Cloaked in Virtue: Unveiling Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy

Cloaked in Virtue

It is now commonly acknowledged that numerous key players in and around the Bush administration’s planning of the Iraqi invasion were connected through a common background in the political philosophy of Leo Strauss, a German-born University of Chicago professor who died in 1973. These Straussian “neocons” were held responsible for exploiting the September 11th attacks in order to further their own foreign policy agenda. Cloaked in Virtue is the first book to take a critical view of the political ideas of Leo Strauss himself by careful attention to his own writings before and after his emigration to the United States. The result is a critical examination of the political theory of Leo Strauss, lifting the veil of intentional obfuscation, and its influence on the neoconservative foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration. Nicholas Xenos is Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Cloaked in Virtue

Unveiling Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy

Nicholas Xenos

First published 2008 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2008 Taylor & Francis Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper by Walsworth Publishing Company, Marceline, MO All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Xenos, Nicholas, 1948– Cloaked in virtue: Unveiling Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy/by Nicholas Xenos. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Strauss, Leo. 2. Political science–United States–Philosophy. 3. United States–Foreign relations–Philosophy. I. Title. JC251.S8X46 2008 327.1273001–dc2 22007038194

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Contents

Preface Introduction

ix xiii

1

The Straussian network

1

2

Becoming Leo Strauss (I)

18

3

Becoming Leo Strauss (II)

42

4

Leo Strauss comes to America: politics between the lines

70

On modernity’s tyranny

87

5

6 Nihilism and the Straussian justification of imperial power Notes Bibliography Index

125 145 163 167

Preface

In my second year of graduate school I took a seminar on Machiavelli. It was early in the 1970s, recent campus turmoil having subsided, the long stupor of the American left just beginning, but I was nevertheless in an unorthodox frame of mind when I entered the seminar, prepared to discuss the meaning of Machiavelli’s works for present-day radical politics. Instead, the professor, a recent Yale Ph.D., took us on what to my mind was a bizarre path through The Prince, concentrating on the number of chapters and whether the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth chapter was really the final chapter and, depending on the answer to that question, which was the central (meaning both the one in the middle and, therefore the most important) chapter of the book. Then the text’s deeper meaning could be unraveled. This approach was confusing to me and once the semester ended I pretty quickly could not remember much else about the course or what, if anything, I might have learned about Machiavelli in it. I certainly could not recall the deeper meaning. Only later did I discover that, while I had not learned much about Machiavelli, or at least that particular Machiavelli, I had had the beginning of an education in the strange hermeneutically sealed world of Leo Strauss and Straussianism. Over time, I became more aware of the presence of Straussian political theorists. They were pretty easy to identify in their writing style, choice of subject matter, speech, and personal style. Not all, but most. The topics they chose to write about generally fit into a narrow range. As editor of a peer-reviewed journal of political science, I could usually tell the Straussian submissions by their titles. Every week, essays would arrive on Plato or Aristotle, on Rousseau or Montesquieu, on The Founders (especially James Madison), or on Tocqueville. Straussians, sadly, have come to have a near monopoly on interest in the history of political theory, but even so they exercise their monopoly on a depressingly small, and depressingly repetitive, range of authors, texts, and themes. Like Strauss, Straussians are often said by outsiders “at least” to be close readers of texts. But like him, it seems that what is discovered in those texts, after the exercise of an elaborate system of “reading between the lines,” turns out to be roughly the same

x Preface

fanciful story each time: philosophy is the best life for “man”; only some, with their souls properly ordered and their eros properly directed toward intercourse with the truth, are capable of it, everyone else being dominated by their baser passions; the philosophical life has to be protected from the irrationally impassioned; politics must be properly ordered by conventionally virtuous “gentlemen,” who in turn have been properly taught by their intellectual betters or directed by a wise Legislator, to channel the passions of the vulgar and keep them from running amok in anarchy or revolution (which are understood to be roughly the same thing) so that the philosophers can safely philosophize. And so on. For the most part, sporting an alarming tendency toward self-satisfied arrogance, Straussians seemed pretty much to keep to themselves and be largely irrelevant to anything beyond scholarly journals and conference panels. That changed abruptly after September 11. The idea that I would ever consider writing a book on Leo Strauss and his epigones was beyond possibility until the aftermath of that horror. I knew that there had been persons of the Straussian persuasion in government positions since the administration of Ronald Reagan, but that seemed generally inconsequential. There was one on the State Department’s policy-planning staff under Reagan but that was innocuous enough. Later, a couple of them served on VicePresident Dan Quayle’s staff, but has there ever been a less consequential vice-president? There were a few others, but it was not at all clear what they were doing in their offices, anyway. Various of the Washington “think-tanks” had become safety nets for the resentfully under-employed among them, and they apparently began a slow, steady migration from those corporate funded sinecures to the publicly funded ones up the street, the trickle under Reagan becoming a flood under George W. Bush, he of the Yale “gentleman’s ‘C’.” Four days after the towers fell, at a meeting in Camp David, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was whispering in the ear of George W. Bush that there was a chance Iraq had something to do with the attack. Two days later, it was Wolfowitz who announced at a Pentagon press briefing that the government’s policy would be one of “ending states who sponsor terrorism,” the first hint of what was to become known as regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq. By the spring of 2003, newspaper and magazine accounts were identifying Wolfowitz as the front man for a group of Straussians that had steadily bored their way into position to influence, or actually make, American foreign policy, using a morally certain, somewhat dim-witted George W. Bush as their compliant foil. I found these accounts to be plausible but insufficient in crucial respects, particularly insofar as most of the journalists writing them had no first-hand knowledge of Strauss’s own writings or of the European political context from which they had emerged. Consequently, they were focused on the cultic aspects of the Straussian tribe, and particularly with its penchant for coded language and

Preface xi

with the genealogy of the Straussian network that deployed it. In this, they were curiously mirroring the purification rituals of the Straussians themselves. What was lost in this approach was the deeply reactionary substance of Strauss’s own political position, one that had been formed in a spirit of counterrevolution against the forces of equality and social justice in Weimar Germany. Now it was his heirs, the opponents of the political and cultural revolutionaries of the 1960s, who had triumphed. Shocked by my own underestimation of the “real world” political influence of Strauss’s writings, I conceived the idea of a short, informed polemic to correct and deepen the journalistic accounts. It would only take a couple of months to complete, I thought. The polemical intent has remained constant, but the task turned out to be more difficult than I anticipated. Strauss’s writings are easy to figure out in the whole, but frustratingly clumsy to untangle in the particular. Long before Ronald Reagan’s lapses of memory, Strauss had perfected a style of plausible deniability. That style, evident in his books and articles written after his emigration to the United States, forces the commentator into lengthy, often tedious exegesis and convoluted lines of explication. The closer one looks at these writings, the more complicated they become without becoming more enlightening of anything but themselves. Although his many academic defenders do it all the time, Strauss cannot simply be quoted on a topic, because there is always a quote available that apparently says the opposite. When this is pointed out, the defenders invariably reach for the Rosetta Stone of plausible deniability: Strauss is being ironic. His gnomic utterances have therefore to be replaced into their total context, and that takes time. Hence, the quickly written polemic has evolved into this somewhat longer, necessarily more “scholarly” work. But the task is necessary, I believe, in order to see what it is that lies behind the obfuscation. The policies of the Bush administration have not been the product of a Straussian conspiracy. The Straussian element is most readily seen in the rhetoric in which those policies have been couched. Of course, material and strategic interests have had their role. Nevertheless, the moral discourse that animates these policies puts the lie to the notion that ideas do not matter. The Straussians have scored major victories in the struggle of ideas in the public realm while various intellectual fashions of the left have effectively abandoned the field. The most troubling aspect of the Straussian success has been the ease with which the news media and liberal writers on public affairs adopted the Straussian language and facilitated the disaster that has become US foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Regime change” and “tyranny” became ubiquitous terms at a crucial moment. Serious writers now ponder the presence of evil in political affairs and some have thought it necessary to rethink the instruments of torture because of it. The virtues of sacrifice, courage, and honor are challenged only at the risk of seeming to be the worst of all things, unpatriotic. The effects of these political, moral, and cultural

xii Preface

discourses will likely be felt for some time. Such rhetoric masks the role of the United States in the world today and the transformation of its citizens into imperial citizens who enjoy the benefits of empire while justifying those benefits and the rule over imperial subjects through their self-styled victimization. The measure of Strauss’s success, the measure of his influence, rests in the degree to which this project has come cloaked in the mantle of virtue. *** This book was conceived in a flash and delivered after what seems like an eternity. I have accumulated many and varied debts along the way, which I am pleased to acknowledge. Carl Bromley pronounced the project initially viable and Rob Tempio saved it from premature death. The gestation outlasted Rob’s tenure at Routledge, if not his patience, but I am grateful to him for his advice and his trust, which never wavered. I learned a great many things from comments on various aspects of the work by my friends Joshua Miller, Wendy Brown, Antonio Vazquez-Arroyo, Prudence Crowther, Larry George, Kathleen Arnold, Alex Betancourt, Jason Koenig, Michael Kolbrener, Srirupa Roy, Roslyn Schloss, and John Wallach. James Der Derian graciously invited me to present some of the material to an audience at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. Judith Butler made it possible for me to spend a semester in the Department of Rhetoric at Berkeley and to offer a graduate seminar related to this project, and I thank her and the other members of the department for that opportunity. I also wish to thank the students in my seminars at UMass and Berkeley for working through some of this argument with me, and Alessandro Frigerio and David Mason for their help with translation. I am grateful for permission to incorporate revised material from my article, “Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror,” which appeared in Logos 3, no. 2 (2004), and from my chapter entitled “The Neocon Con Game: Nihilism Revisited,” in Confronting the New Conservatism: The Rise of the Right in America, ed. Michael J. Thompson (New York: NYU Press, 2007). Long before I had ever heard of Leo Strauss, Arno J. Mayer taught me how to tell the difference between a conservative and a reactionary, among many other things of relevance to this study. What I have learned over the years from Sheldon S. Wolin that has contributed to it is beyond calculation. No one but me, of course, is responsible for whatever errors or lapses remain within the argument and the evidence upon which it is based. My most enduring debts are to my sons, Ezra and Samuel, who challenged me through their relentless needling to finish this book, and to my wife, Lynn Peterfreund, without whose companionship and counsel there would not be anything at all.

Introduction

I would be happy if there were suspicion of a crime where up to now there has only been implicit faith in perfect innocence. (Leo Strauss, “On a Forgotten Kind of Writing”)

Leo Strauss had his moment of dubious fame in 2003, thirty years after his death, when several journalists simultaneously outed him as the philosophical progenitor of a discernible group of advisors within and around the Bush administration that was held to be particularly influential in advocating a bellicose foreign policy. It was suggested that the decision to go to war in Iraq, as well as the questionable public rationale devised to support that decision, were rooted in the conservative political theory of the German-born University of Chicago professor. A lineage was established running from Strauss through his student Allan Bloom to his students, most prominent among them the then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. The word “cult” started to pop up with some frequency. Murmurings about “noble lies” and “esoteric knowledge” were heard. By the end of 2003, Tim Robbins wrote and directed an antiwar play entitled “Embedded,” in which a chorus called “The Cabal,” meant to represent Wolfowitz & Co., chanted “Hail Leo Strauss!” before a projected image of the man. The seemingly unlimited interest in conspiracy theories that is so much a feature of US journalism and popular culture was momentarily peaked. It wasn’t long before the first rumblings of a conspiracy brought forth an echo. Now there were charges of a liberal conspiracy, tinged with antiSemitism, against the memory of Leo Strauss and the perfectly honorable men (they were all men) who had perhaps read a book or article by Strauss or studied with someone who was influenced by him or who one way or another got thrown into the same basket by opponents of the war. Leo Strauss, after all, had been a serious scholar of conservative bent who largely eschewed public political pronouncement and spent his time poring through old books written in Attic Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic. The only things that united Wolfowitz and Abram Schulsky (then in the soon-to-be

xiv Introduction

notorious Pentagon Office of Special Plans) and William Kristol (editor of the Straussian organ The Weekly Standard) and the others was that they were conservative, or rather “neoconservative,” and Jewish. It was so easy to map a secret conspiracy onto age-old anti-Semitism. Once the public conspiracy wars cooled down, the academics took over. The first book to tackle the Strauss question was Anne Norton’s Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire, published by Yale University Press in 2004. Then came a spate of books. The University of Chicago Press, publisher of many of Strauss’s own works, came out with two of them in 2006: Steven B. Smith’s Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism and Catherine and Michael Zuckert’s sensationally titled The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy. Johns Hopkins University Press contributed Thomas Pangle’s Leo Strauss: An Introduction to His Thought and Intellectual Legacy in 2006. Cambridge University Press published Heinrich Meier’s Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem in 2006. Yale kept the flow going with an English translation of Daniel Tanguay’s 2003 book, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography, in 2007, the same year in which the University Press of New England published Eugene R. Sheppard’s Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher. All of these books took notice of the public noise about Strauss and all of them except Sheppard’s set out, at a minimum, to defend Strauss from any complicity in anything untoward. Mark Lilla, meanwhile, published a two-part review essay in the certifiably liberal New York Review of Books attempting to do the same thing, distinguishing between a benign Strauss who is of interest to serious, mostly European scholars, and Strauss’s less gifted American epigones, some of whom have gotten us into a mess. For every Socrates, it seems, you get an Alcibiades or two. Norton, the Zuckerts, Smith, and Pangle all acknowledge their debts to Straussian teachers, though they are of different minds about what it means to be a Straussian. It might then seem that the last thing anyone needs is yet another book on Leo Strauss and the relationship, if there is one, between what he wrote and contemporary American politics. The first line of defense is to suggest that initiates of one sort or another have written all of the recent ones (the exception, Sheppard’s biography, ends with Strauss’s move to the United States in 1937) and that a more critical perspective is in order. But then there is the larger question whether any book of any kind is needed on Leo Strauss. In 1985, the Oxford classicist M. F. Burnyeat suggested, in a New York Review of Books article (reviewing a collection of Strauss’s essays and lectures edited by Thomas Pangle, incidentally) entitled “Sphinx without a Secret,” that there was no point in going into Strauss’s writings all that deeply because his interpretation of Plato is “wrong from beginning to end” and so the story Strauss repeatedly tells of “the classics” and “the philosopher” and “the gentleman” and how the first teaches the second to teach the third “the limits to politics” collapses on its flimsy foundations.1

Introduction xv

This view has been rejected (albeit without much in the way of refutation) not only by those who chalk it up to the resentment of mainstream scholars put off by Strauss’s iconoclastic and idiosyncratic procedures, but also by a new wave of defenders, such as Lilla, Tanguay, and Meier, who argue that the really important contribution Strauss made is centered on the so-called theological-political problem. This refers to the question of the relationship between revelation and reason, or, as Strauss and his students like to put it, Jerusalem and Athens. They claim that it was this problem, dating to Strauss’s earliest writings from the 1920s, that animates and underlies all of his work. The strength of this claim rests in large measure on whether or not the reader thinks this an important question at all. But it also serves the perhaps unintentional purpose of diverting attention from the actual, real-life influence of Strauss’s writings. It is doubtful that Wolfowitz, or Schulsky, or Kristol have spent much time pondering the issue, Jerusalem or Athens? The theological-political feint also reinforces the tendency of Strauss’s defenders to ignore political context. Burnyeat ended his article with a reference to Carnes Lord, who was then on the National Security Council and whom Burnyeat (accurately) classified as a “pupil of a pupil” (in this case, as in so many others, including Wolfowitz, of Allan Bloom). Had it not been for the presence of persons with a Straussian pedigree in Ronald Reagan’s administration, it is doubtful the article would ever have been written, particularly given Burnyeat’s (also accurate) comment that, “Strauss has no discernible influence in Britain at all. . . . Strauss has no following in the universities where her civil servants are educated.” But this presence does not in itself exhaust the political context to which I refer. His defenders are willing enough to acknowledge the Carnes Lordses of the world, even as they argue that Strauss is certainly not responsible for either his pupils or their pupils. Far from the initial suspicion that something nefarious was up with Leo Strauss, the recent literature suggests perfect innocence. This new presumption of innocence is a result of what can only be an intentional political myopia. In 2004, in my own contribution to the noise, I published in the on-line journal Logos the transcript of a public lecture I had delivered in October 2003 in New York City.2 In that lecture and in its published form, I quoted from a letter Leo Strauss had written to his friend, the philosopher Karl Löwith, in May 1933, a few months after the Nazi ascension to power in Germany and enactment of the first anti-Jewish laws. In that letter, Strauss argued that the proper response to the Nazi regime was from the political right: That the Germany of the Right does not tolerate us absolutely does not follow from the principles of the Right. On the contrary: only from the principles of the Right, from the fascist, authoritarian, imperialist principles, can one protest against the dreadful state of affairs.3

xvi Introduction

One would think that this letter could use some reflection on the part of Strauss’s apologists, yet it is mentioned in none of the books and articles I have cited except one: Eugene Sheppard’s biography, in which the German original is reprinted in full.4 Catherine and Michael Zuckert, in their accounting of the truth about Leo Strauss, stoop to criticize my Logos article on two minor points, but nowhere in their book do they acknowledge the letter.5 Mark Lilla actually reviewed the German text containing this letter in the New York Review article on Strauss in which he made the case for Strauss’s importance regarding the theological-political problem, and yet he failed to mention it as well.6 Heinrich Meier, the editor of that text, makes no editorial comment on it and neglects to discuss it in his recent book furthering the theological-political turn (or turning away) in the Strauss literature. The only public comment on this letter by any defender of Strauss of which I am aware came as a brief response after Richard Wolin quoted it in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2006, describing Strauss’s political views as “hair-raising.” The apologist in question wrote to the journal to protest that it was reasonable, given the collapse of the liberal Weimar Republic, for Strauss to have “believed that the only possible (if unlikely) source of effective resistance lay in movements that appealed to conservative German traditions,” a comment that is equally hair-raising.7 In the chapters that follow, I seek to show that the political theoretical stance underlying Strauss’s comments was developed by him in the early 1930s and remained constant thereafter. In my reading, Strauss is no ordinary conservative, but rather an extreme right-wing antimodernist. Strauss was anything but an “innocent.” He adhered to a view of human nature and natural order that demanded an authoritarian political form. What makes it difficult to see this is his well-known theory that “heterodox” writers in every era prior to the modern one have hidden their socially threatening views under a veil of socially correct opinions. These writers intended their works to have two meanings: one, the acceptable one, written on the surface sufficiently clearly to satisfy hasty readers eager to have their opinions reflected back to them; the second, the potentially subversive one, hidden “between the lines” discernible only to some careful readers via a series of clues ignored by the first set of readers. Those careful readers, he came to argue, were the potential philosophers. Strauss’s “discovery” of this form of writing invites the question whether or not he practiced it. I will argue that he did, but only after his arrival in the United States. Since this discovery predated that arrival, the question arises of why he did not deploy it himself until then. Strauss framed his theory of esotericism in the context of writing under the threat of persecution. But Strauss understood persecution in broad terms, and it is my contention that those terms covered the situation in which he found himself in this country, surrounded by a democratic consensus that called for caution in expressing his decidedly antidemocratic views.

Introduction xvii

Strauss’s recent apologists insist that Strauss was a friend of liberal democracy. Steven B. Smith goes one further, proclaiming that Strauss is “a friend of liberal democracy—one of the best friends democracy has ever had.”8 I suspect that evaluations such as these can be explained in part by the significance often attached to “liberal” in liberal democracy. That modifier often signals a restraint on the presumed excesses of democracy: of radical egalitarian democratic impulses and the potential irrationality of collective action. This liberal distrust of democracy is not entirely uncomfortable with Strauss’s elitism. There are moments when liberal fear easily trumps liberal reason, and in moments such as this one, when fear of foreign masses figure prominently in the American conscience, it is easy to fall back on elitist notions of who knows best what is best for “the people,” foreign or domestic. In moments such as this one, Leo Strauss’s heritage may appear innocent. It is not. *** I am aware of the dangers of reading into Leo Strauss what I wish to find there. The approach I have taken is to try to read him forwards from his early intellectual and political environment rather than backwards from what we know, or think we know, about the Straussian political persuasion. The letter to Löwith stands as the document at the beginning, center, and conclusion of my interpretation. Once it is presented, I concentrate on a detailed reading of a few texts that I deem of greatest importance in making sense of it and to show that the letter remains relevant to Strauss’s subsequent writings. M. F. Burnyeat criticized Strauss for substituting exegesis for argument in his microscopic treatment of old texts. I have found it impossible to avoid exegesis in working through Strauss’s old texts because of the dense and constipated nature of his writing style. There is a great deal of repetition in his work, and by relying as much as I do on his own words, more of his style is undoubtedly reproduced in my own than I would wish. The first chapter of what follows is less concerned with Leo Strauss than with the network associated with his name. Saul Bellow’s novel, Ravelstein, not so loosely based on his colleague and friend Allan Bloom, helps to provide a framework for understanding that network. It is, however, a work of fiction, even if barely so. Published before the (second) Iraq war, Bellow’s novel played a role in shaping at least part of the public perception of the Straussian underground. I have endeavored to flesh out that perception and the contribution Straussians themselves have made to it. The Löwith letter makes its appearance at the conclusion of this chapter and provides the impetus for the following ones. My account of Strauss’s early work is given in the second and third chapters, which together constitute my interpretation of the evolution of

xviii Introduction

Strauss’s political thinking up to what I think is its final substantive form. Of necessity, I introduce Strauss’s later notion of esoteric writing out of chronological order in chapter 2, since his autobiographical writings and comments come into play in discussing his early development, and, since those writings and comments were made well after Strauss’s “discovery” of that form of writing, they are therefore at least somewhat suspect. Strauss’s 1965 autobiographical “Preface” to his early book on Spinoza is of particular importance in this regard. The situation of German Jewry, and Strauss’s early involvement in debates about it, figures prominently in this period. In the third chapter I examine the Spinoza book itself, Strauss’s critique of Carl Schmitt, and his interpretation of Hobbes in bringing his political views into their final focus. It also concludes the account of Strauss’s European phase. Chapter 4 consists of a fuller account of Strauss’s theory of esotericism via a presentation of it in his 1948 essay entitled “How to Read Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise.” I then give careful attention to his book of the same year, On Tyranny, in chapter 5. My claim is that this book yields itself to a reading that follows the general lines suggested by Strauss himself for reading Spinoza, and what it yields is a political understanding that is fundamentally consistent with the position articulated in his letter to Karl Löwith and otherwise present in his writings prior to his arrival in the United States. Far from being a response to the totalitarian dangers of Nazism and Communism, my contention is that Strauss’s target is modernity itself. The final chapter begins with an account of Strauss’s Natural Right and History. This text, which originated in lectures given in 1949 and published in 1952, forms the final part of a triptych with the Spinoza essay and On Tyranny. His most widely read and arguably most influential book, its principal theme is modernity’s slide toward nihilism. I will argue that this book represents yet another version of Strauss’s general political perspective, consistent in the most important respects with all that preceded it and that it is not, as some have recently suggested, anomalous within his scholarly output. The importance of the specific presentation of his political theory in Natural Right and History is its effect on the so-called neoconservative discourse as it has developed in reaction to the political and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and led to a reassertion of imperial power at home and abroad.

Chapter 1

The Straussian network

Greek philosophy perhaps never completely extricated itself from the ambiguity of its origins. The philosopher would continually waver between two attitudes, hesitant between two conflicting temptations. At times he would claim that he alone was qualified to direct the state; arrogantly taking the place of the god-king, he would take it upon himself, in the name of the “knowledge” that elevated him above ordinary men, to reform all social life and rule the city as its sovereign authority. At other times he would withdraw from the world to immerse himself in a purely private wisdom; gathering about him a few disciples, he would set out with them to establish his own city within a city. Turning his back on public life, he would seek salvation in learning and contemplation. (Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought)

Befitting a man who made a life and an intellectual reputation out of indirection and prudence, Leo Strauss came to public attention in the United States and elsewhere not through a desire for publicity on his part but through the actions and writings of others. Devoted as he was to friends and students, it was his friends and students—and a friend of one of his students—who dragged his memory out of the academic cave in which it was seemingly interred and into the light of journalistic hyperbole. As a result, and without hyperbole, we can now see that, in terms of the exercise of political power in the United States, this retiring professor may turn out to have been the most influential political philosopher of his generation. Leo Strauss was a German-Jewish intellectual born on September 20, 1899 who left Germany in 1932 for France and England in order to do research on the works of Thomas Hobbes. Unable to return to Germany following the promulgation of anti-Jewish laws by the National Socialist regime, Strauss left England for the United States in 1937. He taught at the New School for Social Research in New York City until moving to the University of Chicago in 1949, where he taught political philosophy until his retirement in 1967. Afterwards, Strauss taught at the Claremont Men’s

2 The Straussian network

College in 1968–1969 and at St. John’s College in Annapolis from 1969 until his death in Chicago on October 18, 1973. Strauss published numerous articles and essays and fourteen books in his lifetime. By and large, these bare facts of a scholar’s life are unremarkable, but Strauss had a remarkable effect on his students, whose reverence for their teacher often gives the appearance of a cult. One of them, Allan Bloom, became momentarily more famous than his mentor when he authored a surprise best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind, in 1987. In a tribute to his former teacher, published a year after Strauss’s death, Bloom observed that those of us who knew him saw in him such a power of mind, such a unity and purpose of life, such a rare mixture of the human elements resulting in a harmonious expression of the virtues, moral and intellectual, that our account of him is likely to evoke disbelief or ridicule from those who have never experienced a man of this quality.1 Bloom cited Strauss only once, and fairly innocuously, in Closing, but Bloom’s anti-egalitarian diatribe on the failings of American higher education represented a popularization, if not bowdlerization, of many of Strauss’s principal themes.2 And thus Alan Bloom became the front man for something publicly identifiable as “Straussianism.” While Bloom’s celebrity faded quickly after his own death in 1992, he shot back into view in 2000 in the guise of the eponymous hero of his friend Saul Bellow’s roman à clef, Ravelstein. Bellow, who, like Strauss and Bloom, taught at the University of Chicago, had urged Bloom to write Closing and had written the preface to it. In his novel, Bellow’s narrator, a writer named Chick, sets out to write a biography of his professorial friend and neighbor, Abe Ravelstein. Ravelstein, like Bloom, is a large man with large appetites and expensive tastes whose surprise best-seller, written at Chick’s suggestion, has provided the resources to feed those appetites. As the novel progresses, Ravelstein becomes periodically ill and eventually dies of complications from AIDS, while Chick himself falls victim to a virulent food poisoning that he barely survives. These illnesses afflicted Bloom and Bellow, respectively, and it was Bellow’s indirect public disclosure of Bloom’s illness and his homosexuality that drew most attention when the novel appeared.3 However, Bellow’s book also provided some insight into the Straussian universe that became more salient within two years of the novel’s appearance. Bellow’s fictional version of that universe is a good place to begin to unravel the partly mythic identities of Leo Strauss and Straussianism. Leo Strauss appears under the name Felix Davarr. “Ravelstein had been a pupil or, if you prefer, a disciple of Davarr. You may not have heard of this formidable philosopher. His admirers say that he is a philosopher in the

The Straussian network 3

classical sense of the term.”4 The distinction of being a true philosopher is a singular one and distinguishes Davarr from Ravelstein, who “never presented himself as a philosopher—professors of political philosophy were not philosophers. He had had a philosophical training and had learned how a philosophical life should be lived. That was what philosophy was about, and this was why one read Plato.”5 And disciple seems the more accurate term to describe Ravelstein’s role within a community of the faithful. Early in the narrative, Chick observes that, Ravelstein knew the value of a set. He had a set of his own. Its members were students he had trained in political philosophy and longtime friends. Most of them were trained as Ravelstein himself had been trained, under Professor Davarr and used his esoteric vocabulary. Some of Ravelstein’s older pupils now held positions of importance on national newspapers. Quite a number served in the State Department. Some lectured in the War College or worked on the staff of the National Security Advisor. One was a protégé of Paul Nitze. Another, a maverick, published a column in the Washington Times. Some were influential, all were well informed; they were a close group, a community. From them Ravelstein had frequent reports, and when he was at home he spent hours on the telephone with his disciples.6 Thus is established a lineage descending from Davarr/Strauss through Ravelstein/Bloom to people in politically important non-academic positions, all forming a community based on common descent and a shared, “esoteric” vocabulary. Chick even remarks to Ravelstein that he seems to be the mastermind behind a “shadow government,” a suggestion apparently received as a compliment, though Chick is careful to say that what was important to Ravelstein was less the influence he might exert on policy than “that he should remain in charge somehow of the ongoing political education of his old boys.”7 The education he supervised was centered on the reading and rereading of certain canonical authors, beginning with Plato and including Xenophon, Aristophanes, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, and “even” Nietzsche. The narrator wants to distinguish Ravelstein from the sort of professors “common enough in my own student days,” whose purpose was to “make you aware of the bourgeois upbringing from which your education was supposed to free you.” These professors, sometimes presenting themselves as revolutionaries and sporting beards and ponytails, made themselves models to be emulated and “spoke youth gibberish.” Ravelstein could not be so easily imitated, Chick claims. “You couldn’t begin to be like him without study, without learning, without performing the esoteric labors of interpretation he had gone through under his late master, the famous, controversial Felix Davarr.”8 And Ravelstein’s students were not the ordinary

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“mackerels” swarming the universities absorbing the moral relativism of their inept professors.9 On the contrary, “the students he accepted” are invariably described as “gifted” (and male) and Ravelstein instructed them on the most important of matters: the correct ordering of their souls.10 Nevertheless, Ravelstein’s students, like those of his lesser academic colleagues, did their best to model themselves on their master. In part, this was by way of “the esoteric labors of interpretation,” but also through the more superficial adoption of Ravelstein’s tastes, as in learning to love, or appear to love, Rossini and in general cultivating a sense of superiority to other, lesser students. This was not altogether by chance. Chick reports that Ravelstein’s “first move” when his students arrived “was to order them to forget their families.” Ravelstein himself “had hated and shaken off his own family. He told students that they had come to the university to learn something, and this meant that they must rid themselves of the opinions of their parents. He was going to direct them to a higher life.”11 By which is meant the higher life of the mind and soul, but perhaps Ravelstein’s students could be forgiven for mistakenly equating this with their teacher’s higher style of life, and so some of them, at least, fell in love with Lanvin and Hermès as well as Plato and Aristophanes.12 Naturally enough, Ravelstein’s refusal to trawl for mackerel and his bucking of the tide of mediocrity are accounted as the reasons for the academic hostility he encounters, a fate also shared by Davarr. In the case of Ravelstein, this was compounded by his literary success. “He exposed the failings of the system in which they were schooled, the shallowness of their historicism, their susceptibility to European nihilism.” Consequently, “All the dunces were united against him.”13 This relationship of mutual contempt is indicative of Ravelstein’s distaste for the bourgeois. Ravelstein’s view is that the “spirited” student is motivated by love, whereas the bourgeois’ overriding concern is the fear of violent death.14 His contempt for his apartment house neighbors, who would complain that he played his recordings of baroque music too loudly (performed on original instruments, Chick repeatedly notes, and played on the most expensive stereo equipment), is palpable. They were “little bourgeois types dominated by secret dreads.”15 Aside from Davarr, one other character that is referred to but never appears in the novel is of importance, and that is Philip Gorman. Gorman is Ravelstein’s former student who has risen to an important position in the Department of Defense and from whom Ravelstein gets the inside information that Colin Powell and James Baker had advised President Bush against pursuing Saddam Hussein’s army all the way to Baghdad during the first Gulf War, a decision Ravelstein abhors, as apparently does Gorman. “Gorman’s academic father had strongly objected to the Ravelstein seminars in which Philip was enrolled. Respectable professors of political theory had told old Gorman that Ravelstein was off the wall, that he seduced

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and corrupted his students,” Chick observes.16 This characterization leaves little doubt that Gorman is a thin cover for Paul Wolfowitz, who was an undergraduate in Bloom’s seminars at Cornell and whose father was a mathematician there. Once the noise over Bellow’s revelations concerning Bloom’s personal life died down, in the aftermath of September 11 and the rush to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the connection to Wolfowitz began to get greater attention, and along with it, the possible connection between Strauss, Straussianism, and the conduct of US foreign policy.17 Bellow’s picture of Ravelstein/Bloom and his world amounts to a sort of ethnography of a subculture, albeit an ethnography such as the subculture itself might produce.18 It is a subculture hierarchically structured by order of master and disciples and that self-consciously differentiates itself from the larger culture through various means. Among these are possession of an esoteric knowledge and arcane language centered on canonical texts, the correct reading of which reveal truths to initiates unseen by others. The term “political philosophy” itself, the distinction between true philosophers and teachers, the notion of the philosophical life, the Platonic ordering of the soul, and the peculiar meaning that love assumes within this lexicon are all constituents of the Straussian language. And then there is the claim of professional persecution by the “dunces” who control the university and its apparatuses. These attributes and claims, together with the veneration of a founding master, give the Straussian subculture its cultic aura. Add that to Bellow’s description of Ravelstein’s “secret government” and the stage was set for the sudden notoriety of Leo Strauss. *** The onset of the US war on Iraq in the spring of 2003 brought with it a series of articles and radio discussions identifying a small group within and around George W. Bush’s administration that had played a central role in shaping its policy on Iraq and with intellectual roots stretching back to the otherwise obscure political philosopher Leo Strauss. Then came the responses. The most extraordinary of these was an apology for her father, Leo Strauss, by Jenny Strauss Clay and published on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Clay, a professor of classics at the University of Virginia, mentioned unnamed “recent news articles” that fingered Leo Strauss as the mastermind behind the neoconservative ideologues who control United States foreign policy. He reaches out from his 30-year-old grave, we are told, to direct a ‘cabal’ (a word with distinct anti-Semitic overtones) of Bush administration figures hoping to subject the American people to rule by a ruthless elite.

