 and was not yet a citizen of the United States,5 what are we to make of his curious claim that he was not and never had been a German?6
Strauss argues in “The Re-education of the Axis Countries Concerning the Jews” that the Germans—he shares this quality with them, at least—will believe only what they see:7 having trusted in a speedy victory,8 they will soon be confronted by a crushing military defeat and this will constitute the most effective basis of their re-education. But some Germans—Strauss identifies them as “high school and college teachers”9 —will not be converted to liberal democracy even after witnessing an Allied victory:
I do not believe that the attitude of the Oberlehrer will have changed even after the defeat; I see no reason why it should. They did not accept the Nazi doctrine, or the Pan-German doctrine for any low consideration of earthly success: they accepted it on grounds of morality; they will not be refuted by defeat; they will wait for the second coming of the Fuhrer once he has been put to sleep in the Kyffhaüser, just as they have been waiting for the Emperor Barbarossa.10
If it is objected that this intellectual elite does not constitute the German people, Strauss has a ready if disturbing reply:
But if the objection is made that the Nazis are not Germany, I would answer that a nation in the political sense of the term is the politically relevant, the politically efficient part of the nation: when in a free election, about 45% of the Germans voted for Hitler, and the other 55% were in a condition of utter confusion and helplessness, then the 45% are the Germans—from any political point of view.11
This is not a “political point of view” that any liberal democrat would recognize; it is rather based on Carl Schmitt’s “concept of the political.”12 Naturally Strauss is no German if the Nazis define what a German is on the basis of Schmitt’s friend and enemy distinction: the Aryan is simply the non-Jew.13 In other words, Strauss does not embrace a comprehensive definition of what it is to be a German that a liberal democrat would favor;14 he is still German enough to recognize the inefficiency of liberalism:15 “Nothing really known permits us to indulge the hope that the politically efficient part of the German people has changed their minds as regards liberal democracy.”16 No matter h o w small this efficient part becomes, Strauss nevertheless defers to “the crucial implication of the Nazi doctrine, viz. the implication that the needs of the German people as interpreted by the most efficient man in the land are the supreme law, not subject to any higher consideration.”17 One wonders if Strauss was deferring to the judgment of his homeland’s most efficient m a n when he stated he had never been a German or whether he had made, as it were at birth, an independent decision to that effect. In other words: is it because of Hitler or because of Strauss himself that Strauss had never been a German?
This question introduces my book’s subtitle: Strauss’s relationship with National Socialism. I should make it crystal clear at the outset that this book is not about Strauss’s impact on the Bush Administration.18 If Strauss is dangerous, it is not because his students are currently up to no good. But by the same token, the fact that Strauss’s students do not presently agree about what Strauss actually thought, proves nothing about Strauss, least of all that he had no teaching.19 If Strauss had a teaching, he may well have chosen not to make that teaching obvi-ous to every reader and chapter 1 will leave no doubt that Strauss had the literary skills required to accomplish precisely this result. As for not being German, as a liberal democrat I must respectfully disagree: Strauss was just as German as Karl Marx or Otto von Bismarck, more so to the extent that he was born a citizen of the Second Reich. Even if Strauss’s claim that he had never been a German is based on a committed young Zionist’s conscientious wartime decision to acknowledge no loyalty to the Reich, Strauss was nevertheless born and raised in Germany and was unquestionably a German before he made that decision. It was only the Nazis who had the power to decide ex post facto that Jews like Strauss had never been German; one must also carefully consider the fact that the only basis on which their inhuman decision could possibly be justified was in those few cases where German-born Jews, of their own free will and accord, abjured all connection with Germany, as Strauss suggests was the case with him. Was Strauss the pre-1933 embodiment of National Socialism’s fallacious Dolchstoß stereotype of the disloyal or even anti-German Jew? Or did he simply acquiesce in the post-1933 view that “the needs of the German people as interpreted by the most efficient man in the land are the supreme law”? This dilemma will justify my book’s subtitle.
An interesting parallel to Strauss’s remarks about the Germans who will await “the second coming of the Führer” suggests itself to the movie-lover. In “The Stranger” (1946), Orson Welles plays a history professor named “Charles Rankin” teaching in a quiet New England town;20 Edward G. Robinson’s character (Wilson) suspects him of being Franz Kindler, a missing Nazi, utterly ruthless and absolutely invisible.21 Wilson insinuates himself into Rankin’s circle and lures the professor into a discussion of the political situation in post-war Germany. Hoping to discover Rankin’s sympathy for the Nazis, Wilson is treated instead to a passionate outburst he little expects: Rankin pronounces the Germans irremediable, just as Strauss did, and indeed calls for their extermination.
Men of truth everywhere have come to know for whom the bell tolled, but not the German. No! He still follows his warrior gods marching to Wagnerian strains, his eyes still fixed upon the fiery sword of Siegfried, and he knows subterranean meeting places that you don’t believe in. The German’s unbroken dream world comes alive, and he takes his place in shining armor beneath the banners of the Teutonic knights. Mankind is waiting for the Messiah, but for the German, the Messiah is not the Prince of Peace. He’s another Barbarossa, another Hitler.22
Wilson is completely fooled by this tirade until he recalls a moment at dinner when a young student had confronted Rankin with Karl Marx as an example of a German humanitarian; Rankin had brushed the young man off by pointing out that Marx, being a Jew, wasn’t German.23 It is only in his dreams that Wilson realizes the truth: “Well, who but a Nazi would deny that Karl Marx was a German . . . because he was a Jew?”
By calling Strauss “the German Stranger,” my intention is not to equate him with Kindler except in the sense that I regard both men as equally German. I am, however, suggesting that Strauss, who unlike Kindler never lost his heavy German accent, may not have been precisely what he seemed. After all, if it was Strauss’s decision as a Jew to confine his loyalty to an exclusively Zionist ideal, on what basis can we consider him to have become an American? But my principal purpose in juxtaposing “The Stranger” with Strauss’s remarks on the reeducation of the Germans is that both speeches touch on what the latter would later call “the theme of my investigations:”24 Viktor Trivas reminds us that National Socialism offers a solution to “the theological political problem.” Crudely understood as the relationship between religion and politics in general, Schmitt’s revival of “political theology” (1922)25 showed those who were able to hear that the modern liberal state was particularly vulnerable to a theological critique initiated by unbelievers. Evidently this critique transcended theory, and Trivas usefully suggests that National Socialism was a religion created by atheists.26 Whether or not he learned anything from the Messiah ben Joseph or the Messiah ben David,27 Hitler was repeatedly recognized as some kind of Messiah (hence Strauss’s “second coming”); if this was deliberate on Hitler’s part, it would constitute a diabolical but nevertheless ruthlessly intelligible application of Jewish means to the last word in anti-Jewish ends.28 In any case, where self-contradictions are concerned, a National Socialist Messiah is certainly no more unthinkable in principle than a Jewish Nazi.
Further evidence that Strauss’s destiny is inextricably linked with National Socialism is not difficult to find. Consider the question: “How will Leo Strauss be remembered?” If only one phrase were to be rescued from his intricately complicated writings, what would it be? This thought-experiment is easily implemented: since literary immortality is best secured by coining a quotable phrase, one need only search the World Wide Web for “leo strauss coined.” The phrase that dominates the electronic response is “reductio ad Hitlerum.” In his best-known book, Natural Right and History, Strauss writes as follows.
Unfortunately it does not go without saying that in our examination we must avoid the fallacy that in the last decades has frequently been used as a substitute for the reductio ad absurdum: the reductio ad Hitlerum. A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler.29
Although the context of this passage is crucial and will be discussed in chapter 3, it is precisely not the context that matters for now; this is likely to be Strauss’s most memorable fragment. He is claiming that a statement like “the masses are worthy of contempt” is not false simply because Hitler shared it. In other words, one can share a number of views with Hitler and not be refuted as a result. The example I chose, of course, is hardly adventitious: the inferiority of the mass of men (with respect to what is highest and most important for man) is a commonplace for Strauss. “One can share a number of views with Hitler and not thereby be refuted.” Strauss’s claim is doubtless true: Hitler viewed vegetarianism as healthy and loved his dogs. Sharing only a single insignificant view with him is very different from sharing a large number of decisively important views. Strauss’s coinage makes no such distinction. The doctrine is true but it can also conceal the truth.
Strauss rejects the reductio ad Hitlerum. He laments the fact (“unfortunately it does not go without saying”) that it is necessary for him to reject so obvious a fallacy. He therefore suggests that the world would be better if such a rejection were unnecessary. He invites us to ask: in what sort of world—due to what alternative course of events “in the last decades”—would such a rejection be unnecessary? The answer to this interlinear question is both obvious and chilling: a world in which sharing views with Hitler would not be the basis for being refuted. Hitler himself attempted to create such a world; a Second World War was required to destroy it. Only in a world where Hitler is regarded as evil can the reductio ad Hitlerum be current. How then can it be unfortunate that this is the world in which we are living? Given the complaisance with which the rise of Hitler was countenanced and the manifest evil wrought by his regime once empowered, a strong case could be made for the proposition that the reductio ad Hitlerum, even if it is a fallacy, is indeed a noble fallacy. It promotes vigilance: it warns us to be suspicious about the recrudescence of National Socialism. For whom is such vigilance unfortunate?
