Ancient Greece is the most beautiful invention of the modern age.
—Paul Valéry
LEO STRAUSS WAS born into a rural Jewish family outside Marburg, Germany, in 1899. His boyhood ambitions, he once remarked, were simple and pastoral: to become a country postman, raise rabbits, and read Plato. His family was observant but not educated, and after serving in World War I he drifted into Zionist circles and began writing for their political publications. Strauss studied philosophy in several German universities, eventually writing his dissertation under Ernst Cassirer in Hamburg. The encounter that left the most lasting impression, though, was with Martin Heidegger, whose lectures Strauss attended in Freiburg and Marburg. He belonged to a privileged generation of then young Jewish students—including Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Karl Löwith, and Herbert Marcuse—who encountered Heidegger just as he was becoming himself as a thinker.
In the early 1920s Heidegger began giving courses on ancient philosophy that were anything but conventional. Rather than simply explicate the views of Plato and Aristotle, he wanted to expose and question their most basic assumptions—in particular their ontological assumptions about “what is.” His intuition was that the first philosophers had distorted this question and that something had been lost, that a way of thinking and even of being in the world had been abandoned in the effort to give a rational account of what is. This radical questioning is what drew students like Strauss to him. Expecting to meet a professor, they encountered a thinker.
At the time, it was unclear where Heidegger was going with this questioning. It would be some years before he made his way back to the pre-Socratic thinkers who, he argued, had given priority to the “question of Being”—that is, the question of what it means “to be,” not what or how things are. And it would be longer still before he articulated his fundamental thought: that once Plato began to talk about the “Ideas” and Aristotle began talking about “essences,” there was a “forgetting of Being” that would have enormous consequences for Western civilization. We fatefully departed from an original “dwelling” with Being and embarked on a path that eventually led to the conquest of nature by science and technology and the self-alienation of mankind. Today we live inauthentically. Not, as Rousseau and the Romantics would have it, because we lost our original innocent goodness; nor, as Catholic reactionaries would have it, because we abandoned the Church; nor, as Marx would have it, because of the rise of capitalism. We live inauthentically because of Socrates.
There was only one Heideggerian, and that was Heidegger. But all the students of Strauss’s cohort were marked by his dual questioning of the philosophical tradition and modern life. Löwith was drawn away from philosophy toward religion and theology; Marcuse threw himself into Marxism and political action. Arendt brought this spirit of questioning to modern politics and history, and Jonas brought it to gnosticism and the modern natural sciences. Strauss was a case apart. He was never an official student of Heidegger’s, and perhaps for just that reason took up Heidegger’s challenge more directly than the others did. He was to devote his intellectual life to the defense of Socratic philosophy, or at least “the possibility of philosophy.” On his account, the trouble in Western civilization began when early-modern and Enlightenment thinkers turned away from the Greek tradition and tried to reestablish philosophy and politics on new foundations.
This was anything but a scholastic disagreement. Heidegger’s view of a decisive historical break in Western thought reflected and fed his apocalyptic view of modernity and his nostalgia for earlier modes of life more in harmony with nature. That nostalgia eventually inclined him to join the Nazi Party, out of the illusion, incomprehensible today, that fascism would restore mankind’s rapport with Being.* Heidegger’s philosophical influence only grew after the war, yet his historical vision and political views no longer convinced anyone but himself.
Strauss’s legacy was double. Though he neither sought nor attained Heidegger’s stature as a philosopher, the influence of his thinking about the “quarrel between the ancients and moderns” continues to spread, particularly in Europe and Asia. But it was in the United States, where he spent his entire teaching career, that the political implications of his historical narrative of loss were developed. And in ways he could not have anticipated, it helped to reshape American politics at the end of the twentieth century. Though the story of Heidegger’s philosophical rise and political fall is one of the most dramatic episodes in modern intellectual history, his thinking has had no perceptible influence on Western political life. The thinking of Leo Strauss, the self-effacing student at the back of the classroom, has.