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She went on to claim that her father was first and foremost a teacher and not a politician, and that while he supported liberal democracy as the best form of government available to us, he was “not blind to its flaws.” He despised “utopianism,” she wrote, in either its Nazi or Communist form, which is “predicated on the denial of a fundamental and even noble feature of human nature: love of one’s own.” As a teacher, he taught students to question the foundations of their “received opinions,” and his daughter notes that “at that time, as is still true today, academia leaned to the left; hence such questioning required an examination of the left’s tenets. Had the prevailing beliefs been different, they too would have been subject to his skeptical inquiry.”19 The daughter’s brief account of the charges brought against her father and of his true thoughts and vocation is so masterfully deceptive as to do her father proud. Let us begin with the unnamed accusers and the charges they bring forward. Prof. Clay claims “we are told” of a cabal, and that the term itself carries anti-Semitic overtones. Told by whom? Articles on the Straussians among the foreign policy makers of the Bush administration in the New York Times, Boston Globe, and International Herald Tribune did not contain the term “cabal.”20 The only widely discussed or read “recent” source that did was Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker article, which begins, “They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal—a small cluster of policy advisors and analysts now based in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.” Abram Shulsky, “a scholarly expert in the works of the political philosopher Leo Strauss,” directs this self-identified cabal.21 So it turns out that we were told of the cabal by the members of the cabal; a strategy of disarmament through disclosure, perhaps. Or is it Cabal? Prof. Clay’s assertion that the term has anti-Semitic overtones refers to its archaic meaning, since it derives from reference to the Jewish cabala. The term lost its original reference long ago and is generally used to refer to a secret group of any kind. But the capitalized term may signify a more nuanced historical understanding within the Office of Special Plans than Prof. Clay either realized or admitted, since in that form it specifically refers to a small committee of the Privy Council under the British King Charles II in the seventeenth century, a group otherwise known as the “Committee for Foreign Affairs,” the precursor of the modern cabinet. In that case, the selfmockery of Shulsky and others shows a very clear self-understanding of the role they may actually have played in the Bush administration’s run-up to the war on Iraq. That, after all, was the point of Hersh’s article. Jenny Strauss Clay is not the only one who tampered with the evidence to suggest that anti-Semitism is the hidden source of the attention her father’s alleged disciples have received. Robert J. Lieber, a Georgetown University professor, played the cabal card in a Chronicle of Higher Education article entitled “The Neoconservative-Conspiracy Theory: Pure Myth.”22 The Wall Street Journal’s late ideologue, “editor emeritus” Robert L. Bartley,

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meanwhile, took the guilt by association route. Bartley stooped to conquer by pointing to the famously delusional followers of Lyndon LaRouche, who have indeed replaced Henry Kissinger with the Straussians as the chosen at the center of their fantasy of an unholy alliance of Wall Street, Israel, and the Queen of England aiming at world domination. From this, Bartley deduces that all references to Straussians “these days” are presumed to be tainted by anti-Semitism, “often in the hands of accusers who are Jewish themselves.” Oh, and for the record, some of Mr. Bartley’s best friends were Straussians.23 A few months later, Joshua Muravcek, in an article published in Commentary and entitled “The Neoconservative Cabal,” followed suit in ascribing any suggestions of the influence of Leo Strauss on US foreign policy to antiSemitism.24 This strategy was so pervasive and so successful that when Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was later interviewed by Sam Tannenhaus for a Vanity Fair article, Tannenhaus opened the interview with the question, “What do you think all the conspiratorial talk is, do you have any notion, in Europe and here, what are people looking at this way?” Wolfowitz replied, “I think it’s pretty obvious and I think it’s pretty disgraceful, but all you can do is ignore it and go on and get the job done.” Tannenhaus’s follow-up question was, “What is it? I mean some say antiSemitism. I guess in Europe that would be . . .” Wolfowitz, cutting him off, interjected, “I just said all I’m going to say about it.” Tannenhaus apparently decided that that was enough of a confirmation, so he closed that line of inquiry by responding, “OK.”25 Thus Tannenhaus started out his interview for an investigative article on the so-called neoconservative brain trust behind the Bush Administration’s foreign policy with the notion that criticism of their influence is just a function of anti-Semitism. This has the effect of doing two things. One of them is obvious: it preemptively disarms the opposition. But secondly, and this is rather more complicated, it portrays them as the ones who are being persecuted; that is to say, as the targets of some kind of systematic persecution. The “dunces,” it would seem, are not confined to academe. *** Returning to Jenny Strauss Clay’s apologia on behalf of her father, she wrote: “To me what characterized him above all else was his total lack of vanity and self-importance. As a result he had no interest in honors within the academy and was completely unsuited to political ambition. He was first and foremost a teacher.” Of his devotion to the “Great Books,” she explained, My father saw reading not as a passive exercise but as taking part in an active dialogue with the great minds of the past. One had to read with great care, great respect and try, as he always said, to understand the

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author as he understood himself. Today this task, admittedly difficult and demanding, is dismissed in fashionable academia as impossible. Rather, we are told, each reader inevitably constructs his own text of which the author has no control and that writers’ intentions are irrelevant. After this seemingly tangential bit of academic skirmishing, she continued, The fact is that Leo Strauss also recognized a multiplicity of readers, but he had enough faith in his author to assume that they, too, recognized that they would have a diverse readership. Some of their readers, the ancients realized, would want only to find their own views and prejudices confirmed. Others might be willing to open themselves to new, perhaps unconventional or unpopular, ideas. I personally think my father’s rediscovery of the art of writing for different kinds of readers will be his most lasting legacy. That is a typical claim made about Leo Strauss and I will have much more to say about Strauss’s “discovery” of esotericism, and the difficulties it presents in reading Strauss, in the chapters that follow. Finally, she wrote that “although I was never a student of my father’s, I sat in on a class of his in the 1960’s,” and followed this with the part of her piece that many readers found the most interesting: “He was a small, unprepossessing, and, truth be told, ugly man (daughters are their parents’ worse critics), with none of the charisma that one associates with ‘great teachers.’ And yet there was something utterly charming.” Some will, I think, recognize a description of Socrates in this last comment: the modest, ugly charmer, the great teacher. In fact, Strauss’s students constantly refer to his charisma and the Socrates comparison is ubiquitous among his admirers. One of the reasons Straussians are often described as a cult, as we have noted, is the cultic reverence its members display toward the person of Leo Strauss. In 1985, when the Oxford classicist M. F. Burnyeat published a well-informed and scathingly critical review of a collection of Strauss’s essays in the New York Review of Books, eight former students and colleagues of Strauss felt compelled to write letters in response to express their outrage.26 The review was accompanied by a famous caricature of Strauss by David Levine, who portrayed its subject with two right hands. Some of the letter writers seem to have been as appalled by the caricature, which one described as “vicious,” as they were by Burnyeat’s criticisms. Joseph Cropsey, Strauss’s colleague at the University of Chicago, wrote that the review “bears the same relation to Mr. Strauss’s thought that the accompanying caricature bears to Strauss’s person. Whoever knows or knew the original must be offended by a travesty generated apparently between levity and a gift for deforming the normal.” Allan Bloom, Strauss’s

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most famous student, denounced Burnyeat’s “calumny” and dismissed the review as an “ugly project.” Paul Sunstein decried Burnyeat’s “slander” regarding Strauss’s influence as a teacher. Harry V. Jaffa confided that “[w]hat went on in Strauss’s classes was remarkable and powerful” and expressed pity toward Burnyeat for not having shared in the emancipatory experience he had had in those classes. Elsewhere, Jaffa has written of the “blinding light that emanated from Strauss himself. . . . I have often compared my encounter with Strauss, beginning in September 1944 to the experience of Saul on the road to Damascus.”27 Then Jaffa invokes Plato’s cave and asserts that, “No one’s life, I believe, was ‘turned around’ more completely than mine by my meeting with Strauss.”28 And the analogies with Jesus and Plato—mirroring the metaphorical pairing of Jerusalem and Athens, a favorite Straussian shorthand that will be explained below—are not at all peculiar to Jaffa. In the same volume in which Jaffa describes his conversion experience, fellow acolyte George Anastaplo uses the “prophet without honor” passage from Matthew as an epigraph to his tribute to Strauss. Anastaplo then attempts to excuse the arrogance displayed by some of Strauss’s students with the remark that, “the more Socratic a thinker may be, the more likely it is that an irrepressible Alcibiades will be attached to him here and there.”29 The kind of ridicule to which Bloom referred is easy to understand. As the public awareness of the Straussian network rose, the website www. straussians.net went through a series of transformations before finally expiring in 2006. As late as the summer of 2004, the site claimed to be an introduction to a “wonderful and persecuted academic movement.” (This slogan was replaced by a reproduction of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s tableau of “Socrates seeking Alcibiades in the House of Aspasia.” That image, in turn, was subsequently jettisoned.) Straussians revel in the sense of persecution. Until the fall of 2004, the website had a link entitled “teachers in the Straussian tradition,” which contained over two hundred names. I do not know of any other persecuted movement that publishes a list of its members anywhere, much less on a website. On this list, a small diamond to the left of a name indicated a graduate student of Strauss’s, and among them there was an apparent hierarchy. Harry V. Jaffa (Claremont Graduate School) was described as “one of the most distinguished, famous, important students of Strauss.” Allan Bloom, who taught at Cornell, Toronto, and Chicago, though, was “the most famous student of Strauss.” Then there was Joseph Cropsey, who was “second only to Allan Bloom as a famed Straussian, primarily because of the History of Political Philosophy, which he edited with Strauss.” Cropsey didn’t get a diamond because, “A Ph.D. in Economics at Columbia, [he] never studied directly under Strauss.” However, “Cropsey’s high school best friend, Harry Jaffa, was a student at the New School, and he introduced Strauss and Cropsey to each other.”

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Once we get past the “big three” and their contemporaries, the Straussian universe becomes a family tree growing outward from Strauss through his “first generation” students to their students and so on. The genealogy can get a little goofy—Strauss begat Bloom who begat Francis Fukuyama. Defying nature, some ascend rather than descend, going from Bloom (usually) to Strauss, even if only to get a glimpse of the patriarch. Thus we are told that Carnes Lord (Naval War College), “Falls into the category of students of Bloom who didn’t do their Ph.D. with Strauss but were around so that they were able to take a course or two with Strauss. Clifford Orwin, Thomas Pangle, and Thomas West also fit into this category.” Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield, meanwhile, is “one of the most prominent Straussians although he never studied directly with Strauss, but may have audited a course or two with him. It was Harry Jaffa that introduced Mansfield to Strauss’s work.” No wonder Jaffa thinks of himself as Saul. This often bizarre account of personal relationships reinforces the notion of Strauss’s extraordinary charisma and gives further credence to the characterization of Straussianism as a variety of cult. And this one comes complete with schisms, sects, and heretics (but, as far as I can determine, no or few apostates). More importantly, this persecuted movement is also pretty well funded. The John M. Olin Foundation and Earhart Foundations, in particular, have provided the financial infrastructure for the maintenance and reproduction of the Straussian academic network. The Olin Foundation financed the establishment of Olin Centers for the study of democracy at several universities, invariably headed by a Straussian. It also endowed a number of professorships at colleges and law schools and issued individual grants to Straussians and others on the political right. Allan Bloom, who founded the Olin Center at Chicago, was the recipient of a $25,000 grant to aid in writing The Closing of the American Mind, for example. By the terms of its endowment, the Olin Foundation was charged with spending all of its assets, and after dispensing some $386 million, the Foundation closed in 2005, taking the Olin Centers with it.30 The Earhart Foundation, meanwhile, continues to provide steady funding for the graduate students of Straussian professors. *** Of course, if Straussians formed only an “academic movement,” persecuted or not, they would not be of much interest to most people. Far less influential in the scholarly world than they may wish to portray themselves to themselves, they have been more successful in political appointments and corporate-sponsored “think tanks.” It took a while for anyone to notice, but then in 1984 the historian of science Stephen Toulmin, who had recently moved from the University of Chicago to Northwestern University, made a curious remark in the middle of a review essay in the New York

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Review of Books of a couple of books about the anthropologist Margaret Mead: Margaret Mead reminds us just how reactionary the contemporary neoconservatives really are. A State Department whose policy-planning staff knows something about the ideas of Leo Strauss but does not understand Russian, let alone appreciate the cultural diversity of the peoples whose lives are affected by its plans, deserves a contemporary Margaret Mead to castigate its parochialism.31 Toulmin’s former Chicago colleague, Nathan Tarcov (“a student of Bloom, probably had a couple of classes with Strauss, but too young to do his Ph.D. with him,” according to the Straussian.net website) identified himself in a subsequently published letter of complaint as the encrypted staff member. Tarcov served on the Policy Planning Staff in 1981–1982, and he objected that he was “practically the only member of the staff who did not have some regional or technical expertise.” Noting that the staff contains a speechwriting function, he went on to say that “it has been customary for there to be some members of that staff without such expertise, though they usually have not been academic political theorists.”32 Perhaps even less usual was the presence of a translator of Aristotle and Xenophon on the staff of the National Security Council, but that, as Burnyeat noted in his New York Review essay, is where another student of Bloom’s, Carnes Lord, was to be found, along with William Kristol, who later became one of the most visible Straussians as editor of the Weekly Standard and a prominent advocate, before and after September 11 of military action against Iraq. And of course, there was Paul Wolfowitz. *** In reaction to the notoriety of Straussians within and around the administration of George W. Bush, and to the policies they pursued, an effort has been made by several serious writers to distinguish between Leo Strauss and Straussians, whether self-proclaimed or labeled by others. The very existence of “Straussianism” has also been questioned. For example, Anne Norton describes herself as having been a student of two of Leo Strauss’s students, Joseph Cropsey and Ralph Lerner, at the University of Chicago. She also “studied with Leon Kass and watched Allan Bloom teach.”33 The distinction between those of whom she was a student and the others is important to her and it is part of a more comprehensive genealogical narrative. She wishes to separate out several stories: of Leo Strauss; of “the philosophic lineage that came from Leo Strauss”; and of self-described Straussians “regarded by others—and regarding themselves—as a chosen set of initiates with a hidden teaching.” She also refers to these last as “lesser” Straussians who “were

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bound not simply by descent from a common teacher or a love of learning. They were bound by politics as well: a distinctly conservative politics. They came to power and have influenced the character of governance in the United States.”34 So on the one hand we have Strauss himself and those whom he taught to read. Some of these latter, such as Cropsey and Lerner, in turn, taught their students how to read, “with the same care and skill and grace they say Strauss brought to them.” And on the other hand, the disciples, “the people who call themselves Straussians.”35 Sometimes she refers to the disciples as the “political Straussians.” Norton is incensed at the disciples. She recounts much of what I have described above and more. And she fingers Allan Bloom as the real culprit. “Bloom, far more than Strauss, has shaped the Straussians who govern in America,” she writes. “Bloom taught both the most powerful and the most vociferously ideological of the Straussians. The most conspicuous of the Straussians in the Reagan and the two Bush administrations have ties to Allan Bloom.”36 Norton can refer to these “lesser” Straussians as political because she sees nothing in Strauss’s or in her own teachers’ writings or approaches to texts that are inherently political in the partisan sense. “Straussians are conservative,” she notes. “Why they are conservative remains something of a mystery. Strauss’s work on Plato or Xenophon or other figures in the canon does not lead inevitably to conservatism. That Strauss himself was a conservative should matter very little.”37 Maybe not, but too many questions are begged here: what do “conservative” and “conservatism” mean? Is Strauss’s way of teaching politically neutral? Is his approach to the interpretation of texts politically neutral? Norton does not discuss any text of Strauss’s in depth. Only one is singled out at all: Natural Right and History. Of this book, she observes that it is said to argue for a return to truth, to a standard common to all and grounded in nature. Perhaps that reading is correct. If so, Natural Right and History presents nature as the realm of self-evident truths. In most of his writings, Strauss is careful to present nature not as the realm of certainty, of “pure and whole knowledge,” but as the unexplored, uncharted territory of a “pure and whole questioning.” Nature was not the site of certainty, nature was the realm of the unknown, the inchoate, of that which might be known but wasn’t, of that which might be known but was not yet. Nature was a riddle: a place of possibilities, a place of questions. Nature was a beginning, a resource, out of which people and worlds could be fashioned. The mysterious and enduring first nature of man remains a question Strauss explored to the end of his life.38 Norton does not tell us in which of his writings Strauss says these things (her book is devoid of citations or bibliography). She does not explain why

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Strauss might have taken different positions vis-à-vis nature in different texts, if indeed he did. She seems not only to want to distance herself from a particular reading of Natural Right and History but from that text itself. She writes that, “Strauss wrote several books. They are quite different from one another. For the Straussians, though not for the students of Strauss, one book seems to stand apart from the rest,” and that book is Natural Right and History.39 Whereas she registers some doubt as to the interpretation of nature it “is said” to contain, she definitively states that the book “casts America as the site of modernity’s redemption” through adherence to a conception of natural right meant to constrain and limit democracy.40 Rejection of this conception, in the logic of the text, leads to nihilism. “For Straussians, for Strauss in Natural Right and History, the world is full of nihilists.”41 For Norton, then, the claim that Strauss is to be distinguished from Straussians, and the students from the disciples, rests importantly on the status of one of Strauss’s texts, which she treats as an anomaly within his corpus. The same claim is made by Mark Lilla in a two-part New York Review of Books essay, the second installment of which is tenuously couched as a review of two books, one of them Norton’s.42 Lilla, too, wants to protect Strauss from the journalists who suddenly discovered him, even resorting to invoking the “cabal” canard and playing the Lyndon LaRouche card. But Lilla’s strategy, as distinct from Norton’s, is to distinguish between Strauss the thinker and Strauss the teacher. “His books are read all over the world today, but his pedagogical activity, and its effects, have been limited to North America,” Lilla writes in the first segment, entitled “Leo Strauss: The European.” In Europe, he suggests, Strauss is treated as an important philosopher, “one of the great minds to have emerged from the rich culture of Weimar,” who must still be read and grappled with, a thinker perhaps on the level of Martin Heidegger. But in the second segment, “The Closing of the American Mind,” Lilla argues that the effect of Natural Right and History on Strauss’s “American disciples” has been “stultifying.” Echoing Norton, Lilla claims that the book’s breathless recounting of the history of western philosophy, wrapped up with what appears to be an argument for American exceptionalism vis-à-vis western culture’s general drift toward nihilism, results in the belief in America as the site of the redemption of the west. He is not certain that it is entirely consistent with what Strauss wrote elsewhere. Lilla’s claim for Strauss’s importance lies in the assertion that what motivated Strauss throughout his intellectual life was what he called the “theological-political problem.” This is a term Strauss introduced in his much-discussed 1965 preface to the English translation of his early book on Spinoza (originally published in 1930). Several recent scholarly works on Strauss have emphasized this thread, which is woven around the supposed confrontation between philosophy and religion, or reason and revelation, or, in one of Strauss’s other well-known formulations, Athens and Jerusalem.43

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The problem is said to be that these oppositions represent opposing conceptualizations of the foundations of truth. There is some controversy over whether Strauss maintained that the respective claims to truth are unassailable from the opposing position, as Lilla seems to think, and therefore one must simply choose between them, or whether he ultimately implied, at least, that philosophy can defeat religion.44 However, Lilla emphasizes that Strauss meant to show that the Enlightenment thinkers were too hasty in their quick denunciation of theological claims to truth and the authority that is based upon such claims. His point was in part to expose this modern rationalist prejudice and reopen the theological-political problem as a problem. And here Lilla invokes another of Strauss’s notions, this one of the “second cave.” What this is meant to illustrate is that we moderns are a step further removed from an ascent toward philosophical knowledge than even the denizens of the cave depicted in Plato’s Republic. Strapped in place, staring at the shadows of the representations of things, Plato’s cave dwellers must first turn away toward the representations before they can begin to venture behind them toward the light that produces the shadows, and then beyond that artificial light toward the things outside the cave and the sun that illuminates them. That path is the path of true philosophical questioning, exemplified by Socrates, as opposed to the unquestioning acceptance of authoritative opinion. Because we are the victims of false philosophy born of science and history, we are buried deeper still than those deluded cave dwellers. Strauss calls their cave a “natural” one; ours is “artificial.”45 What this means is that we must suspend our prejudice and return to “old books” in order to rediscover the “fundamental questions” that our age has either prematurely dismissed or obfuscated. “That,” in Lilla’s reading, “was Strauss’s most fundamental ambition: to prepare a return to Socratic philosophy by first beating a path up from the second cave through the critical study of the history of philosophy.” We will return to this notion of the second cave in a subsequent chapter. Here it suffices to observe that one central aspect of the philosophical tradition recovered by Strauss is the “the art of writing for different kinds of readers” his daughter Jenny Strauss Clay identified as her father’s “most lasting legacy.” This is the esotericism noted by Bellow’s narrator in Ravelstein. The concept does not mean that a writer might write differently for different readers in different writings, but rather that a single text might be constructed in such a way as to be read differently by different readers. Each such reading might be defensible as “correct,” or at least plausible, since the trick is to fashion more than one consistent and coherent meaning of the text. The reason why this might be done is caught by Clay’s comment, quoted above, that some readers “would want only to find their own views and prejudices confirmed. Others might be willing to open themselves to new, perhaps unconventional or unpopular, ideas.” So an esoteric text would appear to confirm conventional views while also presenting unconventional

The Straussian network 15

views to those open to or capable of uncovering them in the text. The sense that such a style characterizes Straussianism as a whole is partly responsible for the widespread suspicion of a “shadow government” communicating through its own form of encryption. Some Straussians in government contributed to this suspicion mightily by drawing attention to the technique. As Seymour Hersh noted in his New Yorker article, in 1999, Gary Schmitt and Abram Shulsky, of the self-described Cabal, co-authored an essay in which they argued that Strauss’s political understanding and method of reading texts are good preparation for intelligence work.46 The hostility with which Strauss’s discovery of esoteric writing was received, they claim, is due to the fact that it is “clearly at odds with the main political tenet of the Enlightenment, i.e., that a good polity can be built on the basis of doctrines that not only are true but are also accessible.” Strauss’s discovery leads not only to the conclusion “that political life may be closely linked to deception,” hardly a shocking idea, but also “suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception.”47 This style of writing and Strauss’s associated style of reading and interpretation will be discussed at length in subsequent chapters. But it presents an obvious a priori difficulty in attempting to give an account of Strauss’s own positions, since his acknowledgment of such a style of writing invites the possibility that Strauss himself wrote in this style. It is a problem noted by many commentators, even if not always fully taken seriously by them. But one important aspect of esotericism is that it is deployed only in writing addressed to a public of diverse readers. It does not apply to discussion between friends, “one’s own,” as Jenny Strauss Clay put it. Private letters between friends are closest to oral discussion, and it is perhaps fortunate for the attempt to make sense out of Leo Strauss’s political thinking that it was a trusted friend who kept a copy of a letter written to him by Strauss and which thereby subsequently achieved a published form for which it was not intended. *** In a recent collection of his essays on Leo Strauss, Steven Smith asserts that Strauss “has been declared an enemy of democracy and a partisan of the radical Right,” and asks, “But where did Strauss even remotely imply this?”48 One simple answer to this question, readily available to any reader of Strauss but ignored by his admirers and defenders, is particularly and uncommonly explicit. Leo Strauss was in Paris on January 30, 1933 when the National Socialist Party came to power in Germany on the strength of its showing in elections that month and the subsequent naming of Adolph Hitler as Chancellor. As noted above, Strauss had left Germany the previous summer on a Rockefeller

16 The Straussian network

Foundation grant to pursue research on Thomas Hobbes in Paris and England. From a fortuitous exile, Strauss was able to learn from correspondents of the sequence of events that followed: the burning of the Reichstag on February 27, the emergency laws enacted the next day that abolished basic rights and protections, the anti-Jewish legislation passed on April 1 and the ensuing boycott of Jewish businesses and professionals. By late spring, Strauss was joined by thousands of German Jews seeking refuge. He may have been unaware that his erstwhile teacher Martin Heidegger and his recent interlocutor, the jurist Carl Schmitt, who had written a letter in support of Strauss’s Rockefeller application, both joined the Nazi party on May 1.49 On May 19, 1933, Strauss wrote a letter to his friend, the philosopher Karl Löwith, reporting on his situation in Paris. Referring to the German intellectuals who had taken refuge or, like Walter Benjamin, were already residing there, Strauss ironically remarks that, “The ‘competition’ is certainly very great: the entire German-Jewish intellectual proletariat finds itself here. It’s terrible—I’d really rather run off to Germany.” However, “here lies the snag [literally: “here lies the hook,” Haken]. Strauss continues: Admittedly, I cannot simply “opt” for another country [Land]—one does not choose a homeland [Heimat] and, most importantly, a mother tongue. I certainly will never be able to write anything but German, even though I will have to write in another language. On the other hand, I see no acceptable possibility of living under the swastika [Hakenkreuz]; that is to say, under a symbol that says to me nothing but: you and your kind, you are all by nature subhuman [φυσει Untermenschen] and therefore true pariahs. There is but one solution. We must always repeat to ourselves: we “men of science”—so our brethren called themselves in the Arab Middle Ages—non habemus locum manentem, sed quaerimus [we do not have a fixed place, but we are searching for it] . . . And, as far as that is concerned, that the Germany of the Right does not tolerate us absolutely does not follow from the principles of the Right. On the contrary: only from the principles of the Right, from the fascist, authoritarian, imperialist principles, can one protest against the dreadful state of affairs. I read Caesar’s Commentaries with deeper understanding and I think of Virgil’s: Tu regere imperio . . . parcere subjectis et debellare superbos [to rule the peoples . . . to spare the conquered and subdue the proud].50 There is no reason to grovel before crosses [Kreuze], even the cross of liberalism, as long as somewhere in the world a spark of Roman thought still glows. And even then: rather the Ghetto than any cross [lieber als jegliches Kreuz das Ghetto].51 This letter represents one of Leo Strauss’s few direct statements of a discernibly political nature. And yet scholars and others who have written

The Straussian network 17

on Strauss, his political positions, or his influence have largely ignored it.52 Perhaps tellingly, the publication of a selection of Strauss’s correspondence with Löwith in English translation, in a journal associated with the Straussian school, began with letters dating from December 1935 rather than with their first exchanges in 1932.53 Strauss’s reaction to the Nazi takeover has its origins in his critique of modernity as the triumph of what he, in conformity with German political discourse of the time, called liberalism and its attendant principle of universal individual rights and equality. That critique was grounded in the realization that the extension of such rights to Jews had had the effect of threatening Jewish collective identity, on the one hand, and encouraging anti-Semitism in the face of Jewish cultural difference, on the other. Strauss searched for an answer to this threat in a return to pre-Enlightenment Jewish writers such as Maimonides while at the same time displaying an interest in contemporary proponents of cultural-national identity on the European right. These included German figures such as Paul de Lagarde and the French writer Charles Maurras, one of the intellectual founders of the protofascist Action Française.54 In this context, Strauss’s letter to Löwith reflects his understanding that a properly fascist movement such as the Italian one was to be distinguished from National Socialism by the absence of a racial component (as opposed to a national one) and its promotion of a premodern corporatist social program.55 This was apparently a formula for reconstituting Jewish communities in subordinate but protected preEnlightenment, imperial form (i.e., “to spare the conquered”). The emphatic character of Strauss’s letter thus points to the depth of his reactionary political instincts and antagonism to liberal modernity. Unraveling the intellectual and political meaning of this letter and its place within the larger structure of Leo Strauss’s thought will be the purpose of the ensuing chapters.