Natural Right and History is based on a series of lectures Strauss gave while the Cold War was heating up (1949); when published in 1953, the Red Scare was in full swing. Communists are enemies of the state. The Left points out that Hitler said the same. Strauss coins and then publishes the reductio ad Hitlerum at this critical time. One can hunt down Bolsheviks and not be a Nazi. One can search through the writings and utterances of Americans to see if they are tainted with Communism without thereby sanctioning the Gestapo. At the same time, others are hunting down Nazis in hiding. Few of these are discovered in the United States: most known Nazis are intelligent enough to find safer havens than this bastion of Liberal Democracy. That which made America a dangerous place to be a Nazi therefore also makes it a good place to be one, especially once it is the deadliest enemies of the Nazis and not the Nazis themselves who are being hunted down here. In any case, Strauss coins the reductio ad Hitlerum because he wishes to express views or (which amounted to the same thing for him) because he intends to “take seriously” those who have expressed views Hitler held as well. His identification of the fallacy not only allows those (like himself) who wish to express true views that just happen to be shared by Hitler (his apparent purpose) but would also provide excellent cover for a Nazi. Any Nazi could plausibly deny that he was a Nazi by saying “just because I share this view with Hitler does not make me a Nazi.” In addition to being Jewish (how can a Jew be a German, let alone a Nazi?), and an anti-Communist (what patriotic American isn’t in the McCarthy Era?), the German Stranger invented a third line of defense. Why?
In summary: the reductio ad Hitlerum is a fallacy; Strauss is logically correct. But as a thinker, speaker, writer, and teacher who often spoke and wrote about “noble lies,” he nowhere acknowledges that the fallacy may well be one of these: a necessary tool for a vigilant defense against a wily and implacable foe. He also never addresses the quantitative question: how many views and views of what magnitude convert the logical fallacy into a political truth. The analogy with the reductio ad absurdum suggests that the fallacy in question is a logical one. Logic is universal: couched in its terms, the rejection of the fallacy protects one view or many, trivial views or decisive ones. Finally, he describes his fallacy in terms of “views.” This evades the decisive question for a second time in a second way: it is not views that must be refuted as Hitler’s but men who must be unmasked and then defeated as Nazis. Views don’t act: men do. Those who are vigilant against Nazis can’t be content simply to refute their “views;” the SPD no less than the KPD (the Socialist and Communist Parties of Germany) tried that approach in Weimar with disastrous results. Instead, they fight them (when they reveal themselves in public) and they unmask them when they are concealed.
Unlike being a Jew, then, Strauss’s rejection of the reductio ad Hitlerum is a concealment that simultaneously reveals. The fact that he was a Jew is no doubt his most effective means of distancing himself permanently from National Socialism. But it should be noted at the outset that the claim that he was a Jew who fled from Hitler’s Germany is strictly speaking false: Hitler came to power in 1933 while Strauss left Germany the previous year. This story will be told in chapter 4. Having begun by pulling out of context Strauss’s most memorable coinage, I have already incurred a debt to the reader to examine this same text in chapter 3. In chapter 1, the reader will find an introduction to what Strauss called “the Art of Writing”: without realizing the importance of “reading between the lines”—by raising, for example, the kind of extra-textual question I just did—one cannot read Strauss. In the pages that follow, the reader will be offered a Strauss-style reading of Strauss himself. This necessarily requires a willingness to read him with great care: only in this way can the riddle of the German Stranger be resolved. In the spirit of Strauss himself, I will not rely primarily on secondary sources although I will appropriately acknowledge the many scholars who have helped me reach my conclusions.
It is tempting to assert that this book is about Nazism only to the extent that it needs to be; unfortunately, this will not prove to be true. Although the connection between Strauss and National Socialism is at the dead center of my concerns, I will not attempt to link the two by offering my readers some prefabricated definition of National Socialism in order to reveal Strauss’s proximity to it: I will rely on them to recognize National Socialism when they see it. Whatever the relationship between the two may be, it cannot be illustrated by a merely conventional understanding of either. For what little it’s worth, I am hoping that the reader will learn almost as much about National Socialism as about Strauss; certainly that is what happened to me while writing this book.
To illustrate the method I reject, consider the following: Nazism is a right-wing political philosophy committed to political action. It is both anti-communist and anti-liberal. It holds democrats in contempt. It is nationalistic: internationalism is attacked as both dangerous and misguided. It is “tough minded”; it is aggressive, violent, and extremist. It is “hard core.” It is Machiavellian in the popular sense of the word. It is scary for democrats; it, in turn, plays off the fear and weakness of its less “tough minded” opponents. It is elitist: some men are judged superior to others. These superior ones never include women or Africans. It is a movement that has secrets: even its own followers are not completely aware of its aims. It is committed to the political use of lying.
This is the kind of carefully contrived list upon which I flatly refuse to depend. While it may perfectly well be true that all of these statements apply to both Strauss and the Nazis, working slavishly through this or any other list is artificial and unpersuasive. But there is one guideline, subject to later revision, that I will set out at the beginning: anti-Semitism, and a fortiori eliminationist anti-Semitism, is neither a necessary nor a sufficient component of Nazism. It is what Hitler sought—tyrannical power over his nation—and not the specific internal enemies that he targeted in order to obtain power that appears to be the crucial matter. There were presumably many Nazis who supported the National Socialist Revolution in spite of rather than because of its anti-Semitism. They too were Nazis. I will take it for granted that if Hitler were in Germany today, he would denounce Turks rather than Jews30 but would still attempt to overthrow whatever liberal democracy had replaced the Weimar Republic. He would still seek to establish tyranny and consolidate power. I therefore take it for granted that a Hitler is possible today. I take it for granted that Nazism could be transplanted and adapted to other places and to other times.31 It could—indeed it probably would, given its terrible reputation—call itself something else. This is what makes it dangerous. The definition of a danger ought not to be restricted to that which has already been defeated. If we take the danger of Hitler seriously—whether we call that danger Fascism, Nazism, or anything else—we must not persuade ourselves that it is only the historical Hitler (or one who is identical to Hitler) who is dangerous. This would amount to the view that dangers can be identified only when they cease to be dangerous. A dead man already beaten on the battlefield cannot be a danger: therefore Hitler is not a danger. If people had been deluded enough to believe this in 1949, Strauss would have had no need to coin the memorable phrase reductio ad Hitlerum.
It is for these reasons that a statement like the following would, under normal circumstances, be simply foolish, short-sighted, historically inaccurate, and, above all, easily refutable:
The Weimar Republic was succeeded by the only German regime—by the only regime that ever was anywhere—which had no other clear principle except murderous hatred of the Jews, for “Aryan” had no clear meaning other than “non-Jewish.”32
But when Strauss writes these words, we are temporarily at a loss: is he lying? Strauss emphasizes the historical exceptionality of Nazism: no regime remotely similar to it ever existed. He offers no reason why this exceptionality should not continue into the future: if anything, he rather suggests that it will. He thus wishes to exempt only one view from his rejection of the fallacious reductio ad Hitlerum: the view that Jews and Jews alone are to be hated murderously. One who holds this view—and only this view—is tainted by the Hitler parallel and subject to refutation on that basis. Armed with that reductio, a Jew (or even a non-Jew who does not hate Jews to the point of murdering them) may express any view or all other views identical to those expressed by Adolf Hitler and still not be subject to refutation or even exposure as a Nazi.
But how can a Jew be a Nazi? How can a Nazi be a Jew? Very easily, if Strauss is wrong that Nazism had no other clear principle than murderous hatred of Jews. For the time being, I am going to assume that he was wrong: that even the crude list presented earlier at least applies to the Nazis. But it is worth noting from the start that there are actually four logical possibilities: (1) Strauss was correct that the essence of National Socialism was the murderous hatred of Jews and, as a Jew, he could never have sympathized with them in the decisive respect, (2) he was correct about the Nazis and yet, paradoxically, endorsed their project, (3) he was wrong about the Nazis but was, regardless of any superficial resemblances, not one himself, and (4) he was wrong about the Nazis—who had other, more important principles—and that this error is perfectly consistent with and indeed intimately related to his technique and intentions. For now, let me summarize two provisional guidelines relating to the fourth: Nazism is not simply anti-Semitism and one can be a Nazi without having a murderous hatred of Jews just as one could hate Jews and murder them long before Nazis came on the scene. And Nazism is and always will remain a danger for the same reason that it was once a danger. The view that Nazism can only be the historical anti-Semitic phenomenon already defeated on the battlefields of Europe is dangerous because it denies the possibility that it may still remain a danger. The view that Nazis have no clear principle other than hatred of Jews is dangerous because it makes Nazis easier to recognize than they would be if they still existed. Even if this were their only clear principle, they would certainly be smart enough to avoid making this obvious in the wake of military defeat and universal persecution.