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Philosophy, for Heidegger and Strauss, was haunted by a doppelgänger. For Heidegger it was the open-ended “thinking of Being” that the pre-Socratics practiced and that some great poets, like Hölderlin, captured in verse. For Strauss, the doppelgänger was divine revelation. On his telling, the hidden wellspring of Western civilization and the source of its vitality was a tension between two incompatible ways of addressing the human condition.
The oldest, which appears in all civilizations, is to seek guidance through divine revelation; the other, which was developed in ancient Greece, was to seek it exclusively through human reason. This tension was already apparent in Greek life but became much more intense in late antiquity with the encounter between the biblical tradition of revelation and Greek philosophy. From that point on starkly different ways of thinking and living presented themselves to reflective people, one idealized in Athens and the life of Socrates, the other in Jerusalem and the life of Moses. And between them, one had to choose.
Why must one choose? Because, Strauss held, all societies require an authoritative account of ultimate matters—morality and mortality, essentially—if they are to legitimate their political institutions and educate citizens. Theology has traditionally done that by convincing people to obey the laws because they are sacred. The philosophical alternative to this obedience was Socrates’s life of perpetual questioning beholden to no theological or political authority. For Strauss this tension between Athens and Jerusalem was necessary and in any case inevitable in human society. Without authoritative assumptions regarding morality and mortality, which religion can provide, no society can hold itself together. Yet without freedom from authority, philosophers cannot pursue truth wherever it might lead them.
In one sense, this is a tragic situation, as the execution of Socrates for impiety and the persecution of philosophers by religious authorities over the centuries show. But in another, it is a healthy one, since the philosopher and the city each have something to teach the other. Philosophers can serve as gadflies to the city, calling it to account in the name of truth and justice; and the city reminds philosophers that they live in a world that can never be fully rationalized, with ordinary people who cling to their beliefs and need assurance. The wisest philosophers, in Strauss’s estimation, were those who understood that they must be political philosophers, thinking about the common good. But they must also be politic philosophers, aware of the risks they take in challenging false certainties.
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In his early writing Strauss developed a distinctive take on this “theological-political problem” and its relation to the modern Enlightenment. In his view, the Lumières, horrified by the Wars of Religion and frustrated by the otherworldliness of classical philosophy, wanted to create a new kind of society that would be free of both religion and classical philosophy—of Athens and Jerusalem. On the one hand, they mocked religion and wanted to crush it, rather than simply distance or protect themselves from it. On the other, they redirected philosophy’s attention away from contemplation of the true, the beautiful, and the good, and toward more practical ends. The monument to this reorientation was the French Encyclopédie. The assumption behind it was that the world could be reformed on the basis of reason and empirical inquiry. And that assumption, on Strauss’s reading of modern history, was wrong. All the Lumières managed to do was distort philosophy’s mission, leaving it and the world worse off. Philosophy quickly lost confidence in itself as a way to absolute truth, giving rise to relativism and nihilism in the nineteenth century. The example of Socrates was forgotten, and with it awareness of the need to choose between Athens and Jerusalem.
Strauss chose Athens over Jerusalem. But as a proud Jew who respected his people’s belief, he also appreciated what religion at its highest development could offer as a way of life, especially for ordinary, nonreflective people.† Judaism was not l’infâme. And he did not believe that the Jewish difference could be abolished by assimilation. He seemed to share Franz Rosenzweig’s view that Judaism, unlike Christianity, could never reconcile itself to history because it saw the truths vouchsafed to it through revelation as transhistorical. Modern Jewish thinkers who tried to blur the distinction between Judaism and Christianity and reform the faith in order to make it compatible with modern sensibilities would fail, and not only because of Christian prejudice. The existence of the Jews will always remain a challenge to the Enlightenment’s hope that politics can be isolated from claims about what lies beyond politics and be rationalized. The call of revelation cannot be extinguished from Jewish life, and therefore from politics; wherever there are Jews, there will be Jerusalem.
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Strauss and Heidegger shared one large assumption: that the problems in Western civilization could be traced to the abandonment of a healthier, ur-mode of thought from the past. And Strauss, like Heidegger, spent much of his career trying to establish the decisive point when the great deviation took place. His seemingly scattered studies of past thinkers, which range masterfully if sometimes idiosyncratically across the classical Greek philosophers and dramatists, medieval Jewish and Muslim thinkers, and many of the major modern philosophers, are really exercises in philosophy looking for its lost original home. Of course, any such nostalgic quest already presumes the existence of what it then claims to discover: El Dorado. Strauss believed he found it in the works of Plato—but a Plato who needed to be freed from his modern interpreters.
