Leo Strauss (1899-1973)

Stephen Hayward's entry in Beer, Frohnen, & Nelson (2006) American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 819-821.

Leo Strauss is credited with reviving interest in classical political philosophy because he believed the study of the classics held the key to understanding the modern "crisis of the West." Through his classical scholarship, Strauss developed powerful critiques of behaviorism and "value-free" social science, historicism, and nihilism. Although Strauss espoused no original philosophy of his own and did not seek disciples, his students have come to be known as the "Straussian school" within academic political science.

Strauss was born in Germany in 1899 and was raised as an orthodox Jew. He studied at the universities of Marburg and Hamburg, and later at Freiburg with Husserl and Heidegger. Strauss left Germany in 1932, first for France and England, and finally for the United States in 1938. He held teaching posts at the New School for Social Research, the University of Chicago, Claremont Men's College, and St. John's College in Annapolis, and he wrote more than a dozen books and scores of essays and reviews in scholarly journals.

Strauss is best known for working out an interpretation of the fundamental distinction between ancient and modern political philosophy. In this distinction, Strauss thought, lay the origin of the crisis of the West: "The most striking difference between classical political philosophy and present-day political science is that the latter is no longer concerned at all with what was the guiding question for the former: the question of the best political order." Classical political philosophy, especially that of Plato and Aristotle, was centrally concerned with the contemplation of the best regime according to nature. Hence the primacy, for the classics, of the idea of natural right, or "what is by nature right or just: is all right conventional (of human origin) or is there some right which is natural?" The contemplation of the best regime according to nature and the idea of natural right led to deliberation about ethics and individual virtue -- the practical, political fruit of regimes guided by political philosophy. Classical philosophers understood that the actualization of the best regime was impossible or extremely improbable, but the contemplative nature of political philosophy generated standards by which to judge and improve actual regimes.

Strauss identified Machiavelli as the turning point in the history of political philosophy and political science: "Machiavelli appears to have broken with all preceding political philosophers." Strauss explained the Machiavellian turn in Natural Right and History (1950): Classical political philosophy had taken its bearings by how man ought to live; for Machiavelli the correct way of answering the question of the right order of society consisted in taking one's bearings from how men actually do live. Machiavelli's "realistic" revolt against tradition led to the substitution of patriotism or merely political virtue for human excellence or, more particularly, for moral virtue and the contemplative life. It entailed a deliberate lowering of the ultimate goal. The goal was lowered in order to increase the probability of its attainment.

This reorientation of the nature of political life, according to Strauss, opened the way for the development of modern natural right by Hobbes and Locke. This version of natural right is based chiefly on comfortable self-preservation. An important corollary of Machiavelli's -- that fortune or chance can be conquered through force -- opened the way for modern physical science as an instrumental means to progress, rather than as another subject of contemplation. From here it is a short step to Francis Bacon's promise of using science "for the relief of man's estate." The modern understanding of natural right experienced several revisions at the hands of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche (among others). Rousseau turned the classical understanding of nature and civil society on its head. The classical philosophers thought imperfect human nature was improved through a well-constituted civil society; Rousseau taught that perfect or idyllic human nature was corrupted through civil society. Rousseau's teaching is the basis for modern totalitarian ideologies that seek a restoration of perfected human nature through force.

Strauss identified a second strand of modernity's rejection of classical natural right -- historicism, or the view that all thought derives from changing historical circumstances. This part of Strauss's work has always been controversial among conservatives, since Strauss identified Edmund Burke as one of the progenitors of historicism:

The historical school emerged in reaction to the French Revolution and to the [modern] natural right doctrines that had prepared that cataclysm. . . . The novel element in Burke's critique of reason reveals itself least ambiguously in its most important practical consequence: he rejects the view that constitutions can be "made" in favor of the view that they must "grow"; he therefore rejects in particular the view that the best social order can be or ought to be the work of an individual, or a wise "legislator" or founder. . . . It is only a short step from this thought of Burke to the supersession of the distinction between good and bad by the distinction between the progressive and the retrograde, or between what is and what is not in harmony with the historical process. . . .

Strauss thought Burke's reaction to Rousseau opened the way for Hegelian historicism and the radical reactions to this historicism by Nietzsche and Heidegger.

In addition to the themes of natural right versus historicism, Strauss is known also for two other controversies, one wholly substantive and one partly methodological. The substantive controversy involves Strauss's ideas about the relationship of reason and revelation; the methodological controversy involves Strauss's interpretation of secret or esoteric writing.
Reacting to the monopolistic claim to truth on the part of modern science and the ostensible philosophic refutation of revealed religion beginning most conspicuously with Spinoza, Strauss held that neither modern science nor modern philosophy could refute the possibility of divine revelation. Although Strauss thought reason and revelation were incompatible, he thought that philosophy required a premise of faith equal to the premise of faith required by revealed religion. Strauss also thought that the tension between reason and revelation -- between Athens and Jerusalem -- was the secret of the vitality of the West. Moreover, modern science and modern philosophy attacked the common moral basis of both classical rationalism and revealed religion, which is why Strauss regarded the fate of both reason and revelation as so closely bound together.

Strauss's interpretive doctrine of secret or esoteric writing, first developed in his analysis of Moses Maimonides, holds that philosophers usually write carefully to conceal the key points of their ideas from general readers. This is done for two related reasons: to avoid persecution for impiety and to avoid directly challenging the political order or legitimacy of the society in which the philosophers live. Hence philosophers write "esoterically" so that only the most perceptive readers --usually other philosophers - will grasp the essence of their teachings. Employing this hermeneutic, Strauss and his students have produced idiosyncratic interpretations of most major philosophers, both ancient and modern.

Although Strauss's writing is usually detailed and sometimes dense, readers will find throughout his writings analyses of striking clarity and judgments of aphoristic quality. Strauss's criticism of "value-free" social science and behaviorism culminated in his famous analogy to Nero, that is, social science "fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns." Another frequently recalled passage is Strauss's description of modern materialistic hedonism as "the joyless quest for joy."

Among Strauss's students are many accomplished conservative political scientists, including the late Allan Bloom, Harry Jaffa, Harvey Mansfield Jr., and Walter Berns.