Danger becomes more dangerous when it is defined in such a way that it can no longer be regarded as a danger. What shall we say of those who speak of the dangers of any poisonous movement only in the past tense? What shall we say of those who recognize only one easily identifiable principle as the sign of this danger? These views are in themselves dangerous: we must ask ourselves whether it is overly meticulous historians, complaisant fools, or Nazis who maintain them. We can multiply these alternatives but must never refuse to consider the last one. If we are vigilant, we must be aware that a beaten enemy is not harmless and that we cannot prepare only for the war we have already won. Nor can we expect our beaten enemy to make central to their renewed efforts a principle that is easily identified and almost generally discredited. It is not enough to hope—especially when one loudly proclaims that this hope is a fact—that no such renewal is possible.
In the wake of a lost war, a proud people, led by skillful manipulators, was turned against the liberal democracy that had arisen in the aftermath of its defeat. The Nazis rejected liberal democracy in both practice and principle. They did everything in their power to build up a blind commitment to a powerful remilitarized Germany infused with fanatical nationalism. They held up the vision of a Third Reich where individualism would be submerged in a unitary state guided by a charismatic leader. Building on long standing prejudices and guided by shrewd political insight, the Nazis created enemies within—enemies who would necessarily be tolerated by the liberal principles that were the basis of the hated democratic regime—in order to destroy it. They could achieve nothing while Weimar stood. Their most dangerous enemies, the only powerful groups that would oppose them to the end, were Socialists and Communists. These groups were divided between themselves about whether the liberal regime should be defended. As the more “tough minded” of the two, the Communists were more dangerous to the Nazis than the Socialists. The Nazis hated the Communists at least as much as they hated the Jews but Jew-hating was easier for the masses to understand. Since Karl Marx was a Jew and could easily be seen by the masses as the friend of the masses, the Nazis could weaken a powerful and potentially popular enemy while fulminating against another enemy who was powerless and despised. But this is only a piece of the Nazi message. Above all it is national pride and the solidarity of all Germans, regardless of class, that constitutes the core of National Socialism. It is indeed a warlike creed, born in the trenches of a desperate war fought at long odds with numerous, wealthy, and implacable foes. The Nazis will emphasize that Germany still has enemies abroad as well as at home; the War is not over and will be renewed. The liberal regime continues to truckle to the nation’s external enemies: it meets their humiliating demands and accepts the conditions of its own servitude. It binds itself to international codes of behavior that are simply the shackles of slavery. The tolerance of the Republic for its enemies both foreign and domestic proves that it is the enemy of German Freedom. This, then, was the Nazi road to servitude.
Some pages earlier, I offered a description of Nazism in general terms as an example of the sort of procedure I would not be following: a list of general views that one might easily be able to show were shared by Strauss and the Nazis. In the previous paragraph, by contrast, I emphasized what the Nazis actually did in order to gain power in 1933. Long before the Nazis created any concentration camps or murdered even the first of the six million Jews, they were dangerous and needed to be stopped. Without overthrowing the Weimar Republic, the Nazis could not have brought about a single arrest, dismissal, or legal murder. Weimar was deeply flawed but it was infinitely preferable to the alternative; it is therefore deeply disturbing in itself that Strauss considered “a radical critique of liberalism” to be the “urgent task” of 1932.33 It was Plato who taught that Democracy (whatever its self-destructive flaws may be) holds the last ditch against Tyranny in Republic VIII. Although he did not know how to make proper use of it,34 Strauss’s discovery that Democracy corresponds to Hesiod’s Age of Heroes is one of several great contributions he made to Platonic studies.35 Weimar proves to be the Age of Heroes in Germany’s history, and had there been any actual German Platonists in the early 1930s, they would have combated Thrasymachus amidst the shadows of the Cave.
Plato’s belated entrance into the text must be greeted with a certain amount of fanfare: after all, it was not because of Franz Kindler that this book is called The German Stranger: the reference is to Plato’s Laws. More importantly, this book could not have been written without Plato for the very good reason that a Platonist is writing it. Plato appears to be democracy’s enemy; Strauss’s defenders insist he was its friend and ally.36 It is as a Platonist that I reject both of these claims and it is likewise as a Platonist that I see them as indissolubly linked. For all the previous discussion of National Socialism and Weimar, then, this Introduction would remain incomplete without serious discussion of Plato. And so, with Plato properly installed at the head of the philosophical parade, footnotes are sure to follow.
To begin with, there are good reasons why there were no true Platonists in Germany during the 1930s. Nietzsche, whose influence during this period was overpowering,37 considered Socrates’ last words in Plato’s Phaedo proof that both of these “great wise men” were “symptoms of decay.”38 Heidegger, the most influential German philosopher alive at the time,39 expressed the same thought in metaphysical terms: Plato’s idea had displaced physis by introducing a cleft (Kluft) between “what is and what appears.”40 Instantiated in Socrates’ cheerful embrace of the final separation of his soul from a mere body,41 the Kluft between Being and Becoming—one might well think of it as a realm-disjoining plateau42 —has long been recognized as the essence of Platonism; hence Aristotle’s unremitting attacks on the chôrismos. Unlike his predecessors Nietzsche and Heidegger, the author of Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (1983) appears to be a Platonist; in fairness to Strauss,43 he never claimed to be one.44 To put it another way: it is only because his Plato is not a Platonist that Strauss, whose admiration for Plato is certainly very evident, appears to be one. In reality, Strauss is no more receptive to what Nietzsche and Heidegger accurately recognized as Platonism—the absolute existence of transcendent Being and the problematic existential status of everything else—than they were.45 But Strauss has no intention of making it easy for his readers to recognize that Strauss’s Plato is not the actual Plato let alone his antithesis. Thus he never directly repudiates Platonism in print;46 he rather disposes of it in a circuitous manner, primarily by means of “Fârâbî’s Plato.”47
But Strauss knows exactly what Platonism is, as proved by a letter he wrote to Gerhard Krüger in 1935: “Kant is really the only Platonist among the modern philosophers.”48 By showing the limits of reason in order to make room for faith, Kant created a modern place, beyond space and time, for Plato’s transcendent idea.49 Pre-Kantian German Platonism had its champion in Moses Mendelssohn,50 the first great philosopher who was both German and Jewish.51 As Strauss knew better than any of his contemporaries,52 Mendelssohn fell victim to a vicious attack launched by F. H. Jacobi,53 subject of Strauss’s doctoral dissertation. Mendelssohn’s successor was Hermann Cohen,54 founder of Neo-Kantianism at Marburg University, where Strauss began his studies.55 It is no accident that Immanuel Kant is the only great German philosopher with an Old Testament Christian name:56 like any true Platonist or any believing Jew, Kant is infused with what I will call “the piety of the Kluft”: he knows that he does not know what he does not know, e.g., whether God loves piety because it is pious or whether it is pious because God loves it.57 One alternative requires a human being to know the mind of God, the other diminishes God with an idea.
German Philosophy is not quite as complicated as its New World students tend to believe: the essential thing to keep firmly in mind is the absolute gulf between metaphysical dualism58 —the Platonic tradition represented by Mendelssohn, Kant, Cohen, and completed in Germany by Franz Rosenzweig59 —and monism, the legacy of the Spinoza revival inaugurated by Jacobi.60 Whether by collapsing the distinction between God and man—a process begun by J. G. Hamann61 and completed by G. W. F. Hegel62 —or by the crude but effective expedient of eliminating God entirely, as Nietzsche and Heidegger did,63 anti-Platonism has a long history in Germany and the whole of this development unfortunately constitutes the philosophical origin of what would finally take the name “National Socialism.”64 I will show that anti-Platonism reaches its theoretical or logical culmination in Strauss, whose improbable and audacious project was to enroll Plato himself in its ranks.65 He did this by means of the phantom (eidôlon) I will call “Plato.”
The origins of Strauss’s “Plato” will be found in Plato’s Laws, a dialogue in which the reader makes the acquaintance of a mysterious “Athenian Stranger,” prototype for this book’s title. Strauss had read Plato’s Laws before he came to the United States in 1938 but this text could only acquire a deeper significance once the émigré became what he was for us: “the German Stranger.” The decisive importance of Plato’s Laws is indicated by the fact that the last book Strauss wrote without the aid of posthumous editing was The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws (1975). This book was in fact the culmination of a process that had already begun in Germany: its frontispiece was the hint from Avicenna that Strauss had discovered in 1929-193066 and that first appeared in print in his last German book, the only one unavailable in English during his lifetime and consequently his most revealing, Philosophie und Gesetz: Beiträge zum Verständnis Maimunis und seiner Vorläufer (1935): “‘the treatment of prophecy and Divine law is contained in . . . the Laws.’”67 This hint created a bridge between “Plato” and the philosophical treatment of Judaism, a bridge constructed by Fârâbî and traversed, according to Strauss, by Maimonides, the subject of Strauss’s paid research at the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentum in the early 1930s.68 The importance of Plato’s Laws for the German Stranger will begin to become apparent by analyzing a passage from the first essay he wrote in English: “On Abravanel’s Philosophical Tendency”(1937).69
Judaism on the one hand, Aristotelianism on the other, certainly supplied the greatest part of the matter of Maimonides’ teaching.70
Strauss’s use of the word “matter” is important: he is not denying that Maimonides was deeply influenced by Aristotle. It was this influence that troubled Cohen and led him to suggest that Maimonides was closer to Plato:71 as both Kantian and believing Jew, Cohen was alive to the metaphysical gulf dividing Aristotelianism from Platonism and recognized that only the latter, thanks to the Idea of the Good, was consistent with the transcendent God of Israel. In apparent agreement with Cohen but really against him—and the easiest way to understand Strauss throughout is in opposition to Cohen72 —Strauss claimed that Maimonides was really a Platonist.73 For Strauss, this claim did not mean that Maimonides, as a believing Jew, embraced the piety of the Platonic Kluft dividing the transcendent God from the merely created world; unlike Cohen, Strauss insists that the matter of his thought was Aristotelian. Strauss’s claims about the “Platonism” of Maimonides therefore had less to do with metaphysical matter than political manner:
But Platonic political philosophy provided at any rate the framework for the two achievements by which Maimonides made an epoch in the history of Judaism: for his codification of the Jewish law and for his philosophical defense of the Jewish law.
