"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." -Henry Adams
---
Leo Strauss, born September 20th, 1899 and died October 18th, 1973... he is now 108 years of age. In memorium.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
An Unsurpassed Scholar: Muhsin S. Mahdi, 1926-2007
Muhsin Mahdi, the world's foremost scholar of medieval Arabic and Islamic political philosophy, died last month at the age of 81. Not a single national publication has seen fit to print an obituary of Mahdi. This failure to do justice to a rare scholar, teacher, and human being underscores how little attention is being paid to something we are in dire need of today: the liberalizing and humanizing strands within the Islamic tradition, the topic to which Mahdi devoted his scholarly career.
Mahdi was born and reared in Iraq. After a sterling undergraduate career at the American University in Beirut, he was awarded a scholarship to study economics at the University of Chicago. Under the influence of gifted teachers like Nadia Abbott and Leo Strauss, he turned to philosophy and eventually to the study of Islamic political philosophy. He entered the Committee on Social Thought and earned his doctorate in 1954. His masterful dissertation was published in 1957 as Ibn Khaldun's Philosophy of History: A Study in the Philosophical Foundation of the Science of Culture.
Mahdi's academic career was spent at Chicago (1957-69) and at Harvard (1969-96), where he held the James Richard Jewett Professorship in Arabic. He was an enormously influential teacher, and one who inspired great loyalty from his students. Some of us who took only a single course from Mahdi--typically, at Harvard, his survey of medieval political philosophy--found our lives markedly touched by his influence. (For a sense of Mahdi's teaching, see the impressive 1992 festschrift, The Political Aspects of Islamic Philosophy, edited by one of his closest students, Charles Butterworth.)
Insofar as I can discern, the key to the almost universal respect in which Mahdi was held by his colleagues--for brilliance and deep learning, even when supplemented by considerable personal charm, are insufficient as an explanation--was his remarkable archival and philological work. Among other things, his rediscovery of many of Alfarabi's works (and his editing and translating of critical editions) rescued a thinker whom Mahdi, following a path laid down by Leo Strauss, showed to rank among both the great philosophers and the great authors.
Mahdi's most celebrated achievement was the outcome of almost superhuman scholarly labor: a critical edition of the single greatest work of Arabic literature, The Thousand and One Nights. Husain Haddawy, who translated the edition into English, described Mahdi's achievement thus:
After years of sifting, analyzing, and collating virtually all available texts, Muhsin Mahdi has published the definitive edition of the fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale (Alf Layla wa Layla, Leiden, 1984). Mahdi fills lacunae, emends corruptions, and elucidates obscurities. . . . What emerges is a coherent and precise work that, unlike other versions, is like a restored icon or musical score without the added layers of paint or distortions, hence, as close to the original as possible. Thus a long-standing grievance has been finally redressed, and redressed with a sense of poetic justice, not only because this edition redeems all others from a general curse, but also because it is the work of a man who is at once the product of East and West.
In his life and work, Muhsin Mahdi also transcended the idea of East and West. He was, as a mutual friend put it after his death, a liberal in the old-fashioned and elevated sense--a man with a true liberal education, deeply versed in, and shaped by, the world's great books. In no way did this show itself more clearly than in Mahdi's devotion to his teacher Leo Strauss. Mahdi's last book, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy (2001)--the fruit of a lifetime of study and unsurpassed on the subject--bears the dedication: "For L.S.--If we had to repay the debt of gratitude incurred by his kindness to us, not even the whole of time would suffice."
In the classroom, I remember Mahdi taking a seemingly dead and wooden work like Alfarabi's Summary of Plato's "Laws" and showing why, when read with care and imagination, it was anything but. That is a rare gift. But it was made possible by his having engaged Alfarabi's work in the spirit intended by the author--namely, with a view to the problem caused by the need for a serious politics to address the question of the divine without falling prey to the simple-minded and/or tyrannical impulses that frequently accompany some of the most typical answers to that question. That is to say, Mahdi counseled practical moderation while allowing one to appreciate theoretical greatness. Everyone who learned from him, or who will learn from his writings, owes him a debt of gratitude that cannot be repaid.
Steven J. Lenzner is a research fellow in political philosophy at the Henry Salvatori Center of Claremont McKenna College.
Mahdi was born and reared in Iraq. After a sterling undergraduate career at the American University in Beirut, he was awarded a scholarship to study economics at the University of Chicago. Under the influence of gifted teachers like Nadia Abbott and Leo Strauss, he turned to philosophy and eventually to the study of Islamic political philosophy. He entered the Committee on Social Thought and earned his doctorate in 1954. His masterful dissertation was published in 1957 as Ibn Khaldun's Philosophy of History: A Study in the Philosophical Foundation of the Science of Culture.
Mahdi's academic career was spent at Chicago (1957-69) and at Harvard (1969-96), where he held the James Richard Jewett Professorship in Arabic. He was an enormously influential teacher, and one who inspired great loyalty from his students. Some of us who took only a single course from Mahdi--typically, at Harvard, his survey of medieval political philosophy--found our lives markedly touched by his influence. (For a sense of Mahdi's teaching, see the impressive 1992 festschrift, The Political Aspects of Islamic Philosophy, edited by one of his closest students, Charles Butterworth.)