The tradition that Strauss said he wanted to recover was, in his words, “zetetic” and “esoteric.” Zetesis is a Greek term meaning inquiry or question, and is associated with skepsis, which has a similar meaning. Strauss understood Socrates to have been a zetetic thinker who only unraveled problems and left them in suspension, which differs from standard scholarly views of Socrates, especially in Plato’s late works, as promoting elaborate doctrines regarding cosmology, epistemology, politics, and the soul. But Strauss went further to suggest that the ancient and medieval Platonic tradition that grew out of Socrates’ activity practiced esotericism in political and pedagogical relations. This claim arose from his study of al-Farabi, the early medieval Islamic philosopher who also had a decisive influence on Maimonides, his medieval Jewish counterpart. The standard view of al-Farabi and of Maimonides is that they wanted to reconcile classical philosophy with revealed law. Strauss became convinced that this was an exoteric, publicly acceptable façade, and that behind it lay a subtler esoteric teaching.
As Strauss characterized them, al-Farabi and Maimonides were philosophers who found themselves faced with powerful conventions sanctioned by revealed religions unknown to the classical world. They saw that revelation and philosophy could never refute each other or be intellectually synthesized without abandoning one or the other. But they also understood that philosophy’s skepticism could pose serious risks, whether to the philosopher himself or to the moral-legal foundation of the city, which rests at some level on unquestioned beliefs. Philosophy lives with a permanently open horizon, leaving unsettled many basic questions regarding morality and mortality. Most people, and all societies, need settled answers to those questions. So how is the philosopher to behave responsibly in such a situation, while still remaining himself?
According to Strauss, al-Farabi and Maimonides wrote in such a way that the casual reader would take away the lesson that philosophy and revelation are compatible. This exoteric lesson is doubly beneficial. It permits the philosopher to live and teach free of suspicion from theological and political authorities; it also plants the idea that those authorities must justify themselves before the tribunal of reason, thereby acting as a brake on superstition and tyranny. The attentive reader, however, will note that these texts are full of contradictions, lacunae, strange digressions, senseless repetitions, and silences. As the reader goes more deeply into them he begins to learn a different, esoteric lesson, which is that philosophy and revelation are not at all compatible. This esoteric lesson is also doubly beneficial. It teaches the reader that genuine philosophy can and should be kept free from all theological and political commitments; it also teaches him by example how to deal safely with conventional authority. The achievement of al-Farabi and Maimonides was to have demonstrated how philosophy can be both free when practiced esoterically and politically responsible when practiced exoterically.
After making this discovery Strauss then worked back in time, developing an idealized picture of an “ancient” or “classical” philosophical tradition that was also esoteric. He became fixed on establishing how this tradition disappeared in the modern era, turning the story into a mythos of the decline and fall of Western thought. (And by implication of Western civilization.) Here Strauss’s debt to Heidegger is most apparent. But reading them together also offers a lesson on the different ways that historical pessimism can translate itself into intellectual nostalgia, and then feed back into political action. Heidegger traveled this circuit himself, beginning as the great young hope of modern philosophy before becoming, a decade later, an enthusiastic fascist praising the “inner truth and greatness of National Socialism” and ending his life in political disgrace, all the while prophesying that “only a God can save us now.” It is a very German story. Strauss passed a quiet, modest life teaching American students and writing his scholarly books, never engaging in politics. But in the decades following his death in 1973 a surprising number of those trained in the school he created have made careers not as philosophy professors but as engaged partisans in the politics of Washington. Theirs is a very American story.