Strauss is a careful writer, and it is only by combining these two achievements—a description that turns on the distinction between Maimonides’ codification of Jewish law and Jewish law itself—that we come to realize that Strauss’s Maimonides was actually offering a philosophical defense for his codification of Jewish law.74 The meaning that Strauss attached to the word “Platonic” will immediately become clear to anyone who realizes that Strauss is therefore not claiming that Maimonides offered a defense of Judaism despite the fact that he appeared to be doing so. Strauss’s ongoing concern with Maimonides is therefore central to understanding Strauss’s own “Platonism.”75 It will be noted that the words “Platonic political philosophy” will reappear in the title of Strauss’s posthumous book; it is this sense of “Platonic” that proved decisive and to which Strauss remained unfailingly loyal. As Cohen recognized, Platonism as traditionally understood—the Platonism that Nietzsche had in mind when he called Christianity “Platonism for the masses”76 —offers a philosophical defense of Judaism: having added personality and speech to Plato’s transcendent Idea in the noumenal realm of Being, the God of Israel uniquely says “I am That I am.”77 It is against this Platonism, the Platonism that Strauss’s Vorläufer (Heidegger and Nietzsche) still regarded as their open enemy, that Strauss’s “Athens” and “Jerusalem” dichotomy will be deployed: insofar as Maimonides is a philosopher,78 he cannot accept Revelation, and when he appears to be doing so, he is really doing something quite different: he is offering a philosophic defense for his own codification of Jewish law based on “Platonic political philosophy.”
It is open to question which of Plato’s political works was the most important for Maimonides and the Islamic philosophers.
The choices come down to two: Plato’s Republic and his Laws.79 Although Strauss will intimate that he comes down on the side of the latter, his understanding of the former, most clearly expressed in the final paragraph of Philosophie und Gesetz,80 reveals what Strauss thought it meant to follow Plato rather than Aristotle. No Platonist will be surprised to learn that Strauss explicates this difference in relation to the Allegory of the Cave; the amazing thing is how he does so. According to Strauss, Plato is an Aristotelian to the extent that both regard contemplation, the bios theôretikos accessible only to the philosopher, as the best life. But unlike Aristotle, Plato subordinates the philosopher’s good to the city by compelling an involuntary return to the Cave. It is this subordination that prepares for philosophy’s later status under the dominion of revealed religion.81 The philosophers not only continue to philosophize: “they are, as authorized by law, free to philosophize in Aristotelian freedom: they can therefore aristotelize.”82 Naturally Strauss ignores the fact that the basis of the allegory is precisely the Platonic—one is tempted to say “Jewish”—dualism based on the Kluft or chôrismos that Aristotle rejects; it reappears in a strictly political form that separates the philosopher from the city and divorces “Athens” from “Jerusalem” in principle. Precisely because he secretly refuses to acknowledge that the city’s good is the highest good—to say nothing of the fact that he does not acknowledge that the Idea of the Good furnishes the basis for his voluntary and earthly self-sacrifice83 —Strauss’s Maimonides is a “Platonist” because he defends Judaism on an Aristotelian basis.
But it is safe to say that the best clue to the understanding of their teaching is supplied by the Laws.
Strauss would soon enough discover—and it constitutes a great contribution to the better understanding not only of “Plato” but of Plato—the most important clue for understanding Plato’s Laws: the Athenian Stranger is the Socrates who followed Crito’s advice and escaped the hemlock.84 Although Strauss wrote little about Plato’s Phaedo—doing so would have forced him to reject Platonism openly85 —he lavished considerable attention on Crito, particularly in his Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy.86 While Plato’s Socrates drowns out the arguments of his oldest friend by channeling, much like a prophet,87 an inspired speech from the personified laws of Athens, Strauss’s “Socrates” is actually practicing “Platonic political philosophy:” he is justifying, for Crito’s benefit,88 the city’s law in a way that actually reinterprets and rejects it.89 The elderly Socrates dies as a result; Strauss suggests that only an elderly Socrates would have done so.90 The judicial murder of Socrates is useful to Strauss because it can be used to illustrate the permanent antagonism between the city and philosophy; it is inconvenient in that Socrates’ cheerful willingness to undergo death suggests that the philosopher’s return to the Cave is both voluntary and just.91 In short: fabricated for the purpose of maintaining an absolute opposition between “Athens” and “Jerusalem,” Strauss’s “Socrates” does not embrace the metaphysical Kluft or orient his earthly existence to a transcendent Beyond, he does not yearn for the separation of immortal soul from imprisoning body,92 and certainly does not inspire his followers to serve their native city, as Plato’s Socrates did, by playing prophet to the Athenian laws.
I cannot discuss here the true meaning of this most ironical of Plato’s works, although I believe that only the full understanding of its true meaning would enable us to understand adequately the medieval philosophy of which I am speaking.
Although he possessed the most important clue to the true meaning of what I too regard as “this most ironical of Plato’s works,” Strauss never gained a “full understanding of its true meaning”: he never understood Laws as Plato himself understood it. In addition to his silence on Phaedo, his decision to ignore Plato’s Epinomis validates this radical claim: the latter has been dismissed as spurious precisely because it is easy to spot its anti-Platonic qualities.93 Those qualities are also present, albeit in a less obtrusive form, in Plato’s ironic Laws and Plato places them there deliberately: just as the student of Thucydides and Xenophon is challenged to reject on historical grounds the deceptive and anachronistic speech of Aspasia that Socrates repeats in Menexenus,94 so also the student of Plato’s Socratic dialogues is challenged, on ethical grounds, to reject the utterly impious law code created by the cowardly law-breaker Plato called “the Athenian Stranger.”95 Having disobeyed the laws of Athens, the Stranger will create a code of laws for Crete that others will be compelled to obey.96 Having fled the Socratic hemlock, the Stranger will now require the drinking of wine, its antidote.97 As Strauss well understood, the reason the first word of Laws is “God” is because the Stranger, having tacitly rejected divine authorship for the laws of Sparta and Crete, will slowly but surely lay claim to it for his own code.98 Unlike Socrates, the Athenian Stranger really is guilty of impiety and if his attempt to corrupt the aged Clinias should prove successful, the youth of Magnesia are in serious trouble. We need only admit (against Strauss) that Plato was a Platonist, reject (with Strauss) the theory of “Plato’s development,” and learn (from Strauss) that the Stranger was an escaping and cowardly “Socrates” (little more thinkable than a National Socialist Messiah or a Jewish Nazi) in order to see that Plato’s loyalty was to the immortal Socrates of the Phaedo, not to the atheistic theology the Athenian Stranger introduces in Laws.99
This is not to deny categorically that Strauss’s uncritical reading of Plato’s Laws may be extremely useful for understanding Maimonides or rather his predecessors beginning with Fârâbî; more importantly, Strauss’s reading of Laws is extremely useful for understanding him. To begin with, the experience of reading Plato’s Laws critically, as Plato intended, is the ideal preparation for giving Strauss the reading he too deserves although reading the two in the reverse order may prove considerably easier for us. Regardless of chronological priority, one cannot read either well without having armed oneself beforehand with a healthy suspicion that neither the Athenian nor the German Stranger speaks for Plato. To be sure one stranger is real and the other merely fictional. But if the intrepid Strauss dreamed of making Plato his mouthpiece, the wondrous Plato had already made a puppet out of Strauss: the best way to show that Strauss’s “Plato” is not the real Plato is to show that Plato’s Athenian Stranger is the real Strauss. This project will be revisited in chapter 9. For the present, identifying Strauss as the German version of the Athenian Stranger is hardly damning on Strauss’s own terms; he does not regard the Stranger as an evil person if only because both stand “beyond good and evil.”100 And who could blame Strauss for fleeing the murderous jail-cell of post-1933 Germany for a refuge in a faraway “Crete”?
On the other hand, we ourselves would need to be cretins to ignore the circumstances under which Strauss actually left Germany in 1932 or to allow first impressions101 to determine our assessment of either Stranger:
At the beginning one receives the impression that the Athenian has come to Crete in order to study there the best laws.102
This sentence comes from Strauss’s masterpiece, the 1954-1955 lectures devoted to the question: “What Is Political Philosophy?” Delivered in Jerusalem, these lectures demonstrate ad oculos Strauss’s own mastery of “Platonic political philosophy;” they will be the subject of chapter 8. For now, it is enough to show that Strauss regards our first impression of the Stranger as wrong:
By this time it has become clear to the reader that the Athenian has not come to Crete in order to study there the best laws, but in order to introduce into Crete new laws and institutions, truly good laws and institutions.103
To the extent that we assume that Strauss favored the laws and institutions of these United States, we fail to recognize that moderation in speech is inseparable from what Strauss was shameless enough to call “Platonic political philosophy.”