Insofar as I can discern, the key to the almost universal respect in which Mahdi was held by his colleagues--for brilliance and deep learning, even when supplemented by considerable personal charm, are insufficient as an explanation--was his remarkable archival and philological work. Among other things, his rediscovery of many of Alfarabi's works (and his editing and translating of critical editions) rescued a thinker whom Mahdi, following a path laid down by Leo Strauss, showed to rank among both the great philosophers and the great authors.
Mahdi's most celebrated achievement was the outcome of almost superhuman scholarly labor: a critical edition of the single greatest work of Arabic literature, The Thousand and One Nights. Husain Haddawy, who translated the edition into English, described Mahdi's achievement thus:
After years of sifting, analyzing, and collating virtually all available texts, Muhsin Mahdi has published the definitive edition of the fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale (Alf Layla wa Layla, Leiden, 1984). Mahdi fills lacunae, emends corruptions, and elucidates obscurities. . . . What emerges is a coherent and precise work that, unlike other versions, is like a restored icon or musical score without the added layers of paint or distortions, hence, as close to the original as possible. Thus a long-standing grievance has been finally redressed, and redressed with a sense of poetic justice, not only because this edition redeems all others from a general curse, but also because it is the work of a man who is at once the product of East and West.
In his life and work, Muhsin Mahdi also transcended the idea of East and West. He was, as a mutual friend put it after his death, a liberal in the old-fashioned and elevated sense--a man with a true liberal education, deeply versed in, and shaped by, the world's great books. In no way did this show itself more clearly than in Mahdi's devotion to his teacher Leo Strauss. Mahdi's last book, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy (2001)--the fruit of a lifetime of study and unsurpassed on the subject--bears the dedication: "For L.S.--If we had to repay the debt of gratitude incurred by his kindness to us, not even the whole of time would suffice."
In the classroom, I remember Mahdi taking a seemingly dead and wooden work like Alfarabi's Summary of Plato's "Laws" and showing why, when read with care and imagination, it was anything but. That is a rare gift. But it was made possible by his having engaged Alfarabi's work in the spirit intended by the author--namely, with a view to the problem caused by the need for a serious politics to address the question of the divine without falling prey to the simple-minded and/or tyrannical impulses that frequently accompany some of the most typical answers to that question. That is to say, Mahdi counseled practical moderation while allowing one to appreciate theoretical greatness. Everyone who learned from him, or who will learn from his writings, owes him a debt of gratitude that cannot be repaid.
Steven J. Lenzner is a research fellow in political philosophy at the Henry Salvatori Center of Claremont McKenna College.
Monday, August 13, 2007
Atheist Tracts: God They're Predictable
As if we were back in eighteenth-century France, atheist tracts are abroad in our land, their flamboyant titles defiant. The God Delusion, God Is Not Great, Letter to a Christian Nation, Atheist Manifesto, Atheist Universe: These are not subtle insinuations against God, requiring inferences from readers, but open opposition inviting readers to join in thumbing their noses. The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, newly published, offers comfort and scholarly reassurance, if not consolation, to atheists who might otherwise feel lonely--as, believing what they do, they surely must.
Atheism isn't what it was in the eighteenth century. Now, the focus of the attack is not the Church, which is no longer dominant, but religion itself. The disdain one used to hear for "organized religion" extends now to the individual believer's faith. Despite the change, politics is still the thrust of the attack. It's just that the delusion of religion is now allowed to be the responsibility of the believer, not of some group that is deluding him. A more direct approach is required.
In our time, religion, having lost its power to censor and dominate, still retains its ability, in America especially, to compete for adherents in our democracy of ideas. So to reduce the influence of religion, it is politically necessary to attack it in the private sphere as well as in the public square. This suggests that the distinction between public and private, dear to our common liberalism, is sometimes a challenge to maintain.
If religion, then, cannot be defended merely on the ground that it is private, what might be said in its behalf for the public good? We know from behavioral studies that, to the embarrassment of atheists, believers, or at least churchgoers, are better citizens--more active and law-abiding--than those who spend Sunday morning reading the New York Times. But why should this be so? And is it really true that atheists, with their newfound aggressiveness, are not public-spirited?
A person of faith might respond to the atheists that God's providence rules, but His mind is unknown to us. We might hope or guess or infer that God gives us freedom to make mistakes, to sin, to offend God, even to expound atheism--but we could not be sure of this. Our uncertainty as to God's intentions preserves the distance between man and God and prevents us from claiming imperiously that we know what God wants to happen. From this negative conclusion one might move to the positive inference that in leaving us free, God leaves us to choose and, to make choice effective, leaves us to choose not merely this or that detail of our lives, but a way of life comprehensively in politics.
But surely not just any politics, arbitrarily posited. We must have a politics that aims at justice. The atheists say that God is unjust because He allows injustice to exist, to thrive. Worse than that, God is complicit in injustice. The reason why "God is not great," in Christopher Hitchens's book title, is that God allows himself to be used, hence diminished, by His believers. Note that the atheist Hitchens, like a believer, wants God to be great. A God of limited powers is not God; God must be omnipotent to ensure that justice triumphs in the world. Hitchens doesn't believe in God, but that is because he does believe in justice. Justice must be realizable if the reproach to God is that He is unjust.
Now we must take a further step guided by human reason alone. Edmund Burke said, with a view to the atheism of the French Revolution, that we cannot live justly and happily unless we live under "a power out of ourselves." By this he meant a power above us, transcendent over our wills and our choices. We must choose to live under a power that limits our choices. In America we have a Constitution that limits our choices, not so much by forbidding things as by requiring us to make our choices through a political process of checks and balances, enforced by a separation of powers. But Burke means to argue that humanly contrived constitutional limits are not enough. Human government is not viable or sufficient without divine government above it in some unspecified relationship.