Chapter 2

Becoming Leo Strauss (I)

Leo Strauss left two principal accounts of his early personal and intellectual development. With the 1965 edition of an English translation of his book, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, published in German in 1930, Strauss took the opportunity to provide a preface situating the text in biographical terms, casting himself in the third person. “The author,” he wrote, “was a young Jew born and raised in Germany who found himself in the grip of the theological-political predicament.”1 In 1970, three years before his death, Strauss appeared together with his friend Jacob Klein at a gathering at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, where both were then teaching, to give what the college dean who introduced them termed “their own accounts of the origin and development of their thoughts in those matters of greatest interest to us, their students.”2 After some preliminary remarks, Strauss began his account with the comment, “I was brought up in a conservative, even orthodox Jewish home somewhere in a rural district of Germany.” He continued: The “ceremonial” laws were rather strictly observed but there was very little Jewish knowledge. In the Gymnasium I became exposed to the message of German humanism. Furtively, I read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. When I was sixteen and we read the Laches in school, I formed the plan, or the wish, to spend my life reading Plato and breeding rabbits while earning my living as a rural postmaster. Without being aware of it, I had moved rather far away from my Jewish home, without any rebellion. When I was seventeen, I was converted to Zionism—to simple, straightforward political Zionism.3 The indeterminacy of “somewhere in a rural district of Germany” (he was actually born in the small town of Kirchhain, near the university town of Marburg, in the state of Kurhessen) contrasts strikingly with the specificity of certain authors and with the earlier assertion that what this young German Jewish author confronted was not a difficulty but rather the “theological-political predicament.” As for the alleged desire to read Plato

Becoming Leo Strauss (I) 19

while sorting mail and raising rabbits, we may speculate that it is the mature Strauss’s ironic reflection of the teenager’s hidden rebellion against “the message of German humanism.” Strauss’s accountings of his years in Germany have provided the basis for many interpretations of his writings from that period, even though some interpreters have acknowledged the potential unreliability of those accounts. Their unreliability is signaled by Strauss’s own observation, at the end of the new preface to his Spinoza book, that: The present study was based on the premise, sanctioned by powerful prejudice, that a return to premodern philosophy is impossible. The change of orientation which found its first expression, not entirely by accident, in the article published at the end of this volume, compelled me to engage in a number of studies in the course of which I became ever more attentive to the manner in which heterodox thinkers of earlier ages wrote their books. As a consequence of this, I now read the Theologico-political Treatise differently than I read it when I was young. I understood Spinoza too literally because I did not read him literally enough. (PSCR, 31) The study to which Strauss refers is a 1932 review of Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political, the translation into English of which was first included as an appendix to the 1965 edition of Strauss’s book on Spinoza (but dropped from the 1997 paperback reissue). Strauss’s preface thus alerts us to the “change in orientation” that he claims separates his reading of texts before his encounter with Schmitt’s book from the way he read them afterwards. Becoming “ever more attentive to the manner in which heterodox thinkers of earlier ages wrote their books” meant that Strauss discovered that such writers engaged in a practice of what he would call esoteric writing, concealing their intentions beneath a veil. To look beneath the veil requires a technique of interpretation sensitive to clues within a text that reveal these intentions and hence a second layer of meaning beneath the surface meaning. That discovery was not made in the Schmitt review, however, or even as a consequence of it, contrary to Strauss’s assertion. Instead, the review, which will be discussed in greater detail below, determined that the limitation of Schmitt’s critique of liberalism was that he had not entirely freed himself from a liberal perspective and, since Hobbes was understood to be the initiator of liberalism, a proper critique would require “a horizon beyond liberalism,” by which Strauss meant to view liberalism from a pre-liberal point of view. In order to see the essence of liberalism it had to be seen from the philosophical and political perspectives it overthrew and replaced.4 Now, as we will see, Strauss in 1932 equated “liberal” with “modern.” It is thus presumably the release from the

20 Becoming Leo Strauss (I)

“prejudice” that a “return to premodern philosophy is impossible” that is signified by that review rather than the discovery of esotericism. In fact, Strauss had already explicitly noticed the manner of writing of “heterodox thinkers of earlier ages,” without yet elevating it to a theory of writing and interpretation, before his Schmitt review appeared. In an essay entitled “The Philosophic Foundation of the Law: Maimonides’s Doctrine of Prophecy and its Sources,” originally published in 1933, but which Strauss claims in a note was written in the summer of 1931, Strauss had this to say: One can with a certain right call Maimonides’s position “medieval religious Enlightenment.” With a certain right: namely if one accepts the view that not only for the modern Enlightenment—and thus for the Age of Enlightenment proper, from which the expression “Enlightenment” is customarily transferred to certain phenomena of the Middle Ages (and of antiquity)—but also for Maimonides and his predecessors and successors in the Middle Ages, it is a matter of freedom of human thought, the “freedom of philosophizing.” But one must not for a moment leave any doubt that these medieval philosophers were precisely not Enlighteners in the proper sense; for them it was not a question of spreading light, of educating the multitude to rational knowledge, of enlightening; again and again they enjoin upon the philosophers the duty of keeping secret from the unqualified multitude the rationally known truth; for them—in contrast to the Enlightenment proper, that is, the modern Enlightenment—the esoteric character of philosophy was unconditionally established.5 Strauss does not elaborate on this distinction between the so-called medieval and modern Enlightenments in this essay. His concern is rather to establish the relationship between philosophy and prophecy in Maimonides’s thought. In this context, the limits to the enlightening of the multitude are framed within terms of imagination and theory. In reconciling philosophy with revelation, Maimonides, in Strauss’s reading, understood the prophet to occupy a higher rank than the philosopher because the former must convey the binding character of revelation to the multitude, and, since only some are capable of philosophical knowledge, the prophet must not only comprehend the meaning of revelation theoretically, as does the philosopher, but must also be capable of presenting that meaning figuratively to the multitude, in images.6 The distinction between the few wise and the vulgar multitude, and the emphasis placed upon it by Strauss, had figured prominently in his book on Spinoza, published the previous year but begun in 1925, which will be discussed in the next chapter. What is new in this 1931 essay, aside from the distinction between the esoteric and exoteric Enlightenments, is the tracing back of Maimonides’s conception of the

Becoming Leo Strauss (I) 21

prophet through his Islamic predecessors to Plato’s figure of the philosopher king. This is an important moment in Strauss’s intellectual history since it marks the beginning of his demonstrable interest in Plato, if not in breeding rabbits. The chronology is important for understanding the obfuscation with which Strauss has clouded his political views and the context in which they were formed as well as the evolution of his scholarly work. By 1931, Strauss had attached the terms “esoteric” and “exoteric” to texts and the specific political and social contexts in which they are composed. In 1932, in his review of Schmitt, he explicitly threw off the prejudice against pre-liberal, ergo premodern, philosophy, but there is no mention of esotericism in his review. Then, in May 1933, Strauss, writing from London, reacted to the Nazi assumption of power in his letter to Löwith, quoted in the previous chapter, by claiming that, “only from the principles of the Right, from the fascist, authoritarian, imperialist principles, can one protest against the dreadful state of affairs,” and not from “liberal” principles (i.e., the rights of man). This juxtaposition of liberal and non-liberal (i.e., “Right”) principles can be read as one between modern principles and premodern ones. This is clearly the case for “authoritarian” and “imperialist” principles, particularly since the latter are directly related in his letter to Roman practices. The reference to fascist principles is at first sight somewhat harder to place, but here it is important to distinguish between French and Italian fascism, on the one hand, and Nazism on the other, as noted above at the conclusion of chapter 1. Two years after his exchange with Löwith, in 1935, Strauss put together three essays—the 1931 essay on Maimonides already discussed, and two others—and published them as a book entitled Philosophie und Gesetz (translated into English in 1995 as Philosophy and Law). Here, in the two new essays and the book’s introduction, written later than the essays it introduces, Strauss amplifies the importance of his turn toward premodern thinkers. He repeats his argument against the prejudice in favor of the modern Enlightenment and his interpretation of Maimonides’s prophetology and the link to Plato. But his only mention of esotericism is in relation to the writings of the medieval Jewish philosopher Gersonides, who rejected it in favor of the open communication of philosophic truths.7 Similarly, in his book on Hobbes published in 1936, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, there is no mention of esotericism. Strauss returned to the issue of esotericism only after his emigration to the United States in 1937. When he did, an important shift took place in his formulation of the issue. In Persecution and the Art of Writing, published in 1952 and containing four essays written in the 1940s, including the title essay, from 1941, Strauss retained his focus on the wise few and the vulgar multitude in the writings of Maimonides, Spinoza, and other Jewish philosophers who reflected on the relationship between philosophy and

22 Becoming Leo Strauss (I)

revelation. But now, after his arrival in the country thought to embody the principles and practices of freedom of thought and expression, he also began to generalize the practice of esoteric writing and to suggest that it was not only not confined to the past, or to authoritarian regimes, but was an enduring feature of the relationship between philosophy and society; any society, even a “liberal” society. *** One of the first essays published by Leo Strauss after his arrival in the United States was “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” which appeared in the journal Social Research in 1941. The essay opens with a startling claim: In a considerable number of countries which, for about a hundred years, have enjoyed a practically complete freedom of public discussion, that freedom is now suppressed and replaced by a compulsion to coordinate speech with such views as the government believes to be expedient, or holds in all seriousness. It may be worth our while to consider briefly the effect of that compulsion, or persecution, on thoughts as well as actions.8 Strauss’s formulation is curious above all for the vagueness of its opening. The countries go unnamed, suggesting that his reference is not necessarily restricted to those occupied at that moment by the Nazi regime. But it is also curious in its equation of officially sanctioned views, whether merely “expedient” or truly believed, with a compulsion that amounts to persecution. He goes on to say that, “A large section of the people, probably the great majority of the younger generation, accepts the governmentsponsored views as true, if not at once at least after a time” (PAW, 22). A footnote relates his comment on the younger generation to the exchange regarding the so-called noble lie between Glaucon and Socrates in Plato’s Republic, where Glaucon asserts that while it may not be possible to get the citizens in the city under discussion to believe it, it might be possible to insinuate it among their children and future generations. Here too, then, Strauss is making a general assertion. These generalities signal that Strauss’s arguments concerning what he calls persecution with respect to thought and writing are not specific to the particular circumstances then prevailing in Germany or Occupied Europe or the Soviet Union. And perhaps most glaring of all, particularly in a writer as concerned with Jewish themes as was Strauss, at the moment when Jews are facing systematic persecution Strauss is focused instead on the “persecution” allegedly experienced by unorthodox writers.9 The compulsion that Strauss equates with persecution consists of the repetition of ideas in the arena of public discussion. More specifically, it is

Becoming Leo Strauss (I) 23

the repetition of ideas on the part of persons held to be responsible or who occupy an “exalted position,” such as a government leader, that Strauss claims tend to become accepted as true if they are never contradicted. It is important to understand what Strauss means by public discussion. He writes: What is called freedom of thought, in a large number of cases amounts to—and even for all practical purposes consists of—the ability to choose between two or more different views presented by a small minority of people who are public speakers or writers. If this choice is prevented, the only kind of intellectual independence of which many people are capable is destroyed, and that is the only freedom of thought which is of political importance. (PAW, 23) Strauss’s characteristic passive construction distances him from the view of freedom of thought he sets out, but the terminology is important here. Freedom of thought is carefully circumscribed by the caveat of political importance. It consists of the limited ability of ordinary people to reason, such that they are capable only of choosing between a restricted number of options presented to them not by philosophers but by public writers and speakers. Take away that choice and ordinary people have nothing to go on. That situation would obtain under conditions of one-party rule with such strict censorship that only one view is presented to the “many.” However, under conditions of wartime restrictions or intense government propaganda, the same condition might obtain in formally liberal societies. Indeed, the situation would not be qualitatively different in a liberal society in which the range of options presented to the public consisted of variations on a single dominant theme. While the common run of people may be drawn into this conformist world of views repeated so often they come to be accepted as true, all those whose thinking does not follow the rules of logica equina, in other words, all those capable of truly independent thinking, cannot be brought to accept the government-sponsored views. Persecution, then, cannot prevent independent thinking. It cannot prevent even the expression of independent thought. For it is as true today as it was more than two thousand years ago that it is a safe venture to tell the truth one knows to benevolent and trust-worthy acquaintances, or more precisely, to reasonable friends. Persecution cannot prevent even public expression of the heterodox truth, for a man of independent thought can utter his views in public and remain unharmed, provided he moves with circumspection. He can even utter them in print without incurring any danger, provided he is capable of writing between the lines. (PAW, 23–24)

24 Becoming Leo Strauss (I)

This is the essence of Strauss’s notion of esoteric writing, now formulated in conjunction with the threat it seeks to evade. It is predicated upon the existence of an intellectual elite able to insulate itself from the great mass of people who lack the capacity to truly think for themselves. Or at least from those who are unable to think about the most important things in a truly philosophical manner. There are thus three models presented by Strauss: 1. a condition of freedom of thought, in which the many choose between ideas presented to them by the government or public intellectuals; 2. a condition of the repression of freedom of thought by the restriction of ideas to one dominant one; and 3. the situation of true philosophers, who exist independently of either of the preceding conditions. The crucial distinction here is that between freedom of thought and independent thought. Those who are capable of independent thought are indifferent to the specific political society to which they belong, forming instead an elite society of their own. They are the Freemasons of intellect. The notion of writing between the lines presumes, on the one hand, a reader able to read between them, and, on the other, a greater number of those who cannot. “The fact which makes this literature possible,” Strauss asserts, “can be expressed in the axiom that thoughtless men are careless readers, and only thoughtful men are careful readers” (PAW, 25). And while esoteric texts require careful readers, careful writers must compose them. Esoteric writing is an art, and one of an exceptionally high order. The writer of such texts is presumed to be in complete control of his technique. The writer must signal his intentions, playing off explicit statements and oftrepeated assertions with “such blunders as would shame an intelligent high school boy.” These errors will alert the reader to the fact that “the real opinion of an author is not necessarily identical with that which he expresses in the largest number of passages” (PAW, 30). These and other criteria must be seen against a backdrop of orthodoxy. Without a prevailing orthodoxy maintained by some kind of sanctions, whether mild or harsh, there is no need for such an art of writing. But Strauss asserts that this has been the situation most of the time. He is at pains to be clear that persecution in his sense can be plotted along a continuum that runs from the Inquisition at one end to “social ostracism” at the other. Between these extremes are the types which are most important from the point of view of literary or intellectual history. Examples of these are found in the Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., in some Muslim countries of the early Middle Ages, in seventeenth-century Holland and England, and in eighteenth-century France and Germany —all of them comparatively liberal periods. . . . Nor should we overlook the fact, not sufficiently stressed by all authorities, that religious persecution and persecution of free inquiry are not identical. There were

Becoming Leo Strauss (I) 25

times and countries in which all kinds, or at least a great variety of kinds, of worship were permitted, but free inquiry was not. (PAW, 32–33) Thus Strauss is able to provide a list running from Anaxagoras to Socrates (who, it should be noted, never wrote anything) to Maimonides to Hobbes and Spinoza to Kant, all of whom “witnessed or suffered, during at least part of their lifetimes, a kind of persecution which was more tangible than social ostracism” (PAW, 33). In none of these eras was “public discussion” seriously restricted, as Strauss’s observation that they were “comparatively liberal periods” purposely acknowledges.10 Strauss pays particular attention to the period initiated by Spinoza in the seventeenth century. It was in this period that some writers, believing that persecution was the result of contingent circumstances, attempted to contribute to the abolition of persecution. These writers, looked forward to a time when, as a result of the progress of popular education, practically complete freedom of speech would be possible, or—to exaggerate for purposes of clarification—to a time when no one would suffer any harm from hearing any truth. They concealed their views only far enough to protect themselves as well as possible from persecution; had they been more subtle than that, they would have defeated their purpose, which was to enlighten an ever-increasing number of people who were not potential philosophers. (PAW, 33–34) Strauss goes on to contrast this optimism about universal enlightenment with “the attitude of an earlier type of writer,” who believed that the gulf between those few who are capable of philosophy and the vast majority who are not made such a project not only impossible but dangerous for all concerned. It is obvious that Strauss accepts the second view, though he carefully avoids presenting it as his own. Strauss summarized his discovery of esoteric writing in a 1954 essay responding to published criticisms of it in a passage worth quoting in full: In studying certain earlier thinkers, I became aware of this way of conceiving the relation between the quest for truth (philosophy or science) and society: Philosophy or science, the highest activity of man, is the attempt to replace opinion about “all things” by knowledge of ‘all things’; but opinion is the element of society; philosophy or science is therefore the attempt to dissolve the element in which society breathes, and thus it endangers society. Hence philosophy or science must remain the preserve of a small minority, and philosophers or scientists must respect the opinions on which society rests. To respect

26 Becoming Leo Strauss (I)

opinions is something entirely different from accepting them as true. Philosophers or scientists who hold this view about the relation of philosophy or science and society are driven to employ a peculiar manner of writing which would enable them to reveal what they regard as the truth to the few, without endangering the unqualified commitment of the many to the opinions on which society rests. They will distinguish between the true teaching as the esoteric teaching and the socially useful teaching as the exoteric teaching; whereas the exoteric teaching is meant to be easily accessible to every reader, the esoteric teaching discloses itself only to very careful and well-trained readers after long and concentrated study.11 Note the nuances of this claim. Strauss advances a particular notion of philosophy (or science, but the concept of science contained here is equivalent to that of philosophy); that is, philosophy is the quest for truth of “all things.” All philosophers who hold this view, and not some other view of what philosophy is, will practice a kind of prudence in the composition of their written texts. They will do this so as not to upset the delicate supports upon which society rests, foundations maintained by generally agreed upon opinion, not truth. This assumption itself rests upon the belief that philosophy is and must be the preserve of a few. The implication is that philosophy is not only dangerous to society, since it threatens to undermine its basis, but also dangerous for the philosopher. The philosopher may display an inner courage insofar as he is willing to challenge his own opinions, but would be foolhardy to invite the distemper of the many. Also entailed in this view is the claim, which Strauss made explicit in his St. John’s address, that philosophers are effectively “beyond good and evil,” since these moral terms are grounded in particular social contexts. Describing the consequences of his work on Maimonides, Strauss said, I arrived at a conclusion that I can state in the form of a syllogism: Philosophy is the attempt to replace opinion by knowledge; but opinion is the element of the city, hence philosophy is subversive, hence the philosopher must write in such a way that he will improve rather than subvert the city. In other words, the virtue of a philosopher’s thought is a certain kind of mania [inspired frenzy], while the virtue of the philosopher’s public speech is sophrosyne [temperance]. Philosophy is as such transpolitical, transreligious, and transmoral, but the city is and ought to be moral and religious. In the words of Thomas Aquinas, only reason informed by faith knows that God must be worshipped, and the intellectual virtues with the exception of prudence do not presuppose moral virtues. To illustrate this point, moral man, merely moral man, the kaloskagathos in the common meaning of the term [that is, the good

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man], is not simply closer to the philosopher than a man of the dubious morality of Alcibiades.12 To “improve rather than subvert the city” means to take a long and indirect path toward reform, but against what measure is improvement judged? Strauss does not say, but it is clearly not moral improvement. Instead, the philosopher, in his public speech, should move the city according to a standard existing outside the city, known to the philosopher and unknown to its citizens, but do so in a way that seems to accord with the conventions of the city. The good man is the man of the city; the philosopher is something else, and when Strauss suggests that Alcibiades is no further from the philosopher than the good man, he is asserting that the philosopher is outside the city and its moral categories, beyond good and evil. But “outside” means here outside the city’s conventions. Philosophers may reside in an ideal city of speech in their heads or in their conversation, they may even owe their greatest debt to that abstract city, but their bodies most definitely reside in a given city, and hence they have an interest in its stability and in the preservation of their bodies, if for no other reason than that they may continue to philosophize. And so the philosopher must negotiate his existence with and within the city. Discretion is called for in that negotiation. Sophrosyne is not a moral virtue. In Aristotle’s Ethics, sophrosyne is introduced within the more general discussion of prudence (phrone¯sis), which is an intellectual (as distinct from moral) virtue. Specifically, prudence is the virtue linking wisdom with action and is characteristic of the heads of households and political men. Temperance is necessary for the proper functioning of prudence because it shields prudence from the influence of the passions.13 So Strauss’s view is that philosophers must exercise self-restraint in their public performance, preserving their enthusiasms for their engagement with ideas and with other philosophers. It is not difficult to discern a particular understanding of Platonic philosophy and its practice in Strauss’s account of philosophy and society. In Strauss’s story, Socrates undertook the questioning of all established opinion, an undertaking that first engendered the ridicule of his fellow citizens, as exemplified in Aristophanes’ comedy, The Clouds, and later their enmity in the wake of the despotic rule of the Thirty Tyrants that followed Athens’s defeat in its war with the Spartan alliance. The result was Socrates’ condemnation and death. Thereafter, Plato, in Strauss’s reading, adopted the more circumspect approach described in Strauss’s account of philosophy and its relationship to society. That approach, in turn, was adopted by the medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophers whom Strauss studied in the late 1920s, after his early interest in Spinoza led him regressively to the study of Maimonides and thence to Alfarabi. It was the last of these, Strauss wrote in the introduction to Persecution and the Art of Writing,

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who ascribed to Plato the view that in the Greek city the philosopher was in grave danger. In making this statement, he merely repeated what Plato himself had said. To a considerable extent, the danger was averted by the art of Plato, as Farabi likewise noted. But the success of Plato must not blind us to the existence of a danger which, however much its forms may vary, is coeval with philosophy. (PAW, 21) Strauss’s “discovery” of this art of writing, and the chronology in which its emergence in his work occurs, raises several important questions and it has been extensively debated. But that debate has served to obscure rather than clarify the nature of Strauss’s political thought in his German period. As a general observation, it is easily conceded that some writers have engaged in the practice of esoteric writing. The difficulty becomes one of identifying which writers in which specific situations. The more controversial issues revolve around the specific claim regarding philosophy and opinion and the deep antagonism latent in the relationship between the philosopher and society, a relationship that must be mediated by strategies of deception. Perhaps more controversial still, Strauss’s “discovery” raises the question whether or not he himself engaged in such an art of writing and consequently also the question of how to read him. These questions must be supplemented by the acknowledgment that Strauss’s recounting of his writings in Germany during these decades were given after many years residing and teaching in the United States and with a posteriori knowledge of the fate of German Jews. The change of environment within which Strauss wrote is itself relevant to the question of how to read these accounts. They may therefore be read as adaptations to an entirely different political and cultural context from those upon which he is reflecting and as containing a certain amount of foreshadowing. Independently of the issue of their possible esotericism, therefore, there is ample reason for caution in accepting Strauss’s accounts in his own terms. My claim is that Strauss’s political views remained roughly unchanged from the 1930s on. Those views were deeply antithetical to what he saw as the Enlightenment doctrines underlying liberalism and democracy. What did change were two things: following his engagement with Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political, Strauss was able to focus his already formed political position on the concept of nature, including human nature; and secondly, the social and political context in which he found himself. Those changes are refracted through Strauss’s political rhetoric. It seems clear enough that Strauss at some point adopted the view of philosophy that he ascribes to esoteric writers, of philosophy as the quest for truth of “all things,” and therefore that we should expect him, at the very least, to practice prudence in his public writings, especially once he had drawn attention to this view. But it is just as likely that this view of philosophy

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was adopted, at least in part, to accord with his already formed, selfconsciously heterodox political position, which he sought to shield by, and mediate through, this view of philosophy. The autobiographical 1965 preface presumptively meets the criterion of prudential writing, though many commentators fail to systematically take this into account when basing their treatment of Strauss’s European period on his own testimony.14 But while there is a presumptive doubt about the veracity of this testimony, the chronology I have established above indicates that there is no reason to assume that Strauss was engaged in hiding his views beneath a veil before his emigration to the United States, even though he had “discovered” esotericism at least as early as 1931. So what follows will be an intertwined process of recovering Strauss’s political position in Germany and uncovering what is veiled in his subsequent autobiographical accounts. *** After his declaration in the 1965 preface regarding the “theologico-political predicament” in which he found himself when writing his book on Spinoza, Strauss goes on to claim that, “At that time Germany was a liberal democracy. The regime was known as the Weimar Republic” (PSCR, 1). These innocuous sounding statements are actually freighted with meaning. To refer to the Weimar Republic as a liberal democracy is almost a commonplace in contemporary terms, but its meaning in the context of Strauss’s position in the 1920s is not transparent. Strauss apparently did not use the locution “liberal democracy” in his published writings during the period in question.15 Recalling that Strauss’s review essay on Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political was included in the same volume as the preface, it is instructive to note that Schmitt clearly distinguished liberalism from democracy in that text and others.16 Schmitt associates liberalism with individualism, which, with its insistence upon the priority of personal freedom, results in a consistent depoliticization of society and emphasis instead upon economic and social matters. Private law, morality, and economic concerns are the stuff of liberalism. Democracy, by contrast, is understood as entailing a thoroughgoing egalitarianism and collectivism, a trend Schmitt sees as leading toward the realization of the total state. By blurring the lines between state and society, democracy thus represents a tendency opposed to liberalism’s separation of spheres.17 In the body of his text on Spinoza, in fact, Strauss explicitly recognizes that liberalism and democracy are distinct by distinguishing between liberal and democratic elements in Spinoza’s political theory (SCR, 243). Indeed, later in the preface itself, in a formulation absent in its precise form from the book that follows, he says of Spinoza that his political theory differs from classical republicanism insofar as “the republic which he favors is a liberal democracy. He was the first philosopher who was both a democrat and a liberal. He was the philosopher

30 Becoming Leo Strauss (I)

who founded liberal democracy, a specifically modern regime” (PSCR, 16). One question to consider, therefore, is why does Strauss use the notion of “liberal democracy” in 1962 to categorize Weimar and Spinoza’s philosophy? Further, by referring to Weimar and to liberal democracy as “regimes,” Strauss intends to convey more than the term’s narrow meaning in common usage. “Regime” is a term of art deployed by Strauss in his American writings that roughly translates Aristotle’s concept of politeia.18 By this term, Strauss means to signify the totality of the way of life of a political community rather than simply its form of government. From the point of view of the regime, a change in the form of government entails a fundamental change in the life of the community as a whole. What, then, does Strauss mean to signify by categorizing Weimar and liberal democracy as regimes? Strauss situates Weimar in relation to two traditions: German and French. These traditions are given human shape in the personages of Bismarck and Goethe, respectively. In this juxtaposition, it appears that Strauss means to assign to Bismarck the notion of a Germany that occupies its central position against the cultural intrusions from the west as well as from the east (Russia). Goethe, on the other hand, is tied to the “leaning” toward the west, but is said to have identified fully neither with Germany nor with the French Revolution. Thus, “By linking itself to Weimar the German liberal democracy proclaimed its moderate, non-radical character: its resolve to keep a balance between dedication to the principles of 1789 and dedication to the highest German tradition” (PSCR, 1). The principles of 1789 were, of course, those of the so-called Rights of Man, but the principles underlying the German tradition are left somewhat obscure. The presumption is that these principles are essentially those of a cultural and linguistic nationalism. The Weimar Republic was weak, Strauss claims. By 1925, everyone could tell that its days were numbered. “The old Germany was stronger—stronger in will—than the new Germany,” he notes, adding that, while Weimar was doomed, the victory of the National Socialists was not foreordained. Rather, he attributes the Nazi victory to the strength of will and political acumen of Adolph Hitler, just as, citing Leon Trotsky’s history of the Russian Revolution as his authority, communism triumphed because of Lenin’s role in that country. This explanation leaves open the question of what other alternatives were thought possible by contemporaries in light of Weimar’s imminent demise. What alternatives did Strauss envision at the time? Strauss notes two explanations for Weimar’s weakness, only to dismiss them both. “Half-Marxists,” he writes, attribute the regime’s fragility to economic factors, while others cite the impact of the harsh measures imposed on a defeated Germany after World War I. He rejects the first explanation on the grounds that other liberal democracies survived the same economic conditions and the second because it overlooks the fact that liberal

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democracy had always been weak in Germany, proven by the fact that it had failed after 1848, when the conditions for its success would seem to have been brighter (PSCR, 1–2). In setting out on his own path toward an explanation, Strauss invokes an enigmatic principle of interpretation: It is safer to try to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low. In doing the latter one necessarily distorts the high, whereas in doing the former one does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal itself fully as what it is. (PSCR, 2) This principle then justifies his turn away from the immediate explanations for the crisis faced by the Weimar Republic and toward an interpretation of its titular origin in Goethe’s Weimar, which is to say the “greatest epoch of German thought and letters,” the “classical Germany” of the last third of the eighteenth and first third of the nineteenth century. And the first thing Strauss wishes to note of this epoch is that, “No one can say that classical Germany spoke clearly and distinctly in favor of liberal democracy.” Given that the term is anachronistic, it would be strange if anyone did. But Strauss’s argument is instructive nonetheless. He takes Rousseau to be the progenitor of classical Germany, and the ambivalences within Rousseau’s thought played themselves out there. On the one hand, Strauss claims, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, with its advocacy of a constitutional monarchy and a bureaucratic state elite, represents the “radicalization” of Rousseau’s thought. At the same time, Strauss sees Rousseau as “the first modern critic of the fundamental modern project (man’s conquest of nature for the sake of the relief of man’s estate) who thereby laid the foundation for the distinction, so fateful for German thought, between civilization and culture.” Rousseau’s thought thus divides into streams that lead to the French Revolution and the rights of man, in one branch, and the German romantic reaction to the Revolution in the other. These streams were immediately linked because the victory of the principles of the Revolution in Germany coincided with the end of the Middle Ages there, and the beginning of a longing for their loss: All profound German longings—for those for the Middle Ages were not the only ones nor even the most profound—all these longings for the origins or, negatively expressed, all German dissatisfaction with modernity, pointed toward a third Reich, for Germany was to be the core even of Nietzsche’s Europe ruling the planet. (PSCR, 2) Thus, a third Reich, but not necessarily the Third Reich.

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Strauss himself shared the German dissatisfaction with modernity and his intellectual development took place within that shared space, as we shall see presently. The nature of his longing, if indeed he did long for something, is a bit harder to define. In moving toward that definition, it is important to note direct and indirect references to two figures in Strauss’s depiction of German development after Rousseau. Strauss comments that, “It has been said, not without reason, that Hegel’s rule over Germany came to an end only on the day Hitler came to power” (PSCR, 2). Strauss does not say that it was Carl Schmitt who said this.19 Strauss thus opens and closes his Preface with whispered references to Schmitt. The overt textual reference is to Friedrich Nietzsche. Unlike Schmitt, Nietzsche—and especially his text Beyond Good and Evil—is a constant, and explicit, presence in the Preface, and indeed throughout Strauss’s writings.20 Nietzsche is once again invoked as Strauss begins his interpretation of the condition of German Jews. The weakness of “liberal democracy” accounts for the fact that “the situation of the indigenous Jews was more precarious in Germany than in any other Western country” (PSCR, 2–3). “Liberal democracy” in this accounting stands variously for modernity and for the modern Enlightenment. This is obvious in Strauss’s claim that liberal democracy stood in opposition to medieval society understood as “the kingdom of darkness.”21 This also means that it stood in opposition to the longing for the Middle Ages previously mentioned. This seems to account for the comments that follow, since Strauss then notes that religion, and specifically Catholicism, provided the essential social bond in the Middle Ages, and that, “The action most characteristic of the Middle Ages is the Crusades; it may be said to have culminated not accidentally in the murder of whole Jewish communities” (PSCR, 3). This curious comment, tinged with a distancing irony, is followed by the observation that the German Jews were emancipated by the effects of the French Revolution and were given full political rights under the Weimar Republic. They therefore accepted the modern, liberal notion that religion is a private matter, and the consequences were catastrophic. The connection of German Jews to liberal democracy’s opposition to the Middle Ages leads to an inevitable result once German longing reaches a position of power: The Weimar Republic was succeeded by the only German regime—the only regime ever anywhere—which had no other clear principle than murderous hatred of the Jews, for “Aryan” had no clear meaning other than “non-Jewish.” One must keep in mind that Hitler did not come from Prussia, nor even from Bismarck’s Reich. (PSCR, 3) While Strauss once again places the onus on the personality of Hitler, this interpretation seems to contradict Strauss’s earlier claim that the triumph

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of National Socialism was not foreordained in the crisis faced by Weimar. How to account for this? It suggests that while the specific situation of German Jews was a particularly vulnerable one because of the attitude of German cultural nationalists towards them, it was decisive only in the context of a universal vulnerability represented by the liberal democratic order, so that their destruction was initiated by an outsider to the Bismarckean Reich against which Weimar identified itself. The relationship of German Jews to German society and to German thought is of utmost importance to Strauss. Emancipation brought a supposed assimilation. Strauss draws an important distinction between post-emancipation German Jews and the golden age of Spanish Jewry. The flourishing of thought among the latter was a result of its absorption of Greek thought by way of Islamic philosophers. That is to say, Spanish Jews were not fully assimilated intellectually, since they responded to the Greek element in Islamic philosophy. By contrast, the great Jewish intellectuals of Germany were steeped in German thought, the thought of the particular nation in the midst of which they lived— a thought that was understood to be German essentially: political dependence was also spiritual dependence. This was the core of the predicament of German Jewry. (PSCR, 3) This was also, in a way, the predicament of Strauss himself. By absorbing a Greek element into their thought, Spanish Jewish philosophers absorbed what Strauss considers a truly universal element. They managed to maintain a distance from their philosophical and political environment. In this interpretation, the later Strauss is reflecting upon his own discovery of the esoteric style of Maimonides, whose esotericism was made necessary by precisely that distance. German Jews, including the young Strauss, knew no such intellectual distance, even as they experienced social discrimination on an individual and collective level. Strauss’s own intellectual journey did not manifest a break with all German thought—we have already noted Schmitt and Nietzsche—but rather an affiliation with that element of German thought that pointed toward true universality; that is, toward the Greeks. Strauss illustrates the situation of German Jews by reference to three authors. He quotes a passage from Goethe’s novel, Wilhelm Meister, in which Jews are said to be necessarily excluded from a culture grounded in Christianity. Strauss then cites Nietzsche, “two generations later,” who announced, again in Beyond Good and Evil (in this case, to section 251), that, “I have not yet met a German who was favorably disposed toward the Jews” (PSCR, 3). Strauss points out that, in context, it is clear Nietzsche does not share this view. However, he notes, “two generations later, in

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1953, Heidegger could speak of the ‘inner truth and greatness of National Socialism’ ” (PSCR, 4). As Strauss’s note to this comment makes clear, the 1953 text in question, An Introduction to Metaphysics, consists of lectures delivered in 1935, and Heidegger chose not to delete the passage in question when they were published eighteen years later. Having distanced Nietzsche from the attitude toward Jews that he reports, Strauss is less forgiving of Heidegger, though he prefaces the quotation by noting that the unfavorable attitude displayed toward Jews is manifested even in someone who might be “favorably disposed toward this or that man or woman of Jewish origin” (PSCR, 4).22 Thus we have three questions—what was Strauss’s attitude toward liberalism and democracy? What does he mean when he refers to Weimar as a regime? What alternatives did he see to Weimar at the time?—and three key contemporary figures silently or explicitly evoked in his description of German intellectual developments: Carl Schmitt, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger. The three questions and the three figures are interconnected, as will become clearer as we explore the development of Strauss’s views in the chapters that follow. But we can begin to answer the question of alternatives by following the account of the Jewish problem given by Strauss in his 1965 preface. *** While Strauss’s reference to Hitler represents a foreshadowing in his account of how he came to write his book on Spinoza, since Hitler came to power three years after the book’s publication, his description of the situation of German Jews in relation to the liberal doctrine of the rights of man is more or less faithful to his position at the time. Fully understanding that position entails a recounting of the trajectory of Zionism, which Strauss provides. That trajectory consists of three stages. The combination of the liberal assumption of rights with the palpable existence of anti-Semitism was conceptualized as the “Jewish problem”—Strauss noting that in the nineteenth-century’s liberal optimistic mode, “much, if not all, sufferings” were conceived as “problems which as such were soluble as a matter of course” (PSCR, 4)—and the solutions to this problem took form in Zionism. The first form was the political Zionism of Theodor Herzl and Leon Pinsker, which, while provoked by the failure of the liberal solution, nevertheless remained within the liberal framework insofar as it continued to see the problem “as a merely human problem” and therefore to be solved politically through the acquisition of a state. Political Zionism, then, strictly understood was the movement of an elite on behalf of a community constituted by common descent and common degradation, for the restoration of their honor through the