For moderation is not a virtue of thought: Plato likens philosophy to madness, the very opposite of sobriety or moderation; thought must not be moderate but fearless, not to say shameless. But moderation is a virtue controlling the philosopher’s speech.104
The crucial point of intersection is that despite their moderation, both the Athenian and the German Strangers have a solution both fearless and shameless to “the theological-political problem.”
The Athenian Stranger does not reject the divine origin of Crete’s laws in principle and he does not deny the existence of Zeus;105 neither will the German Stranger ever make his atheism explicit in English (as he had in German)106 or directly attack the Declaration of Independence. On the other hand, he will never endorse the view “that governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” More revealing is his refusal to embrace the crisp and perfect separation of Church and State.107 Without denying the existence of the Olympian gods, the Athenian Stranger introduces new ones—the heavenly bodies108 —and elevates those with knowledge of mathematics and astronomy (or respect for those who have such knowledge) to political leadership through the agency of an all-powerful Nocturnal Council he is shameless enough to call “divine.”109 Inspired by Heidegger’s anti-Platonic rehabilitation of physis, the German Stranger will make exactly the same point by explaining why the word “nature” is not found in the Bible,110 an essential component in his ongoing project to divorce “Athens” from “Jerusalem.”111 There is certainly far less evidence that either Stranger believes in an unseen, transcendent God than that Maimonides or Fârâbî did. But the atheistic German Stranger never protests the fact that the Athenian’s city is filled with “god-talk” or that belief in the city’s “gods” is strictly regulated and enforced; his solution to the theological-political problem is the antithesis of ours. Equipped with a secret police,112 Magnesia is based on an atheistic religion and the Stranger himself functions as its atheistic Moses.113 Strauss “naturally”114 does not deplore any of this: he thus mistakes Plato’s motives for creating his Cretan city. As anachronistic as it may sound,115 Plato’s Laws subjects an anti-Platonic “Socrates”—yet another self-contradiction to join hands with the Nazi Messiah and the Jewish Nazi—to the ancient archetype of the reductio ad Hitlerum.116 It is in any case a serious mis take to apply A. N. Whitehead’s famous remark about “footnotes to Plato” only to philosophers; the son of Ariston was particularly astute at predicting the political means by which the idea would be deformed, attacked, and annihilated.117 This, indeed, was an important component of his ongoing pedagogical project: to show Kluft-cleaving philosophers their obligation to follow Socrates back down into the Cave lest the likes of Thrasymachus administer their poison to an otherwise well-intentioned and capable public.118
In the chapters that follow, I will show that before he left Germany in 1932, the German Stranger was deeply influenced by two soon-to-become Nazis—not ignorant anti-Semitic thugs but brilliant professors of Law and Philosophy. Their hatred of Weimar was no secret to the young Strauss even at a time when university professors could not openly express such political convictions. More importantly, he drew upon their work to create a radical critique of liberal democracy; ironically, the result was a synthesis (chapter 4) that neither of them could have reached on their own. This need hardly surprise us; Strauss would have surpassed any teachers on such matters and, like Shakespeare’s Richard the Third, could “set the murderous Machiavel to school.” It is ultimately because he had a far clearer understanding of its philosophical origins that Strauss can teach us infinitely more about National Socialism than the two cowardly, utterly repulsive, and lapel-pin-wearing Nazi philosophers, Heidegger and Schmitt. It bears emphasis and demands thoughtful consideration that even a drop of “Jewish blood” was sufficient to bar anyone, regardless of their political convictions, from joining the Nazis. But Strauss did what no mere Nazi could have done or even dreamed of doing: he boldly brought his anti-liberal project to the United States, the most fearsome of his homeland’s Western enemies and the greatest and most powerful liberal democracy there has ever been. No more than the Athenian was the German Stranger intent on learning from others about the best laws and institutions; he had a rather more Machiavellian project in mind. Carefully concealed in the form of commentary on the political philosophers of the past, protected by the tolerance he despised but knew full well how to exploit, he tirelessly promulgated his “Platonic” critique of liberal democracy in the belly of the whale.
I intend to show why Strauss’s “political philosophy” is dangerous to men and women who love the freedom that only a liberal regime based on unalienable individual rights can give.119 Although this book looks back to the thinkers of the past, it is pointless to deny that democracy will continue to be endangered by those who would persuade its citizens to sacrifice individual autonomy in a quasi-religious commitment to destroying enemies both at home and abroad. But I see the German Stranger’s project as primarily destructive; it was the theoretical foundation of Liberal Democracy in general that he sought to annihilate, not some new form of totalitarianism that he aimed to erect. In any case, he tells us openly that the theological-political problem was at the heart of his project; we need only ponder the implications of the fact that although he gave particular attention to the relationship between religion and the state, he never expressed any support for keeping them separate. Every reader who recognizes the Platonic basis of this separation—and its dependence on I Samuel 8:7 and John 18:36—will, I believe, quickly recognize the force of my principal argument. I will not claim, as Tacitus did, to be writing sine ira et studio (“without anger or zeal”);120 Tacitus wrote after the fall of Rome’s Republic; I have no desire to outlive mine. But I realize that I will only be heeded if I can reveal Strauss’s intentions to any fair-minded reader, not only those who already realize that “Athens” and “Jerusalem” are not the irreconcilable enemies Strauss’s project requires them to be. To the extent of my ability, neither honesty nor integrity, whether personal or academic,121 will be abandoned in the pages that follow if only for the sake of my native land, which demands something better than our best from those who love her.
I will close this Introduction with the same thought-experiment that led to a discussion of Strauss’s reductio ad Hitlerum. Another German émigré, also of Jewish lineage, coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” Even if all the other works and words of Hannah Arendt should be lost in some future cataclysm (or forgotten through the unstoppable progress of time), her claim to fame will rest on the insight that the crimes of Nazism were perpetrated for the most part by commonplace little men of whom one would never imagine such hatred and evil. To the extent that there was no shortage of non-fictional Kindlers,122 it is not entirely clear that she was right, but Arendt will certainly be remembered as a keen observer of the Nazis. In a larger sense, how could either Strauss or Arendt not be remembered for their remarks connected with Nazism? The rise and fall of National Socialism took place in their native land and was the most important event of their troubled lives. In her biography of Arendt, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl tells a story that illustrates how differently these two Germans of Jewish origin reacted to the rise of National Socialism in the early 1930s. It also explains why one of them coined a phrase dedicated to seeing Nazis more clearly while the other discovered an argument that can conceal them.
Hannah Arendt’s tolerance for intellectuals who failed to understand the darkening political situation grew weaker as her allegiance to the Zionists’ critique grew deeper. Leo Strauss, the author of a much admired critique of quite a different sort, Die Religionskritik Spinozas, met with a curt rejection from Hannah Arendt for his lack of awareness. Strauss, an associate of the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, met Arendt at the Prussian State Library and made an effort to court her. When she criticized his conservative political views and dismissed his suit, he became bitterly angry. The bitterness lasted for decades, growing worse when the two joined the same American faculty at the University of Chicago in the 1960s. Strauss was haunted by the rather cruel way in which Hannah Arendt had judged his assessment of National Socialism: she pointed out the irony of the fact that a political party advocating views Strauss appreciated could have no place for a Jew like him.123
No genuine philosopher can rest on authority (the argumentum ad verecundiam)) and each must finally find her or his own way. But a courageous woman’s prior discovery of a truth for which a man has already decided to fight a dubious battle undoubtedly makes the burden of duty seem less difficult to bear and indeed as light as a feather.
1. Both lectures have subsequently been published. Nathan Tarcov, “Introduction to Two Unpublished Lectures by Leo Strauss,” Review of Politics 69 no. 4 (Fall 2007), 513-514 refers to his “Will the Real Leo Strauss Please Stand Up?” American Interest 2.1 (2006).
2. Tarcov, “Real Leo Strauss.”
3. Julie Englander, “Defending Strauss” Chicago Reader (August 24, 2007).
4. RAC 538; this passage is also quoted in Tarcov, “Real Leo Strauss,” after which is found: “In retrospect, we are bound to think that the hopeful German whose remark Strauss reported was far closer to the truth about postwar Germany than was Strauss himself.”
5. RAC 535n15.
6. Cf. GS3 493, 639, and 624-25: “Surely I can’t ‘opt’ for some other country—a homeland and above all a mother tongue one can never select, in any case I will never be able to write other than in German, even though I will be forced to write in another language” The context is noteworthy.
7. RAC 532: “No proof is as convincing, as educating, as the demonstration ad oculos”
8. RAC 531; cf. Gerhard Krüger to Strauss (hereafter “LS”), Marburg, 19 April 1933 at GS 428: “Now that world history will soon enough have made an end of liberalism, the important and actual questions will finally be understood again.”