Is such a divine, transcendent power possible? The atheists say it is not. They say that man is by nature a tool-maker, not a religious being who yearns to worship God. In their view worship is nothing but a tool to get what we want; the power allegedly over us is "out of us" in the sense of originating in our selves. "Religion poisons everything," says Hitchens in the subtitle of his book, because every believer's private desires are given terrific force over others' desires without their consent. Religion makes believers into tyrants. The source of religious tyranny is therefore human, when men conceive of religion and convince themselves while fooling others that they deserve to have what they can get. Atheism uncovers the fact of human tyranny that uses religion as a mask.
Is there an atheist alternative to tyranny? Is there such a thing as a non religious principle, replacing God, that is truly transcendent and not a tool of our passions? One can think of such a principle, something like Kant's categorical imperative that requires each person, without appealing to God, to act only on a universal idea, not one that favors himself or promotes his own interest over others. But how does this work in practice? Has Germany, the country of Kant, been a paragon of justice in the world since Kant fashioned his theory? More pointedly, has not the atheist totalitarianism of the twentieth century, with its universal pretensions, proved to be the worst tyranny mankind has ever seen?
There was an Epicurean atheism in the ancient world quite different from ours today. That atheism also uncovered tyranny behind the mask of religion, but it was content to point out the power of injustice. Injustice in this view was the way of the world, and there was no remedy for it. The only recourse for a reasonable person was to stay out of politics and live a life of pleasure, seeking calm, watching storms of the sea from ashore, and suppressing one's indignation at injustice.
Today's atheism rejects this serene attitude and goes on the attack. In its criticisms of God it claims to be more moral than religion. But it cannot do this without becoming just as heated, thus just as susceptible to fanaticism, as religion. Today's atheism shows the power of our desire for justice, a fact underestimated by the Epicurean pleasure-lovers. But it ignores the power of injustice, which was the Epicurean insight. Atheists today angrily hold religion to a standard of justice that the most advanced thinkers of our time, the postmoderns, have declared to be impossible. Some of those postmoderns, indeed, are so disgusted with the optimism of atheism that, with a shrug of their shoulders, they propose returning to the relative sanity of religion.
It is not religion that makes men fanatics; it is the power of the human desire for justice, so often partisan and perverted. That fanatical desire can be found in both religion and atheism. In the contest between religion and atheism, the strength of religion is to recognize two apparently contrary forces in the human soul: the power of injustice and the power, nonetheless, of our desire for justice. The stubborn existence of injustice reminds us that man is not God, while the demand for justice reminds us that we wish for the divine. Religion tries to join these two forces together.
The weakness of atheism, however, is to take account of only one of them, the fact of injustice in the case of Epicurean atheism or the desire for justice in our Enlightenment atheism. I conclude that philosophy today--and science too--need not only to tolerate and respect religion, but also to learn from it.
Harvey Mansfield is professor of government at Harvard University and the author, most recently, of Manliness.
Atheism isn't what it was in the eighteenth century. Now, the focus of the attack is not the Church, which is no longer dominant, but religion itself. The disdain one used to hear for "organized religion" extends now to the individual believer's faith. Despite the change, politics is still the thrust of the attack. It's just that the delusion of religion is now allowed to be the responsibility of the believer, not of some group that is deluding him. A more direct approach is required.
In our time, religion, having lost its power to censor and dominate, still retains its ability, in America especially, to compete for adherents in our democracy of ideas. So to reduce the influence of religion, it is politically necessary to attack it in the private sphere as well as in the public square. This suggests that the distinction between public and private, dear to our common liberalism, is sometimes a challenge to maintain.
If religion, then, cannot be defended merely on the ground that it is private, what might be said in its behalf for the public good? We know from behavioral studies that, to the embarrassment of atheists, believers, or at least churchgoers, are better citizens--more active and law-abiding--than those who spend Sunday morning reading the New York Times. But why should this be so? And is it really true that atheists, with their newfound aggressiveness, are not public-spirited?
A person of faith might respond to the atheists that God's providence rules, but His mind is unknown to us. We might hope or guess or infer that God gives us freedom to make mistakes, to sin, to offend God, even to expound atheism--but we could not be sure of this. Our uncertainty as to God's intentions preserves the distance between man and God and prevents us from claiming imperiously that we know what God wants to happen. From this negative conclusion one might move to the positive inference that in leaving us free, God leaves us to choose and, to make choice effective, leaves us to choose not merely this or that detail of our lives, but a way of life comprehensively in politics.
But surely not just any politics, arbitrarily posited. We must have a politics that aims at justice. The atheists say that God is unjust because He allows injustice to exist, to thrive. Worse than that, God is complicit in injustice. The reason why "God is not great," in Christopher Hitchens's book title, is that God allows himself to be used, hence diminished, by His believers. Note that the atheist Hitchens, like a believer, wants God to be great. A God of limited powers is not God; God must be omnipotent to ensure that justice triumphs in the world. Hitchens doesn't believe in God, but that is because he does believe in justice. Justice must be realizable if the reproach to God is that He is unjust.