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acquisition of statehood and therefore of a country—of any country: the land which the strictly political Zionism promised to the Jews was not necessarily the land of Israel. (PSCR, 5). Writing from the perspective of the 1960s, Strauss acknowledges the success achieved by political Zionism in the eventual founding of Israel, a “blessing for all Jews everywhere regardless of whether they admit it or not,” (PSCR, 5) but nevertheless, political Zionism could not solve the Jewish problem. Its weakness was revealed by the second stage, which was that of cultural Zionism. The state conceived by political Zionism requires a cultural substance, a “national mind.” Cultural Zionism attempted to provide Jews with a cultural substance grounded in a collective heritage, yet the foundation, the authoritative layer, of the Jewish heritage presents itself, not as a product of the human mind, but as a divine gift, as divine revelation. Did one not completely distort the meaning of the heritage to which one claimed to be loyal by interpreting it as a culture like any other high culture? Cultural Zionism believed it had found a safe middle ground between politics (power politics) and divine revelation, between the sub-cultural and the supra-cultural, but it lacked the sternness of these two extremes. When cultural Zionism understands itself, it turns into religious Zionism. But when religious Zionism understands itself, it is in the first place Jewish faith and only secondarily Zionism. (PSCR, 6) Religious Zionism is thus the third stage. Returning to the standpoint of 1965, Strauss remarks that religious Zionism is at fundamental odds with its political counterpart, since it cannot conceive of the solution to the Jewish problem in human terms. In that sense, for religious Zionism the Galut, Exile, must subsume the state of Israel rather than being ended by it. We thus arrive at the greater significance the Jewish problem assumed for Strauss. The liberal state, with its sharp division between the rights recognized in its political sphere and the discrimination it allows in the private sphere, cannot solve the Jewish problem that it engenders because “such a solution would require a legal prohibition against every kind of ‘discrimination,’ i.e. the abolition of the private sphere, the denial of the difference between state and society, the destruction of the liberal state” (PSCR, 6). But what does that then mean for the liberal state? According to Strauss, “To realize that the Jewish problem is insoluble means ever to bear in mind the truth proclaimed by Zionism regarding the limitations of liberalism.” Those limitations are concentrated in the central tenet of

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liberalism regarding the relegation of religion to a private sphere outside the purview of the state. This insulation from political discrimination, however, does not present barriers to social discrimination, as the experience of emancipated German Jews made clearly manifest. Now, it is reasonable to assume that at the time Strauss wrote this assessment he was familiar with the similar argument of Karl Marx in his essay, “On the Jewish Question.”23 In Marx’s interpretation, the universal rights embodied in the liberal state are merely abstract and formal. That abstraction allows concrete distinctions to exist in civil society. Marx’s answer to the Jewish question is the realization of the universal principles in concrete reality through overcoming the distinction between state and civil society. For Marx, as for Strauss, the Jewish problem is not an isolated one, but rather a signifier of a fundamental problem in the liberal state. In Strauss’s vocabulary, Marx’s solution to the liberal state would be the democratic one, dissolving the separation of public and private and thus dissolving the liberal state. But Strauss does not address this notion directly in his preface. Instead, he engages once again in foreshadowing. Rather than say that the Jewish problem is insoluble within the liberal state, Strauss declares it insoluble tout court. The proof is the anti-Jewish policies of the Soviet Union, where Stalin deployed tactics previously used, “not to say invented by,” Hitler. Strauss cautions: This is not to say that Communism has become what National Socialism always was, the prisoner of an anti-Jewish ideology, but it makes use of anti-Jewish measures in an unprincipled manner when and where they seem to be expedient. It is merely to confirm our contention that the uneasy “solution of the Jewish problem” offered by the liberal state is superior to the Communist “solution”. (PSCR, 6–7) What is that “uneasy solution”? It means recognizing the limitations of liberalism, which are reflected in the relationship of the Galut to the state of Israel, and beyond that, the limits of any attempt to solve fundamental political problems: The establishment of the state of Israel is the most profound modification of the Galut which has occurred, but it is not the end of the Galut: in the religious sense, and perhaps not only in the religious sense, the state of Israel is a part of the Galut. Finite, relative problems can be solved; infinite, absolute problems cannot be solved. In other words, human beings will never create a society which is free of contradictions. From every point of view it looks as if the Jewish people were the chosen people in the sense, at least, that the Jewish problem

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is the most manifest symbol of the human problem as a social or political problem. (PSCR, 6) Thus the solution is not a solution, after all, but rather a realization of limits. What is the effect of all this foreshadowing, of the invocation of Hitler, Stalin, and the creation of Israel? By bringing these future events into his narrative of his own life, Strauss gives the impression that his choices at the time were limited.24 The foreshadowing obscures his initial claim that by 1925 there was no doubt that Weimar was doomed and that a new Reich was on the horizon. That claim means that in 1925 the liberal state was in a crisis from which it was not expected to recover. There was no premonition of the victory of the National Socialists; rather, there were a variety of political options thought to be viable, even necessary. Except for his discussion of Zionism, Strauss is notably silent about what options he considered at the time. We can say categorically that preservation of the liberal state, or the “liberal democratic regime” more generally, was not one of them. *** Leo Strauss’s political engagement was from the beginning an intellectual one. His conversion, as he later put it, to political Zionism should be seen within the wider context of the Jewish youth associations of the late imperial and early Weimar years in Germany. These groups were modeled on the German Wandervögel movement, begun around the turn of the century, which brought together youths who shared a “contempt for modernity, for urban civilization, and for the materialism of adult society.”25 Decentralized in structure, they combined a taste for mysticism with hiking in the countryside singing folk songs. The guiding spirit was identification with the German Volk. Crucially, their purpose was to establish a German spiritual identity that necessarily brought the movement into confrontation with the Jewish problem. While a few within the groups favored admitting assimilated Jews, and still fewer were willing to admit Jews without restriction, most groups either rejected admission of Jews on the grounds that they were racially inferior or favored recognizing Jews as a separate and autonomous Volk. All of these positions, however, were based on the presumption that Jews were culturally and racially distinct from Germans.26 The faction recognizing Jews as a distinct Volk unsurprisingly had some sympathy with Zionism. And indeed, the Jüdischer Wanderbund BlauWeiss was established in imitation of the Wandervögel groups. Like them, it sought to develop a national identity through hiking and connecting to a national tradition, but for the young Jews who joined this group, there was an inherent tension between its aims of cultivating a Jewish national

38 Becoming Leo Strauss (I)

identity and the German landscape through which it wandered.27 More importantly, George L. Mosse has observed that the Jewish groups absorbed many of the conceptualizations of German nationhood into their own, including the ideal of the heroic, which affected their internal politics, transforming them from relatively democratic to “leadership” organizations: Thus, this important movement of Jewish youth, attempting to evolve a deep-seated Zionist identity, assimilated certain aspects of the ideology of the German Youth Movement into its theoretical framework. Here we have another instance of German-Jewish symbiosis, but the Zionist solution was rejected by the vast assimilationist liberal Jewish majority.28 Strauss himself belonged to the Blau-Weiss and contributed to debates within the movement. In a contribution in January 1923 to a Zionist youth publication, Strauss commented upon the merger of Blau-Weiss with another Zionist youth group. Exemplifying the trajectory from a democratic to a leader-led organization outlined by Mosse, Blau-Weiss had come under the influence of Walter Moses, who represented what Strauss called the “German-Jewish and power politics-oriented wing” of the group. Moses advocated a military-like hierarchical structure for Blau-Weiss under the leadership of an all-powerful Führer and aiming at emigration to Palestine. Strauss, a critic of the faction represented by Moses, remarked, One should not let oneself be deceived by the political demands of Walter Moses. What he calls “political” is political in the ancient sense of the word, rather than in the modern sense that is relevant for us. What is hidden behind his absolute negation of the sphere of the “private” is not a modern Leviathan, but rather the pagan-fascist counterpart of that, which, in the case of the Frankfurt faction, bears a mystical-humanitarian stamp. (To be sure, both of these attitudes are modern, even though they are antimodern, which is precisely what renders them inner-modern.)29 That Strauss still identified with the modern sensibility, even though critical of it, is made explicit when he writes that, even if we completely set aside the question of whether the rejection of the modern spirit can be justified at all, it is still self-evident that it is impossible to extricate oneself from modern life without employing modern means. Thus we have no need whatever to enter into a discussion of the usual insults, by now quite hackneyed, hurled at the “bourgeois” attitude.30 By “modern spirit” Strauss means a secular one, though he feared that it lacked spiritual depth. And so Strauss advocates the spirit of radical critique

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to provide that depth: “we unambiguously profess the spirit of sobriety as opposed to that of pathetic declamation. ‘Belief’ may still be decisive, yet belief is no oracle but is subject to the control of historical reasoning.”31 This position puts Strauss in a critical stance toward both the political Zionism of Walter Moses and the cultural Zionism represented by the socalled Frankfurt faction. Strauss expressed the dilemma faced by such a position in terms of Exile, or Galut. German Jews faced a tradition that was at one and the same time German and Jewish. German Jews had to develop a critical relationship to this tradition, not only because [its] content is conditioned by, and supportive of, galut and therefore endangers our Zionism but also because inherent in this content as religious content is a definite claim to truth that is not satisfied by the fulfillment of national demands. The distinction we make here between “religious” and “national” undoubtedly contradicts ancient Jewish reality; it is the legacy of the liberal Judaism of the previous century. Nonetheless, it is presently unavoidable. For this ancient Jewish world, which was enclosed in itself, has been destroyed, and the spiritual presuppositions of life in that world have been canceled by the intrusion of modern science.32 Religion, Strauss claims, demands belief, and a properly religious attitude is to be found in the biblical experience of religion rather than in the modern humanist attitude, which Strauss characterizes as “an expression of the needs of the soul (especially for the ‘sanctification of the human being’).”33 Even worse is “the banal nonsense that believes that the national encounter [Erlebnis]—the humble and reverent experience of the people forces [Volkskräfte] that tower over us—is religion.”34 Against the humanist creation of the concept of God that satisfies human needs or sanctifies human practices stands the original experience of God before anything else. This experience, once simply experienced, must today be “explicitly enacted”: “an ‘explicit’ act of faith must take the place of the belief in God, a belief that was selfevident to earlier generations and that was simply invested (‘implicit’) in their world.”35 The “theological-political predicament” in which Strauss felt himself gripped is thus presented here in his simultaneous demand for reason and faith, with reason understood in the sense of modern science. And while he tried to maintain that there was a “modern” way out of this dilemma, his appeal to a pre-Enlightenment religiosity is an indication that Strauss was beginning to sense an alternative. One aspect of a modern solution is nationalism. Strauss’s critique of political Zionism expresses his sense of its limited concept of the nation. That limit consists of the liberal model that Herzl followed, which identified the nation with the state. For an alternative, Strauss turned toward the

40 Becoming Leo Strauss (I)

Right. In 1924, he wrote an essay on Paul de Lagarde, the late nineteenthcentury anti-Semitic writer whose criticisms of the lack of spiritual unity within the new German nation and promotion of the idea of the Volk against the forces of democratization and urbanization made him the de facto founder of the Volkish movement.36 Significantly, Lagarde described his writings as “theological-political.” His anti-Semitism was grounded in his interpretation of Jewish religion rather than race, which did not, however, prevent him from calling for their extermination as infectious organisms.37 Lagarde identified Jews with liberalism and the liberal state, to which he opposed an authentic German spirit understood in religious terms. Strauss turns to Lagarde as part of what he sees as the necessity of reflectiveness entailed in Zionism, which has willfully rendered the existence of Jews problematic. Noting that justice requires being able to see oneself in the eyes of the other, the Zionist must be concerned “with the ways and means by which the Jewish essence [das jüdische Wesen] is mirrored in the mind of other peoples” as “an act of national justice.”38 Strauss makes plain that in his view Lagarde is a modern thinker despite his reverence for the Middle Ages, and that he manifests the quality of “probity” (Redlichkeit), or intellectual seriousness that Strauss finds characteristic of certain nineteenthcentury trends, including one that results “out of resignation in the face of the bourgeois-proletarian-Cossack future of Europe” and within which he places Lagarde.39 This probity causes Lagarde to criticize an ossified Protestantism whose roots lay in Pauline Christianity, wherein the law takes precedence over spirit and Judaism thereby triumphed over the gospel. “What the fulfillment of the Law from Sinai, immutable and given once and for all times, is to Judaism, the belief in the unique event of the Crucifixion and in the unique event of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is to Pauline Christianity,” Strauss summarizes. “In both cases religion is the attitude toward something finished, rigid, and objective, which is the exact opposite of evangelical piety and Germanic inwardness [Innerlichkeit].” This position would have led Lagarde “to concern himself with Judaism even if there were no ‘Jewish question’ in Germany.”40 Furthermore, Lagarde’s contempt for Judaism and liberalism were one and the same, since, in Lagarde’s view, “liberalism is secularized Judaism. It too is characterized by a superstitious belief in the rigid, objective, unique, and isolated fact. Only thus have the Jews been able to gain influence over the Germans, without rebirth in the German spirit.”41 Because Lagarde understands the nation as the fundamental spiritual unit of human association, the state appears as an instrument of the nation. Further, individuals are subsumed within the nation rather than appearing as autonomous entities, and therefore one can speak only of the rights of the nation rather than of individuals. Human rights have no meaning in this framework. Nor does assimilation of individuals. Upon this basis, the state, which is the political instrument of the nation, can demand either expulsion

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or assimilation of subjugated peoples. With reference to the Jews, the German state’s policy should act to restrict Jewish influence upon the German nation, while the ultimate goal would be either complete assimilation or expulsion.42 Reviewing Lagarde’s assertions and demands, Strauss concludes his essay by observing that, one does well to be clear about the fact that they are supported by a radical moralism—by the same moralism that prompted Lagarde’s rejection of Paulinism. No sooner do they almost touch than they move apart—the radical moralism of the German hailing from Fichte, and the radical moralism of the Zionist writers and politicians who stand under entirely different influences.43 Michael Zank interprets this passage to indicate two affinities between Lagarde and Strauss: a “radical moralism” shared by the two writers that is grounded in political convictions and that transcends conventional moral discourse of a liberal or religious nature; and a sense that “religion was the decisive factor in establishing political differences between nations,” which is signaled by the fact that both understand their concerns as “theologicalpolitical” ones.44 *** These early writings show an author deeply uneasy toward the modern sensibility but unable to find a way out. Liberal modernity is the problem; it cannot provide the solution. He was yet to throw off the modern “prejudice” against the truth of premodern philosophy. That was soon to change.

Chapter 3

Becoming Leo Strauss (II)

The political and cultural Zionisms that Strauss wrestled with in the early 1920s he understood to be situated within the modern sensibility: they were “innermodern.” In order to better understand these currents and the critiques of Orthodoxy they contain, in 1925 he began a study of the seventeenthcentury philosopher Benedict Spinoza, whose Theologico-Political Treatise Strauss claims initiated the modern approach to Biblical study. “In our time scholars generally study the Bible in the manner in which they study any other book,” Strauss writes in the introduction to the result of his turn to Spinoza, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion.1 The presupposition of such an approach is rejection of revealed religion, and Spinoza’s book is of importance because it represents the Enlightenment’s critique of revelation. If Spinoza’s critique is sound, there is no basis for Orthodoxy because Orthodoxy rests upon the possibility of revelation. This text has received attention mostly from those who are interested in pursuing the “theological-political predicament” in Strauss’s work. Even then, it is often reduced in importance relative to Strauss’s later preface to the work and others of his writings on Spinoza and/or Judaism. 2 My interest in the text is somewhat different. The first draft of Strauss’s book was completed in 1928 and the final manuscript was published in 1930.3 Strauss dates his self-described “change of orientation” around 1932 and his critique of Carl Schmitt. My purpose in giving an exegesis of Spinoza’s Critique of Religion is to see what it can tell us about that change. In particular, Strauss gives an interpretation of Hobbes in comparison to Spinoza in this text, and that provides an opportunity for comparison with his treatment in The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, completed and published after his encounter with Schmitt. Thus this chapter will be primarily devoted to three of Strauss’s texts published within a span of six years: Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, “Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political,” and The Political Philosophy of Hobbes. ***

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The leitmotiv of Spinoza’s Critique of Religion is found in Strauss’s emphasis on the Epicurean tradition as the root of all criticism of religion. Strauss’s argument is that the motive for the critique of religion can be separated from the critique itself. The motive is the achievement of a condition of happiness understood as ataraxia, or freedom from disturbance. Basing himself largely on Lucretius’s De rerum natura, Strauss argues that Epicurean science aimed first and foremost at elimination of the fear of the gods and fear of death. Ignorance of the causes of phenomena, which are thus ascribed to the capricious or malicious actions of gods, must be replaced with a true understanding of those causes in order for fear to be attenuated. Strauss emphasizes that in such a context, those truths that produce tranquility might be a priori acceptable. Ascribing a motive to Epicurus he derives from the texts of his followers, Strauss notes that, it is in no sense to be said that Epicurus consciously reconstructs the world as a figment in harmony with his impelling interest. Rather it is that his dominant will to self-liberation from fear disposes him to seek out and prefer facts which work for equanimity and consolation. It is not only the specific scientific findings which are modified by this tendency, but the specific scientific approach as a whole. (SCR, 41) Thus, “it is not truth qua truth which brings calm, but the particular truth that there is no ground for fear” (SCR, 41). The centrality of the motive behind Epicureanism becomes clear when Strauss declares that this motive, the desire for tranquility of mind and freedom from confusion, represents “a universal human motivation for rebellion against religion” (SCR, 42). Strauss traces this tradition forward through the twelfth-century Andalusian-Arab philosopher Averroës (Ibn Rushd), whose translations and commentaries on Aristotle led to the recovery of the Greek philosopher’s legacy in Europe. While the Epicureans counseled a withdrawal from the world into the proverbial garden, the Averroist approach is one of necessary engagement with civic life. “Since eudaimonia is found in contemplation or theory, and theory is accessible only to the few who are wise, special precautions are needed for the guidance of the ignorant many, for the sake of law and order,” Strauss notes, summarizing a position he claims dates from the Greek sophists. “This assumes that civil government, which regulates and supervises only external human actions, is not in itself sufficient for orderly corporate life within society” (SCR, 47). The crucial difference from the pagan Epicureans is that social life in the twelfth century was based upon revealed religion and revealed religion originated in the actions and words of individuals. Thus can be understood the importance given by the Averroist tradition to the role of the prophet in maintaining social order. Strauss claims that,

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According to Averroism, the gift which enables the prophet, as distinct from the philosopher, to perform his function is imagination, the capacity which operates most purely in our dreams. Prophecy, born of the joint activity of imagination and intelligence, makes its appeal to the imagination of the many. Prophesy appeals to the striving of the many after material satisfactions in order to move the many to externally virtuous behavior (the many being considered incapable of true virtue). (SCR, 48) So while the philosopher may reject religion in the pursuit of truth, he must also recognize the role religion plays in the social order, a role mediated not by the philosopher but by the prophet. The third figure Strauss introduces in tracing the development of the Epicurean tradition is Machiavelli, whom Strauss loosely links to Averroism (SCR, 48).4 Machiavelli embraced the political possibilities of prophecy by wishing to exploit religion’s potential for fostering political virtue. But Strauss is careful to insert an important distinction between Machiavelli and at least one version of Machiavellianism when he notes that the Florentine’s attitude towards religion does not originate “in political calculation but from profound sympathy with what is spontaneous, unsophisticated and genuine in the face of decadence and corruption.” Thus the Averroist interest in protecting the wise through the manipulation of the many is not present in Machiavelli, though his critique of Christianity was appropriated along with the Averroist tendency by political writers of the seventeenth century. So while acknowledging that he is really speaking of three distinct traditions —the Epicurean, Averroist, and Machiavellian—based on three different motivations—ataraxia, theory, and virtú (which is Machiavelli’s term that embodies the elements noted above)—Strauss prefers to subsume the three under the single rubric of Epicurean because the motivation of ataraxia “is the least mediate, in the sense of not having been called forth under pressure from a particular historical situation.” It is the sense of the term “Epicurean” as commonly understood to mean opposition to religion that Strauss wishes to emphasize (SCR, 49). By emphasizing this less historically mediated motivation, Strauss is highlighting the intention that is distinct from the means. Thus Epicureanism as Strauss deploys the term is not tied to the physics of Democritus or any other particular scientific paradigm. It stands instead for what he says it stood for in the Judaic tradition: opposition to religion. Strauss’s generous deployment of the term Epicurean should not obscure the important differences he adduces between the Epicurean and Averroist positions, even as he elides them. These differences become clear in his chapter on Spinoza’s contemporary, Thomas Hobbes. At the outset of this chapter, Strauss summarizes what he has argued are the key aspects of

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the specifically modern criticism of religion. The Epicurean concern for individual tranquility of mind has morphed into a concern for peace within society at large, which leads to the rejection of religion for its illusory character and to a reliance upon the development of human capacities as opposed to some notion of original human perfection. A consequence of this last element is rejection of revelation. Hobbes combines all three aspects of this critique, his philosophy being “the classic form in which the positivist mind comes to understand itself.” Following in the footsteps of Epicurus and Lucretius, Hobbes “grasps afresh—and in a manner entirely different— that religion and science are by their nature opposed” (SCR, 86). The crux of the Hobbesian position, according to Strauss, lies in the importance of methodical thinking for human happiness. Science is seen as properly methodical in its study of causes of phenomena, while religion is unmethodical and fails to uncover true causes. Religion may aim at happiness but it is incapable of delivering it, while science is the true path. Thus science and religion are fundamentally opposed. Among the important foundations of this position is the notion that life itself constitutes a primary good, “for life itself is desiring.” There is no “highest good,” since happiness consists in the capacity to secure the constant satisfaction of desires, without end. It follows from this that death is the primary evil, since it brings an end to desire, but there is also a greatest evil, which is “death in pain by violence.” So, Strauss concludes, for Hobbes, “there is no highest good, but only a worst evil.” Strauss emphasizes that avoidance of violent death then becomes foundational for the notion of natural right (SCR, 92–3). Peace and security thus become the motivations and the purposes of states. While political theory and religion may both spring from fear, only theory that employs proper method is capable of showing the way to the overcoming of fear through the rational explanation of causes. What we might call this political Epicureanism entails, in Hobbes’s case, a thorough separation of theory and religion. In this, Strauss distinguishes him from Spinoza, whom Strauss regards as less radical than Hobbes. Strauss links Spinoza to the Averroist tradition insofar as he “could not but recognize religion as an essential means for the maintenance of the state,” while for Hobbes “there is no point of union which could serve for a similar defense of religion.” The reason for this is that Hobbes recognized no source of political allegiance other than reason, while for Spinoza, “the command ‘thou shalt love thy neighbor’ takes its force as commandment for the multitude only from the belief that the commandment is the directly ‘revealed’ word of God.” For Hobbes, the commandment is binding because God created humans as reasonable beings and the commandment is rationally valid. In Hobbes, by contrast to Spinoza, there is no distinction between the “wise men and the vulgar,” and hence, “there is no necessity for the recourse to religion” (SCR, 101).

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Strauss’s interpretation of Spinoza in Spinoza’s Critique of Religion is grounded in this matter-of-fact identification of him with the Averroist strain within the Epicurean tradition and the distinctions between the wise and the vulgar, on the one hand, and reason and imagination, on the other. In Spinoza’s approach, philosophy seeks the truth, while piety teaches obedience to God’s will. Spinoza subjects Scripture to criticism on the grounds of the rational principle of noncontradiction. Whatever is found to be consistent within Scripture, both New and Old Testaments, is held to be “rational morality” (SCR, 117). And what Spinoza discovers as this consistently rational morality is obedience to God through works of justice and neighborly love. “But,” Strauss notes, obedience requires that we “know” God to exist as the fount of all justice and mercy, and this “knowledge” is not true but adapted to the mental range of the vulgar, and—this is of major import—indeed runs counter to the real meaning of the philosophic parts of Scripture. The concern of the Scripture as a whole can therefore only be to bring about active obedience to God, and this obedience expresses itself only in works of justice and charity. This obedience may be justified in two ways, which stand directly opposed to each other: philosophically, or vulgarly. But what counts is not the justification; but the works. (SCR, 119) Scripture is consistent on its teaching regarding works; on everything else regarding which it is inconsistent, reason is entitled to make its own judgments based on its own standards. Strauss argues that in his discussion of miracles, Spinoza relies on a twofold distinction between “mere experience” and philosophic knowledge. “To the theology founded on the experience of miracles, Spinoza opposes his theology which stands rooted in awareness of the stable and unchanging order of nature.” Thus, Here we meet again the opposition we saw in Lucretius’ confrontation of the religious and the scientific world-view: the world as the work of spontaneously and suddenly appearing, discontinuously willing, working forces, and as such not surveyable by man, causing anguish and confusion; and the world as fixed and unchanging eternally identical order, thus in principle within the range of human conceptions, and as such not disquieting but rather offering tranquility of mind. (SCR, 127) In the case of miracles, Spinoza adopts the position that nothing can occur contrary to the laws of nature, and in the case where a cause is not known, it is assumed to be in principle knowable. If no natural cause is known for

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an event, reason dictates that it does not follow from this that the cause is supernatural. At most, no conclusion can be reached (SCR, 132–3). In taking this position, Spinoza introduced skepticism into biblical criticism, and once skepticism was introduced, there was no end to its workings. Thus, Strauss argues, “the authority of Scripture was shaken prior to all historical and philological criticism, but also prior to all metaphysics, through the establishment of the positive mind, through the disenchantment of the world and through the self-awareness of the disenchanting mind” (SCR, 136). Reason, seeking a knowable cause for every event, becomes immune from faith. Its self-sufficiency engenders a self-satisfaction that causes it to see itself as occupying a more advanced position than the forms of consciousness that precede it. But faith is not susceptible to rational refutation, Strauss maintains. The critical reasoning of the “positive mind” is unheard by the ears of the faithful, to whom skepticism is alien. The rationalist therefore cannot win by argument. Instead, he turns to mockery. For Strauss, the Enlightenment’s deployment of mockery to undermine faith is a sure measure of its failure to win its contestation with revelation by argument (SCR, 143–6). This standoff between reason and revelation is the central point in Strauss’s treatment of the relationship between Spinoza and his predecessor, Maimonides, for it was Maimonides who argued that there is no intrinsic conflict between reason and Orthodoxy. There are several key elements to Strauss’s comparison. First there is the disagreement between the two philosophers regarding sin: Spinoza, in opposition to Maimonides, thought it impossible to sin against God. Given that difference, Maimonides was wary of philosophy’s transgression with regard to God’s will, while Spinoza was not. Secondly, Maimonides, basing himself on Aristotle’s distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge, thought that the understanding, in and of itself, is limited, thus requiring a supplement in the form of revelation. Spinoza, basing himself on post-Aristotelian “modern” science, which presumes the progress of knowledge, accepted no limit to human understanding. From the point of view of Spinoza, which Strauss emphasizes is the modern position, Maimonides’s acceptance of faith means that he understands philosophy to supply the proof of truths already presumed a priori and thus that Maimonides is trapped in prejudice. Prejudice now becomes the target of the modern mind and the restraint from which it seeks to free itself: If, in the polemics of the previous age, and still to some extent in Spinoza’s own polemics, the weightiest suspicion that could be cast on an opponent was the reproach of innovation, from now on the jus primi occupantis is denied. Doctrines or institutions can no longer be defended on the ground that they are prescriptive and generally recognized. All prejudices are questioned. The more radical the doubt, the greater the

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assurance that one becomes free from prejudices. Innovation, apostasy, arbitrariness as terms of reproach have finally lost their capacity to strike terror to the heart. (SCR, 165) In the particular case of Spinoza, Strauss argues that the attempt to be free of prejudice takes the form of his rejection of Judaism. The struggle against prejudice is the fundamental theme of the Enlightenment, being based as it is upon the free application of reason. It is “the unambiguous polemical correlate of the all too ambiguous term ‘freedom’” (SCR, 178). Strauss notes that the Enlightenment never entirely freed itself from prejudice, and even introduced new ones, but that these facts do not subvert the Enlightenment project itself, since this criticism is made on the Enlightenment’s own terms. Within those terms, it is understood that each age judges the past as well as the future on the basis of its experience, and “since every age has its own experiences, and, in principle, the capability of holding strictly to its experiences in its judgments, the admonition to freedom from prejudice is meaningful” (SCR, 178). The struggle against prejudice is a struggle against “the easy way” of dependence upon the judgment of others and upon ossified traditions. The Enlightenment mind is thus grounded in the present, judging on the basis of its own experience and constantly judging anew. Strauss emphasizes that while the Enlightenment mind is capable of self-criticism on its own terms, for being insufficiently autonomous and free of prejudice, it cannot see itself in a broader perspective. That perspective is provided by revelation, which “essentially appeals to a fact that is prior to all human judgment.” And this “fact,” in the form of the covenant, is still present. This present of revelation is quite other than the present of experience, in which the positive mind lives, and this by reason of the fact that the latter experience is and wishes to be immediate experience, to be as close as possible to the experienced, whereas the immediate hearing of revelation quenches the will to immediacy and calls forth the desire for non-presence, for mediacy. Those who hear revelation must hear it in a mediated manner, through the prophet, through Moses. The present covenant is thus known mediately. This means that the critique of prejudice is irrelevant to the tradition grounded in revelation (SCR, 179). The contrast between what Strauss calls the positive mind and the mind attuned to revelation is an important one, central to Strauss’s interpretation of modernity. From the perspective of revelation, obedience is based on the original condition of faithfulness, from which the present is a falling away. The future promises a restoration of the original condition. Citing Abraham

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ibn Daud, a predecessor of Maimonides, Strauss observes that in the fallen state of the present, obedience to the revealed commandments takes precedence over the “rational” commandments precisely because the former are beyond human understanding. In this context, the example of Abraham and the command made to him to sacrifice his son is exemplary. Obedience is thus understood to precede inquiry, to limit it, but not to bar it. “In the beginning was the revelation. Inquiry is nothing other than making the revelation one’s own, elucidating it. . . . Obedience does not arise at the end of the inquiry as a makeshift but precedes all inquiry.” Because the origin is perfection, sin is made possible as a falling away, and the suffering in the present for the past entails the promise of forgiveness. So presence of the past, the revelation, is the promise of the future (SCR, 180). On the other hand, The positive mind, which rebels against revealed religion, is characterized precisely by this: that it looks toward the future, not merely hoping for it, but rather using its own powers to build the future, and that it does not suffer from the past. The positive mind is incapable of suffering from the past, since it has not lost an original perfection by a Fall, but has by its own effort worked itself out of the original imperfection, barbarism and rudeness. What is felt from within as fidelity, as obedience, appears to the positive mind as stupidity, imprisonment in prejudices. To that mind, “rebellion” is “liberation,” “to become an apostate” is “liberty.” The contraries prejudice-freedom correspond strictly to the contraries obedience-rebellion, and strictly contradict them. (SCR, 180–1) Because the Enlightenment, the age of freedom, presupposes an age of prejudice, which precedes it, prejudice is “an historical category. This precisely constitutes the difference between the struggle of the Enlightenment against prejudices and the struggle against appearance and opinion with which philosophy began its secular journey” (SCR, 181). This second contrast, between the Enlightenment and the ancient mind, is equally important as that between Enlightenment and revelation. In this formulation, philosophy began in an engagement with the common opinions of its time, rather than in a simple rejection of those opinions as in some sense outmoded. Presumably, it thus avoided mockery. Strauss may have Socrates in mind here, though he does not specify, nor does he elaborate on this position. Also central to his treatment of Spinoza and Maimonides is Strauss’s emphasis on their respective arguments regarding the wise and the multitude. Strauss attributes differing positions taken by the two philosophers in part to their differing relationships to Judaism. Spinoza assumes “that