9. RAC 536.
10. RAC 536-37; for this type of “morality,” cf. GN 358 and GS3 235.
11. RAC 535.
12. Carl Schmitt (hereafter “CS”), The Concept of the Political, translated by George S. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 49: “For as long as a people exists in the political sphere, this people must, even if only in the most extreme case—and whether this point has been reached has to be decided by it—determine by itself the distinction of friend and enemy. Therein resides the essence of its political existence. When it no longer possesses the capacity or the will to make this distinction, it ceases to exist politically.”
13. RAC 535.
14. An early use by LS of the misleading “we” is found at RAC 532: “We are then confronted with the question ‘what is the true doctrine?’ We shall not hesitate to answer: liberal democracy.” But LS emphasizes that “we” are in no position to persuade the Germans to accept this “true doctrine” at 534: “Germans are going to question the competence of the Anglo-Saxons. They are amazingly well informed about all the deficiencies of liberal democracy in the countries concerned: Jim Crow, India, etc.” He later distinguishes himself as Jew (“us”) from “you” (the erstwhile “we” of 532) at 535. Note that LS is attacking Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy, not endorsing the causes for which King and Gandhi would later give their lives.
15. RAC 533: “Where are the roots, in German soil, of liberal democracy? Of course, there is a tradition of German liberal democracy—but we have to add, a tradition of political inefficiency of German liberal democracy.” On the “humanizing influence” of Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy (534), compare Catherine H. Zuckert, Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 268: “Unlike Farabi’s Plato, Strauss does not suggest that philosophers can gradually improve or reform public opinion over time.”
16. RAC 533.
17. RAC 532.
18. See Peter Minowitz, Straussophobia: Defending Leo Strauss and Straussians Against Shadia Drury and Other Accusers (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009).
19. This line of defense is employed by Michael Zuckert, “Straussians” in Steven B. Smith (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 263-286.
20. Cf. GS3 573.
21. Victor Trivas, “The Stranger,” directed by Orson Welles (1946). “Charles Rankin: Who would think to look for the notorious Franz Kindler in the sacred precincts of the Harper School, surrounded by the sons of America’s first families? And I’ll stay hidden till the day when we strike again.” No photographs of Kindler exist and he speaks impeccable English.
22. Trivas, “Stranger”; nominated for an Academy award for The Stranger, having directed the antiwar Niemandsland (1931) and then Dans les rues (1933) in Paris, Viktor Aleksandrovich Trivas (born St. Petersburg, 1896) deserves further study.
23. Trivas, “Stranger”: “Wilson: Well, then you have no faith in the reforms that are being effected in Germany. Rankin: I don’t know, Mr. Wilson. I can’t believe that people can be reformed except from within. The basic principles of equality and freedom never have and never will take root in Germany. The will to freedom has been voiced in every other tongue. All men are created equal, liberté, égalité, fraternité, but in German Noah: There’s Marx. ‘Proletarians, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.’ Rankin: But Marx wasn’t a German, Marx was a Jew.” To my students Giampaolo Bianconi and Christina Pappas I am indebted for this transcript.
24. JPCM 453 (“Preface to Hobbes Politische Wissenschaft”).
25. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, translated by George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Cf. GS3 232 and 237.
26. The exploitation of religious faith for a project intended to eradicate the root of the Judeo-Christian tradition, i.e., the Jewish People, has left its mark on other cultural artifacts, for example Emil Pressburger’s “49th Parallel.” Here a Nazi U-Boat commander gives a National Socialist sermon to a group of devout Christians in Canada; only at the very end does it become clear to them that he is not talking about Jesus.
27. Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971), 18. Consider also 127-8 in the context of the parenthetical remark at 27.
28. The 19/20 June 1934 letter of Jakob Klein to Strauss found at GS3 511-15 will be discussed in chapter 5; here Klein identifies National Socialism as Judentum ohne Gott; “Judaism without God” (513).
29. NRH 42-43.
30. See Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Explanations of the Final Solution have generally been informed by (1) the contrast between “intentionalists,” who have emphasized the intentions of “Hitler and other leading Nazis,” and “structuralists” who have concentrated on “the bureaucratic apparatus” (1-2). This dialectic is not always clearly distinguished from (2) the contrast between “intentionalist” and “functionalist” approaches, the latter tending to an “instrumental” explanation for Nazi anti-Semitism, like the one that informs my own approach in this Introduction. Longerich usefully draws attention to two other dynamics as well: (3) the contrast between future-oriented, i.e., post-War, solutions to the Judenfrage and those wartime decisions, for example at Wannsee (309-10), to implement the Endlösung in the here and now, and (4) the contrast between negative and positive motivations for eliminating the Jews; Longerich emphasizes throughout that Nazis were much more articulate about the evils of Jewry than the positive advantages to be reaped from destroying it (71). To these I would add: (5) the contrast between viewing the Nazis as stupid, opportunist thugs with no master plan or positive vision even if they had intentions, and a willingness to contemplate “the philosophical basis for National Socialism,” which would tend to synthesize intentionalist, non-instrumental, future-oriented, and positive explanations for the Holocaust.
31. Consider the curious case of Jeff Weise, a Native American of the Chippewa People who killed ten (“Behind the Why of a Rampage, Loner With a Taste for Nazism; New York Times, March 23, 2005). “Although the F.B.I. said it could not confirm the authenticity of the postings, someone who identified himself as Jeff Weise, a high school student living on the Red Lake Indian Reservation, posted 34 messages on a neo-Nazi Web forum last year, expressing admiration for Hitler and frustration at the lack of racial purity and authentic racial pride in his community. He used the handles Todesengel, meaning ‘angel of death’ in German, and NativeNazi on the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party’s Web forum. The forum has a swastika on a green flag on its homepage and promotes itself as an alternative to white-supremacist sites, a place where people of all races are welcome as long as they oppose racial mixing. ‘I guess I’ve always had a natural admiration for Hitler and his ideas, and his courage to take on larger enemies,’ Mr. Weise wrote in a posting last March. ‘I also have a natural dislike for communism.’ He added, ‘It kind of angers me how people pass prejudgment on someone’ who expresses support for Hitler” (A12; emphases mine).
32. SCR 3 and LAM 226. Strauss repeats this claim in a stronger form in “Why We Remain Jews” (1962) at JPCM 321: “The Nazi regime was the only regime of which I know which was based on no principle other than the negation of Jews.”
33. SCR 351: “A radical critique of liberalism is therefore possible only on the basis of an adequate understanding of Hobbes. To show what is to be learned from Schmitt for the execution of this urgent task was therefore the main concern of our comments.” This is the last word of LS’s review “Comments on Der Begriff des Politischen by Carl Schmitt” (1932).
34. See CM 130-33.
35. Among these I would include a willingness to seek Plato’s teaching between the lines, the rejection of “Plato’s Development,” the rehabilitation of the Platonic dubia, and the juxtaposition of Crito with Laws. His practice of reading Plato with great care and particular attention to dramatic details has not been included because it is less clear that LS was unique in this respect.
36. LAM v (Allan Bloom); LAM 24 will be discussed in Chapter 7.
37. GN 361.
38. Friedrich Nietzsche (hereafter “FWN”), Twilight of the Idols, translated by Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 11 (“The Problem of Socrates”): “Throughout the ages the wisest men have passed the same judgment on life: it is no good . . . Even Socrates said as he was dying: ‘Life is a long illness: I owe the savior Asclepius a cock.’ Even Socrates had had enough of it.—What does this prove? . . . I myself was first struck by this impertinent thought, the great wise men are decaying types, in the very case where it meets with its strongest opposition from scholarly and unscholarly prejudice: I recognized Socrates and Plato as symptoms of decay, as tools of the Greek dissolution, as pseudo-Greek, as anti-Greek (Birth of Tragedy, 1872).”
39. RCPR 27-29 (“An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism”).
40. Martin Heidegger (hereafter “MH”), Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 196-97: “Being as idea is now promoted to the status of what really is, and beings themselves, which previously held sway, sink to the level of what Plato calls mê on—that which really should not be and really is not either—because beings always deform the idea, the pure look, by actualizing it, insofar as they incorporate it into matter. . . . The chôrismos has been ripped open, the cleft [Kluft] between the idea as what really is, the prototype and the archetype, and what really is not, the imitation and the likeness. That which appears, appearance, is no longer phusis, the emerging sway, nor the self-showing of the look, but instead it is the surfacing of a likeness. . . . Now on and phainomenon (what is and what appears) are disjoined.”
41. Phaedo 115c2-116a1.
42. Cf. Diogenes Laertius 3.4.
43. But see WIPP 26 (“What Is Political Philosophy?”): “If one does not relapse into the decayed Platonism which is underlying the notion of timeless values, one must conceive of the values embodied in a given social science as dependent on the society to which the social science in question belongs, i.e., on history.”
44. GS3 650 (LS to Karl Löwith, 23 June 1935): “So-called Platonism is only an escape [eine Flucht; cf. Phaedo 115c5] in the face of Plato’s problem.”
45. Most revealing is PPH 141-47 but CM 119-20 and HPP 27-28 are the canonical statements; note the assimilation of “the idea” to “nature.”