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Strauss came to America in the middle of his life, at the age of thirty-eight. He had spent most of the 1920s as an itinerant German scholar, working and teaching at various Jewish research centers while writing books on Spinoza and Maimonides. His circumstances finally changed in 1932 when he received a Rockefeller grant to do research in Paris, where he remained until 1934, and then in England, where he lived until 1937. In view of what was unfolding in Germany, the grant may have saved his life. Strauss published a much-admired book on Hobbes while in England, a country he loved, and, to judge by his correspondence, where he would have preferred to remain. But he had no academic prospects there, or in Palestine, where his friend Gershom Scholem failed to secure him a position.
In the end, Strauss looked to America, a country he had expressed no interest in until then. After spending a short time as a research fellow at Columbia University he obtained his first fixed teaching post at the New School for Social Research in 1938, where he spent ten obscure but intellectually productive years. In 1949 Strauss left the New School for the University of Chicago, where he would remain for the next two decades building the school that became “the Straussians.”
Strauss went to Chicago at an important moment in the history of American higher education. World War II had just ended, Nazism had been defeated, and the cold war with Soviet communism had begun. The universities were expanding, both in size and in reach, and were admitting people who had previously been excluded. In such a setting one can imagine students’ excitement when a short, unassuming foreigner with a high-pitched voice entered the classroom and began analyzing the great books, line by line, claiming that they treated the most urgent existential and political questions—and that they might contain the truth. The effect would have been intensified for Jewish-American students, who at a time when cultural assimilation still seemed the wisest course found themselves before a teacher who treated Judaism and the philosophical tradition with equal seriousness and dignity.
Strauss’s pedagogical method was famous for its simplicity and directness. A student would be asked to read a passage from the work being discussed; Strauss would make a comment or two, noting contradictions or discrepancies with earlier passages; a student might then raise a question, which would lead Strauss to digress, taking it to a much higher level and illustrating it with often earthy examples. (He was particularly fond of examples from a newspaper advice column of the time, “Dear Abby.”) Then on to the next passage. And that was all. No attempt was made to force the work into an arbitrary historical context; nor were there appeals to disembodied streams of thought. The only relevant questions were: What did Aristotle, or Maimonides, or Locke, or Nietzsche mean in this work? And, on a generous reading, could he possibly be right?‡
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Strauss’s seminars were almost always devoted to single philosophical works, not to large swaths of intellectual history. But shortly after arriving at Chicago he was asked to deliver the prestigious Walgreen Lectures, which were finally published in 1953 as Natural Right and History. This work, his most influential, must be considered the founding document of the Straussian school. It was, so to speak, Strauss’s application for citizenship and his way of accepting his academic chair in political science.
In the book he developed a number of original theses about the history of political philosophy, all directed against standard Whiggish accounts that described a steady rise from classical, to medieval Christian, to early-modern authoritarian, to late-modern democratic and socialist thought. Strauss claimed that, properly viewed, there had been a single coherent tradition of “classical natural right” running from Socrates to Thomas Aquinas. This tradition made a strict distinction between nature and convention, and argued that justice is what accords with the former, not the latter. Whether the rules of nature are discovered through philosophy or revelation, whether one account of nature is more persuasive than another, all this is less important, according to Strauss, than the conviction that natural justice is indeed the standard by which political arrangements must be judged. What Machiavelli represented, in Strauss’s view, was a great rebellion against this standard—not only against Christianity but against the tradition of classical natural right as a whole. Once that break was made it was only a matter of time before modern thought—after making intermediate stops at liberalism and romanticism—descended into relativism and nihilism.
The dense and brilliant argument of Natural Right and History is put forward with unusual panache yet without sacrificing Strauss’s characteristic directness and irony. Although it recounts a history of philosophy, it does so in a way that forces the reader to think hard about fundamental questions. Whether it convinces is another matter. Critics have charged Strauss with ignoring the very different historical periods in which his authors wrote, with underappreciating if not ignoring Christianity’s break with the classical past and the Christian roots of early-modern discussions of human rights and limited government, and with many other errors. And even Strauss’s students admit that his treatment of natural right is difficult to square with his treatment of the Socratic method, which involves questioning all appeals to authority, including that of nature.