Now we must take a further step guided by human reason alone. Edmund Burke said, with a view to the atheism of the French Revolution, that we cannot live justly and happily unless we live under "a power out of ourselves." By this he meant a power above us, transcendent over our wills and our choices. We must choose to live under a power that limits our choices. In America we have a Constitution that limits our choices, not so much by forbidding things as by requiring us to make our choices through a political process of checks and balances, enforced by a separation of powers. But Burke means to argue that humanly contrived constitutional limits are not enough. Human government is not viable or sufficient without divine government above it in some unspecified relationship.
Is such a divine, transcendent power possible? The atheists say it is not. They say that man is by nature a tool-maker, not a religious being who yearns to worship God. In their view worship is nothing but a tool to get what we want; the power allegedly over us is "out of us" in the sense of originating in our selves. "Religion poisons everything," says Hitchens in the subtitle of his book, because every believer's private desires are given terrific force over others' desires without their consent. Religion makes believers into tyrants. The source of religious tyranny is therefore human, when men conceive of religion and convince themselves while fooling others that they deserve to have what they can get. Atheism uncovers the fact of human tyranny that uses religion as a mask.
Is there an atheist alternative to tyranny? Is there such a thing as a non religious principle, replacing God, that is truly transcendent and not a tool of our passions? One can think of such a principle, something like Kant's categorical imperative that requires each person, without appealing to God, to act only on a universal idea, not one that favors himself or promotes his own interest over others. But how does this work in practice? Has Germany, the country of Kant, been a paragon of justice in the world since Kant fashioned his theory? More pointedly, has not the atheist totalitarianism of the twentieth century, with its universal pretensions, proved to be the worst tyranny mankind has ever seen?
There was an Epicurean atheism in the ancient world quite different from ours today. That atheism also uncovered tyranny behind the mask of religion, but it was content to point out the power of injustice. Injustice in this view was the way of the world, and there was no remedy for it. The only recourse for a reasonable person was to stay out of politics and live a life of pleasure, seeking calm, watching storms of the sea from ashore, and suppressing one's indignation at injustice.
Today's atheism rejects this serene attitude and goes on the attack. In its criticisms of God it claims to be more moral than religion. But it cannot do this without becoming just as heated, thus just as susceptible to fanaticism, as religion. Today's atheism shows the power of our desire for justice, a fact underestimated by the Epicurean pleasure-lovers. But it ignores the power of injustice, which was the Epicurean insight. Atheists today angrily hold religion to a standard of justice that the most advanced thinkers of our time, the postmoderns, have declared to be impossible. Some of those postmoderns, indeed, are so disgusted with the optimism of atheism that, with a shrug of their shoulders, they propose returning to the relative sanity of religion.
It is not religion that makes men fanatics; it is the power of the human desire for justice, so often partisan and perverted. That fanatical desire can be found in both religion and atheism. In the contest between religion and atheism, the strength of religion is to recognize two apparently contrary forces in the human soul: the power of injustice and the power, nonetheless, of our desire for justice. The stubborn existence of injustice reminds us that man is not God, while the demand for justice reminds us that we wish for the divine. Religion tries to join these two forces together.
The weakness of atheism, however, is to take account of only one of them, the fact of injustice in the case of Epicurean atheism or the desire for justice in our Enlightenment atheism. I conclude that philosophy today--and science too--need not only to tolerate and respect religion, but also to learn from it.
Harvey Mansfield is professor of government at Harvard University and the author, most recently, of Manliness.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
The History of Political Philosophy
Political philosophy is generally understood to have 4 historical "ages" or epochs: Classical, Medieval, Enlightenment or Modern, and Contemporary. I have added for the sake of clarity two more (by breaking the Enlightenment Age into two: Early Enlightenment and Late Industrial and adding one more, the contemporary age). For the sake of inclusiveness I have added Continental political philosophy (to represent Marxist and poststructuralist thought) and non-Western political philosophy. Below I have collaborated the known ages of political philosophy [using Strauss & Cropsey (1987) The History of Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press] with current day scholarship [using Zuckert & Zuckert (2006) The Truth About Leo Strauss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press]. I hope to demonstrate the ever-growing breadth of Strauss's legacy in the universal understanding of political philosophy. The history of political philosophy begins thus chronologically:
Classical Political Philosophy
• THUCYDIDES (c. 460 - c. 400 B.C.)
Classical Political Philosophy
• THUCYDIDES (c. 460 - c. 400 B.C.)
THE WAR OF THE PELOPONNESIANS AND THE ATHENIANS
• PLATO (427 - 347 B.C.)
THE REPUBLIC
- Translations: The Republic, translated by Allan Bloom. Published 1991, Basic Books, 487 pages.
- Studies: The City and Man, by Leo Strauss. Published 1978, University of Chicago Press, 254 pages. Socrates' Second Sailing: On Plato's Republic, by Seth Benardete. Published 1989, University of Chicago Press, 248 pages. Plato's Republic: A Study, by Stanley Rosen. Published 2005, Yale University Press, 432 pages.
THE STATESMAN
THE LAWS
• XENOPHON (c. 430 - c. 354 B.C.)
CYROPAEDIA
MEMORABILIA
ANABASIS
• ARISTOTLE (384 - 322 B.C.)
POLITICS
NICOMACHEAN ETHICS
• MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO (106 - 43 B.C.)
REPUBLIC
LAWS, OFFICES
TUSCULAN DISPUTATIONS
• ST. AUGUSTINE (354 - 430)
THE CITY OF GOD
Platonic scholars: Leo Strauss, Seth Benardete, Stanley Rosen, Allan Bloom, Joseph Cropsey, Christopher Bruell, Michael Davis, Ronna Burger, and Mary Nichols.