46. Cf. Harvey C. Mansfield, Manliness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 26: “Strauss took it upon himself to dissolve the so-called doctrines that scholars had imputed to the ancients: the theory of ideas in Plato, teleology in Aristotle, admiration for Sparta in Xenophon. These were reifications, modernized pseudo-clarities, confections of the positive mind, that ignored the distinction between esoteric teaching and exoteric writing, accepted partisan or dialogic assertion as truth, and lacked all sense of humor.”
47. FP 364: “A Platonist who would adopt such a view [sc. that ‘justice and the virtues were the highest subjects’], might be expected to refer to the ‘ideas’ of justice and the other virtues: Fârâbî is completely silent about these as well as about any other ‘ideas.’” Cf. PAW 14 and FP 374-75 and consider LS’s greater caution in “How Fârâbî Read Plato’s Laws” (WIPP 134-54). See Daniel Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography, translated by Christopher Nadon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 49-98.
48. GS3 449-50. One gets the vague impression that the Straussian movement’s “flabby periphery” (cf. RCPR 24 and SPPP 30) regards Kant as an idealist; without the Ding an sich, he may well be. But that’s like saying that Plato is a relativist apart from the Idea of the Good.
49. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (Bedford, NY: St Martin’s, 1965), 29, 89-90, and 310-14. A particularly revealing passage is Critique of the Power of Judgment, edited by Paul Guyer, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 140-48.
50. Moses Mendelssohn (hereafter “MM”), Phädon, or On the Immortality of the Soul, translated by Patricia Noble (New York: Peter Lang, 2007). Cf. GS2 (Editorial Introduction to Phädon) 501-3.
51. For the origin of the German equivalent of natural, individual, and unalienable rights in MM’s teacher Leibniz, see GS2 (Editorial Introduction to “Sache Gottes oder die gerettete Vorsehung”), 526. Also Jean-Louis Viellard-Baron, Platon et l’Idéalisme Allemand (1770-1830) (Paris: Beachesne, 1979), 57-62.
52. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Essay (University: University of Alabama Press, 1973), 739-46.
53. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (hereafter “FHJ”), Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn in The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, translated and edited by George di Giovanni (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984), 173-251.
54. See in particular Hermann Cohen (hereafter “HC”), Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, translated by Simon Kaplan (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1995). LS’s “Introductory Essay” is reprinted at SPPP 233-47.
55. JPCM 460 (“A Giving of Accounts”).
56. Sympathy for LS seldom extends to Kant; e.g., Susan Meld Shell, Kant and the Limits of Autonomy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
57. Euthyphro 10a2-3; cf. RCPR (“On the Euthyphron”) 188: “Therefore, if the philosopher is pious, piety is a virtue. But Socrates is a representative of philosophy. Hence, if Socrates is pious, piety is a virtue. And if he is not pious, piety is not a virtue.”
58. Cf. Edmund Husserl (hereafter “EH”), Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, translated by Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960). Although his dualism is hardly metaphysical, EH’s Cartesian version separates him from the radical anti-Platonists. See Hans Jonas, “Heidegger’s Resoluteness and Resolve” in Günther Neske and Emil Kettering (eds.), Martin Heidegger and National Socialism; Questions and Answers, translated by Lisa Harries (New York: Paragon, 1990), 197-203.
59. Franz Rosenzweig (hereafter “FR”), The Star of Redemption, translated by William W. Hallo (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970. For a good introduction this difficult work, see Stéphane Mosès, System and Revelation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, translated by Catherine Tihanyi, “Foreword” by Emmanuel Lévinas (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1992).
60. SCR 16-17 and LAM 241 (“Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion”): “The formal reception of Spinoza took place in 1785 when F.H. Jacobi published his book On the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn. Jacobi made public the fact that in Lessing’s view there was no philosophy but the philosophy of Spinoza. The philosophy of Kant’s great successors was consciously a synthesis of Spinoza’s and Kant’s philosophies.”
61. Johann Georg Hamann (hereafter “JGH”), Golgotha and Sheblimini! (an attack on Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem) in Writings on Philosophy and Language, translated and edited by Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 164-204.
62. G.W.F. Hegel (hereafter “GWFH”), “On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law [Naturrecht], on its Place in Practical Philosophy, and its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Right” (1802-03) in G.W.F. Hegel, Political Writings, edited by Laurence Dickey and H.B. Nisbet, translated by H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 102-180. For “completed,” see RCPR 24-5 (“Relativism”).
63. SCR 12-13 and LAM 236-37 (“Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion”).
64. The critical step, visible in the context of JGH and FHJ, is the continuity between GWFH and FWN, who otherwise appear incompatible. GWFH speaks as a Christian but abolishes the transcendent God while FWN preaches the abolition of God in Biblical language; both embody an oxymoronic impia religio (Catullus 90.4) that reaches its telos in National Socialism. Cf. SCR 17 and LAM 241 (continuation of the passage quoted in n60 above): “Spinoza’s characteristic contribution to this synthesis was a novel conception of God. He thus showed the way to a new kind of religion or religiousness which was to inspire a wholly new kind of society, a new kind of church.”
65. In good Hegelian fashion, this movement is actually circular and originates with JGH; see James C. O’Flaherty, Hamann’s Socratic Memorabilia: A Translation and Commentary (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967). JGF emphasizes Socrates’ supra-rationalism against MM, LS emphasizes his knowledge of ignorance (first at GS2, 411: “There is no teaching of Socrates”) against HC (“Cohen und Maimuni”; 1931). At HPP 7 (“Plato”; 1963), this becomes: “Strictly, there is then no Platonic teaching; at most there is the teaching of the men who are the chief characters in his dialogues.” The later statement does not repeal the earlier one; this leaves the Athenian Stranger, “the chief character in his dialogues” who clearly does have a teaching.
66. GS2 xviii (Heinrich Meier).
67. AAPL 1; cf. QRMF 5, PL 125n62 and GS2 xviiin13 (Heinrich Meier); the oldest of these references is 1931.
68. Eugene R. Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2006), 67-74; for the Entstehungsgeschichte of PL, see GS2 x-xxx.
69. GS2 195-227. Friends of liberal democracy will find an early ally in Abravanel and this explains why LS does not consider his inconsistencies as deliberate; see 213-5. The passage quoted below sets the stage for distinguishing Abravanel from Maimonides (hereafter “RMbM”).
70. GS2 198. The next four block quotations constitute a single continuous passage; this citation therefore applies to all of them.
71. Hermann Cohen, “Charakteristik der Ethik Maimunis” in Jüdische Schriften III, edited by B. Strauss (Berlin: C.A. Schwetske & Sohn, 1924).
72. From EW 107-117 (“On the Argument with European Science;” 1924) to the “Introductory Essay” (1973), by design the last essay in LS’s last book; see SPPP vii. An indispensable guide to this subject is Leora Batnitzky, “Hermann Cohen and Leo Strauss,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 12 n. 3 (2006), 187-212.
73. First in GS2 393-436 (“Cohen und Maimuni”; 1931).
74. Cf. OVAM 544-45, quoted below.
75. In addition to “Cohen und Maimuni” (1931), PL (1935), and QRMF (1936), see “The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed” (1941) at PAW 38-94 (to which the interested reader is initially directed), “Maimonides’ Statement on Political Science” (1953) at WIPP 155-169, “How To Begin To Study the Guide of the Perplexed” (1963) at LAM 140-183, and then three shorter essays that appear at SPPP 192-209: “Notes on Maimonides’ Book of Knowledge” (1967), “Note on Maimonides’ Letter on Astrology,” “Note on Maimonides’ Treatise on the Art of Logic” LS’s most revealing comments about RMbM are found in his 1938 letters to Jacob Klein; see GS3 545 and 549-50: “It will thus produce the interesting result that a merely historical assessment—the assessment that Maim. in his belief was absolutely no Jew—is of considerable actual significance: the incompatibility in principle of Philosophy and Judaism (in verse 2 of Genesis ‘clearly’ expressed) will be demonstrated ad oculos.”
76. See FWN’s “Vorwort” to Beyond Good and Evil. In SPPP, “Notes on Maimonides’ Book of Knowledge” immediately follows “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil” On this juxtaposition, see Strauss to Klein of 23 July 1938 at GS3 553: “That which N. [sc. FWN] had in view with Zarathustra, i.e., a parody of the Bible, M. [sc. RMbM] achieves to a much more impressive degree.”
77. SPPP 162 (“Jerusalem and Athens; Some Preliminary Reflections”): “God replied [sc. to Moses]: “Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh.” This is mostly translated: “I am That (Who) I am.” One has called that reply “the metaphysics of Exodus” in order to indicate its fundamental character. It is indeed the fundamental biblical statement about the biblical God, but we hesitate to call it metaphysical, since the notion of physis is alien to the Bible.” The sensitive reader will immediately grasp the limitations of MH’s understanding of National Socialism having been informed that Plato is found responsible for the deformation of physis (hereafter responsible for the deformation of) in Introduction to Metaphysics (1935); neither Judaism nor the God of Israel is mentioned there.
78. RCPR 270 (“Progress or Return? The Contemporary Crisis in Western Civilization”; 1981): “No one can be both philosopher and a theologian, nor, for that matter, some possibility that transcends the conflict between philosophy and theology or pretends to be a synthesis of both.” This claim will here be subjected to a reductio ad Hitlerum.