But the real problems with Natural Right and History were not historical, they were pedagogical. Had Strauss returned to continental Europe to teach after the war, his students already would have studied the history of philosophy, however superficially, in high school. That might have made them more susceptible to historicism and relativism, and hostile to the very idea of natural right. But in return they probably would have been more inclined—as are his European admirers today—to see Strauss himself as a thinker exploring the philosophical tradition for his own purposes. His American followers have had difficulty seeing him in that light, as an original thinker whose example might help them to follow their own paths in thinking. They treat him less like Socrates than like Moses, and Natural Right and History as tablets brought down from the mountain. In a little more than three hundred pages, the book offered American students unfamiliar with any other account of philosophy’s history an epic, just-so version of it, tracing our intellectual decline from the Golden Age of Athens to the modern Age of Iron. It is a script. But unlike the script one might be taught in a European high school, along with others, this script gave the United States an important place in the unfolding of a single story.
Strauss introduced the book with the words of the Declaration of Independence, “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” and then asked: Do we still? Does the contemporary West still believe in natural “inalienable Rights,” or do we rather believe, as Strauss dryly puts it, that “all men are endowed by the evolutionary process or by a mysterious fate with many kinds of urges and aspirations, but certainly with no natural right”? If the latter, doesn’t that mean that modern liberalism has declined into relativism, and isn’t that indistinguishable from the kind of nihilism that gave rise to the political disasters of the twentieth century? “The contemporary rejection of natural right leads to nihilism,” Strauss writes, “nay, it is identical with nihilism.” As a rhetorical device for piquing interest in the apparently antiquarian task of recovering classical philosophy, this introduction succeeds brilliantly. But it also raises the peculiar thought that such an enterprise is wrapped up with American destiny.
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Strauss never wrote a single essay about American thought and only a few shorter pieces on “the crisis of our time,” forgettable exercises in Weimar Kulturpessimismus that display little feel for American life. After Natural Right and History he spent most of his time at Chicago teaching courses on important European figures in the history of philosophy, concentrating mainly on their political works. His students then were also, like him, mainly interested in studying old books, in reviving la querelle des anciens et des modernes, and adapting an aristocratic understanding of the philosophical life to the slightly vulgar American democratic setting. They did their best to imitate Strauss, the main difference being the missionary zeal and rhetoric of moral uplift that sometimes suffused their writings. A few of Strauss’s early students got involved with contemporary politics (one wrote speeches for the 1964 Republican presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater) and it is true that conservatives were drawn to him because of his skepticism toward modern ideas of progress and his hostility to communism. But so were cold war liberals who shared his admiration for Lincoln and wanted to have a clear understanding of liberal democracy’s weaknesses in order to protect it. Most were probably Democrats in those years and supported the civil rights movement, but the Straussian school remained scholarly, not partisan.
After 1968, all that changed. The universities imploded, and the Straussians took the student revolts, and all that followed in American society, particularly hard. From Strauss they had learned to see genuine education as a necessarily elite enterprise that is difficult to maintain in a leveling, democratic society. And thanks to Natural Right and History, they were also prepared to see the threat of “nihilism” lurking in the interstices of modern life, waiting to be released and to turn America into Weimar. This was the premise underlying Allan Bloom’s best seller The Closing of the American Mind (1987), and helps to explain why its genuine insights into American youth got buried in Weltschmertz and doomsaying. Bloom and several other influential Straussians spent the 1960s at Cornell University, which had a particularly ugly experience with student violence, race-baiting, and liberal cowardice in the face of attacks on the university. Buildings were seized, faculty were threatened, the university’s president assaulted. That moment seems to have been an apocalyptic revelation for Bloom, opening his eyes to the fact that “whether it be Nuremberg or Woodstock, the principle is the same” and that “Enlightenment in America came close to breathing its last during the sixties.”
After the 1960s, one began to see a new, more political catechism developing among certain of Strauss’s disciples. There are still plenty of Straussians who are nonpartisan and only devote themselves to teaching old books. But many others, traumatized by the changes in American universities and society, began gravitating toward the circles of neoconservatives then forming in New York and Washington. The catechism these political Straussians began to teach their students is nowhere recorded, and not because there is a secret doctrine being passed around by esoteric means. The catechism so permeates the way they think about Strauss today, and therefore about themselves and their country, that its philosophical and political tenets need not be articulated.