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philosophy is a matter for the wise minority, and that socially intended revealed religion is a matter for the unwise majority.” This contrasts with Maimonides, who understands Mosaic law to “convey two groups of articles of faith: first, the fundamental truths as such, and second, propositions that must be believed for the sake of maintaining order in human communities” (SCR, 170). For Maimonides, the connection between these propositions and fundamental truths is mediated by “the philosophically minded rabbi, who feels himself responsible for the guidance of the multitude and who enjoys the people’s confidence,” while Spinoza, who rejects the notion that the multitude can order its life according to philosophical truths rather than in accord with socially beneficial obedience, cannot resort to such a mediator, since he believes the multitude would ridicule a philosopher who claimed spiritual authority. This signifies, for Strauss, Spinoza’s alienation from Judaism. His model is not the rabbi, but rather the “philosopher living ‘cautiously’ remote from the crowd” (SCR, 171). It is a model Strauss will later take as his own. A final aspect of Strauss’s treatment of Spinoza is of importance here, and that is his contrast between the political theories of Spinoza and Hobbes. Turning away from the Theologico-Political Treatise, Strauss relies heavily on Spinoza’s unfinished Political Treatise in order to explicate the relationship within Spinoza’s thought between the freedom of the individual and the freedom of and within society, on the grounds that this text is a particular political application of Spinoza’s Ethics. Strauss notes that while Spinoza’s Introduction to the Political Treatise contains similar points made in the Preface to Book III of the Ethics criticizing previous writers for their inadequate views on the passions, his tone in the Introduction is much harsher and more dismissive of all previous philosophers than it is in the Preface, where some respect is shown toward Descartes and (in Strauss’s reading) the Stoics (SCR, 224–5).5 And the reason for this, according to Strauss, is that in the Political Treatise, unlike in the Ethics, Spinoza adopts the position of the statesman rather than the philosopher. That is, he proposes to develop a realist theory of politics based on what is effective. The guiding principle here is chapter 15 of Machiavelli’s Prince, where the distinction is made between the imagined truth of things as presented by previous writers versus the “effectual truth” upon which basis Machiavelli will develop his political theory. The statesman is not wise, but knows how to act. The attribute of the statesman who loathes utopian fantasies is “intellectual probity.” Its basis is the discovery of the “ultimate facts of human nature” by statesmen and what they have made of that discovery. Spinoza will use the experience of statesmen to inform political theory (SCR, 225–6). When Strauss notices that Spinoza’s anti-utopian tone is harsher than Machiavelli’s, he attributes this to the fact that utopias present a problem for Spinoza not only for politics but also for philosophy. For politics, the

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“factual predominance” of the passions is essential and based upon experience, but Strauss argues that Spinoza goes beyond this to affirm the predominance of the passions, and that this affirmation is grounded in Spinoza’s larger monistic philosophical presuppositions. The passions belong to nature, and thus to God. So for Spinoza, it is not a question of the virtuous passions as the foundation of a state—neither statesmen nor ordinary people are expected to lead a life of virtue, in his view, in any event—but of the passions tout court. Strauss emphasizes that this position is prior to Spinoza’s attention to politics. This means that he views the political world “from the distance of contemplation”: His interest in the state is mediated by his interest in theory. His political theory presupposes that theory is the one thing needful—even though only as the sole means of attaining perfect happiness. For on this assumption the gulf between the few wise and the multitude is given, and political theory is unconcerned with the wise and concerned only with the multitude. The abyss, created by interest in theory, between the wise and the multitude, makes the wise essentially spectators of the life of the multitude. For the wise, the multitude becomes an object of theory. (SCR, 229) Thus Spinoza winds up with a distinction between his moral theory, which prescribes a way of life lived by the wise, and his theory of natural right, grounded in the passions of the multitude (SCR, 230). This distinction does not exist for Hobbes. His depiction of the natural state is meant to serve as a counterpoint to the advantages of a properly sovereign state. The depiction of the natural state is based upon its nearest approximation, the experience of civil war. Natural right in Hobbes’s scheme is grounded in reason, but rational behavior in a state of nature demands suspicion toward others and all possible measures aiming at self-protection. Thus there is a rational, primary interest in peace common to all. But for Spinoza, natural right is an expression of the amount of power an individual possesses since everything is a unique expression of God’s power. The individual has a right to use its power toward self-preservation without regard to anything external to him- her- or itself. Natural right in Spinoza’s account is, then, derived from his concept of God, not from human necessities or experience (SCR, 231–2). And it follows for Spinoza that conflict, hatred, and antagonisms of all sorts, while contrary to human reason, are reconciled within the larger rationality of nature. Reason may be the guide to self-preservation on the part of the wise, but the multitude are ruled by passion, and politics can be based only on the multitude because it is the greater power. For Spinoza, there can be no question of a social contract. Instead, if peace is to prevail, the multitude “must be driven

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into a state, like a flock of sheep into their pen by their shepherd, the shrewd and cunning politician, by force and threats” (SCR, 236). The ruler’s right to rule is the superior power he demonstrates through ruling. The only limitation on that power is the presence of subjects who use their intelligence and refuse to be manipulated by the ruler’s cunning (SCR, 237). In his discussion of Spinoza’s political theory Strauss emphasizes the differing relation of politicians and the wise, respectively, to the multitude. The wise man, who, like all men, benefits by living in a state, and who recognizes its advantages, “stands apart in his very capacity as wise man, from the direction of the state, from the specific reason of the state.” That reason lies in “the capacity of the ruler to rule, and in the capacity of the ruled to be ruled.” The wise man cannot live the life of the wise man while distracted by affairs of state, and the wise man is not dominated by his passions, in any event. The politician, like the multitude, is so dominated. The politicians are the ones who have figured out how to guide the multitude (SCR, 240–1). In Strauss’s reading, Hobbes displays a greater sensitivity to actual experience than the seemingly more “realistic” Spinoza. It is only when Strauss reflects upon Spinoza’s appreciation for the multitude’s love of freedom that he sees what he calls a human element in Spinoza’s thought, one that enables Spinoza’s doctrine of natural law to become meaningful as political theory. However, Strauss argues that this appreciation is grounded in an inconsistency. Only if Spinoza gives up his notion of the distinction between the multitude and the wise, which is required by his metaphysical presuppositions regarding the passions, can he attempt to argue either for a democratic state, based on equality, or a liberal one, based on the rationality of all the members of the state (SCR, 242–4). In order to bridge this gap, Spinoza invokes religion as a substitute for reason in teaching citizens to love their neighbors and thus to diffuse the antagonism and conflict built into Spinoza’s conception of conatus (SRC, 244–5).6 Spinoza must rely on the spreading of the religious dogma of the necessity of performing acts of loving kindness as a substitute for reason, since such acts of piety are in accord with reason, in order for the multitude to be brought to the level of reason and to secure a peaceful political existence. But they are not brought there by reason. Therefore, while Spinoza rejects revelation, he accepts the product of that revelation on rational grounds (SCR, 245–50). This is significant for Strauss for several reasons. Hobbes is shown to be the more consistent theorist, since his theory of natural law accords with his conceptualization of natural right. By contrast, Strauss sees Spinoza’s democratic and liberal political positions to be at odds with his metaphysical conception of nature. Here, as elsewhere in this text, Strauss’s critique of Spinoza takes the form of a critique of his inconsistencies and contradictions. It is precisely that contradictory character that led Strauss to a revised method of reading Spinoza some twenty years after completion of his book.

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But before turning in the next chapter to that theory of reading, we must revisit Strauss’s self-described rupture brought about by his reading of Carl Schmitt and what effect it may have had on Strauss’s view of Hobbes. *** On his own account, Leo Strauss’s intellectual formation took a decisive turn in 1932 when he encountered Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political. Schmitt’s book was written, among other things, as an attack on pluralism. For Schmitt, the contestation among different sectors of German society reflected in their parliamentary confrontations represented a fundamental weakening of the state. The cause of this contestation was a combination of the individualism characteristic of modern liberalism together with a blurring of the distinction between society and state. In an effort to provide a coherent conception of the state, Schmitt thought it necessary to first provide a coherent conception of the political. The opening line of The Concept of the Political states this plainly: “The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political.”7 By separating the political from the state conceptually, Schmitt establishes his basis for criticizing the pluralist view that everything that involves the state is political.8 It is then that Schmitt famously moves to define the specifically political as the distinction between friend and enemy. The categories of friend and enemy, Schmitt cautions, “are to be understood in their concrete and existential sense, not as metaphors or symbols, not mixed and weakened by economic, moral, and other conceptions, least of all in a private-individualistic sense as a psychological expression of private emotions and tendencies.”9 According to Schmitt, liberal individualism leads to the internal fracturing of the state as competition between individuals organized into interests forecloses the formation of a genuine political community; i.e., one able to identify its collective friends and enemies. In his “Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political,” Strauss emphasizes the point that Schmitt’s book is a polemic aimed at liberalism. The issue then becomes the degree to which this polemic is unable to transcend the limit of liberalism itself. And for Strauss, the key to that limit is the liberal notion of “culture.” By this, Strauss means the general sense that culture is constituted out of a variety of independent domains, such as the religious, the economic, the moral, the aesthetic, etc.10 Strauss observes that Schmitt only appears to be accepting the notion of autonomous, equally significant spheres of culture when he proposes a definition of the political on analogous terms to the defining categories of the other spheres.11 Instead, Strauss reads him as claiming that the political does not delimit another domain similar to the others, and thus “that the understanding of the political implies a fundamental critique of at least the prevailing concept of culture” (N, 94–5).

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This interpretation enables Strauss to engage two related themes that would become central to his own thinking. Schmitt, according to Strauss, places the political in a foundational realm of its own based on the fact that its extreme manifestation, war, results in killing and risking death. It is thus fundamental for human beings in general and consequently not analogous to the realms of the aesthetic or the economic or the moral. Strauss concludes that Schmitt’s position allows us to see that “culture” is not autonomous, thereby questioning the claim—which Strauss takes to be the modern claim—that culture represents “the ‘pure’ product of the human spirit.” Instead, “culture always presupposes something that is cultivated: culture is always the culture of nature.” And by this, Strauss means, “primarily, that culture develops the natural predisposition; it is careful nurture of nature— whether of the soil or of the human spirit makes no difference; it thus obeys the orders that nature gives itself.”12 However, he warns, culture can also be understood as the conquest of nature “through obedience to nature (parendo vincere, in Bacon’s phrase); then culture is not so much faithful nurture of nature as a harsh and cunning fight against nature. Whether culture is understood as nurture of nature or as a fight with nature depends on how nature is understood: as exemplary order or as disorder to be eliminated” (N, 97–8, emphasis in original). So Strauss has shifted the emphasis from Schmitt’s focus on the state to the question of nature and of the relationship of human society to nature. This shift opens onto Strauss’s discussion of Schmitt’s interpretation of Hobbes. If the modern world thinks of culture as entirely the product of the human spirit, it is because it has forgotten the other sense of nature— the sense “of the soil.” That is, the nature upon which the modern notion of culture is based is human nature, and because man is by his nature an animal sociale, the human nature on which culture is based is the natural social relations of men, that is, the way in which man, prior to all culture, behaves toward other men. The term for natural social relations understood in this manner is status naturalis. The can therefore say: the foundation of culture is the status naturalis. (N, 98) This, according to Strauss, was Hobbes’s view, since for him the civil state, which makes all the elements of culture, such as agriculture, trade, manufacture, architecture, etc., possible, is predicated on its opposition to the natural state. And the natural state in Hobbes’s view is a state of war. This means that in Schmitt’s understanding of the political, allowing for the difference that Schmitt thinks in terms of groups at war rather than individuals, “the status naturalis is the genuinely political status.” And this means that the political is “the status as the ‘natural,’ the fundamental and

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extreme, status of man” (N, 98–9).13 It also means, in Strauss’s interpretation, that “Hobbes, to a much higher degree than Bacon, for example, is the author of the ideal of civilization. By this very fact he is the founder of liberalism” (N, 100). What follows from this claim is crucial to an understanding of Strauss’s position vis-à-vis liberalism and modernity and deserves to be quoted in full: The right to the securing of life pure and simple—and this sums up Hobbes’s natural right—has fully the character of an inalienable human right, that is, of an individual’s claim that takes precedence over the state and determines its purpose and its limits; Hobbes’s foundation for the natural-right claim to the securing of life pure and simple sets the path to the whole system of human rights in the sense of liberalism, if this foundation does not actually make such a course necessary. Hobbes differs from developed liberalism only, but certainly, by his knowing and seeing against what the liberal ideal of civilization has to be persistently fought for: not merely against rotten institutions, against the evil will of a ruling class, but against the natural evil of man; in an unliberal world Hobbes forges ahead to lay the foundation of liberalism against the—sit vena verbo—unliberal nature of man, whereas later men, ignorant of their premises and goals, trust in the original goodness (based on God’s creation and providence) of human nature or, on the basis of natural-scientific neutrality, nurse hopes for an improvement of nature, hopes unjustified by man’s experience of himself. (N, 100–1) Liberalism is thus understood as grounded in a conception of natural right, which is itself grounded in “the securing of life pure and simple.” This conception issues in an entire system of human rights understood as generalized individual rights. Further, the modern conception of culture is an extension of this individualism, and it is in this sense that liberalism and civilization are coterminous. And Strauss draws the following conclusion: If it is true that the final self-awareness of liberalism is the philosophy of culture, we may say in summary that liberalism, sheltered by and engrossed in a world of culture, forgets the foundation of culture, the state of nature, that is, human nature in its dangerousness and endangeredness. (N, 101) It is here that Strauss ultimately finds fault with Schmitt. Insofar as Schmitt reverses Hobbes and finds the political in the status naturalis as presented by Hobbes, he stays within the liberal orbit. Schmitt wishes to preserve the notion of the essential dangerousness of the individual

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because his concept of the political depends upon it. Strauss understands Schmitt’s position to result in an “opposition between pacifist internationalism and bellicose nationalism” that resolves itself into an opposition between anarchist and authoritarian theories (N, 108–9). And this opposition, Strauss argues, comes down to a debate over whether the human being is by nature good or evil. However, this opposition is not necessarily a moral one. “Evil,” as Schmitt understands the term in Hobbes’s usage, refers to human beings’ animal nature, insofar as they are driven by their natural drives. But for Strauss, this means that evil is understood to be morally innocent: Hobbes had to understand evil as innocent “evil” because he denied sin; and he had to deny sin because he did not recognize any primary obligation of man that takes precedence over every claim qua justified claim, because he understood man as by nature free, that is, without obligation; for Hobbes, therefore, the fundamental political fact was natural right as the justified claim of the individual, and Hobbes conceived of obligation as a subsequent restriction upon that claim. If one takes this approach, one cannot demur in principle against the proclamation of human rights as claims of the individuals upon the state and contrary to the state, against the distinction between society and state, against liberalism—assuming that liberalism is not altogether the unavoidable consequence of the Hobbesian approach. A true, radical critique of liberalism would thus need to reject the view of innocent evil and “return to the view of human evil as moral baseness.” This Schmitt fails to do (N, 109–10). Instead, Schmitt embraces the view of innocent evil in his reversal of Hobbes and his valorization of the political, which entails a valorization of the dangerous individual. Schmitt wishes to valorize the political in a world increasingly drifting toward an apolitical desire for entertainment. His motivation is the loss of the seriousness of human life that accompanies the loss of the political, and for Strauss that means that Schmitt’s project is ultimately a moral one. Depoliticization is to be seen in the desire for “agreement and peace at all costs. In principle however, it is always possible,” Strauss argues, to reach agreement regarding the means to an end that is already fixed, whereas there is always quarreling over the ends themselves: we are always quarreling with each other and with ourselves only over the just and the good (Plato, Euthyphro 7B-D and Phaedrus 263A). Therefore if one seeks agreement at all costs, there is no other path than to abandon entirely the question of what is right and to concern oneself solely with the means. It thus becomes intelligible that modern Europe, once it had started out—in order to avoid the quarrel over the right faith—in

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search of a neutral ground as such, finally arrived at faith in technology. . . . Agreement at all costs is possible only as agreement at the cost of the meaning of human life; for agreement at all costs is possible only if man has relinquished asking the question of what is right; and if man relinquishes that question, he relinquishes being a man. (N, 114) Schmitt correctly understands that the political is entailed in the disagreement over “what is right,” but because he understands morals only in the “humanitarian-pacifist sense,” he couches his polemic against liberalism as a polemic against morals. Such a position leads him not only into a contradiction (since his opposition to depoliticization is essentially a moral one), but also reveals that endorsing the political in these terms leads to an affirmation of fighting (with friends and against enemies) without regard to “what is being fought for.” This position, Strauss sees, is a fundamentally liberal one, albeit in inverted form: it is an expression of toleration toward all “serious” convictions that entail the real possibility of war, just as liberalism is indifferent to all “honest” convictions as long as they do not disturb the peace. “Thus the affirmation of the political as such proves to be a liberalism with the opposite polarity” (N, 116–17). In Strauss’s judgment, Schmitt’s critique of liberalism does not go far enough. It remains “in the horizon of liberalism.” To complete the critique it is necessary to go beyond that horizon, and for Strauss that means to go back behind it. Rather than stay within the structure of Hobbes’s thought, it is necessary to engage what it was that Hobbes engaged. When Strauss concludes his essay on Schmitt by proposing that, “A radical critique of liberalism is thus possible only on the basis of an adequate understanding of Hobbes” (N, 119), he is signaling his own effort to reconstitute the preliberal moral universe that Hobbes attempted to erase and, ultimately, to resuscitate a pre-liberal notion of natural law. The precise meaning of that return and its political consequences must be clearly understood. Strauss’s argument favors a return to a view of the human being as naturally evil, and not innocently so. In Strauss’s reasoning, the latter view leads to the effort to transform that nature through “culture,” understood as the effort to educate the individual to realize his self-interest and thus to attain a level of autonomy vis-à-vis the state. Such a project leads ultimately to liberalism and the doctrine of rights against the state. Properly understanding the evil nature of the human being should, by contrast, lead to the more “natural” response of authoritarian rule.14 Such a response corresponds, unlike the one based on “natural-scientific neutrality,” to “man’s experience of himself.” Carl Schmitt, impressed by the critique of The Concept of the Political, first saw to its publication and then wrote a letter in support of Leo Strauss’s successful application for a Rockefeller Foundation grant to research a book

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on Thomas Hobbes. Strauss wrote to Schmitt from Berlin in March 1932 to thank him for his support and for his interest in his work on Hobbes.15 Strauss was still in Berlin in September of that year when he again wrote to Schmitt. His critique having in the meantime been published, Strauss elaborated on his interpretation of several of Schmitt’s arguments in The Concept of the Political, saying that recent conversations with others had alerted him to some possible misunderstandings of the text. Basing himself on “an oral exchange” he had had with Schmitt, Strauss wishes to confirm that for Schmitt the political is a primary and not a secondary or derivative relationship, by which he means that the political is not something mapped on previously existing oppositions between groups based upon nonpolitical issues. Instead, Strauss wishes to confirm “the conclusion that there is a primary tendency in human nature to form exclusive groups.”16 Strauss then returns to clarify a point he had raised on his review when he remarked that the opposition articulated by Schmitt between Left and Right is first presented in his book as between internationalist pacifism and bellicose nationalism and later as between anarchism and authoritarianism. In his review, Strauss had reduced the first opposition to the second, but now he observes that, the coincidence, at first merely empirical, of bellicose nationalism and sympathy for authoritarian order can hardly be wholly accidental. Does it accord with your understanding to explain the connection between “authoritarianism” and “nationalism”—allow me for now these abbreviations—as follows: The ultimate foundation of the Right is the principle of the natural evil of man; because man is by nature evil, he therefore needs dominion. But dominion can be established, that is, men can be unified, only in a unity against—against other men. Every association of men is necessarily a separation from other men. The tendency to separate (and therewith the grouping of humanity into friends and enemies) is given with human nature; it is in this sense destiny, period. But the political thus understood is not the constitutive principle of the state, of “order,” but only the condition of the state. Now this relationship of rank between the political and the state does not emerge sufficiently, I believe, in your text.17 Strauss’s clarification also helps us clarify his own position. The necessity of dominion, of ruling human beings who are evil by nature, is primary. Nationalism, or some form of collective identity, follows from this as a necessity of dominion, as a consequence of the evil nature of the human being. We see here a connection to the content of the letter Strauss wrote to Löwith some sixteen months later, in May 1933. The proper response to the Nazi regime, which is based on no principle other than a racial one, is an

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embrace of principles of the right, which Strauss articulated as “fascist, authoritarian, imperialist.” All three of these principles are grounded in Strauss’s notion of dominion. The common denominator, as John P. McCormick’s interpretation of the relationship of Strauss’s views to Schmitt’s makes clear, is rule through fear.18 Nazism, too, it can be said, represented a rule through fear and it, too, was based on a grouping of friends and enemies. But its foundational principle was not the inherent evil of the human being but rather race and it thus excluded Strauss and Löwith (but not the Catholic Schmitt). There may be much, then, in the jibe Hannah Arendt is reported to have directed at Strauss, noting “the irony of the fact that a political party advocating views Strauss appreciated could have no place for a Jew like him.”19 *** Strauss’s book on Hobbes’s political philosophy was completed in 1935 and published the following year in an English translation of the German manuscript.20 The continuity between his critique of Schmitt and his interpretation of Hobbes is immediately apparent, particularly in the first five chapters of the text, which were apparently written in 1933.21 In his preface to the first edition, Strauss situates his study of Hobbes within the larger context of the history of natural law theories. Specifically, he claims that there is a fundamental difference between the natural law theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and those of the classical and medieval periods. He terms this a “difference of principle,” and explains the difference as follows: Traditional natural law is primarily and mainly an objective “rule and measure”, a binding order prior to, and independent of, the human will, while modern natural law is, or tends to be, primarily and mainly a series of “rights”, of subjective claims, originating in the human will. (PPH, vii–viii) Hobbes, he thinks, is the founder of this modern notion, one that can also be seen in later writers, such as Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau (PPH, viii).22 “On this new doctrine all later moral and political thought is expressly or tacitly based.” And Strauss clarifies what he means by “all”: To indicate its political importance one might stress the fact that the ideal of civilization in its modern form, the ideal both of the bourgeoiscapitalist development and of the socialist movement, was founded and expounded by Hobbes with a depth, clarity, and sincerity never rivaled before or since. (PPH, 1)23

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Strauss’s distinction between natural law and natural right traditions is an important aspect of his general critique of the modern age and is repeated in later works published in the United States. Strauss’s original argument in this book is that Hobbes’s innovation does not derive from, nor is it dependent upon, his celebrated adoption of the method of modern (i.e., Euclidian and Galilean) science, but rather proceeds from a moral attitude that antedates his embrace of that science. It is because Hobbes tried to adopt the method of modern science to the exposition of his view of human nature that there appear contradictions in his writings, which Strauss aims to resolve: In order to find out which of the contradictory statements express his real opinion, we have to hold fast to our first impression of the rigour and unity of his thought. For that impression is nothing other than the perception of Hobbes’s fundamental view of human life, and that view is not contradictory, but one and indivisible. It is this view, and not modern science, which is the real basis of his political philosophy. That view has its origin not so much in any learned or scientific preoccupation, but in actual experience of how men behave in daily life and in “public conversation”. (PPH, x) This view drawn from experience is of the human being as naturally evil. The problem in interpreting Hobbes that Strauss seeks to overcome lies ultimately in Hobbes’s classification of things as either natural or the product of human activity. The latter leads to the view of the human being as the being who by his art produces from his own nature the citizen or the State, who, by working on himself, makes himself into a citizen. In so far as man works on himself, influencing and changing his nature, so that he becomes a citizen, a part of that artificial being called the State, he is not a natural being. (PPH, 8) The citizen is the result of the application of technology on himself. The evil nature of man lies in his vanity. Strauss emphasizes that it is the role of the state, of Hobbes’s Leviathan, to subdue the proud, but that Hobbes purposely downplays this because, “If this conception of natural appetite is right, if man by nature finds his pleasure in triumphing over all others, then man is by nature evil. But he did not dare to uphold this consequence or assumption of his theory” (PPH, 13). If that striving for power is a natural appetite, no moral judgment can be made on it. So, Strauss thinks, Hobbes downplays it in favor of a secondary striving after power, a rational one that “rests on already rational reflection and is for that

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very reason not natural, i.e., not innate, not in existence prior to all external motivations, to all experience and education” (PPH 10). In this reading of Strauss’s, Hobbes recognizes the natural evil of man but suppresses it. The second foundational element for Hobbes is the avoidance of death, or, Strauss continuously emphasizes, the fear of violent death. Its importance within Hobbes’s scheme for Strauss is due to the fact that it lies not in a reasoned knowledge that one will eventually die, but rather in a pre-rational fear of premature death (PPH, 16–17).24 It is this fear that serves to contain vanity as each man’s appetite for power runs into another’s. It is in the confrontation with a superior power of another that the individual becomes aware of limits and in this awareness, this blunting of pride for the sake of self-preservation, lies the origin of the just attitude: What man does from fear of death, in the consciousness of his weakness at the hands of other men, when he honestly confesses to himself and to others his weakness and his fear of death, unconcerned about his honour, this alone is fundamentally just. (PPH, 25, emphases in original) This position makes possible the distinction between the attitude of the unjust man who obeys the laws of the State for fear of punishment, i.e. without inner conviction, and the attitude of the just man, who for fear of death, and therefore from inner conviction, as it were once more accomplishing in himself the founding of the State, obeys the laws of the State. (PPH, 25–6) Through a pre-rational passion the individual is brought to reason and thus to a moral condition. Strauss emphasizes that it is only then that a moral judgment is made on pride. This represents a step away from nature. The “artificial State” is grounded in the mutual recognition of individuals based on their roughly equal fear of death. In the absence of such recognition, “despotic rule is the natural State” (PPH, 22). What is common to the natural and the artificial state is the motive that lies behind each, which is fear of violent death (PPH, 66). The fear that emerges in the confrontation between prideful human beings is what frees the individual of illusion. Prior to that confrontation, the individual is able to imagine himself as all-powerful and unrestricted. The confrontation with another such individual destroys that illusion and opens the way for reason. The same realization of the fear of violent death, the same freeing of illusions of the imagination, Strauss claims, is what opens the way to science. Fear of violent death trumps vanity, including the natural sense of mental superiority that presumes an already existing

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knowledge, and thus makes the freedom from prejudice possible upon which modern science rests (PPH, 26–7). This is the key point in Strauss’s claim that Hobbes’s observations of human life, and the moral attitude he derived from it, precede his adoption of the method of modern science. Strauss makes one reference to his review of Schmitt in The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, and that is in the context of his argument that the ideals established in Hobbes’s political philosophy “are precisely the ideals of the bourgeoisie,” reflective of the value of a peaceful life (PPH, 118). Hobbes displaces aristocratic honor by the virtues of justice and charity, but these virtues, “which in Hobbes’s view, are the only moral virtues, have, however, their ultimate foundation in fear of violent death. The criticism of aristocratic virtue thus, in the last analysis, means the replacement of honour by the fear of violent death” (PPH, 116). When Hobbes criticizes the bourgeoisie, he has, at bottom, no other aim than to remind the bourgeoisies of the elementary condition for its existence. This condition is not industry and thrift, not the specific exertions of the bourgeoisie, but the security of body and soul, which the bourgeoisie cannot of itself guarantee. (PPH, 121) When Hobbes remarked that he preferred country people to city people, Strauss interprets this to mean that, he prefers the horrors of the state of nature to the spurious joys of society. Hobbes “prefers” these terrors of the state of nature because only on awareness of these terrors can a true and permanent society rest. The bourgeois existence which no longer experiences these terrors will endure only as long as it remembers them. By this finding Hobbes differs from those of his opponents who in principle share his bourgeois ideal, but reject his conception of the state of nature. (PPH, 122) It is at the end of this passage that Strauss footnotes his review of Schmitt, remarking that “I have treated this rather more fully” there. Science and technology complicate the matter of remembrance. Hobbes is of the view that, “Only ill fortune, especially unforeseen ill fortune, teaches men,” since only this reminds man of the “horror of his natural situation” (PPH, 124). Strauss sees, however, that the bourgeois avoids reflecting on the freedom that defines the break with nature and decides instead “to deny that freedom theoretically by mechanistic physical science, and to assert it practically by the conquest of nature, and particularly of human nature, with the help of that science” (PPH, 125). The domination of nature draws the bourgeois citizen further from nature. Strauss’s point here is because Hobbes

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is distrustful of good fortune, he distrusts those of the “virtues of nature” associated with the aristocracy in favor of those associated with hard work (PPH, 125–36), but it has also been pointed out that this attitude makes possible a conquest of nature that diverts the bourgeois citizen from recalling the essential terror of the state of nature. But because Hobbes’s political philosophy is not predicated on modern science, it is possible to do without it. Thus John P. McCormick notes that, Once one corrects the mistakes of Hobbes’s liberal successors, who take up the task of trying to have citizens rule themselves by providing them with the products of the conquest of nature and allay their fears by showing them the orderliness of nature, one can set up a state more in accord with the natural condition of humanity, more in accord with “the political.”25 This would require the shift Strauss noted in his critique of Schmitt from culture understood as the conquest of nature to culture understood as obedience to nature (N, 97–8): a new political culture that would reinforce the foundational natural terror. In the last chapter of The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, Strauss goes beyond Hobbes to discuss the consequences for “the new political science” of Hobbes’s appropriation of the form of modern science as the one through which to articulate his “moral attitude” (PPH, 129). The consequence resolves itself into the problem of method, and it is only here that Hobbes truly breaks with the philosophic tradition (PPH, 136). To model political philosophy on mathematics is to put it in opposition to the passions as well as to the opinions that are the “weapons” of the passions, and thus the exact knowledge of a scientific political philosophy must be completely free of the character of opinion. . . . Thus, with this ideal there is already the anticipation of the systematic overstepping of ordinary values, a morality opposed to pre-scientific morality, a truly paradoxical morality and a form of politics which is Utopian and outstrips all experience. (PPH, 138) However, in Hobbes, this break appears at first as a return to Plato as against Aristotle, since Hobbes understands Plato to start from ideas as opposed to words and therefore to offer the possibility of “an exact and paradoxical political science” (PPH, 141). But Strauss argues that Hobbes misunderstands Plato. Hobbes’s interest is in devising a universally applicable political philosophy and he does so on the basis of vanity and the fear of death, “i.e. motives on whose force one can depend in the case of all men under all circumstances,” while, for Plato, “exactness means the undistorted

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reliability of the standards” (PPH, 151). Political philosophy thus reduces to a technique for achieving a properly functioning state. Its task is to alter the unstable balance of the existing State to the stable balance of the right State. . . . That means that the introduction of this method into political philosophy presupposes the previous narrowingdown of the political problem, i.e. the elimination of the fundamental question as to the aim of the State. (PPH, 152) Hobbes establishes natural right on the basis of vanity and fear of violent death, and deduces “the right State” from them, but he does not and cannot judge these principles. “What is justified in this way is indeed not strictly a standard, a norm, a law, an obligation; but a right, a claim” (PPH, 154–5). It is this that makes Hobbes the founder of modern political philosophy. For Strauss, Hobbes’s innovation also leads to the problem of sovereignty. In antiquity, the analogous question was “Who or what should rule?” and the answer was “The law.” Strauss adds, with a reference to Cicero, that, Philosophers who could not acquiesce in the divine origin or law justify this answer in the following way: the rational should rule over the irrational (the old over the young, the man over the woman, the master over the slave) and therefore laws over men. (PPH, 158) The problem of sovereignty arises because, in Hobbes, all men are presumed to be more or less equally reasonable. “Because all men are equally ‘reasonable’, the reason of one or more individuals must arbitrarily be made the standard reason as artificial substitute for the lacking natural superiority of reason in one or more” (PPH, 159). This substitution of sovereign power for reason is because Hobbes denies the existence of a binding law in the state of nature. “In its place we have the ‘right of nature’ which is, indeed, according to reason but dictated not by reason but by the fear of death,” which for Strauss signifies a break with rationalism (PPH, ibid.). “This break with rationalism is, therefore, the fundamental presupposition of modern political philosophy in general. The acutest expression of this break which can be found in Hobbes’s writings is that he conceives sovereign power not as reason but as will” (PPH, 160). It is thus only a short step “to Rousseau’s theory that the origin and seat of sovereignty is la volonté générale. Rousseau made completely clear the break with rationalism which Hobbes had instituted” (PPH, ibid.). Strauss is quick to add that Rousseau’s general will underlies both the notion of a “folk-mind” and “class-consciousness” (PPH, 161); i.e., the notions of collectivity underlying nationalism and communism, respectively.