79. LS tends to assimilate Republic to Laws; see QRMF 5 and 11: “And as the political science known to a judged by Maimonides to merit some attention is a Platonizing politics, it will be, in the final analysis, the doctrines of the Republic and the Laws which will determine the manner in which Maimonides understands the Torah.”
80. PL 131-33.
81. PL 132: “The Platonism of these philosophers is given with their situation, with their standing in fact under the law.” Note the absence of quotation marks for this “Platonism.”
82. PL 132-33.
83. In addition to Republic 520e1 and 361e1-362a3, see Cicero de Republica 6.17.
84. In addition to AAPL 2, WIPP 33, and SPPP 65, see Strauss to Jacob Klein, 12 December 1938 at GS3 562: “The Laws rests on the fiction that Socrates has fled from the prison! The gap for the Laws (the gap through which Socrates escapes to Crete—) is expressly indicated in Crito. Thus there exists no ‘earlier and later’ in Plato’s writings.” Two of LS’s three most important insights about Plato arise simultaneously.
85. His collaborator and executor Joseph Cropsey (SPPP vii) tackled this ugly job; see Plato’s World: Man’s Place in the Cosmos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 185: “This life-denying manifesto might be thought to collapse under the weight of a gross self-contradiction if it pronounced dogmatically on a subject that must be obscure to every human being while still encumbered by his body. The more true it is that the body clouds man’s vision of the truth, the more guarded will we be in receiving the ruminations of the still fleshly philosophers as they tell our postmortem fortune.”
86. SPPP 38-66 (“On Plato’s Apology of Socrates and Crito”).
87. Cohen, “Ethik Maimunis,” 221; also Hermann Cohen, “Das soziale Ideal bei Platon und den Propheten” in Jüdische Schriften II, edited by B. Strauss (Berlin: C. A. Schwetske & Sohn, 1924). Cf. QRMF 19.
88. LS’s “On the Euthydemus” (SPPP 67-88) follows his treatment of Crito (SPPP 54-66) because he needs to justify the view, on which his reading of Crito entirely depends, that the speech of the Athenian laws is aimed at a sub-philosophic Crito, not the reader.
89. SPPP 62: “As for the Laws’ argument that one must unqualifiedly obey the laws even more than a son must obey his father, it is sufficient to think of the case of an insane father against whom one may use deception and even force in his own interest and to wonder whether cities are incapable of passing insane laws. Be this as it may, Kriton is fully satisfied that the Laws say the truth, as fully as that other father, Kephalos, would have been.”
90. SPPP 63: “The Laws have no reason to discuss whether another course of action would have been appropriate if Socrates had been younger.” Cf. WIPP 32-33.
91. Cf. Plato, Republic 520e1 and Cicero, De Officiis 1.28.
92. Cf. FP 371: “Fârâbî’s Plato silently rejects Plato’s doctrine of immortality, or rather he considers it an exoteric doctrine.”
93. LS’s failure to expound Epinomis (see chapter 9) partially vitiates his third important contribution to the study of Plato: a willingness to accept all thirty-five dialogues in the collection of Thrasyllus as genuine; see, for example, SPPP 46-7 on Theages.
94. See Charles H. Kahn, “Plato’s Funeral Oration: The Motive of the Menexenus.” Classical Philology 58 no. 4 (October 1963), 220-234.
95. CM 132: “The reason [that despite the fact Socrates ‘showed his preference for democracy by deed: by spending his whole life in democratic Athens, by fighting for her in her wars and by dying in obedience to her laws . . . he surely did not prefer democracy to all other regimes in speech’] is that, being a just man in more than one sense, he thought of the well being not merely of the philosophers but of the non-philosophers as well, and held that democracy is not designed for inducing the non-philosophers to become as good as they possibly can, for the end of democracy is not virtue but freedom, i.e., the freedom to live either nobly or basely according to one’s liking.” This endorsement of “enforced virtue,” another self-contradiction, shows that LS’s Socrates has traveled from Weimar to Crete.
96. This compulsion, and every other obnoxious feature of the Stranger’s legislation, tends to vanish in Christoper Bobonich, Plato’s Utopia Recast; His Later Ethics and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Amidst an embarrassment of riches, Laws 808d4-e7 offers the eager student an alternative.
97. Lysis 219d5-e4. See Seth Benardete, Plato’s “Laws”: The Discovery of Being (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 2-3 and 51.
98. Laws 818b9-d1 marks the midpoint of this journey.
99. A compelling explanation of the curious geology Socrates offers in Phaedo is juxtaposed with both Timaeus and the Athenian Stranger in Catherine H. Zuckert, Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 809: “Since pious and well-ordered souls can see the heavens as they are only after they die, they cannot become well-ordered while they are embodied, as Timaeus suggests [cf. 834: ‘In contrast to the Athenian (and Timaeus), however, Socrates does not base his belief in the existence of gods on observations of the regular, hence intelligible, movement of the heavens’], by contemplating the orderly movement of the heavens.”
100. FP 365: “For the philosopher who, transcending the sphere of moral or political things, engages in the quest for the essence of all beings, has to give an account of his doings by answering the question ‘why philosophy?’” The Athenian Stranger abandons “the sub-Socratic level” at AAPL 182; the “idea of the good” (along with “philosophy,” never mentioned in Laws) is replaced by astronomy at 183.
101. Cf. FP 360-62.
102. WIPP 29.
103. WIPP 30.
104. WIPP 32.
105. Consider AAPL 7, 58, 121, and 172.
106. EW 202-211 (“Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion;” 1928) will be discussed in chapter 2. Cf. LS to Gerhard Krüger, 7 January 1930 in GS3 380: “For me there was only one thing clear: that in God, I cannot believe.”
107. Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem or On Religious Power and Judaism, translated by Allan Arkush, introduction and commentary by Alexander Altmann (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 1983), 33 (first sentence): “State and religion—civil and ecclesiastical constitution—secular and churchly authority—how to oppose these pillars of social life so that they are in balance and do not, instead, become burdens on social life, or weigh down its foundations more than they help to uphold it—this is one of the most difficult tasks of politics.”
108. In addition to Epinomis, see Laws See 809c7, 817e8-818a4, 818b7-8, 821b8-9, 822a6-8, and 966d9-968b1. Cf. JPCM 373 (“On the Interpretation of Genesis”; 1957).
109. Laws 969b2.
110. SPPP 151 and 162 (“Jerusalem and Athens”).
111. MITP is a clear statement for the beginner.
112. AAPL 89: “They [sc. ‘the law guardians’] must live in a humble and austere manner; being themselves servants, they must not keep servants or slaves nor use for their private service the servants or slaves of the husbandmen and villagers; heavily armed, they must explore the whole country in summer and winter; for this purpose they must practice all kinds of hunting [see AAPL 115: ‘Hunting of human beings by land is only implicitly disapproved;’ cf. Laws 824a10-14]. One may call them the secret police.” Cf. Laws 763b6-c2. For the principle involved, see AAPL 170.
113. Cf. SPPP 216 (“Niccolo Machiavelli”): “What Machiavelli prophesies is, then, that a new revelation, a revelation of a new Decalogue is imminent. The bringer of that revelation is of course not that mediocrity Lorenzo, but a new Moses. That new Moses is Machiavelli himself, and the new Decalogue is the wholly new teaching on the wholly new prince in a wholly new state.”
114. AAPL 186.
115. Considering its dependence on Laws 743a4-b3, RAC 532 (1942-1943) seems self-referential: “I remember the argument of German students in the early 1920s: a country whose policies are not fettered by moral considerations is, other things being equal, twice as strong as a country whose policies are fettered by moral considerations. For 50% of all possible ways and means are rejected, as immoral, by the moralistic countries, whereas all ways and means are open to the unscrupulous country.” On the other hand, LS only begins referring to Laws in the early 1930s.
116. Consider Laws 735d1-736a3.
117. Given the ancient theological-political antagonism between Israel and Egypt, the Stranger’s often expressed admiration for the latter is striking; the first mention of prosecution for impiety involves violation of Egyptian practices; see Laws 798e4-799b9 and AAPL 25. Numenius, by contrast, famously described Plato as “Moses atticizing.”
118. Republic 327a1, 347c3-5, 488c4-5, 518c4-d1, and 520c1. LS, by contrast, reads Republic in the context of Laws as shown by the last word of his “Plato” at HPP 61: “Having arrived at the end of the Laws, we must return to the beginning of the Republic.” Despite his rejection of “Plato’s development,” LS shares with developmentalists the view that Laws constitutes Plato’s last word.
119. Republic 557d1-9.
120. Annals 1.1
121. My “The Alpine Limits of Jewish Thought: Leo Strauss, National Socialism, and Judentum ohne Gott,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 17 n. 1 (2009), 1-46 contains the following errors: for Judenbewegung read Jugendbewegung (4n15), read Sasso for Genno (8), the correct citation at 17n75 is “The Case of Wagner” §2, 321, read “Nazi” for Nazi in the quotation at 20n124, read 1960 for 1961 (20), and at 35, I should have cited and explained LAM 266-67 in a note attached to “never directly refers.”
122. Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office, translated by Tom Lampert (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).
123. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. Second Edition. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 98. An attempt to neutralize this testimony is found at Minowitz, Straussophobia, 38.