Medieval & Renaissance Political Philosophy
• ALFARABI (circa 870-950)
THE POLITICAL REGIME
THE ENUMERATION OF THE SCIENCES
PLATO'S LAWS
THE ATTAINMENT OF HAPPINESS
THE PHILOSOPHY OF PLATO
• MOSES MAIMONIDES (1135-1204)
GUIDE OF THE PERPLEXED
TREATISE ON THE ART OF LOGIC
LETTER ON ASTROLOGY
• ST. THOMAS AQUINAS (1225-1274)
SUMMA THEOLOGICA
SUMMA CONTRA GENTILES
ON KINGSHIP TO THE KING OF CYPRUS
COMMENTARY ON THE NICOMACHEAN ETHICS
COMMENTARY ON THE POLITICS OF ARISTOTLE
• MARSILIUS OF PADUA (circa 1275 - 1342)
THE DEFENDER OF THE PEACE
• NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI (1469 - 1527)
THE PRINCE
DISCOURSES ON THE FIRST TEN BOOKS OF TITUS LIVIUS
• MARTIN LUTHER (1483 - 1546)
COMMENTARY ON PSALM 101
THE OPEN LETTER TO THE CHRISTIAN NOBILITY OF THE GERMAN NATION
SECULAR AUTHORITY
WHETHER SOLDIERS, TOO, CAN BE SAVED
• JOHN CALVIN (1509-1564)
INSTITUTES OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION
COMMENTARY ON ROMANS
COMMENTARY ON THE HARMONY OF THE GOSPELS
• RICHARD HOOKER (1553-1600)
THE LAWS OF ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY
Medieval scholars: Muhsin Mahdi, Ernest Fortin, Ralph Lerner, Joel Kraemer, Charles Butterworth, Miriam Galston, Remi Brague, Hillel Fradkin, Joshua Parens, and Christopher Colmo.
Renaissance scholars: Harvey Mansfield, Clifford Orwin, and Vickie Sullivan.
Early Modern (or Enlightenment) Political Philosophy
• FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626)
NEW ATLANTIS
WISDOM OF THE ANCIENTS
HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF HENRY VII
ADVERTISEMENT TOUCHING AN HOLY WAR
OF THE TRUE GREATNESS OF BRITAIN
ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING
• HUGO GROTIUS (1583 - 1645)
THE LAW OF WAR AND PEACE
• THOMAS HOBBES (1588 - 1679)
LEVIATHAN
• RENE DESCARTES (1596 - 1650)
DISCOURSE ON METHOD
MEDITATIONS
• JOHN MILTON (1608-1674)
THE READY AND EASY WAY TO ESTABLISH A FREE COMMONWEALTH
A SECOND DEFENSE OF THE PEOPLE OF ENGLAND
AREOPAGITICA
OF REFORMATION IN ENGLAND
OF EDUCATION
THE TENURE OF KINGS AND MAGISTRATES
A TREATISE OF CIVIL POWER IN ECCLESIASTICAL CAUSES
• BENEDICT SPINOZA (1632 - 1677)
THEOLOGICAL-POLITICAL TREATISE
ETHICS
EPISTLE 50
• JOHN LOCKE (1632 - 1704)
FIRST TREATISE
SECOND TREATISE
SOME CONSIDERATIONS OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE LOWERING OF INTEREST AND RAISING THE VALUE OF MONEY
A LETTER CONCERNING TOLERATION
• MONTESQUIEU (1689 - 1755)
THE SPIRIT OF THE LAWS
THE PERSIAN LETTERS
CONSIDERATIONS OF GREATNESS AND DECLINE OF THE ROMANS
• DAVID HUME (1711-1776)
ENQUIRY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING
TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE
ESSAYS
ENQUIRY CONCERNING THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALS
• JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU (1712 - 1778)
DISCOURSE ON THE SCIENCES AND ARTS
DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN AND FOUNDATIONS OF INEQUALITY AMONG MEN
SOCIAL CONTRACT
DISCOURSE ON POLITICAL ECONOMY
THE GOVERNMENT OF POLAND
LETTER TO M. D'ALEMBERT ON THE THEATRE
• IMMANUEL KANT (1724 - 1804)
CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON
CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL REASON
CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT
• WILLIAM BLACKSTONE (1723 - 1780)
COMMENTARIES ON THE LAWS OF ENGLAND
• ADAM SMITH (1723 - 1790)
AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF THE WEALTH OF NATIONS
• THE FEDERALIST (1787 - 1788)
• THOMAS PAINE (1737 - 1809)
THE RIGHTS OF MAN
COMMON SENSE
AGRARIAN JUSTICE
DISSERTATION ON FIRST PRINCIPLES OF GOVERNMENT
• EDMUND BURKE (1729 - 1797)
REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE
AN APPEAL FROM THE NEW TO THE OLD WHIGS
TRACTS ON THE PROPERTY LAWS IN IRELAND
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS
SPEECH TO THE ELECTORS OF BRISTOL
SPEECH ON CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA
LETTER TO THE SHERIFFS OF BRISTOL
SPEECH ON ECONOMICAL REFORM
SPEECH ON THE REFORM OF THE REPRESENTATION OF THE COMMONS IN PARLIAMENT
LETTER TO SIR HERCULES LANGRISHE
LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD
FOUR LETTERS ON A REGICIDE PEACE
Early Modern scholars: Victor Gourevitch, Richard Kennington, Hilail Gildin, Hiram Caton, Roger Masters, Thomas Pangle, Pierre Manent, David Schaefer, Nathan Tarcov, Robert Faulkner, Robert Kraynak, Jerry Weinberger, Arthur Melzer, and Christopher Kelly.