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A final consideration of Strauss’s on the consequences of Hobbes’s innovation is significant. The classical view that “only reason justifies dominion, found its most radical expression in Plato’s saying that the only necessary and adequate condition for the weal of a State is that the philosophers should be kings and the kings philosophers” (PPH, ibid.). This means that the perfect state is constituted entirely internally. By contrast, Hobbes presupposes “the primacy of foreign policy,” consistent with the notion of jealous neighbors. For Plato, the good legislator rules with an eye to peace, while, “The primacy of foreign policy is taught not only by Hobbes but in all specifically modern political philosophy, whether implicitly or explicitly” (PPH, 162–3). *** If Strauss’s encounter with Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political engendered a change of orientation, that change should be visible in a comparison of the treatment of Hobbes in his book on Spinoza, written before that encounter, and his treatment in The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, which was written during and after. It is notable, at the outset, that there is no difference in his approach to the respective texts. The structure of Strauss’s Hobbes book is conventionally scholarly, as is the structure of the Spinoza book.26 No elaborate hermeneutic of suspicion is invoked in Strauss’s interpretation.27 Violent death is described as the greatest evil for Hobbes in both books. The “political Epicureanism” Strauss found in Hobbes in the earlier book has disappeared, however.28 Fear remains central, but now Strauss emphasizes Hobbes’s endeavor not just to overcome it but also to maintain it. Importantly, whereas in the Spinoza book Strauss focused on the fear of violent death as the greatest evil and methodical thinking as the means to overcome fear, in the Hobbes book method plays a secondary role and comes into play only after Hobbes has fully formulated his moral theory. Instead, pride, which is nowhere mentioned in his earlier treatment of Hobbes, now assumes a central importance and is tied to his experience of human beings. And its importance is that it is pride that demonstrates the evil nature of human beings. The centrality of that concern for Strauss is clearly tied to his critique of Schmitt. In the Spinoza book, Strauss had emphasized that Hobbes, like Spinoza, did not believe in sin. Sin implies a falling away from, and thus the possibility of returning to, a primal condition of goodness through forgiveness, which is promised by revelation (SCR, 180). Without sin, there is only the future understood as progress from a past of superstition. Hobbes does theorize a progress beyond illusion, but, in Strauss’s reading in The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, the essentially evil character of the human being remains, hidden and unredeemable. While the primal fear must be invoked over time,

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the evil nature of the human being is covered over and forgotten. Strauss wishes to recall it. If the sinful human being is compelled to obedience by the promise of redemption while the guiltless individual is free to rebel, the Straussian model for a secular age appears to be the perpetual need to recognize and contain the human being’s evil nature. The mechanism for doing so is the inculcation of perpetual fear. There would appear to be different ways to accomplish this. One would be a return to nature; more specifically, to despotism, the natural form of rule. Another, related form, is to exploit that element of modern political thought that places foreign affairs at the forefront. Here we would be on something like Schmitt’s terrain of internal friends and external enemies. A third way is to return to religion. The initial fear against which science constitutes itself is fear of the gods. Absent this fear, another option is the creation of a myth in the form of the state holding a fearsome power.29 The elements of all of these possibilities are present in Strauss’s reading of Hobbes, since Hobbes means to reconstitute natural despotism as artificial monarchy, emphasizes internal peace and external threat, and has constructed the Leviathan as a secular, “awesome” myth. *** A final comparison between Strauss’s pre- and post-encounter with Schmitt concerns the treatment of Hobbes in relation to Spinoza. There are several relevant points to recall. First, in his earlier book Spinoza is presented as indebted to the Averroist tradition while Hobbes is not. This means that religion as a means for preserving the state is present in Spinoza’s “theological-political” theory but not in Hobbes’s, because Hobbes relies on a certain capacity of all individuals to reason, while Spinoza holds that only some are capable of sufficient reason and that the rest, the multitude, must be brought to reasonable conclusions through imaginative, rather than rational, means. In Hobbes there is nothing to compare with Spinoza’s distinction, also present in Averroës and Maimonides, between the wise and the vulgar, philosophy and piety (SCR, 101). Secondly, while Hobbes’s notion of natural right entails the rational decision on the part of individuals to seek peace and to curb the passions, Spinoza understands the passions as part of a greater natural order in which conflict plays its part and is harmonized only within that larger order. In Spinoza’s view, power is natural and the greater power prevails. The statesman’s role is to force individuals into a state, and his legitimacy is a result of having the power to do so. So in Spinoza, the distinction between the wise and the vulgar yields to a tripartite categorization of the wise, the politician, and the multitude. The politician, dominated by his passions as is the multitude, is the “shepherd” driving the flock (SCR, 236). In The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, Spinoza’s conceptualization of the distinctions between the philosopher, the politician,

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and the multitude is displaced by Strauss’s discussion of classical political philosophy and of the theme of natural law. In Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, Strauss argued that Hobbes’s political philosophy bears a closer connection to experience than does that of the more “realist” Spinoza, who bases his on metaphysical presumptions. There, the argument is that Hobbes understands the emergence of the will to peace that makes the social contract possible. Peace may require, “in addition to the peaceable attitude, the coercive power of the state, which ensures security,” but that coercive power represents “the fulfillment of that attitude’s own intention. The pacific attitude and the power of the state support each other in turn.” By comparison, “Spinoza has no possibility at all of understanding, after the manner of Hobbes, the germination of the pacific attitude, of honesty, from men’s concern to preserve their lives, thus no possibility of understanding the social contract” (SCR, 235). This position asserting Hobbes’s greater attention to experience is repeated in his later book, but with a significant substantive alteration. Strauss emphasizes that Hobbes, unlike Spinoza, had to deny the natural primacy of the passions. Had Hobbes recognized the passions, and particularly vanity, as equally justified by nature as reason, he would not have been able to construct his theory of natural right and therefore the moral theory upon which his political philosophy is based. Because Spinoza does not recognize an antithesis between the passions and reason, his political philosophy has no moral foundation. Spinoza, indeed, and not Hobbes, made might equivalent to right. Naturalistic political philosophy necessarily leads to the annulment of the conception of justice as such. Thanks to the moral basis of his political philosophy and thanks to it alone, Hobbes kept the possibility of acknowledging justice as such and distinguishing between right and might. (PPH, 28) Strauss thinks that this gives the advantage to Hobbes’s political philosophy, because it is “based on a knowledge of men which is deepened and corroborated by the self-knowledge and self-examination of the individual, and not on a general scientific or metaphysical theory” (PPH, 29). This contrast between Hobbes and Spinoza is important enough for Strauss to return to it at the very end of his book in order to conclude his argument that the “consistent naturalism” of Hobbes’s scientific studies cannot be the basis of his political philosophy, which is instead premised on a dualistic conception of nature such that “man, by virtue of his intelligence, can place himself outside nature, can rebel against nature” (PPH, 167–9). The experience to which Hobbes is more attuned is now not the emergence of the “peaceable attitude” but rather the effort to keep the evil nature of the

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human being in check by rebelling against that nature. That is what Strauss refers to as the foundation of Hobbes’s moral theory. *** Strauss’s downplaying of the Epicurean tradition is important. The desire to secure ataraxia, or freedom from disturbance, is still a motivating force, but with the recognition, albeit repressed, of pride as a natural passion representing an inherent evil, the situation changes. Methodical thinking cannot fully accomplish its task of eliminating fear. Instead, the methodical mind must continuously impose itself, the belief in progress must be continuously affirmed, human nature must be continuously repressed. This is what is meant by Strauss’s conviction that in Hobbes, the citizen is a product of technology. There is a constitutive tension within modernity and its civilizing process. On the face of it, Strauss’s concerns here seem similar to that of Sigmund Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1930, and the critique of instrumental rationality of the so-called Frankfurt School, and most particularly of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, published in 1947. But Freud’s concern was to reveal the origins of guilt in the process of instinctual repression that he saw as a necessary part of the civilizing process. Freud’s tale was of a struggle between Eros and Thanatos, the impulse to join together and the impulse to destroy, the outcome of which was still in doubt.30 There was no doubt Freud was on the side of Eros, though his contribution to the struggle was clearly the application of a method. Thus Freud stands within the process of modernity Strauss seeks to escape. The same can be said of Horkheimer and Adorno. The very title of their work signals their engagement from within the Enlightenment tradition. Theirs is a project of the self-examination of Enlightenment, not its wholesale rejection. Their critique “is intended to prepare the way for a positive notion of enlightenment which will release it from entanglement in blind domination.”31 If anything even more hostile to the reduction of truth to method than was Strauss, Horkheimer and Adorno saw the critique of method as a necessary step in the struggle for social justice. This was hardly Strauss’s concern. Instead, Strauss may have caught himself in his own contradiction. He sought a solution to the problems he saw in modernity that would not be “innermodern.” He looked for that solution in a premodern notion of human nature. But the application of that solution in the age of technology must partake of technology.32 This is close enough to the French and Italian fascists’ embrace of modern technology in the service of premodern notions of corporate identity and heroic glory to give pause. The citation of Virgil, “Tu regere imperio . . . parcere subjectis et debellare superbos [to rule the peoples . . . to spare the conquered and

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subdue the proud] deployed in Strauss’s letter to Löwith may now be seen in the deeper meaning it had for him. It is a rule for ruling stubborn vanity. In his criticism of Schmitt, Strauss linked the notion of a “return to the view of human evil as moral baseness” to the necessary critique of liberalism (N, 110). He also argued that “agreement at all costs” can only be reached on means to an end that is already fixed, but that that entails giving up the fundamental “question of what is right,” about which “we are always quarreling with each other” (N, 114). That fundamental question would therefore have to be framed in terms of human evil. In his book on Hobbes, Strauss similarly observes that the turn to method presupposes “the previous narrowing-down of the political problem, i.e. the elimination of the fundamental question as to the aim of the State” (PPH, 152). The turn to method, which is to say toward means, in Hobbes (and by extension all modern political philosophy) is made possible only by forgetting the evil nature of the human being and establishing instead the modern notion of natural rights. In this text, Strauss suggests that the notion of natural law is the antidote to the doctrine of natural rights and the turn toward method. But he is silent in both the critique of Schmitt and in the Hobbes book on what, exactly, the aim of the state is. The quotation from Virgil (and, possibly, the reference to Caesar’s Commentaries) comes as close as Strauss will come to an answer. The aim of the state is to impose peace on a recalcitrant human nature. It is, in his formulation, to realize the principles of the political Right.

Chapter 4

Leo Strauss comes to America: politics between the lines

In his 1965 autobiographical preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, Leo Strauss never discusses the substance of the book itself. Instead, he situates the writing of it in terms of his struggle with the so-called theologicalpolitical problem in the 1920s. Then, at the end of the preface, referencing his review essay on Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political, Strauss makes the following assertion, already quoted above in chapter 2: The present study was based on the premise, sanctioned by powerful prejudice, that a return to premodern philosophy is impossible. The change of orientation which found its first expression, not entirely by accident, in the article published at the end of this volume, compelled me to engage in a number of studies in the course of which I became ever more attentive to the manner in which heterodox thinkers of earlier ages wrote their books. As a consequence of this, I now read the Theologico-political Treatise differently than I read it when I was young. I understood Spinoza too literally because I did not read him literally enough.1 We have seen in chapter 2 that Strauss had become aware of the concept of esoteric writing—“the manner in which heterodox thinkers of earlier ages wrote their books”—well before his review of Schmitt and that it did not feature as a central part of Strauss’s interpretations of premodern theorists in either the essays published in Philosophy and Law or his book on Hobbes. Instead, it was only after his emigration to the United States that Strauss began to formulate it as a theory of interpretation. The question then is how much of this change of orientation is substantive and how much an issue of technique. My argument is that the substantive change in Strauss’s thinking that resulted from his encounter with Schmitt mainly concerns his embrace of what he thinks of as a premodern notion of nature, and particularly of human nature, and the justification such a view provides for the “fascist, authoritarian, imperial” principles of the political Right. He threw off the “modern prejudice” that lies behind the Enlightenment’s notion of progress

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by becoming more fully aware of the idea of nature against which the Enlightenment rebelled but did not defeat. This gave him an “anthropological” grounding he had struggled to find for his rejection of the rights associated with democracy and liberalism. What he had already learned of the technique of esoteric writing became salient only after his emigration when Strauss adopted the technique to veil the political views that had already been formed during his years in Germany, France, and England. Strauss’s critique of modernity and embrace of a politics predicated on the essential evil of the human being and of the authoritarianism that follows from it now became shielded by a pseudo-scholarly apparatus and the techniques of exoteric writing he himself described at length. The key terms to follow in Strauss’s various texts from his American period emerged from his pre-American writings: the distinction between the natural and the artificial and the centrality of fear. *** What does Strauss mean when he says that he understood Spinoza too literally because he had not read him literally enough? To answer this question is to return to his book Persecution and the Art of Writing, and specifically to one of the essays contained within it, “How to Study Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise,” which Strauss originally published in 1948. This essay is the presumed corrective to the erroneous approach he had taken in his book of some twenty years earlier, though Strauss never references the previous work. In it, he displays the full panoply of elements constitutive of retrieving hidden material from exoteric books. It therefore expands and deepens the understanding that Strauss put forward as what his daughter described as “the art of writing for different kinds of readers.”2 In this essay, Strauss develops several principles of interpretation that became his signature approach to texts. In the first instance, he distinguishes between interpretation and explanation, which is a distinction between attempting to understand a text as the author understood it, on the one hand, and “an attempt to ascertain those implications of his statements of which he is unaware.”3 It thus becomes imperative, in Strauss’s view, that the work of interpretation precede any attempt at explanation. The key to interpretation is the issue of the author’s intention. Authorial intention is absolutely essential for Strauss. It is a vexing issue in textual interpretation more generally, and has been extensively debated, especially since the advent of the notion of the unconscious and the entailed notion that an author may not even be aware of his or her actual motivation or intent in writing. Strauss and those who follow his procedure of interpretation give no weight to psychoanalytic approaches to authorial intent. Nor do they subscribe to any manner of historical or structural principles of interpretation—that one can discern intent only by taking into account the linguistic environment within

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which an author writes, for example, or by situating the author within a specific political or institutional context. But neither do they adhere to the claim that one can discern an author’s intent simply by what that author says it is, for reasons that will become clear momentarily. Instead, Straussian interpretation rests on the notion, more than occasionally violated in practice, that the answer to the question of intent can only be derived from the text itself. But it matters very much what kind of text it is that is being interpreted, and what kind of author wrote it. The distinction between interpretation and explanation is one between meanings of which the author is aware and those of which he or she is not. But within this notion of interpretation there is room for statements an author does not make that are part of the intention. Strauss asserts that it is obvious that, within the interpretation, the understanding of the explicit meaning of a statement has to precede the understanding of what the author knew but did not say explicitly: one cannot realize, or at any rate one cannot prove, that a statement is a lie before one has understood the statement in itself. (PAW, 143) Now, it is clear that some knowledge that an author has but does not state “explicitly” does not mean that an explicit statement is ipso facto a lie, so it is worth bearing in mind that Strauss leaves that implication here. But introducing the distinction between what an author knows and what he or she says opens the way for Strauss to make a characteristically dogmatic assertion regarding how to navigate a text. He writes: It is a general observation that people write as they read. As a rule, careful writers are careful readers and vice versa. A careful writer wants to be read carefully. He cannot know what it means to be read carefully but by having done careful reading himself. Reading precedes writing. (PAW, 144) In Spinoza, Strauss has the added advantage of an author who himself advanced procedures for interpreting texts. In doing so, Spinoza distinguished between “hieroglyphic” and “intelligible” books, the Bible being an example of the former and his own works examples of the latter. Because a book such as the Bible requires external information for its proper interpretation while intelligible books do not, Strauss concludes that “according to [Spinoza’s] view, the whole ‘history’ of his works, the whole historical procedure as employed by the modern students of his works, is superfluous; and therefore, we may add, rather a hindrance than a help to the understanding of his books” (PAW, 149). This claim accomplishes several things at once. It relieves Strauss of the need to take into account

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any interpretations of Spinoza other than the one he will derive from the text. In addition, it permits Strauss to present his view of interpretation as derivative from Spinoza’s. But it also allows him to effectively improve upon this view by claiming that the “modern” approach to texts has presented an additional barrier to interpretation unknown to Spinoza. And that leads Strauss into his polemical critique of so-called historicism. The context for this critique is provided by Strauss’s assertion that following Spinoza’s approach to intelligible books reaches an impasse “because his books are not as easily intelligible to us as the non-hieroglyphic books which he knew were to him” (PAW, 150). The reason for this is the emergence not so much of a historical mode of interpretation that was unknown to Spinoza, but more importantly of what Strauss claims is a specifically “modern” presupposition; namely, that all truth is historical. This presupposition would make it impossible to understand Spinoza as he understood himself, which is the first principle of Strauss’s mode of interpretation, because Spinoza did not understand himself in historical terms. To understand Spinoza as he understood himself, Strauss asserts, one must begin from the “incentive” to understand him, “that incentive being the suspicion that Spinoza’s teaching is the true teaching. Without that incentive, no reasonable man would devote all his energy to the understanding of Spinoza, and without such devotion Spinoza’s books will never disclose their full meaning” (PAW, 152, emphasis in original). Possessing such an incentive, Strauss legitimates “correcting” Spinoza’s own principles of interpretation by arguing that, while Spinoza was able to ignore all thought previous to his own as superstition, the fundamental shift in orientation toward truth that emerged after Spinoza and to which we are heirs (and which Strauss likens to another form of superstition) necessitates a different sort of historical approach: The need for a correction of Spinoza’s hermeneutics follows directly from the assumption that his teaching is the true teaching. On the basis of this assumption, the true teaching is accessible to us only through certain old books. Reading of old books becomes extremely important for us for the very reason for which it was utterly unimportant to Spinoza. We shall most urgently need an elaborate hermeneutics for the same reason for which Spinoza did not need any hermeneutics. We remain in perfect accord with Spinoza’s way of thinking as long as we look at the devising of a more refined historical method as a desperate remedy for a desperate situation, rather than as a symptom of a healthy and thriving “culture.” (PAW, 154, emphases in original) The “desperate situation” is the one in which we find ourselves as a result of historicism, which Strauss characterizes as a “pseudo-philosophy.” And

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here he revives a metaphor he had already deployed in an essay published in 1931 and again in 1935 in a note in his introduction to Philosophy and Law.4 Basing himself on a particular reading of the cave analogy used by Plato in the Republic, Strauss compares our situation to what he terms “the natural obstacles to philosophy.” Adding a basement to Plato’s cave, Strauss comments that, People may become so frightened of the ascent to the light of the sun, and so desirous of making that ascent utterly impossible to any of their descendents, that they dig a deep pit beneath the cave in which they were born, and withdraw into that pit. If one of the descendents desired to ascend to the light of the sun, he would first have to invent new and most artificial tools unknown and unnecessary to those who dwelt in the natural cave. He would be a fool, he would never see the light of the sun, he would lose the last vestige of the memory of the sun, if he perversely thought that by inventing his new tools he had progressed beyond the ancestral cave-dwellers. (PAW, 155–6) In Strauss’s interpretation, Spinoza understood the “natural” obstacle to philosophy to be superstition, which is grounded in the imagination and the passions and which, like philosophy, also presents “an account of the whole.” But today we face a second, “unnatural” obstacle in pseudophilosophy. Strauss claims that, The very idea of a final account of the whole—of an account which necessarily culminates in, or starts from, knowledge of the first cause or first causes of all things—has been abandoned by an ever-increasing number of people, not only as incapable of realization but as meaningless or absurd. The authorities to which these people defer are the twinsisters called Science and History. (PAW, 156) That abandonment is a consequence of the notion of scientific progress, which requires a historical dimension in order to substantiate its claim to be progressive. Modern thought must be shown to be more advanced than what precedes it, which in turn provides the foundation for the belief of continued and future progress. So Strauss sees modern science and the emergence of the history of thought as part of the same phenomenon. “If the history of human thought is studied in the spirit of modern science, one reaches the conclusion that all human thought is ‘historically conditioned,’ or that the attempt to liberate one’s thought from one’s ‘historical situation’ is quixotic,” he argues (PAW, 157). Once this attitude, the modern attitude, takes hold and become generally accepted,

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there no longer exists a direct access to the original meaning of philosophy, as quest for the true and final account of the whole. Once this state has been reached, the original meaning of philosophy is accessible only through recollection of what philosophy meant in the past, i.e., for all practical purposes, only through the reading of old books. (PAW, ibid.) Thus Strauss, through a critique of the historical approach, arrives at a different historical approach. The critique is predicated on a dogmatic assumption dogmatically applied: philosophy is “the quest for the true and final account of the whole.” On this view of philosophy, the history of thought was philosophically irrelevant. It becomes relevant once again, in Strauss’s revised form, if the equally dogmatic assertion of the historical specificity of human thought is set aside and the history of thought becomes an act of retrieval. Historicism itself emerged, Strauss notes, as part of a critique of modernity insofar as modernity was identified with modern natural science. But this critique never shed the notion that “modern thought (as distinguished from modern life and modern feelings) was superior to the thought of the past,” and so “Historical understanding lost its liberating force by becoming historicism, which is nothing other than the petrified and self-complacent form of the self-criticism of the modern mind” (PAW, 158). Strauss uses the “second cave” as a justification for violating the principles of reading Spinoza that are derived from Spinoza’s way of reading. Because of historicism, it is no longer possible for us to read exactly as Spinoza read, i.e., non-historically. We must now restore the “natural” ground upon which Spinoza stood. Strauss writes of this as having acquired “the right . . . to deviate from [Spinoza’s] own rules for reading” (PAW, 158). But since Spinoza excluded history from the reading of intelligible books, as opposed to hieroglyphic ones, Strauss wishes to exclude all that Spinoza meant by that term from the rules that he will now develop. Strauss’s understanding of a historical mode, meant to help us up the ladder to the natural cave, is idiosyncratic. “Contrary to what [Spinoza] implies, we need for the understanding of his books such information as is not supplied by him and is not easily available to every reasonable reader regardless of time and place,” Strauss argues. But we must never lose sight of the fact that information of this kind cannot have more than a strictly subordinate function, or that such information has to be integrated into a framework authentically or explicitly supplied by Spinoza himself. This holds of all knowledge which he did not supply directly and which he did not therefore consider relevant for the understanding of his books: information

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regarding his life, character and interests, the occasion and time of the composition of his books, their addressees, the fate of his teaching and, last but not least, his sources. (PAW, 159) These principles of reading are set within the claim that Spinoza’s mature writings are not addressed to his contemporaries, but rather to posterity, and therefore all of his sources are irrelevant. If Spinoza was writing for posterity, he could exclude all facts thought to be relevant or explicable only to his contemporaries. “The flight to immortality requires an extreme discretion in the selection of one’s luggage,” Strauss observes. “A book that requires for its adequate understanding the use, nay, the preservation of all libraries and archives containing information which was useful to its author, hardly deserves being written and read at all, and it certainly does not deserve surviving its author” (PAW, 160). A further consequence of assuming that Spinoza was addressing posterity is to interpret letters differently from the mature works, since letters are written to contemporaries. But Strauss assumes not only that Spinoza addressed posterity in those books, but that by doing so he is addressing “the best type of readers,” while “the large majority of his letters are obviously addressed to rather mediocre men” (PAW, ibid.). Thus Strauss’s rules for reading Spinoza historically systematically exclude all information normally understood to be historical. Nevertheless, they are predicated on a distinction between the early and mature works of Spinoza, a distinction Strauss isolates from any notion of “development” but which he nowhere substantiates. He says merely that “there must have been facts and teachings which were very important to Spinoza during his formative years when he was naturally less capable than later of distinguishing between the merely contemporary . . . and what he considered deserving preservation” (PAW, ibid.). Upon what, then, does the distinction between “formative” and “mature” rest if not upon some notion of development? At what point did Spinoza become “naturally” more capable of distinguishing between the contemporary and the timeless? By surmising that Spinoza was naturally less capable in this area during his formative years than later, Strauss implies that the supposition lies not in biography but instead in a generic distinction between youth and maturity that is Strauss’s own, a presupposition external to any evidence provided by Spinoza himself. Further, the disregard of concern for sources apparently has no bearing on another of Strauss’s claims: “The understanding of Spinoza’s silence about a fact or a teaching with which he must have been familiar, and whose mention or discussion would have been essential to his argument, belongs to the interpretation proper. For the suppression of something is a deliberate action” (PAW, 161–2). How does one know what “must have been familiar” to an author without a knowledge of his or her sources?

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The key to both of these claims is found in the fact that Spinoza explicitly addresses his Theological-Political Treatise to philosophers and to Strauss’s interpretation of that fact. The distinction between books addressed to what Strauss persistently refers to as “the vulgar” and those addressed to philosophers is fundamental to Strauss (and, he thinks, to Spinoza, who read the Bible as a book addressed to the vulgar). He writes: Books addressed to the vulgar must be adequately intelligible if read in the way in which the vulgar is used to read, i.e., their substance must disclose itself to very inattentive and careless reading. In other words, in vulgar books written for instruction the most fundamental teaching must be written large on every page, or it must be the clearest teaching, whereas the same does not hold of philosophic books. (PAW, 162) Further, since Spinoza addresses his book to those whose philosophical efforts would be freer if they could free themselves from the belief that philosophy ought to be subservient to theology, Strauss concludes that the actual addressees are not philosophers, but rather potential philosophers (PAW, 162–3). And this means that the addressees are themselves not fully free of the prejudices of the vulgar (PAW, 184). And not only that, but Spinoza’s wish to be read only by such readers cannot prevent others who are capable of reading Latin from reading his book. Therefore, In the Treatise Spinoza addresses potential philosophers of a certain kind while the vulgar are listening. He speaks therefore in such a way that the vulgar will not understand what he means. It is for this reason that he expresses himself contradictorily: those shocked by his heterodox statements will be appeased by more or less orthodox formulae. (PAW, ibid.) Strauss repeats this claim more emphatically and expands its scope a few pages later when he states that, Spinoza cannot have been ignorant of the obvious truth which, in addition, had been pointed out to him if not by Plato, at any rate by Maimonides, that every book is accessible to all who can read the language in which it is written; and that therefore, if there is any need at all for hiding the truth from the vulgar, no written exposition can be strictly speaking esoteric, meaning that it must have an exoteric quality as well (PAW, 187).5 These claims buttress Strauss’s formulation of the principles of esoteric writing. Whereas Strauss had criticized Spinoza for his contradictions in

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Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, he now advances the view that the author’s contradictions are strategic. While superficial readers will respond to the position most clearly or often stated by an author, and consider contradictory formulations, when they even notice them, to be mistakes or unintelligible, careful readers will be able to discern what is going on. Only a few readers will even be able to register all of the contradictory statements. “Only a minority of readers,” Strauss writes, will admit that if an author makes contradictory statements on a subject, his view may well be expressed by the statements that occur least frequently or only once, while his view is concealed by the contradictory statements that occur most frequently or even in all cases but one; for many readers do not fully grasp what it means that the truth, or the seriousness of a proposition is not increased by the frequency with which the proposition is repeated. (PAW, 184–5) With the intent of concealing his or her true statements, the author is likely to place them somewhere in the middle of a text rather than at the end. In other cases, “not the explicit statements, but the necessary consequences from explicit statements contradict other explicit statements” (PAW, 185). There are other techniques, including contradictory statements where neither represents the actual view of the author but where working out the surface contradiction may lead the reader to an unstated true position (PAW, 185–6). From all of these considerations, “the sound rule for reading the Treatise,” Strauss concludes, is, that in case of a contradiction, the statement most opposed to what Spinoza considered the vulgar view has to be regarded as expressing his serious view; nay, that even a necessary implication of a heterodox character has to take precedence over a contradictory statement that is never explicitly contradicted by Spinoza. . . . Only by following this rule of reading can we understand Spinoza’s thought exactly as he himself understood it and avoid the danger of becoming or remaining the dupes of his accommodations. (PAW, 186) As to what exactly constitute these “accommodations,” Strauss does not say. Strauss’s rules for reading Spinoza are instructive for alerting us as to how to read Strauss. What is it that Spinoza conceals? The basic argument of the Treatise is that by subjecting the Bible to rational criticism one arrives at a certain relationship between rational truth and piety. For Spinoza, there is no contradiction between these two, but Strauss insists that there is. Strauss’s argument that Spinoza is an author whose statements confirming “vulgar

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views” must be dismissed and all those “contradicting the vulgar view has to be considered as his serious view” (PAW, 177) hinges on a phrase used by Spinoza in one of his earliest works, i.e., a work of his formative years, and repeated in the Theological-Political Treatise. In that early work, his Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, Spinoza asserts several rules of living to follow if one is to heal the intellect (Spinoza assuming that it has become tainted by the pursuit of the false goods of wealth, honor, and bodily pleasure). The first of these is, to speak according to the power of the understanding of ordinary people, and to do whatever does not interfere with our attaining our purpose. For we gain a considerable advantage, if we yield as much to their understanding as we can. In this way, they will give a favorable hearing to the truth.6 The first phrase, in Latin, is “ad captum vulgi” and Strauss translates it as “to speak with a view to the capacity of the vulgar” and glosses the last sentence by stating, “i.e., the vulgar will thus be induced to accept such truths as the philosopher may wish to communicate to them, or they will not resent occasional heresies of the philosopher” (PAW, 177).7 Strauss’s translation and gloss are clearly tendentious. The notion that Spinoza took the position that the philosopher “will adapt the expression of his thought to the generally accepted opinions by professing, as far as is possible or necessary, these very opinions, even though he considers them untrue or absurd,” and that this is the meaning of the phrase “ad captum vulgi,” Strauss argues, is shown by the fact that in the Theological-Political Treatise Spinoza uses the phrase in connection with the suggestion that Moses may have taught things he didn’t believe (PAW, 178). But Strauss’s rhetoric— his choice of the term “the vulgar” instead of “the multitude” or “the masses” to translate “vulgi”—is not innocent and conveys in English radical distinctions that are not Spinoza’s. *** Let us turn to Spinoza’s preface to his Theological-Political Treatise, where Strauss claims that Spinoza addressed his book to “potential philosophers of a certain kind while the vulgar are listening” (PAW, 184) and where “he explicitly urges the vulgar to leave that book alone” (PAW, 162). What Spinoza writes, at the very end of a preface of several pages, is this: Such, Philosophical Reader, are the questions I submit to your notice, counting on your approval, for the subject matter of the whole book and of the several chapters is important and profitable. I would say more, but I do not want my preface to extend to a volume, especially as I know

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that its leading propositions are to Philosophers but commonplaces. To the rest of mankind I care not to commend my treatise, for I cannot expect that it contains anything to please them: I know how deeply rooted are the prejudices embraced under the name of religion; I am aware that in the mind of the masses superstition is no less deeply rooted than fear; I recognize that their constancy is mere obstinacy, and that they are led to praise or blame by impulse rather than reason. Therefore the multitude, and those of like passions with the multitude, I ask not to read my book; nay, I would rather that they should utterly neglect it, than that they should misinterpret it after their wont. They would gain no good themselves, and might prove a stumbling-block to others, whose philosophy is hampered by the belief that Reason is a mere handmaid to Theology, and whom I seek in this work especially to benefit.8 The first thing to note about this is that “the vulgar,” as Strauss put it, is constituted by a very small minority of readers of Latin within a small minority of readers of any kind in seventeenth-century Netherlands. Add to this the problem that Spinoza waits until after he has challenged conventional understandings of the relationship between theology and reason in his preface before suggesting that philosophers will already know these things and that everyone else would be better off not reading the book that follows because they manifest the weaknesses he describes. What justification is there here for Strauss’s claim that the book is addressed to would-be philosophers (rather than simply the “philosophical reader” whom Spinoza identifies) and not at all to the multitude? The book is clearly addressed to a Latin-reading, educated element of the “multitude” consisting of Jewish rabbis and Calvinist and other Christian theologians.9 Only when this audience is convinced of the errors of its prejudices can the space be opened for the free development of philosophy. As for those whom he hopes will not read it, this appears to be a rhetorical maneuver. Spinoza suggests that anyone who identifies with his portrait of a superstitious, fearful reader should ignore his book. How many readers who have gotten that far would then self-identify with that description and put the book down? Or is Spinoza advertising to such readers and inviting them to proceed wrathfully? Not likely for an author who gives as one of the reasons for writing the book, “The opinion ordinary people have of me. They never stop accusing me of atheism, and I am forced to rebut this accusation as much as I can.”10 Strauss’s argument is that Spinoza is addressing would-be philosophers while the vulgar are listening and that his text is therefore an exoteric one (as, in principle, are all heterodox texts), containing both a surface and a hidden meaning. That Spinoza may be writing in two registers can be conceded without the implications Strauss puts upon it. An alternative, and