It begins with the assumption that the modern liberal West is in crisis, unable to defend itself intellectually against internal and external enemies, who are abetted by historical relativism. This crisis obliges us to understand how modern thought reached such an impasse, which takes us back to the break with classical thought. There we discover the prudence of classical philosophy, which trained its adepts directly, and statesmen indirectly, about natural right and the fundamental problems of politics. This practice, it is then suggested, deserves to be recovered, especially in the United States, which was founded self-consciously on the idea of natural right and therefore still takes it seriously. Such an exercise would not only shore up the American polity, it would contribute to the defense of liberal democracy everywhere. The unspoken conclusion: America has a redemptive historical mission—an idea nowhere articulated by Strauss himself.
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The year 2003 marked the thirtieth anniversary of Strauss’s death. In that year several superb studies of his thought were published in Europe, where his posthumous reputation keeps growing and translations of his writings keep appearing. An edition of his collected works, edited by a German scholar, proceeds apace and has piqued interest in Strauss’s early engagement with Zionism, his views about Judaism, his critique of the Enlightenment, and the “theological-political problem” more generally. The edition also helps to place him more centrally in the German Jewish culture of Weimar and reveals him to be one of the great minds of his generation. His European readers have no interest in and little knowledge of the political engagements of his American disciples.
But this was not the Strauss discussed and rumored about in the United States in 2003. The anniversary of his death happened to coincide with the American invasion of Iraq, and in the lead-up to the war, journalists began noticing that several of its prominent advocates had studied in the Straussian school. The idea began circulating that Strauss himself was the master thinker behind the interventionist policy of democracy promotion developed by American neoconservatives. Writers who had never read him trawled his dense commentaries on ancient, medieval, and modern political thought looking for incriminating evidence. Finding none, some suggested that Strauss never wrote what he thought, that his secret political doctrines were passed on esoterically to adepts who subsequently infiltrated American government and operated duplicitously. At the ideological fringes the term “cabal” was occasionally employed, in ignorance (one hopes) of its anti-Semitic connotations.
The suspicions regarding Leo Strauss and the Iraq War were misplaced and the whole affair was unseemly. But the connection between the Straussians and the American right is quite real. From reading Strauss his disciples learn that although philosophers should not try to realize ideal cities, they do bear responsibility for the cities in which they find themselves. From their teachers they then learn about the importance of defending liberal democracy against the threats it faces, at home and abroad. After that they are fed a lot of cloying scholarship about the American founding, the glories of statesmanship, the burden of prudence, and the need for civic virtue. They are also encouraged to think that America has been slipping into nihilism since the 1960s and that, however vulgar, right-wing populism and religious fundamentalism contribute to the nation’s recovering its basic sense of right and wrong. This is the path that led from the seminar rooms in Chicago to the right-wing political-media-foundation complex in Washington that has transformed American politics over the past five decades. It is a long way from Athens.
The ironies in this short chapter of American intellectual history are almost too many to number. Where but in America could a European thinker convinced of the elite nature of genuine education produce pupils who would go on to make common cause with populist politicians? Where but in America could a teacher of esotericism, concerned about protecting philosophical inquiry from political harm, find his books used to train young people to become guardians of an ephemeral ideology? Where but in America could the Socratic practice of skeptical questioning inspire professions of faith in a national ideal? Yes, Henry James was right: America is hard on all European legacies.
* On Heidegger and his involvement with National Socialism, see my The Reckless Mind, chapter 1.
† “Judaism is not a misfortune but, let us say, a ‘heroic delusion.’ . . . No nobler dream was ever dreamt. It is surely nobler to be a victim of the most noble dream than to profit from a sordid reality and to wallow in it. . . . The truth of the ultimate mystery—the truth that there is an ultimate mystery, that being is radically mysterious—cannot be denied even by the unbelieving Jew of our age.”See “Why We Remain Jews” (1962), in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, a collection of Strauss’s writings on Judaism (SUNY Press, 1997).
‡ Thanks to the work of the Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago, many audio tapes and transcripts of Strauss’s courses can now be consulted online. See leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu.