Straussianism

Mark C. Henrie's entry in ibid.

Straussianism is the term used to denote the research methods, common concepts, theoretical presuppositions, central questions, and pedagogic style characteristic of the large number of conservatives who have been influenced by the thought and teaching of Leo Strauss (1899-1973). Straussianism is particularly influential among university professors of historical political theory, but it also sometimes serves as a common intellectual framework more generally among conservative activists, think tank professionals, and public intellectuals. Currently, Straussianism is associated in the public mind with neoconservatism, but the precise nature of this relationship is controversial.

Least controversially, Straussianism is defined by its method within the academic discipline of political theory. Straussians engage in a "close reading" of the "Great Books" of political thought; they strive to understand a thinker "as he understood himself"; they are unconcerned with questions about the historical context of, or historical influences on, a given author; they seek to be open to the possibility that in any given Great Book from the past, one may come across something that is the truth, simply. Two things may at once be said about this approach, which resembles in important ways the old New Criticism in literary studies. First, the method is powerful, and the effort of intellectual discipline that it requires cultivates a particularly focused kind of discursive intelligence: Straussians, like the old New Critics, are often among the most penetrating readers of texts. Second, like the New Criticism, the Straussian method may be reproduced with relative facility. It does not require field research, extensive contextual historical investigations, technical skills such as paleography, or the acquisition of multiple foreign languages. All that is necessary is a properly trained mind and a Great Book. These two facts may help explain, on the one hand, the intellectual prestige of Straussians, and on the other hand, the widespread success of Straussianism as an academic "school."

There is a more controversial dimension to the Straussian method. Straussians make a strong distinction between the works of political thought that rise to the level of Great Books and those that do not. Great Books are those written by authors -- philosophers -- of such sovereign critical self-knowledge and intellectual power that they can in no way be reduced to the general thought of their time and place. In fact, the great minds who write such books create the general thought of later times: books by lesser writers, no matter how important, are understood as epiphenomenal to the original insights of a thinker of the first rank. With respect to writers of the first rank, this premise leads to an intensity of hermeneutic engagement that is often described as Talmudic Talmudic skills were, of course, developed in relationship to a divine text, one that could not err. In effect, the Straussian method encourages a like respect for the writings of true philosophers.

It is here that the possibility of "esoteric" writing is invoked. Given the example of Socrates' conviction and execution by Athens for the crimes of impiety and corrupting the youth, later philosophers, Straussians maintain, learned to write at two levels for two sorts of readers. On the surface, their teaching would strive to be unobjectionable to the authorities of their regime; their deepest insights -- or their real opinions -- would lie hidden, accessible only to those few with the intellectual penetration and patience to navigate the apparent lapses in argument, mistakes in citation, or peculiarities of presentation that had been made deliberately to draw the adept to the philosophical core of a work. While some Straussian writings can be marvels of hermeneutic display, the value of the resulting payoff is ambiguous. Thus, Machiavelli is shown by Straussians to be an immoralist: well, was that not the received interpretation of the readers of his time?

While there are students of Strauss who are not political conservatives, Straussianism is rightly recognized as an authentic form of conservatism. Strauss's approach to the Great Books was meant, in part, as a response to the historicist presuppositions of the mid-twentieth century, which read the history of political thought in a progressivist way, with past philosophies forever cut off from us in a superseded past. To be open to the possibility that Plato has hold of the truth -- and that more recent thinkers are therefore wrong -- is to reject the progressivist narrative radically. Moreover, one of Strauss's major themes concerned specifically the problem of modernity, and this has remained a perennial theme for his disciples. Modern political philosophers have been, Strauss argued, from the beginning engaged in a project to change the world rather than to understand it. Compared with the ancients (and the medievals), their project entails a "lowering of the sights" of political life -- from the high end of virtue to the low end of commodious self-preservation. Something genuinely human is thereby in danger of being lost.

Modernity, however, progresses for Straussians in "waves" of deepening difficulty, each new crisis of the handiwork of a philosopher-founder: Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Nietzsche. While these waves may be distinguished, they are also logically connected. Thus, the central political problem of the twentieth century -- totalitarianism, whether national socialist or international communist -- may be understood as a radicalized form of a more deep-rooted political and intellectual problematic within modernity as such. This analysis of the crisis of the twentieth century comported well with the spiritual stance of many other conservatives during the Cold War years -- perhaps particularly with that of conservative Roman Catholics, who soon recognized in Strauss someone from outside their own faith community who nonetheless seemed to advance something very like a traditional Catholic critique of modern philosophy and the modern world.

From the beginning, Straussianism has been controversial. Being conservative, and being devoted to the Great Book, they met with often fierce opposition within complacently progressive and scientistic political science departments and had difficulties finding academic positions. But the Straussian have been a subject of controversy among otherwise well-disposed conservatives as well. To make matters still more complex, some Straussians have turned against other Straussians. These changing attitudes are the result of the changing nature of Straussianism itself -- or at least of its emphases and modes of presentation.

After Strauss's death, two prominent schools of Straussians evolved, usually described as East Coast and West Coast Straussians. The East Coast Straussians were in some sense led by Strauss's student Allan Bloom at the University of Chicago; the West Coast Straussians have been led by Strauss's student Harry Jaffa at Claremont McKenna College in California. Both schools have reflected deeply on Strauss's work in an effort to appropriate it more deeply; yet in so doing they have pushed elements of Strauss's thought in such a way as to create intellectual tensions with other varieties of American conservatism.

The East Coast Straussians have tended increasingly to emphasize philosophy as the one best way of life for man -- and to emphasize that this way of life is not open to all. They have also interpreted Strauss's account of the relationship between reason and revelation, or Athens and Jerusalem, in such a way as to become dismissive of revealed religion.

In his own work, Strauss's attempt to revive the political science of Plato and Aristotle seemed to constitute a not unsympathetic rejoinder to modern liberal democracy, emphasizing instead natural hierarchies among human beings and the advantages of the "rule of the gentlemen," who are characterized by their moral virtues and their moderation. Natural inequalities and the importance of the virtues are clearly conservative themes. But East Coast Straussians have grown less political, less interested in correcting the modern regime. They are now more relativistic about many moral and civic virtues -- which depend upon the regime and hence are conventional -- while tending to restrict natural right (or natural justice) to the philosophical virtues and the philosophical life. What had been a hierarchy of soul-types has become more of a binary distinction between philosophers and nonphilosophers. What is more, the account of the philosophical life provided by a figure such as Allan Bloom has taken on certain overtones, with the most prominent place given to the act of skeptical unmasking or of penetrating to unsettling depths. It is difficult to find in such an account any room for a contemplative "delight in the truth," which others have taken to be the summit of the philosophical life. In fact, "truth" is not a prominent word in the lexicon of East Coast Straussianism.

Similarly, Strauss was careful and coy in his descriptions of the relationship between Athens and Jerusalem. Rhetorically, he treated them more or less as equals, each unable to refute the other dialectically and each founded on a kind of faith. In the context of his time, many readers understood him to be mounting a philosophical defense of the possibility of revelation -- something quite remarkable in an age of scientific certainty and self-confidence. The East Coat Straussians, however, suggest that the respect with which Strauss treats revealed religion is an exoteric feature of his writing. Rather than a coequal, but nature Jerusalem is radically subordinate to Athens. Religion has dignity only within the limits of reason. And even if this is a doubtful interpretation of Strauss's position -- there is some evidence to the contrary -- what is certainly clear is that, for Strauss, the claims of Athens and Jerusalem can never be resolved into a "synthesis." Therefore, "Christian philosophy" is a misnomer, and the works of such thinkers as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas fall outside philosophy's Great Tradition.

Taken together, these features of the East Coast school have led some conservatives to view them as crypto-nihilists, sharing more with Nietzsche than with Plato. When such accusations are made, however, East Coast Straussians can recall that similar charges were raised against Socrates, and so they are in the best of company philosophically.

The West Coast Strussians are less philosophical and more political, concerned primarily with the American founding and America's liberal democratic regime. The West Coast school has produced excellent scholarship on the thought of the founding generation and also on Abraham Lincoln. They are, however accused by some conservatives of constructing an ideology out of the "self-evident" truths announced in the Declaration of Independence. "Truth" is very much a part of the West Coast lexicon -- in particular, the truth that "all men are created equal."

In the face of totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, Strauss deeply appreciated the moderation, security, and freedom of America. While generally critical of all modern regimes, he nonetheless treated America as the best regime under the circumstances. What was it about America that enabled this evidently -- and perhaps preeminently -- modern country to escape the ideological fanaticisms of the twentieth century? The answer given by the traditionalist Russell Kirk was that America was not as modern as its enthusiasts believed: in fact, a great deal of premodern tradition survived and flourished in the New World, both in custom and even in constitutional law. This Tocquevilleian perspective is not, however, the West Coast Straussian view. Rather, the West Coast school has held that it was America's foundation on universal natural rights that shielded it from the historicism that gave birth to the monsters of twentieth-century ideology. The natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the government by consent that is the corollary of the truth of human equality, really do constitute natural justice. America is just insofar as it cleaves to those truths, and it errs only when it diverges from them -- as has sometimes been the case, especially with slavery, and then after the Progressive Era. In his more immoderate statements, Harry Jaffa comes close to speaking of the American constitutional order (at least, as understood by Lincoln) as the Best Regime itself, the regime laid up in heaven come down to earth.

In the course of developing this position, at least two elements of Strauss's own thought have had to be modified. First, Strauss insisted on the irreconcilability of Athens and Jerusalem; the West Coast school claims that on the decisive point of equality, Athens and Jerusalem agree. Second, Strauss understood modernity in all its waves to participate in a general "lowering of the sights" of political life; America was no exception to that indictment. The West Coast school has tended to deny the modernity of America, at least in any negative sense. Consequently, whereas Strauss insisted on a strong distinction between ancient natural right, medieval natural law, and modern natural rights, the West Coast school tends to blur these distinctions.

The result of the West Coast school's efforts has been a well-developed theoretical defense of a conservatism closely identified with the Party of Lincoln. One feature of the position is its ready political utility: in effect, it provides a philosophical justification for patriotic pride in American exceptionalism. The work of the West Coast school has been influential among some California politicians and also, for example, in the jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas. The school's most heated arguments have been with traditionalist and often Southern conservatives, whom they accuse of unprincipled historicism. As recently as the 1980s, it was generally acknowledged that any possible American conservatism would have a disproportionately Southern complexion, the South being the most conservative region of the country. The West Coast school, however, has worked aggressively to render all forms of "Calhounianism" untenable within American conservatism.

This schematic account of Straussianism in two schools omits much. There are East Coast Straussians who have retained a genuinely political interest in correcting the one-sided partisanship of American liberal democracy. There are Europeans and Canadians who are deeply respectful of Strauss but who are in no way dogmatic, combining in fruitful ways what they have learned from Strauss with what they have learned from other great teachers. And there are by now indications of an emerging school of what might be called faith-based Straussians: those trained in Straussian methods and sympathetic to many Straussian concepts and lines of inquiry, but who consciously subordinate the more extreme Straussian presuppositions to revealed wisdom.

As America prepared for war against Iraq in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a great deal of journalistic commentary, particularly in Europe, centered on the malignant influence of neoconservatives within the Bush administration -- and of Straussians within neoconservatism. Numerous Straussians took to print to deny any connection between the neoconservative Bush Doctrine and the thought of Leo Strauss -- and, in fact, most of the evidence adduced by the journalists leveling the charge was quite strained. The traces of Straussianism were said to be evident in (1) the Bush administration's view that liberal democracy is the "final" form of political order toward which all socities move in history, (2) the neoconservatives' approach to politics as a search for the right "enemy," and (3) the purported mendacity of the Bush administration concerning weapons of mass destruction. This is a peculiar bill of indictment. It was Alexandre Kojève, not Leo Strauss, who introduced the "end of history" thesis: Strauss argued at length against Kojève that the universal and homogenous state could only be tyranny. It was Carl Schmitt, not Leo Strauss, who introduced the Freund/Feind (friend/enemy) distinction at the core of "the political": Strauss had a critical dialogue with Schmitt as well. And the Platonic teaching concerning the "noble lie" certainly cannot be understood as providing blanket permission for opportunistic political dissembling.

However, one plausible link between Straussianism and the neoconservatives who were prominent in advocating the Iraq War concerns the matter of "regime." The Greek word politeia had traditionally been translated into English as "constitution," but Strauss and his followers have always translated it as "regime." According to Aristotle, the regime is borth the "arrangement of offices" in a city and the "way of life" of a city: politics and culture are deeply intertwined. Among some Straussians, particularly those engaged in intraconservative disputes with traditionalists, a vulgar view emerged which held that properly understood, regime analysis implies the straightforward sovereignty of politics over culture. In contrast, traditionalists held, against the Marxists, that politics is deeper than economics, and culture deeper still than politics. It is possible that this Straussian certainty about the sovereignty of politics played a role in neoconservative expectations about the likely outcome of regime-change in Iraq.