Late Modern (or Industrial Age) Political Philosophy
• JEREMY BENTHAM (1748-1832)
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALS AND LEGISLATION
A FRAGMENT ON GOVERNMENT
DEONTOLOGY TOGETHER WITH A TABLE OF THE SPRINGS OF ACTION AND THE ARTICLE ON UTILITARIANISM
• JAMES MILL (1773-1836)
UTILITARIAN LOGIC AND POLITICS
• GEORG W. F. HEGEL (1770-1831)
PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND
• ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE (1805-1859)
DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA
THE OLD RÉGIME AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
THE EUROPEAN REVOLUTION AND CORRESPONDENCE WITH GOBINEAU
THE RECOLLECTIONS OF ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
• JOHN STUART MILL (1806-1873)
ON LIBERTY
REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT
UTILITARIANISM
REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT
A SYSTEM OF LOGIC
PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
• KARL MARX (1818-1883)
THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO
THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY
THESES ON FEUERBACH
CAPITAL
• FRIEDRICH ENGELS (1820-1895)
LUDWIG FEUERBACH AND THE OUTCOME OF GERMAN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY
HERR EUGEN DÜHRING'S REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE
• FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844-1900)
THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
• JOHN DEWEY (1859-1952)
THE PUBLIC AND ITS PROBLEMS
RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT
EXPERIENCE AND EDUCATION
LIBERALISM AND SOCIAL ACTION
DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION
Late Modern scholars: William Galston, Michael Gillespie, Susan Shell, Richard Velkley, Steven Smith, Laurence Lampert, Gregory Smith, and Peter Berkowitz.
The Contemporary Age
• EDMUND HUSSERL (1859-1938)
PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE CRISIS OF PHILOSOPHY
THE CRISIS OF EUROPEAN SCIENCES AND TRANSCENDENTAL PHENOMENOLOGY
• MARTIN HEIDEGGER (1889-1976)
AN INTRODUCTION TO METAPHYSICS
BEING AND TIME
NIETZSCHE (4 VOLS.)
"A LETTER ON HUMANISM"
THE QUESTION OF TECHNOLOGY AND OTHER ESSAYS
• HANNAH ARENDT (1906-1975)
THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM
EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM
CRISES OF THE REPUBLIC: LYING IN POLITICS; CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE; ON VIOLENCE; THOUGHTS ON POLITICS AND REVOLUTION
• KARL POPPER (1902-1994)
THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES
THE POVERTY OF HISTORICISM
• FRIEDRICH HAYEK (1899-1992)
THE ROAD TO SERFDOM
THE CONSTITUTION OF LIBERTY
THE FATAL CONCEIT
• LEO STRAUSS (1899-1973)
SPINOZA'S CRITIQUE OF RELIGION
PHILOSOPHY AND LAW
THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF HOBBES: ITS BASIS AND GENESIS
ON TYRANNY
PERSECUTION AND THE ART OF WRITING
NATURAL RIGHT AND HISTORY
THOUGHTS ON MACHIAVELLI
WHAT IS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY?
HISTORY OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
THE CITY AND MAN
SOCRATES AND ARISTOPHANES
LIBERALISM ANCIENT AND MODERN
XENOPHON'S SOCRATIC DISCOURSE: AN INTERPRETATION OF THE "OECONOMICUS"
XENOPHON'S SOCRATES
THE ARGUMENT AND THE ACTION OF PLATO'S LAWS
STUDIES IN PLATONIC POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
THE REBIRTH OF POLITICAL CLASSICAL RATIONALISM
ON PLATO'S SYMPOSIUM
• ISAIAH BERLIN (1909-1997)
FOUR ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
FREEDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL: SIX ENEMIES OF HUMAN LIBERTY
THE SOVIET MIND: RUSSIAN CULTURE UNDER COMMUNISM
POLITICAL IDEAS IN THE ROMANTIC AGE: THEIR RISE AND INFLUENCE ON MODERN THOUGHT
• ALEXANDRE KOJÈVE (1902-1968)
INTRODUCTION TO THE READING OF HEGEL
OUTLINE OF A PHENOMENOLOGY OF RIGHT
• ERIC VOEGELIN (1901-1985)
COLLECTED WORKS
• JUDITH SHKLAR (1928-1992)
AFTER UTOPIA: THE DECLINE OF POLITICAL FAITH
LEGALISM: LAW, MORALS, AND POLITICAL TRIALS
MEN AND CITIZENS: A STUDY OF ROUSSEAU'S SOCIAL THEORY
FREEDOM AND INDEPENDENCE: A STUDY OF THE POLITICAL IDEAS OF HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND
THE FACES OF INJUSTICE
AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP: A QUEST FOR INCLUSION
• JOHN RAWLS (1921-2002)
A THEORY OF JUSTICE
POLITICAL LIBERALISM: THE JOHN DEWEY ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
THE LAW OF PEOPLES
THE COLLECTED PAPERS
LECTURES ON THE HISTORY OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY
JUSTICE AS FAIRNESS: A RESTATEMENT
LECTURES ON THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
• ROBERT NOZICK (1938-2002)
ANARCHY, STATE, AND UTOPIA
Continental Political Philosophy
• HERBERT MARCUSE (1898-1979)
THE STRUGGLE AGAINST LIBERALISM IN THE TOTALITARIAN VIEW OF THE STATE
REASON AND REVOLUTION
SOVIET MARXISM
• MICHEL FOUCAULT (1926-1984)
POLITICS, PHILOSOPHY, CULTURE
THE POLITICS OF TRUTH
ETHICS: SUBJECTIVITY AND TRUTH
• MAX HORKHEIMER (1895-1973)
THE AUTHORITARIAN STATE
• JEAN BAUDRILLARD (1929 - )
THE CONSUMER SOCIETY
SIMULACRA AND SIMULATION
AMERICA
THE SPIRIT OF TERRORISM: AND REQUIEM FOR THE TWIN TOWERS
• JÜRGEN HABERMAS (1929- )
THE STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE
TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE AS IDEOLOGY
PHILOSOPHICAL-POLITICAL PROFILES
THE PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE OF MODERNITY
THE NEW CONSERVATISM
BETWEEN FACTS AND NORMS: CONTRIBUTIONS TO A DISCOURSE THEORY OF LAW AND DEMOCRACY
THE POSTNATIONAL CONSTELLATION
THE DIVIDED WEST
Non-Western Political Philosophy
• CONFUCIUS (551-479 B.C.)