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more “proximate” explanation for Spinoza’s rhetorical strategy is provided by Yirmiyahu Yovel, who locates it within the immediate cultural tradition in which Spinoza was formed; i.e., the Marrano culture of Amsterdam Jewry.11 The Marranos, forced converts from Judaism to Christianity in fifteenth-century Spain and Portugal, maintained a secret crypto-Jewish identity that produced a series of dualisms and equivocations in their daily existence. Referring to Strauss and to the work of John Wolfson, who situated Spinoza’s heterodoxy in his peculiar reading of medieval Jewish philosophers, Yovel argues that, In looking for a precedent for Spinoza’s use of language, Strauss went back to Maimonides, but his is too great a leap. Just as Wolfson bypassed Marranism in seeking Spinoza’s Jewish roots, so did Strauss bypass a crucial step concerning the use of language. The direct and relevant tradition that Spinoza continued almost uninterruptedly is that of the Marrano culture and linguistic habits. Spinoza’s mastery of equivocation and dual language brings to a climax devices and sensibilities in which the Marranos had excelled for generations.12 The art of writing with multiple meanings intended for multiple audiences had been a feature of New Christian writing before Spinoza and, Yovel claims, can be seen in several specifically Spanish art forms, including the picaresque novel, some of which were written by conversos (including, possibly, Cervantes).13 When deployed by Spinoza, it is in order to bridge the gap between reason and the imagination. But whereas Strauss sees not only deception but also mendacity, Yovel argues instead that, “using dual language, the philosopher can adjust his mode of speech to the multitude while always retaining a level of discourse in which his statements are philosophically true. This duality allows him to be effective without being totally deceptive.”14 Specifically addressing Strauss’s treatment, Yovel accepts “Strauss’s basic point” on esoteric writing, but criticizes him for “the sometimes unnuanced interpretation that Strauss himself seems to give it.” Writing before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yovel continues: Literary equivocation has existed since ancient times, the Bible not excepted. Heterodox authors in the early Enlightenment—Hobbes, Spinoza, and Bayle, among others—have practiced it, as do some contemporary Soviet writers and Western satirists. Yet Strauss tends to put excessive weight on the notion of “persecution” and on the function of prudence and dissimulation. Games of language have served many other purposes as well, including seduction, entertainment, diplomacy, or self-deception. Even Spinoza and Maimonides, Strauss’ main examples, use this genre for other purposes. Maimonides recognizes that every human group must be addressed according to its level of

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comprehension—not as manipulation merely but in order to provide it with some positive metaphysico-religious substance and with a semblance of truth.15 Yovel also takes issue with Strauss’s larger interpretation of Spinoza by pointing out that rather than masking his atheism, Spinoza’s equivocations are aimed at establishing traditional terms on their previously unrecognized rational basis. Yovel reads Spinoza as attempting to preserve basic elements of religion within a rational system, and therefore not as aiming at dissimulation in his use of language.16 That Spinoza was cautious in putting forward his views is not in question. Neither is the fact that that caution was justified by a reasonable concern that he might be courting prosecution for stating those views. But neither fact justifies Strauss’s elevation of that concern and that caution into a general principle involving philosophers, would-be philosophers, and the “vulgar.” Yovel has shown that Spinoza’s use of language should be seen within a definite cultural tradition. Spinoza biographer Steven Nadler, using the sort of documentation ruled out a priori by Strauss, has given specificity to the actual dangers Spinoza ran in publishing the Treatise, what political motivations he had in doing so, and to what actual factions in Dutch politics he was addressing his arguments and appeals.17 *** Leaving the plausibility of Strauss’s reading of Spinoza’s esotericism aside, what has changed in his interpretation of him? The essay’s title signals that what is at issue is an approach to Spinoza’s text. It is meant to correct his previous approach. The principal difference in that approach is that, beginning where his previous critique ended, Strauss enters the text’s architecture through its contradictions. In doing so, Strauss claims to uncover that architecture, which was previously shrouded. But we are left to our own devices to figure out what substantive difference in the meaning of Spinoza’s text this uncovering reveals. Only a hint of Strauss’s changed interpretation of Spinoza can be gleaned from the 1965 preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion. In it, Strauss engages in a lengthy critique of Hermann Cohen’s indictment of Spinoza. Several elements of that critique are especially relevant here. Strauss says that Spinoza “attempted a synthesis of premodern (classical-medieval) and of modern philosophy” by seeking to restore the classical notion of contemplation upon a modern notion of nature (PSCR, 15–16). And Spinoza also attempted to return to classical republicanism, but with a twist. “The republic which he favors is a liberal democracy. He was the first philosopher who was both a democrat and a liberal. He was the philosopher who founded liberal democracy, a specifically modern regime.” Strauss also notes that,

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“Generally speaking, his polity gives the passions much greater freedom and correspondingly counts much less on the power of reason than the polity of the classics. Whereas for the classics the life of passion is a life against nature, for Spinoza everything that is is natural” (PSCR, 16). So the first hint has to do with Spinoza’s straddling of the classical and the modern, attempting to graft a classical republicanism onto a modern notion of the passions. We have seen the role that the passions played in Hobbes. The use of the term “regime” is an indication that Spinoza was attempting to construct a theory appropriate to an entirely new political and cultural configuration by adapting elements of classical republicanism. When Strauss notes that “Spinoza is free from the classical aversion to commercialism,” we have an indication of what that new configuration might entail (SCR, ibid.). Strauss writes that Spinoza “lifts Machiavellianism to theological heights” in understanding the Biblical God in terms of power. “Spinoza’s God is simply beyond good and evil. God’s might is His right, and therefore the power of every being is as such its right” (PSCR, 18). Because Spinoza similarly sees the state in terms of power, Cohen sees him as a sophist. Further, because Spinoza recognizes substantive differences between individuals with regard to their capacity to reason, and does not endorse general public enlightenment, Cohen thinks his commitment to democracy is suspect. And Spinoza showed no fidelity to his fellow Jews, effectively giving aid and comfort to their enemies by his denial of the truth of Judaism. For these and other reasons, Cohen concludes that the excommunication of Spinoza is justified (PSCR, 18–19). In response to Cohen, Strauss claims, first, that, “Our case against Spinoza is in some respects even stronger than Cohen thought. One may doubt whether Spinoza’s action is humanly incomprehensible or demoniac but one must grant that it is amazingly unscrupulous” (PSCR, 19). Strauss then introduces elements that were present in his original book but brought more to the surface in his essay. Cohen mentions Spinoza’s fear, and that suggests a humanly comprehensible motive. Strauss considers that, under the circumstances he faced, Spinoza was compelled to veil his attack on Christian prejudices by appealing to Christian prejudices; specifically, anti-Jewish prejudices. Most importantly, Strauss judges that Cohen fails to follow Spinoza’s thought at the point at which he confronts a contradiction in Spinoza’s argument concerning the universal validity of the Old Testament, which seems to be rejected in one place and accepted in another (PSCR, 20). Then Strauss begins to use passive constructions and scare quotes to describe what he thinks Spinoza is doing. “The ‘assimilationist’ ‘solution to the Jewish problem’ which Spinoza may be said to have suggested . . .” (PSCR, 20–1). The “Zionist” solution, which Spinoza also suggested, “could seem to require the preservation of the ceremonial law. . . . (PSCR, 21). And, “freedom of philosophy requires, or seems to require, a liberal state” (PSCR,

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ibid.). This leads up to the suggestion that, if Spinoza was attempting to advance a liberal state in the interests of both Jews and philosophers, “we must stress all the more the fact that the manner in which he sets forth his proposal—to say nothing of the proposal itself—is Machiavellian: the humanitarian end seems to justify every means; he plays a most dangerous game; his procedure is as much beyond good and evil as is his God” (PSCR, ibid.). The cautious, fearful Spinoza is taking a chance on the liberal state, which now emerges as a tactical decision. This is the point at which I believe Strauss begins to modify his earlier interpretation. In particular, recall that in Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, Strauss had seen a contradiction between Spinoza’s metaphysics and his support for liberalism and democracy. What is hinted at here is that Strauss now sees the contradiction as a product of Spinoza’s “Machiavellian” realism, and in that sense not as a contradiction at all. Like Cohen, Strauss has grown suspicious of Spinoza’s commitment to democracy. It is in this context that Strauss launches an assault on Cohen’s neoKantian liberalism with its “morally demanded infinite progress of morality” grounded in a notion of a God that amounts to an idea of universal harmony (PSCR, ibid.). Without “the idea of God” as Cohen understands it morality as he understands it becomes baseless. That idea is the basis of his trust in infinite progress or of his belief in history, of his “optimism,” of his certainty of the ultimate victory of the good: “there is no evil.” But eternal progress also requires eternal tension between the actual state and the state as it ought to be: immorality is coeval with morality. (PSCR, ibid.) This means that there is need of a coercive state. Strauss emphasizes the uneasiness about power internal to this scheme. Strauss finds it present as well in tensions around criminality within the liberal worldview of autonomous moral selves. There is unacknowledged power at work. “However justly Spinoza may deserve condemnation,” he remarks, for his Machiavelli-inspired hard-heartedness, it is to be feared that Cohen has not remained innocent of the opposite extreme. Since he attacks Spinoza in the name of Judaism, it may suffice here to quote a Jewish saying: “but for the fear of government, men would swallow each other alive”. (PSCR, 22) Strauss then condemns Cohen for his support of revolutions though he rejects war and for a drift toward irrationalism in defense of the principle of revolution. This drift and other inconsistencies would have been avoided

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“if he had taken seriously the law of reason or the natural law which may be said to indicate the right mean between hard-heartedness and softheartedness” (PSCR, ibid.). This indictment of Cohen’s liberal progressivism is a prologue to a question concerning interpretation. That question has to do with the proper way to think of a tradition. Strauss summarizes Franz Rosenzweig’s defense of Cohen as entailing the view that a text that is part of a living tradition should be interpreted from the point of view of that tradition’s highest achievement, which is also its deepest meaning (PSCR, 24). Strauss holds that this leads to a central question, the answer to which will lead to the ultimate judgment on Spinoza as well as on Cohen: is the right interpretation “idealizing” interpretation, i.e. the interpretation of a teaching in the light of its highest possibility regardless of whether or not that highest possibility was known to the originator, or is it historical interpretation proper, which understands a teaching as meant by its originator? Is the conservatism which is generally speaking the wise maxim of practice also the sacred law of theory? (SCR, 25) We know that Strauss’s answer is the “conservative” one. But this diverges from his original interpretation of Spinoza in Spinoza’s Critique of Religion insofar as the opening assumption of the book is that Spinoza was the initiator of a tradition of Bible interpretation. Strauss has now shed the constraints of “tradition.” In shedding those constraints, it would appear that Strauss has uncovered Spinoza’s essential duplicity. Cohen, heir to a tradition of enlightenment, “did not pay sufficient attention to the harsh necessity to which Spinoza bowed by writing in the manner in which he wrote. He did not understand Spinoza’s style, which was indeed entirely different from his own.” Strauss takes issue with Cohen’s denial “that in Spinoza’s time the freest minds were compelled to withhold and to deny the truth” (SCR, ibid.). The “Machiavellian” Spinoza is taking a gamble that the best way to preserve the life of the philosopher is to make his peace with the changing times by adapting classical forms to the new situation and by combating certain prejudices by appealing to those prejudices. Those forms correspond to Spinoza’s account of reason and the passions, the role of images in communicating with the multitude, and a tripartite configuration modeled on antiquity of the wise man, the politician, and the multitude. All of this is made necessary by basing oneself on the “effectual truth,” as Spinoza learned from Machiavelli. The new forms are not “true,” but they may make it possible to insulate the seekers of truth from the effects of the passions that drive everyone else. That new configuration is the “modern regime” called liberal democracy.

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The question, then, is what relation this liberal democracy might bear to the Leviathan, the fear-inducing state we saw emerge out of Strauss’s encounter with Schmitt and his interpretation of Hobbes in the last chapter. If Strauss now comes to endorse liberal democracy after his arrival in the United States, is he playing a Machiavellian game? My claim is that he is. What he has learned through his new approach to Spinoza is how to attack prejudices by appealing to those prejudices. The principles of esotericism that had been before his eyes for years now took on a new significance in his new surroundings and Strauss now linked Spinoza’s style of writing to a tradition, an “art of writing” under persecution, that turns out to be an everpresent necessity. Strauss now adopted that art himself. It is not so much his political ideas that changed as it was his style. That style was put on display in On Tyranny, to which we will now turn.

Chapter 5

On modernity’s tyranny

Leo Strauss’s On Tyranny was published in 1948, the same year as his essay on how to study Spinoza. This complex book consists of a translation of Xenophon’s dialogue Hiero, also known as Tyrannicus, a work and an author whom Strauss considered unjustly ignored by modern scholars, along with Strauss’s interpretive essay that partly decodes it and partly adds another layer or layers of convoluted meanings. After the philosopher Alexandre Kojève reviewed the book, On Tyranny was reissued in French translation in 1954 with the original material plus Kojève’s review and a response by Strauss, and then in an English edition published in the United States in 1964. (A 1991 edition contains all of this material plus the correspondence between Strauss and Kojève.) Much of the secondary literature that engages this book is devoted to the exchange between Strauss and Kojève and focuses on the debate over the possibility of a world state and Kojève’s apparent defense of Stalinist politics.1 That debate is of some relevance in regard to Strauss’s political position and I will turn to it at the end of this chapter, but I first wish to direct attention to Strauss’s original text. And the question that should be addressed to that text is, is it an exercise in exoteric writing? If On Tyranny is an exoteric book containing a heterodox esoteric meaning, then Strauss, by his own account, would presume that only “careful readers” will read it “literally enough.” Shadia Drury has interpreted the book as containing a “teaching on tyranny,” which she understands to be an argument for the legitimacy of rule of the wise beyond the law, an argument grounded in Strauss’s notion of classical natural right.2 But she does not read this text as an esoteric one. Indeed, in her book on Strauss’s political thought she explicitly eschews Strauss’s own method of reading any of Strauss’s texts.3 So on her account, this teaching is overt: Strauss simply uses Xenophon to state the classical position on tyranny, which Strauss sees as a theoretical ideal which might become actualized, but only by chance. The best practical regime, based on the same premises as the ideal tyranny, “is a compromise between wisdom and unwisdom, tyranny and consent. The practically best regime is the rule under law of ‘gentlemen.’ ”4 But Drury makes her case by relying more on

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another text of Strauss’s, his Natural Right and History, than she does On Tyranny, which she barely interprets at all. Drury’s fixation is with Strauss’s elitism and its grounding in his version of classical natural right and in his alleged embrace of the “noble lie” as an instrument of governing. I have suggested that there is more than elitism in Strauss’s turn to what he sees as a premodern conception of human nature: i.e., that such a conception underlies a profoundly reactionary penchant for authoritarian forms. In any event, the use of myth and other forms of imagery are instrumental to Strauss’s view, but are deemed in the interest of the ruled, not the rulers, as Drury suggests. And the notion that rulers use deceit in ruling, alone, should strike no one as new news. It is the logic behind Strauss’s particular version of this notion that is important for any understanding of contemporary politics. Catherine and Michael Zuckert have recently attacked Drury’s views on Strauss’s attitude toward tyranny in their defense of Strauss against the barbarians. While Drury chooses not to apply techniques of reading esoteric texts to Strauss’s works, the Zuckerts are emphatic in their belief that Strauss did not engage in esotericism, period. Though his thesis regarding esoteric writing met with considerable hostility and criticism, they maintain that he continued to emphasize it for philosophical and pedagogical reasons. They embrace Strauss’s own bête noire, historicism, in order to explain Strauss’s stubborn emphasis on the esotericism practiced by writers in the past. The esotericism thesis, they argue, is Strauss’s way of undermining the alleged empirical evidence in favor of historicism and of establishing his counterclaim that philosophy and political philosophy are and always have been meaningful possibilities, because human thought is not historically limited as the historicists claim: the so-called evidence of agreement between all previous thinkers and their times, or of the domination of thought by history, is an artifact of the conscious accommodation thinkers made to dominant opinion in their times. These accommodations testify to the power of authority, but not to the limits of the possibilities of human thought. It is not enough for Strauss to affirm that it is possible to think outside the historical box, so to speak: he must show that it has indeed happened, and thus that it may continue to happen.5 Strauss’s own writing is not marked by esotericism in the face of persecution but rather by another, one could say more noble, purpose, which they call a “pedagogical reserve.” In this practice, “Strauss fails to say all that he thinks, or, better put perhaps, he fails to flesh out (as we poor readers often wish he would) the full scope of his reasoning.”6 Esoteric writers “say things they don’t believe,” but,

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The practice of pedagogical reserve . . . may find the author saying less than he thinks, but not other than what he thinks, except as he may tentatively adopt or consider one or another view as a step in his developing argument, a practice characteristic of completely nonesoteric writing. But the point is not systematically to suggest the contrary of what he thinks, or even to withhold the main conclusions to which he has come.7 This last claim is in some tension with what they otherwise acknowledge, with particular attention to Strauss’s commentaries: That sense that Strauss withholds, that he wants his readers to work hard to piece out his conclusion, follows, we believe, from this purely educational side of his enterprise. By writing what appear to be mere summaries, Strauss forces his readers to study the original texts, on their own and thoroughly, in order to ferret out his interpretive moves. The peculiar mode of writing that Strauss adopted in his later works no longer concerns persecution or noble lies, but only the leading up of the young that Strauss called education.8 The apparently open implications of inviting readers to investigate on their own can easily be seen as subverted by the notion that one is leading them somewhere. In Strauss’s case, the destination is always predetermined. Neither Drury nor the Zuckerts consider On Tyranny to be an esoteric text, though they read it in entirely different ways. The question of whether Strauss is “lying” in the presentation of his views winds up at the center of their disagreement. However, it is possible that Strauss is not lying but rather withholding, and withholding with a purpose. Neither Drury nor the Zuckerts subject the book to a particularly careful reading of the sort Strauss might deploy or encourage. The insistence that On Tyranny does not contain an esoteric message cannot be a priori discounted, as the Zuckerts do by denying that Strauss wrote in this mode, because Strauss himself says that any heterodox writer’s work necessarily partakes of this style. Given the alleged dominance of historicism and relativism in western culture, Strauss has to be seen, and clearly saw himself, as a heterodox writer. If this is an exoteric text, its style becomes critical for a proper decoding. One would assume that Strauss’s most frequently and clearly stated position would accord with the vulgar view of the subject and that his less frequent statements contradicting the vulgar view must represent his genuine views. In addition, one should be alert to contradictions and to how those contradictions are manifested. And Strauss warns that an author of such a text will vary his method so as to make it more difficult to discern by the slightly less careless reader who may begin to sense a pattern.9 Then there is the vexing problem of silences.

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In beginning his commentary, Strauss says that contemporary social science cannot identify the very tyranny that it faces. He writes of what he calls the modern form of tyranny that, not much observation and reflection is needed to realize that there is an essential difference between the tyranny analyzed by the classics and that of our age. In contradistinction to classical tyranny, present-day tyranny has at its disposal “technology” as well as “ideologies”; more generally expressed, it presupposes the existence of “science,” i.e., of a particular interpretation, or kind, of science. Conversely, classical tyranny, unlike modern tyranny, was confronted, actually or potentially, by a science that was not meant to be applied to “the conquest of nature” or to be popularized and diffused. But in noting this one implicitly grants that one cannot understand modern tyranny in its specific character before one has understood the elementary and in a sense natural form of tyranny which is premodern tyranny. The basic stratum of modern tyranny remains, for all practical purposes, unintelligible to us if we do not have recourse to the political science of the classics.10 Many of the elements of this approach are by now familiar to us. Strauss means to step back to a premodern text in order to see what the modern treatment of a subject looks like from that point of view. The premodern standpoint is the “natural” one, rendering the modern variant artificial by definition. Strauss’s explicit target is political science in its modern form. What he calls “the first political scientists” addressed the question of tyranny because “tyranny is a danger coeval with political life” (OT, 22). Their clear and eloquent interpretations guided the generations until the modern era when, Strauss asserts, the modern scientific attitude prevented value judgments from being introduced into scientific claims. Yet he notes that, in face of the experience of the recent past, “with a kind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imagination of the most powerful thinkers of our past,” and which was unrecognized by current political science, “it is not surprising that many of our contemporaries, disappointed or repelled by present-day analyses of present-day tyranny, were relieved when they rediscovered the pages in which Plato and other classical thinkers seemed to have interpreted for us the horrors of the twentieth century” (OT, 23).11 In this context, Strauss registers his surprise that Xenophon’s Hiero, “the only writing of the classical period which is explicitly devoted to the discussion of tyranny and its implications, and to nothing else,” has not attracted renewed interest (OT, ibid.). What is written between the lines here? We should note Strauss’s equivocal language, particularly the semi-concealed judgment that Plato et al. “seemed to have interpreted for us the horrors of the twentieth century.” Or at least seemed to in the “rediscovered pages” to which Strauss refers. And if “many of our contemporaries” rediscovered these pages of Plato and other

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classical theorists, then what of Strauss’s opening claim of the failure of recognition? As usual, Strauss provides no specific references for any of these assertions, but proceeding on Strauss’s own terms, we can readily assume that Strauss is referring to Karl Popper’s influential text, The Open Society and Its Enemies, which was originally published in 1945, and in the first volume of which, subtitled The Spell of Plato, Popper argued that the roots of modern totalitarianism are to be found in Plato’s Republic, with its description of a regulated society governed by a knowledge elite deploying deceit and in Plato’s departure from the open-minded investigations of his teacher, Socrates.12 The clear implication is that Strauss means to direct attention away from Plato’s description of the ideal polity in the Republic, and in particular with the reading of it proffered by Popper, and toward the treatment of the tyrant in the work of Plato’s contemporary, Xenophon. Strauss indirectly invites us to compare the works of these two classical authors, to read them together. In seeming to target modern political science, Strauss identifies Machiavelli as the key figure who introduced an “epoch making change” into political science. Altering his previous attitude toward the foundation of modern thought in Hobbes, Strauss now claims that it was Machiavelli who discovered “the continent on which all specifically modern political thought, and hence especially present-day political science, is at home” (OT, 24). And as he argued in his earlier book on Hobbes, Strauss asserts that, “one cannot understand the meaning of Machiavelli’s achievement if one does not confront his teaching with the traditional teaching he rejects” (OT, ibid.). For a moment, Strauss seems to be in conformity with a great many recent interpreters of Machiavelli when he identifies that tradition with the “mirror of princes” genre of literature, but he quickly moves in another direction. In looking to the mirror of princes tradition, one must beware of the temptation to be wiser, or rather more learned, than Machiavelli wants his readers to be, by attaching undue importance to medieval and early modern mirrors of princes which Machiavelli never stoops to mention by name. Instead, one should concentrate on the only mirror of princes to which he emphatically refers and which is, as one would expect, the classic and the fountainhead of this whole genre: Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus. (OT, ibid.) However, it is not this text of Xenophon’s that is central. Rather, since Machiavelli’s “Prince is characterized by the deliberate disregard of the difference between king and tyrant,” and since Xenophon’s life of Cyrus is devoted to the good king, we must look elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, there is only one earlier work on tyranny to which Machiavelli emphatically refers: Xenophon’s Hiero. The analysis of the Hiero leads to the

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conclusion that the teaching of that dialogue comes as near to the teaching of the Prince as the teaching of any Socratic could possibly come. By confronting the teaching of the Prince with that transmitted through the Hiero, one can grasp most clearly the subtlest and indeed the decisive difference between Socratic political science and Machiavellian political science. If it is true that all premodern political science rests on the foundations laid by Socrates, whereas all specifically modern political science rests on the foundations laid by Machiavelli, one may also say that the Hiero marks the point of closest contact between premodern and modern political science. (OT, 24–5) So Machiavelli is treated as the initiator of modern political science and Xenophon represents the premodern, which in Strauss’s view is identical with the classical. But they also represent the “closest contact” between their respective views. There are a number of remarkable rhetorical maneuvers executed by Strauss in his two paragraphs on the relationship between Xenophon and Machiavelli. First, Strauss begins by noting that, “present-day political science often traces its origin to Machiavelli. There is truth in this contention” (OT, 23–4). He does not say that this contention is true. He points only to a difference between the Prince and Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, saying that the former, but not the latter, “is characterized by the deliberate indifference to the distinction between king and tyrant; the Prince presupposes the tacit rejection of that traditional distinction” (OT, 24). When Strauss observes that Machiavelli was conscious that “he was breaking away from the whole tradition of political science by the position he took in the Prince,” Strauss makes the point by citing a comment from the Discourses (OT, ibid.). When Strauss mentions Machiavelli’s “emphatic” reference to the Hiero, and does so in a long paragraph in which the Prince is identified three times and the Discourses not at all, his note indicates that the reference to this text of Xenophon’s occurs in the Discourses rather than in the Prince (OT, ibid.; 106 note 5). Then there is the caution not to be “wiser, or rather more learned, than Machiavelli wants his readers to be.” That comment alone signals that Strauss’s explicit comments on Machiavelli may not fully represent what he thinks the Florentine is up to. After grounding modern political science somewhere in Machiavelli’s writing, or rather after allowing that there “is truth” in the claims made by practitioners that is it grounded there, Strauss takes his readers on a circuitous route between two of Machiavelli’s texts and two of Xenophon’s. That expedition ends not with a general contrast between these two authors, with Machiavelli representing the modern and Xenophon the Socratic premodern, but rather between Machiavelli and the Hiero. And then Strauss drops that subject. There are only two further references to Machiavelli’s

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works in Strauss’s commentary on the Hiero. The first, the possible importance of which will be discussed below, is to suggest that Xenophon displayed greater prudence than did Machiavelli (OT, 56). The second is to point out that several figures identified as “princes” in the Prince are called “tyrants” in the Discourses, a difference Strauss speculates is the result of a lesson in tact that Machiavelli learned from Xenophon (OT, 64). So Machiavelli seems to have learned something about tact but little about prudence. By contrast, what we are to learn in the comparison of the Prince with the Hiero, namely, “the subtlest and indeed the decisive difference between Socratic political science and Machiavellian political science,” we are presumably to learn on our own, following Strauss’s clues. Instead of pursuing this line of argument, Strauss reiterates his familiar critique of historicism and his equally familiar claim of intent to understand Xenophon as he understood himself. “I have tried,” Strauss writes, to understand Xenophon’s thought as exactly as I could. I have not tried to relate his thought to his “historical situation” because this is not the natural way of reading the work of a wise man; and, in addition, Xenophon never indicated that he wanted to be understood that way. I assumed that Xenophon, being an able writer, gave us to the best of his powers the information required for understanding his work. I have relied therefore as much as possible on what he himself says, directly or indirectly, and as little as possible on extraneous information, to say nothing of modern hypotheses. (OT, 25) What is the “natural way of reading the work of a wise man”? Not just any man but a wise man, and not just any wise man but one who is “an able writer”? The “natural” way to approach such a writer is the way Strauss approached Spinoza and the way he approaches the entire tradition of esoteric writing he read into Spinoza. Strauss indicates as much in the paragraphs that follow his intention to read “naturally.” He does so when he draws attention to what he takes to be the fact of Xenophon’s eclipse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as compared with Plato, on the one hand, and Thucydides, on the other. But Xenophon, Strauss claims, did not want to be understood as either a philosopher or as a historian. He identified himself instead as an “orator” and Strauss sees his eclipse as coterminous with the eclipse of the art of rhetoric in this period. But Xenophon’s rhetoric is of a certain kind; it is Socratic rhetoric, and “the most perfect product of Socratic rhetoric is the dialogue” (OT, 26). We leave aside the implication here that there is no distinction worth making between Socrates, who wrote nothing, and Plato and Xenophon, who wrote dialogues. Strauss’s immediate point is to suggest that, because his dialogues are less complex than those of Plato, “By understanding the art of Xenophon, one will realize certain

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minimum requirements that one must fulfill when interpreting any Platonic dialogue, requirements which today are so little fulfilled that they are hardly known” (OT, ibid.). Thus the meaning Strauss gives to Socratic rhetoric becomes crucially important, and in explicating its characteristics, he gives an account not only of esotericism, which is not explicitly identified as such, but of the place it occupies within Strauss’s own constellation: Socratic rhetoric is meant to be an indispensable instrument of philosophy. Its purpose is to lead potential philosophers to philosophy both by training them and by liberating them from the charms which obstruct the philosophic effort, as well as to prevent the access to philosophy of those who are not fit for it. Socratic rhetoric is emphatically just. It is animated by the spirit of social responsibility. It is based on the premise that there is a disproportion between the intransigent quest for truth and the requirements of society, or that not all truths are always harmless. Society will always try to tyrannize thought. Socratic rhetoric is the classic means for ever again frustrating these attempts. This highest kind of rhetoric did not die with the immediate pupils of Socrates. Many monographs bear witness to the fact that great thinkers of later times have used a kind of caution or thrift in communicating their thoughts to posterity which is no longer appreciated: it ceased to be appreciated at about the same time at which historicism emerged, at about the end of the eighteenth century. (OT, 27) Almost all of the critical elements we have observed in Strauss’s formulation of the relationship between philosophy—and the philosopher—and society are present here. Socratic rhetoric is meant to convey truths to those who are capable of grasping them while barring the door to others who “are not fit for it.” Those truths are potentially harmful to society and so the philosopher must be cautious. “Just” here means that the philosopher observes the necessity of maintaining the social order. The audience for the philosophic text, however, is not necessarily contemporary with its author. Since the tension between philosophy and society, or truth and convention, is always present (unless, by some chance, truth would become realized in the social order, but more on that later), the philosopher’s audience is all potential philosophers arrayed across posterity. But “harmful” here operates in two directions, since “society will always try to tyrannize thought,” and so Socratic rhetoric must make that impossible by providing cover for the philosophers. That Strauss deploys the term tyranny in this way, and in this context, should be especially noted. It is now the philosophers who are the victims, or potential victims, of a tyranny that is coequal with society (or at least with all probable forms of society).