THE ANALECTS
• CHANAKYA (350-283 B.C.)
ARTHASHASTRA
NITISHASTRA
CHANAKYA NITI
• MO TZU (470-390 B.C.)
MO TZU
• MENCIUS (372-289 B.C.)
MENG FE TZU
• HAN FEI (280-233 B.C.)
HAN FEI TZU
Friday, January 26, 2007
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Introduction -- Why A Political Philosophy?
Welcome. The purpose of this blog is to discuss the growing scholarship and interest in Leo Strauss and why I think Strauss is rightly to be considered the most important teacher of our age.
If you have never heard of Leo Strauss, there is a semi-accurate Wikipedia entry on the right column (for more accuracy, read Hadley Arkes' and Jenny Clay Strauss's introductions). If you have heard of Strauss, it's more than likely slander. However, a basic investigation of Strauss's books and the scholarship produced by his greatest students would divest one of such myths. For the most complete coverage of how Strauss became associated with the Iraq War and the Bush administration (thanks to a cabal of journalists and political extremists) and how such associations have no foundation in fact, see Catherine & Michael Zuckert's The Truth About Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy & American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
To get a good sense of Strauss, it is important to understand his thought in the context of his times in Weimar Germany. Fortunately there is new scholarship in publication that explores this in depth. Eugene R. Sheppard's Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher (New Hampshire: Brandeis University Press, 2007) concisely traces such a development in Strauss's early thought. This scholarship is much-needed. Greater minds read and understand Strauss better than me, but I have not yet seen a definitive, up-to-date website chronicling the latest scholarship on Strauss and this blog is intended to fill in that gap.
Why do I think Strauss is important? Because he has radical insights into the nature of philosophy that I admire; it is his exacting critiques of modernity, namely his undermining of historicism, relativism, and the fact-value distinction (still largely in the present-day); and his pioneering rediscovery of the classic texts which makes a life devoted to truth worth living.
There is another reason, and it has the most enduring importance for me: Strauss cuts to the immediacy and importance of philosophy itself in asking the question philosophy ought itself ask of every human being: What is the good life or, to be more exact: Quid sit deus? Is the 'good' life one devoted to faith in the commandments of God (and this question never goes away) or is it a life devoted to the love of wisdom? Which is the source of this goodness: man or God? Can man achieve his highest abilities through knowledge, that is, without God? Obversely: is a life devoted in pure faith without knowledge the best life for a man?
Such questions, Strauss maintains, are the heart and vitality of the West which is the theological-political problem presented us by the legacy of Western tradition. To be more exact, Strauss maintains that it is the friction of these two traditions Athens and Jerusalem which present to the world a force to be reckoned with. A careful reading of Strauss will show that this is also the heart and vitality of his own writings.
Critics often brand Straussians with the accusation of intellectual 'elitism.' While there may be good reasons for this, I can only add that it because they recognize that their world, or the modern world, is not the free and open (scientifically and technologically enlightened) world that expands to all ends of the earth in light and freedom and consciousness, but Swift's Lilliput of tiny people in comparison to the gigantesque and all-encompassing Brobdingnag of the ancients. Who in this modern age, after all, are capable of such a reverse Weltenschauung of perspective -- that the evolutionary notion that we are somehow superior to the ancients because of the impressive array our technological progress? This is an important philosophical question to ask: one can only reside in the realm of opinion until a more exacting investigation is made.
Thankfully, if the interested student is endowed with patience and with a phenomenological view that the philosophical texts are not only metaphorical (or pointing to some truth outside them), they can begin to appreciate that the secret the Straussians are famously trying to hide is staring us right in the face: the philosophical text itself.
Leo Strauss thus presents us with what is probably considered the most complicated aspect of philosophy, which is determining the author's intention. What is the philosophical content of a text to teach us? And is there a content to be taught, if at all? And here I illustrate the very process that makes Straussians caricatured by its critics, but which is the method that is available to all: careful reading. What is careful reading? Careful reading is reading slowly. And reading slowly begins from the assumption that the philosophers of the past have something to tell us, not just on one level, but on different levels and that what they have to say is partly expressed in the very form it is presented in. Hence, to read a philosophical text in the way that Strauss taught, we suspend our judgments and we ask questions every step of the way. We, in other words, obey the text by taking it seriously and by taking its author seriously. We do not assume we are superior to the past or that we could interject the text with our own biased, modernistic assumptions. Nor do we assume that the text is comprehensible or easy: we do not assume anything. After all, the great philosophers never lived in our age. The texts that the great philosophers passed down to us is our doorway to their minds. At the profanum, we lay our biases and become students in the primordial sense of the word.
What is the use of becoming a student of things we consider below us? Why waste my time assuming everything has a hidden meaning? How do I know that it is not going to lead me to a dead-end, and be completely useless? Of course one never knows. And neither does one know, if one is philosophically honest with oneself, whether one can know more than others. And here we learn, through Strauss, that the true student of life and existence begins radically with the Socratic credo: the only thing I know for sure is that I don't know. Not knowing, one can never be sure if they really do have the secrets to the universe. It is only in recognizing the communal, i.e. social, political (in other words) nature of philosophy.
According to Strauss (see The City and Man), Socrates, traditionally considered the founder of philosophy, brought philosophy from the wilderness assumptions (physics) of the pre-Socratics and into the city itself. Hence, philosophy as initiated by Socrates, is innately political (poly-tic, involving many), which is what Aristotle meant when he said that man is a political animal. Without a city, without even each other, man as man is nothing. The Socratic truth is that every human being has some glimpse of the Good, or how things ought to be. The Socratic method is in exploring just what that is. Political philosophy, hence, is not just the study of regimes, but the study, phenomenologically of what men consider is good for them. It is only in asking such questions that progress in any sort of political debate is to be made.
If a philosophy cannot address this socio-communal (i.e. political) aspect of our lives (i.e. matters of the city, which is the abode of man, and not the mountains, the abode of animals), it is not even philosophy or sub-philosophical. And this is the heart of the truly Socratic method that Strauss outlines. Central to Strauss's contributions also is the question of the city and the place of the city within philosophy's purview: in other words, political philosophy (as contradistinguished from political science). What is the importance of political philosopher over and above other forms of philosophy?
The question of the city's place is exactly where Strauss parted ways from the individualistic and existential philosophy of Heidegger: man is not an island. History is the witness to his fact: while Heidegger lived in the comfort of the university under the Third Reich (a regime he hoped would suit his cutting-edge philosophical views), Strauss was forced into exile. The experience, undoubtedly, was freshly political in nature and provided Strauss the truly existential fact of life: that no matter how mystical one's doctrine is, there is always the element of the political.
Strauss eventually found his home on the soil of American democracy where his legacy began to take off. Critics of Strauss, of course, often mention the sinister aspect of Strauss because he questioned as a political philosopher the limitations of a democracy. An in-depth review of Plato would reveal a similar sinister quality as well: he too explored the limitations of a democracy within his most famous dialogue The Republic. That Strauss is criticized by the uneducated (who have no time for Plato, of course) is just an indication of Strauss's very principle that too much philosophy is dangerous for society and that, while democracy is the most just regime for man (as it assumes man will make the best judgments in an election), it will never guarantee that such judgments stem from an educated or virtuous soul.
As can be witnessed by the growing scholarly output of Strauss's students, the slow and quiet pursuit of truth that is the hallmark of Strauss rapidly bore fruit. Not only had Strauss inspired many great students, but Strauss's legacy lives on in the lives he touched personally and who are at this very moment providing America's educational institutions with some of the best scholarship and translations of philosophical texts available (a list of available scholarship is forthcoming).
Now is the age to begin to appreciate Strauss as more than a mere antiquarian, or evil genius behind the Iraq War, but as the educator of our age in addressing problems which every honest philosopher of the future will have to ask. Inherent in every political question, in every scientific question, in every relativistic or historicist question, in every question related to the place of revelation and the possibilities and problems it presents to philosophy, Leo Strauss was there. He is our bridge from the obscurantist dead-ends of modern philosophy to the truly integral world of the ancients on whose shoulders this and and future ages will have no choice but to stand on whether glorious or rotten.
It is my view that if philosophy is to have life and embrace life and to have a future at all, it will have to take account of Leo Strauss and his careful study of the ancients which find their voice in our age through him. Because, perhaps the future is not after all 'our future' -- perhaps there is no future to speak of for a flat and jaded world of modernists. Perhaps our future as human beings, undeserving descendants of giants, is our past and rediscovering just how it was that humans lived lives of greatness and excellence. One has to wonder if the ancients, who addressed questions of technology (techne) before Christ fulfilled the commandments of the Jews, now look down upon us from the heights of Elysium with great laughter, that we who love technology so much with the dream of being its masters, are now its slaves -- slaving away not even in the cave that Plato spoke of, but in a cave below the cave.
Monday, January 22, 2007
Strauss on Philosophy
... to the question "What is philosophy?":
"To philosophize is to be conscious of the absolute transitoriness of all that is human, but at the same time as if one had all eternity at one's disposal, to search for the truth -- with complete calm, without any hurry -- always with urgency, but never hurried -- with the courage for a graceful venture, and constantly prepared to begin from the very beginning."
~Leo Strauss, Note from April 1, 1937
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