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We are now in a better position to understand what is written between the lines and in plain sight in the following passage that immediately follows the one previously excerpted: The experience of the present generation has taught us to read the great political literature of the past with different eyes and with different expectations. The lessons may not be without value for our political orientation. We are now brought face to face with a tyranny which holds out the threat of becoming, thanks to “the conquest of nature” and in particular of human nature, what no other tyranny ever became: perpetual and universal. Confronted by the appalling alternative that man, or human thought, must be collectivized either by one stroke and without mercy or else by slow and gentle processes, we are forced to wonder how we could escape from this dilemma. We consider therefore the elementary and unobtrusive conditions of human freedom. (OT, ibid.) The reference to the experience of his generation would seem to point toward the experience of Nazism and Communism, but there are two reasons for being suspicious of that insinuation. The most obvious is that Strauss refers to a threat that is coincident with modernity itself. That threat is posed in Heideggerian terms, which will be discussed presently. The second reason is that it was the critique of modernity that led Strauss to read “with different eyes” and that critique, represented in its first instance in the Schmitt review, preceded the Nazi regime. If anything, the Communist threat can be seen as consistent with the critique of modernity, as is evident from the notion that the application of technology will lead to collectivization “either by one stroke and without mercy or else by slow and gentle processes”; i.e., either through the development of the processes of liberal modernity or through communist revolution. This is a variant of the convergence theory with its roots in Heidegger. But if Heidegger helps to show the way, the escape will be by other means. And if those means are not understood by Strauss’s contemporaries, “One can only hope that the time will again come when Xenophon’s art will be understood by a generation which, properly trained in their youth, will no longer need cumbersome introductions like the present study” (OT, 28). My contention that Strauss’s target, “modern tyranny,” is not what it appears to be, can be supported by reflecting on the quotation from Thomas Babington Macaulay, the nineteenth-century Whig historian and politician, that Strauss has chosen as an epigraph for his commentary. This would be an obvious task for any interpreter of Strauss alert to this author’s own demands for close reading, and yet to my knowledge no one who has

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discussed this commentary has as much as mentioned the apparent anomaly of Strauss deploying a Whig historian in this way. Here is Strauss’s rendering of Macaulay’s words: The habit of writing against the government had, of itself, an unfavorable effect on the character. For whoever was in the habit of writing against the government was in the habit of breaking the law; and the habit of breaking even an unreasonable law tends to make men altogether lawless. . . . From the day on which the emancipation of our literature was accomplished, the purification of our literature began. . . . During a hundred and sixty years the liberty of our press has been constantly becoming more and more entire; and during those hundred and sixty years the restraint imposed on writers by the general feeling of readers has been constantly becoming more and more strict. . . . At this day foreigners, who dare not print a word reflecting on the government under which they live, are at a loss to understand how it happens that the freest press in Europe is the most prudish. (OT, 22) These passages, unattributed by Strauss, are from the twenty-first chapter of Macaulay’s The History of England since the Accession of James II and the discussion from which they are drawn is on the emergence of newspapers during the reign of William of Orange in the seventeenth century, an event which Macaulay calls a “revolution.”13 Macaulay is pointing out here that attacks on William were much harsher during the first half of his reign, when a de facto censorship of the press dating from the Licensing Act under Charles II was in force, than in the second half, after the Act expired. The reason he gives is that under the Licensing Act, when even moderate attacks on the government were presumed to be illegal, responsible people obeyed the law and kept silent. In the sentences immediately preceding the first of Strauss’s excerpts, Macaulay observes that, In general, therefore, the respectable and moderate opponents of the Court, not being able to publish in the manner prescribed by law, and not thinking it right or safe to publish in a manner prohibited by law, held their peace, and left the business of criticizing the administration to two classes of men, fanatical nonjurors who sincerely thought that the Prince of Orange was entitled to as little charity or courtesy as the Prince of Darkness, and Grub Street hacks, coarseminded, badhearted and foulmouthed. Thus there was scarcely a single man of judgment, temper and integrity among the many who were in the habit of writing against the government.

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Strauss’s first set of ellipses leaves out Macaulay’s further observation that the end of censorship had a moderating effect by allowing those who had been silent to voice their views. Strauss’s second set, in the second paragraph, signals the dropping of the following sentence: “That purification was effected, not by the intervention of senates or magistrates, but by the opinion of the great body of educated Englishmen, before whom good and evil were set, and who were left free to make their choice.” The third set of ellipses marks the omission of this sentence: “At length even that class of works in which it was formerly thought that a voluptuous imagination was privileged to disport itself, love songs, comedies, novels, have become more decorous than the sermons of the seventeenth century.” Hence the observation of foreigners regarding prudishness. These missing passages fill out Strauss’s ironic intention in prefacing his commentary with this epigraph drawn from an exponent of the view that history represents an unfolding of human progress and freedom of thought and expression. In his editing, Strauss makes Macaulay say that maintaining the law takes precedence over criticism of government and therefore silence is preferable in order to prevent the spread of lawlessness, and that the opinion of the public in a period of freedom of expression is an informal sort of censorship. Macaulay’s first point is clearly that freedom of expression is better for public order than censorship. As for his criticism of the effect of a widespread readership, his comment is aimed at the deleterious effect on literary style. So Strauss’s version of Macaulay accomplishes two things at once. In its edited version, Strauss deploys an unimpeachably progressive authority to make his own reactionary point. He hints that he will not openly criticize the “government” because the law has now become whatever is the prevailing view of the general reading public, and this is doubled by his choice to retain Macaulay’s comment on foreigners. This position fits perfectly with the interpretation presented in chapter 2, above, of his essay “Persecution and the Art of Writing.” The restrictions under which Strauss thinks himself to be writing have nothing to do with Nazism or Communism, but rather with the informal censorship of public opinion, or what Heidegger called the dictatorship of das Man and the mode of so-called inauthenticity represented by it, which is characterized by “averageness” and “leveling down.”14 But Strauss’s method of reading also tells us to go to the source and see what has been left out. Here, Macaulay’s comment on style is of the greatest significance. Strauss’s argument, after all, hinges on the recovery of a style that has gone out of style in late modernity and gone unnoticed by contemporary readers. It is not a style for the masses who read newspapers that Strauss will deploy. Those masses and their champions are not his audience. But, if he is to put forward a heterodox view in writing, he must evade their possible view while he addresses his audience of potential philosophers. Secondarily, Macaulay’s comment that “the opinion of the

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great body of educated Englishmen, before whom good and evil were set, and who were left free to make their choice” was the reason why the passing of the Licensing Act had a positive effect and did not lead to a weakening of the established order, in turn, buttresses the first point. Strauss will make a great deal out of the distinction between philosophers and “gentlemen.” The latter, guardians of what is noble and decent when properly educated, are the upholders of order. It is when their influence is weakened through the extension of general education and technology that the problem of mass public opinion becomes manifest. That is the “modern tyranny” in the context of which Strauss’s “tyrannical teaching” must be understood. *** Strauss’s commentary is indeed cumbersome. Before proceeding to it, a sketch of the main themes of Xenophon’s dialogue, entitled Hiero, or Tyrannicus, will be helpful. The dialogue takes place between the poet Simonides and the tyrant Hiero. It is ordinarily considered a minor work of Xenophon’s and the main theme of the dialogue is generally understood to be a comparison between the life of the private person and the life of the tyrant, with Simonides trying to persuade Hiero to become, basically, less tyrannical and more king-like. Simonides first asks Hiero, who has been both, to compare the benefits and sorrows of each way of life. Hiero replies that perhaps Simonides should tell him about the life of the private man since he is at present one. In this reply, Hiero refers to Simonides not as a poet but as a “wise man” (sophou andros).15 Simonides then lists a series of pleasures and pains that are grounded in the bodily senses and the soul and surmises that the tyrant experience greater pleasures of these kinds and fewer pains. Hiero answers that in each of these cases, contrary to the speculations of those who have no experience as tyrants, the tyrant actually has fewer pleasures than the private man and greater pains. He explains this in terms of the diminution of pleasure experienced as satiety and a variety of other arguments. When Simonides then shifts the focus and observes that tyrants, at least, because of their material possessions, have the greater capacity to aid their friends and hurt their enemies,16 Hiero responds that he is surprised that, like the multitude, Simonides judges more by his eyes than by his intelligence, a remark that throws some doubt on his previous characterization of Simonides as a wise man. Hiero explains that the tyrant’s life is a fearful and lonely one, despite the appearance of material security. The tyrant can trust no one, using his material possessions only to buttress his position rather than for pleasure, and being unsure of the motivations of others. He fears “the brave because they might dare something for the sake of freedom; the wise, because they might contrive something; and the just,

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because the multitude might desire to be ruled by them” (5.1, OT, 12). As for the notion of aiding friends and harming enemies, the tyrant can never be sure that those who receive benefits from him will be truly friends, and his enemies include the multitude over which he rules and which he cannot harm without harming himself. And finally, ending this line of argument in the Hiero, Simonides suggests that being honored is itself a good and that “a real man” (aner) differs from all other animals and from “mere human beings” (anthropoi) in seeking honor and the tyrant must endure all the other ills of which Hiero has spoken in order to receive the greatest honor. But Hiero likens the honors received to receiving sex without love or gifts out of fear. Rather than receiving honor as a benefactor, “the tyrant, Simonides, knows well, lives night and day as one condemned by all human beings to die for his injustice” (7.10, OT, 15). The last part of the Hiero consists of Simonides’ response to Hiero’s description of the miserable life of the tyrant. Simonides says that he thinks that he can teach Hiero “that ruling does not at all prevent your being loved and that it even has the advantage of private life in this respect” (8.1, OT, 16). Hiero points out that ruling requires doing many things, such as exacting money, compelling various kinds of services, punishing injustices, and so on, and adds that, “the man who is a tyrant needs mercenaries. And no burden weighs heavier on the citizens than that. For the citizens [politais] believe that tyrants keep these mercenaries not to share equal honors [isotimias] with themselves, but to get the advantage by supporting them” (8.10, OT, 17). So Simonides suggests that the tyrant delegate punishments to others and reserve to himself the awarding of prizes. Indeed, awarding prizes for a variety of things stimulates the desire of citizens to obtain them and thus urges them toward competitive emulation. This method would be useful for promoting beneficial actions, as well as keeping the population too busy for mischief. Hiero finds this convincing but again brings up the issue of mercenaries. Simonides suggests that the mercenaries be ordered to serve the citizens; to effectively become public bodyguards. This would allow ordinary citizens the safety with which to pursue their business. And “being disciplined the mercenaries would best be able to preserve what belongs to their friends and to destroy what belongs to their enemies” (10.7, OT, 19). And Simonides’ final series of suggestions calls for Hiero to spend his private possessions on the public good, which would reduce the financial burden of the citizens and in general serve to promote the public over the private good. “I tell you, Hiero, your contest is against others who rule cities; if you make the city you rule the happiest of these, know well that you will be declared by herald the victor in the most noble and magnificent contest among human beings” (11.7, OT, 20). Such a strategy will result in being loved, Simonides assures Hiero. “Enrich your friends with confidence, Hiero,” Simonides concludes, “for you will enrich yourself” (11.13, OT, 21).

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Your enemies, meanwhile, “will be utterly unable to resist you” (11.15, OT, ibid.). Hiero does not reply. *** As would be expected, Strauss’s commentary begins with the question of Xenophon’s intent and with the apparently uncontroversial observation that Xenophon nowhere clearly states his intent. This is because the work is a dialogue, and furthermore one in which Xenophon does not himself appear as one of the interlocutors. A character in a dialogue, as in any literary work, cannot simply be assumed to represent the author’s viewpoint.17 But Strauss also questions whether Xenophon’s intent can be gleaned from the apparent content of the dialogue “because we do not know to what type of men it is addressed” (OT, 29). The answer to this question turns out to be central to Strauss’s interpretation. We saw in the discussion of Spinoza’s Treatise, above, as well as in his approach to the Hiero, that it is one of Strauss’s principal rules of interpretation that one begins from the text and from information supplied within it by the author when one is dealing with an “able” author. Strauss takes a very broad view of what constitutes such information and very quickly moves from Hiero to others of Xenophon’s texts in order to complicate his interpretation. He does this in the first instance when he notes that, “While practically everything said in the Hiero is said by Xenophon’s characters, Xenophon himself takes full responsibility for the title of his work” (OT, 31). Strauss purports to find meaning in the fact that, “No other work contained in the Corpus Xenophonteum has a title consisting of both a proper name and an adjective referring to the subject” (OT, ibid.). This observation gives Strauss the opportunity to draw comparisons with several other works of Xenophon that either have a proper name in the title or an alternative title. The adjective Tyrannicus reminds Strauss of still other works with adjectives in the titles, all of which profess to teach a skill. Finally, Strauss notes that only one other work of Xenophon’s “consists almost exclusively of utterances of men other than the author” (OT, 32). The net effect is to draw at least eight other texts of Xenophon’s into the interpretation, where they remain for the duration of his commentary. The result of this procedure, which dogmatically treats all of Xenophon’s writings as a single text, is a maze of inferences, references, and references within references. The interpretive principle of treating all of Xenophon’s (or any author’s) multiple works as a single text must rest on Strauss’s a priori assumption that a certain kind of author knows something— presumably “the truth,” as he says of Spinoza—and that that something lies behind all of the author’s texts. It allows Strauss to similarly treat all of Plato’s texts as a single text, thus avoiding the extensive scholarly debate over whether or not Plato’s late dialogues represent a qualitative change

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from the early, Socratic dialogues. That distinction was important to Karl Popper, Strauss’s anonymous opponent, for one. Indeed, Strauss not only treats the works of certain authors as a single text; he generally gives the question-begging impression of a single “classical” position shared by many authors.18 These attributes add to the complexity of Strauss’s style, a complexity most readily seen in the maze, and haze, of his reference notes. There, not only will one often find references to several texts by the same author, but also to several separate passages of the same text, itemized out of their original page sequence, along with references to one or more texts of one or more additional authors with the same out-of-order series of page citations, as well as to other of Strauss’s notes, located either before or after the note in question.19 The temptation is to try to follow all these signposts in order to reconstruct what Strauss has deconstructed, though almost all readers who even begin this task will grow weary and either give up the effort or undertake it sporadically. But even those who persevere may find themselves unable to piece it all together. And then there is Strauss’s caution that the cautious writer will vary his or her technique so as to avoid discovery through an overly obvious routine. The cumbersomeness of his commentary is deliberate. Strauss’s mastery of the technique of plausible deniability is pretty thorough. Nevertheless, a suggestive way through this maze can be discerned in some themes that connect On Tyranny to the premodern view of human nature and the natural authoritarianism it calls forth that Strauss first articulated through his engagement with Carl Schmitt and Hobbes. To begin to unravel this aspect of Strauss’s meaning it is best to start with his question of to what sort of men the dialogue is addressed. There are a number of different sorts of men who enter into the picture. As we have seen in the account of the Hiero, Xenophon introduces several categories of men: the “wise man” (sophou andros), the “real man” (aner), and the “mere human being” (anthropos), along with the gentleman, the citizen, and the tyrant. And recall that Hiero (5:1) gives an account of the sorts of men he fears: “the brave [andreious] because they might dare something for the sake of freedom [eleutherias]; the wise [sophous], because they might contrive something; and the just [dikaious], because the multitude [plêthos] might desire to be ruled by them.” All of these distinctions are important and Strauss draws attention to them after pointing out that this expression of fear on the part of Hiero occurs “in what is literally the central passage of the Hiero” (OT, 41). He is particularly concerned with Hiero’s statement concerning those he fears, since Hiero (but not Xenophon) had previously addressed Simonides as a wise man, and thus intimates that he has something to fear from him. What that is is noticeably vague: that the wise man might “contrive something.” Hiero’s categories mean that the wise man is neither brave nor just. Strauss addresses the relationship between Hiero’s three categories in a series of apparently contradictory statements. Strauss writes that the wise

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man is to be distinguished from the sophist, a distinction lost on the vulgar, because, “the wise man is a gentleman, whereas the sophist is servile.” But then Strauss notes that the failure of the vulgar to make this distinction rests with, the ambiguity of “gentlemanliness.” In common parlance, “gentleman” designates a just and brave man, a good citizen, who as such is not necessarily a wise man. Ischomachus, that perfectly respectable man whom Xenophon confronts with Socrates [in the dialogue Oeconomicus], is called a gentleman by everyone, by men and women, by strangers and citizens. In the Socratic meaning of the term, the gentleman is identical with the wise man. The essence of wisdom, or what distinguishes wisdom from ordinary gentlemanliness, escapes the vulgar, who may thus be led to believe in an opposition between wisdom and the only gentlemanliness known to them: they may doubt the gentlemanliness of the wise. (OT, 42) Because the vulgar believe that the tyrannical life is the most enjoyable— the view put forward, possibly disingenuously, in the first half of the Hiero —they will falsely assume that the wise will either strive to become tyrants or to teach their friends to be, and thus emerges the vulgar fear of the wise, a fear apparently reproduced by Hiero’s fear (OT, 42–3). What, exactly, is the distinction that Strauss is introducing between the Socratic and the vulgar view of the gentleman? How does he come to identify the wise man with the gentleman? What is at stake in this distinction? In three notes contained within the single paragraph in which he presents these views, Strauss makes references to Xenophon’s Memorabilia, Oeconomicus, and Cyropaedia and to Plato’s Republic, Symposium, Seventh Letter, and Gorgias, and invites his reader to “compare” passages between and among them. The only substantive comment he makes in any of these notes is the claim that, “the distinction between the two meanings of ‘gentleman’ corresponds to the Platonic distinction between common or political virtue and genuine virtue” (OT, 109, note 27). We are referred to two passages from the Oeconomicus to compare with two from the Memorabilia, and then to compare these with a passage from the Republic. The first passage from the Oeconomicus occurs in a context in which Socrates has been discussing the art of household management (oeconomia) with a man named Critobulus and leading the latter to the conclusion that husbandry is the most honorable form of making a living. Critobulus now asks Socrates to explain how it is that some men do well and others badly at husbandry and Socrates replies by recounting a conversation he had with Ischomachus, “a man whom I took to be really one of those who are justly styled ‘gentlemen.’” His account of Ischomachus’s description of his life is one of tedious detail and utter

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conventionality, most of which is taken up with Ischomachus’s description of how he has “trained” his wife. In the second cited passage, when Socrates asks Ischomachus to describe the daily life of a gentleman and the latter requests that Socrates correct him if he detects anything wrong in his conduct, Socrates replies ironically, how could I presume to correct a perfect gentleman, I who am supposed to be a mere chatterer with my head in the air, I who am called— the most senseless of all taunts—a poor beggar? I do assure you, Ischomachus, this last imputation would have driven me to despair, were it not that a day or two ago I came upon the horse of Nicias the foreigner. I saw a crowd walking behind the creature and staring, and heard some of them talking volubly about him. Well, I went up to the groom and asked him if the horse had many possessions. The man looked at me as if I must be mad to ask such a question, and asked me how a horse could own property. At that I recovered, for his answer showed that it is possible even for a poor horse to be a good one, if nature has given him a good spirit. Assume, therefore, that it is possible for me to be a good man [agathôi andri] and give me a complete account of your occupations, that, so far as my understanding allows me, I may endeavor to follow your example from tomorrow morning; for that’s a good day for entering on a course of virtue. (Oec. 11.3–11.6)20 Socrates’ irony is directed at the common notion of the gentleman and the concept of virtue that attaches to it. The positive assertion, by analogy, is that it is possible to be a good man without possessions. The assumption regarding possessions and their relationship to virtue is solidified in Ischomachus’s account that follows, since he goes on to say that the gods grant prosperity to some and that he uses his prosperity to benefit his friends and his city (Oec. 11.7–11.9). Isochomachus thus articulates the conventional view that to be virtuous is to benefit one’s friends, and by extension one’s city, in this way, the same position put forward by Simonides to Hiero. Whereas in his own text Strauss writes that Socrates is to be distinguished from the sophists on the grounds that “the wise man is a gentleman, whereas the sophist is servile,” his first reference to Memorabilia, Xenophon’s recollections of Socrates, says something quite different. There, a distinction is being made between Socrates and the natural philosophers. That Socrates was taken to be a natural philosopher is the caricature of him given in Aristophanes’ Clouds and was a common view. It was also germane to the charge of impiety brought against Socrates at his trial. Xenophon emphasizes that unlike the natural philosophers, Socrates was always concerned with questions having to do with “human problems” and Xenophon says of Socrates’ distinction between the sorts of questions he asks as compared to

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the natural philosophers—not, as Strauss indicated, the sophists—that “men who know the answers to questions like these, he thought, are truly noble, while the men who do not know deserve to be called slaves” (Mem. 1.1.16).21 By committing this obvious “blunder” does Strauss mean to negate his overt statement regarding Socrates’ relationship to the sophists, or does he tacitly mean to direct our attention to the question of piety and Socrates’ relation to the natural philosophers? When we turn to the second reference from the Memorabilia, we find Xenophon, again in his own voice, giving an account of Socrates’ definitions of various forms of government: Socrates was of the opinion that kingship and tyranny were both forms of government, but he believed they differed from each other. Kingship is the government of men both with their consent and according to laws of the state, he said, while tyranny is government both without the consent of the people and not according to law, but as the ruler wishes. Where magistrates are chosen from among the men who discharge their lawful obligations, the state, he believed, is an aristocracy. Where the magistrates are chosen on the basis of property, the government is a plutocracy, and where the officials are chosen from among all the citizens, it is a democracy. (Mem. 4.6.12) Why are we directed here? What relationship does this have to the first reference from Memorabilia, and why are we to compare these with the references from Oeconomicus? We should note that neither of the passages cited from Memorabilia are given as direct quotation of Socrates’ words. However the second passage, in which Socrates delineates the different forms of government, takes place after a dialogue on self-discipline between Socrates and the youth—and prospective philosopher—Euthydemus,22 which is presented by Xenophon in direct quotation. Socrates asks Euthydemus “what kinds of things are called just” and the youth replies, “What the laws command.” Euthydemus is then led to affirm what Socrates poses as questions. These affirmations are that those who do what the law commands act justly and are therefore just men, and that no one obeys the law without knowing what it commands. Then Socrates continues: “Do you think that anyone who knows what he ought to do thinks that he should not do it?” “I do not.” “Do you know anyone who does other than what he thinks he ought to do?” “I do not,” replied Euthydemus. “Do men who know the law in regard to mankind [anthrôpous nomima] do just deeds?” “Certainly.” “Are men who do just deeds, just men?” asked Socrates. “Who else would be?” “Then our definition is correct

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which defines just men as those who know the law in regard to mankind [anthrôpous nomima]?” “I think so.” (Mem. 4.6.6) This exchange raises the question of which laws are being discussed; the laws of any given city or “the law in regard to mankind”? A plausible, if somewhat strained, interpretation of the passages cited by Strauss, when added up and seen in the contexts in which they appear, might go something like this: the conventional view of the gentleman is one who seeks material possessions with which to help his friends and his city and is someone who obeys the law of the city. He is busy at his quotidian tasks and is not reflective. He is conventionally thought to be just and noble. Socrates, on the other hand, is someone who asks fundamental questions about “the law in regard to mankind,” not about any particular laws. He pursues goods that are not material, which may be of benefit to his friends and to a city, but not in the commonly understood way. He is noble because he does not reduce himself to serving thoughtlessly, and he is just because he follows the “law in regard to mankind,” not the laws of the city. In the passage in which Xenophon says that Socrates distinguished between kingship and tyranny, the reference to laws is to the laws of the city. The tyrant rules without concern for law in this sense and without the consent of the governed. He rules according to his own wishes. It is conceivable that a tyrant could be just if the tyrant ruled in accordance with the “law in regard to mankind,” though the ruled, who do not have knowledge of that law, do not consent. Socrates does not show himself, unambiguously, to be an opponent of tyranny. As it is, there is no judgment entailed in the views of different forms of government reported by Xenophon. They are merely classificatory. We now turn to the Republic, to the passage Strauss invites us to compare with the passages from Xenophon, and which, it is hinted, will tell us something about “the distinction between the two meanings of ‘gentlemen’” Strauss has suggested, which, he adds, “corresponds to the Platonic distinction between common or political virtue and genuine virtue.” Here, where the dialogue continues after Plato’s famous simile of the ship, we are reminded by Socrates that the common run of citizens consider people such as himself, the true philosophers, to be useless stargazers. The stargazer reference recalls the charge against Socrates that he was a natural philosopher, with his head in the clouds (actually, in this simile, simply gazing upward). And here, too, Socrates wishes to distinguish the true philosopher from the bogus ones, for it is the latter that bring dishonor, and danger, upon the former. Socrates reminds Adeimantus, his interlocutor, that they have already established earlier in the dialogue that if someone is to become a “good and fine person” (kalon te kagathon esomenon) he must be a pursuer of the truth, which Socrates describes in erotic terms. “It is the

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nature of the real lover of learning to struggle toward what is, not to remain with any of the many things that are believed to be,” he argues, drawing the distinction between seeking the truth and remaining at the level of opinion that Strauss often recalls (Rep. 490a).23 In the lines following Strauss’s reference, Socrates reminds Adeimantus that “courage, high-mindedness, ease in learning, and a good memory all belong” to the nature of the fine and good person, or the gentleman. And this brings us to Strauss’s comment regarding “common or political virtue and genuine virtue.” Political virtue is the virtue of the city, what is commonly understood to be virtue, the virtue to which Xenophon’s Socrates ironically refers in his conversation in Oeconomicus. “Genuine” virtue is not only dissimilar to political virtue; it is antithetical to it. The Socratic “gentleman” is judged by a fundamentally different, and opposed, standard from that of the city, its customs, and its laws, which is why the Socratic gentleman is thought to be useless. So when Strauss observes, in the passage quoted above, that, “The essence of wisdom, or what distinguishes wisdom from ordinary gentlemanliness, escapes the vulgar, who may thus be led to believe in an opposition between wisdom and the only gentlemanliness known to them: they may doubt the gentlemanliness of the wise” (OT, 42), he is being disingenuous. He, and Socrates, at least in this Platonic rendering, believe that there is such an opposition and, in anything less than an ideal society, there must be. This passage from the Republic, taken in conjunction with what we have gleaned from the references to Xenophon’s texts, simply confirms that the true philosophers are guided by a different standard from non-philosophers as to what it means to be a just man. They are beyond the conventional understanding of good and evil. The key question now becomes, what is the content of the “law in regard to mankind”? Xenophon’s Socrates asks questions and Plato’s engages in an erotic quest. But Xenophon also has Socrates say, in his interrogation of Euthydemus, that no one obeys a law without knowing what it commands and that the just men are “those who know the law in regard to mankind.” If the philosopher is just in this sense, he must know the content of this law. *** What is it that the philosopher knows? If Socrates is the embodiment of the philosopher, then he knows that the greatest good is not identical with the greatest possession. “While people in general” are likely to think this, “Socrates makes a clear distinction between the two things. According to him, the greatest good is wisdom, whereas education is the greatest good for human beings, and the best possession is a good friend” (OT, 85). Strauss refers the reader to a comparison between Hiero 4.3 and two passages from the Memorabilia in a note following “human beings.” The Hiero reference

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is to comments by Hiero rebutting Simonides’ assertions regarding the benefits of the tyrant’s life as compared with the private man. Hiero says, “Fatherlands [patrides] in their turn, are worth very much to other human beings. For citizens act as a bodyguard to one another against slaves, and against evil-doers, without pay, so that no citizen will meet a violent death.” The implication here is that the city is a possession of its citizens, which they value for its security. The first reference to Memorabilia has Socrates talking to feuding brothers, and he questions why their possessions produce envy between them when they accept unequal possessions within the political community for the sake of security and sufficiency (Mem. 2.3.2). The second reference, which takes us backward in the text, is again to Socrates’ criticisms of the natural philosophers, and it is of the sort of knowledge that they seek, and from which he is distancing himself, that human beings cannot solve the riddles they pose (Mem. 1.1.13–15).24 We know from Strauss’s earlier depiction of Socratic virtue that Socrates has no material possessions. Not any material thing, and not the city, but a good friend is the best possession. A good friend is a broader category than a fellow citizen or a brother, both of which are “naturally” given (at least in Socrates’ context, since one does not choose one’s place of citizenship but is born into it). Strauss is emphasizing here, once again, the distinction between the wise man and the citizen (or political man). Simonides is presented by Xenophon as a poet, by Hiero as a wise man, and by Simonides himself as a private man. Strauss emphasizes another aspect of Simonides’ identity. Noting that the Hiero contains Xenophon’s “tyrannical teaching,” and, in accordance with Strauss’s view concerning heterdox writers, Xenophon had to find a way to present it indirectly. More precisely, The Hiero reveals . . . if only indirectly, the conditions under which the “tyrannical” teaching may be expounded. If the city is essentially the community kept together and ruled by law, the “tyrannical” teaching cannot exist for the citizen as citizen. The ultimate reason why the very tyrant Hiero strongly indicts tyranny is precisely that he is at bottom a citizen. Accordingly, Xenophon entrusted the only explicit praise of tyranny which he ever wrote to a “stranger,” a man who does not have citizen responsibilities and who, in addition, voices the praise of tyranny not publicly but in a strictly private conversation with a tyrant, and for a purpose which supplies him with an almost perfect excuse. (OT, 76–7) Strauss adds that, “Socrates did not consider it good that the wise man should be simply a stranger; Socrates was a citizen-philosopher” (OT, 77). In making the claim of what Socrates thought, Strauss cites Xenophon’s

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Memorabilia, where Socrates is in a conversation with Aristippus, who claims to avoid being subjected to any master (i.e., to become a slave) by remaining outside membership in any political community. Socrates observes that citizens have taken all sorts of precautions in order to protect themselves and are still “wronged,” so how can Aristippus hope to be safer than a citizen without such safeguards, even though cities have passed laws protecting the movement of strangers (Mem. 2.1.13–15). Here the implication is that it is safer for any man, and not just the wise man, to be a citizen than a stranger. Strauss is playing on the sense of “good” here, where it means prudent, if it means anything. But also of importance is Strauss’s further claim that Xenophon and Plato agree on this point: “Plato entrusted his discussion of the problematic character of the ‘rule of laws’ to a stranger,” meaning in his Laws (OT, 77). Strauss makes a number of theoretical moves that, at best, represent considerable liberties with his sources. In opening a discussion of the two ways of life dealt with in Xenophon’s dialogue, Strauss claims that, “Insofar as ‘tyrant’ is eventually replaced by ‘ruler,’ and the life of the ruler is the political life in the strict sense, the question discussed in the Hiero concerns the relative desirability of the life of the ruler, or of the political life, on the one hand, and of private life on the other” (OT, 78). In support of the “strict sense” in which the life of the ruler is the political life, Strauss cites two passages from Memorabilia, neither of which have any discernible relationship to his interpretation.25 Strauss might have in mind Aristotle’s famous definition of the citizen as one who is both able to rule and to be ruled, and he might well expect his readers to make that inference. Why then refer instead to one passage where it is said that Socrates counsels the prospective ruler to seek divine guidance and another where Xenophon gives a hypothetical account of Socrates questioning what it is that constitutes the good citizen (the answer being the benefits he brings to the city)? The second reference is potentially compatible with Aristotle’s understanding, since the citizen can function in any of the ways suggested by Socrates. But the first reference introduces the issue of piety, which is not a part of Aristotle’s definition. It is also something that is not explicitly mentioned in Hiero. But it is something that Strauss wishes to introduce into the text, as we shall see. Strauss understands Hiero to be a “citizen in the most radical sense” while “Simonides proves to be a stranger in the most radical sense,” and therefore “the dialogue presents the contrast between the citizen and the stranger” (OT, 78–9). The two ways of life that are contrasted, then, in the two parts of Hiero are not the private life and the tyrant’s life, but the life of the stranger and the life of the citizen. Strauss goes further. Simonides, he claims, “reveals himself by his being or by deed as a wise man,” and so, “Ultimately, the dialogue serves the purpose of contrasting the two ways of life: the political life and the life devoted to wisdom” (OT, 79, emphasis in original).

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Among the differences between these, is that, while Hiero, as the political man, wishes to be loved, Simonides desires honor. More precisely, the political man desires to be loved by everyone, without qualification, while the wise man desires recognition only by “those who are free in the highest degree” (1.16, OT, 5). Strauss emphasizes this distinction between love and admiration. “The beneficent ruler is praised and admired by all men, whereas he is loved mainly by his subjects: the limits of love coincide normally with the borders of the political community, whereas admiration of human excellence knows no boundaries” (OT, 89). Citing the example of subjects who both love and admire their benefactor and comparing this to those, in “enemy cities,” who might admire the same figure without loving him, Strauss draws the conclusion that “love has no criterion of its relevance outside itself, but admiration has” (OT, ibid.). Because he does not require love in the same way as the political man, the wise man is self-sufficient, while the ruler is dependent upon the citizens.26 Thus, The specific function of the wise man is not bound up with an individual political community: the wise man may live as a stranger. The specific function of the ruler on the other hand consists in rendering happy the individual political community of which he is the chief. The city is essentially the potential enemy of other cities. Hence one cannot define the function of the ruler without thinking of war, enemies, and allies: the city and her ruler need allies, whereas the wise man does not. To the specific functions correspond specific natural inclinations. The born ruler, as distinguished from him who is born to become wise, must have strong warlike inclinations. (OT, 90) Given the previous identification of the political life with “rendering happy” the city, the wise man is, by his “specific function,” not a citizen. Socrates now stands as an apparent exception to a general rule. Strauss himself, of course, was a stranger, in at least four senses. The first of these is in the nature of the Galut, or exile. In his Jewish identity, Strauss explicitly embraced the Galut.27 Also as a Jew, he was “denaturalized” by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, when German Jews lost their status as citizens. The third sense is as a “foreigner” in the United States. And lastly, as a philosopher (even though he publicly denied that title). Strauss notes that Xenophon considered a streak of cruelty an essential element of the great ruler in general. The difference between the tyrant and the nontyrannical ruler is ultimately not a simple opposition, but rather that in the case of the tyrant certain elements of the character of the ruler are more strongly developed or less easily hidden than in the case of the nontyrannical

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ruler. Nor is it necessarily true that the pleasure which the ruler takes in hurting enemies is surpassed by the desire to be loved by friends. (OT, 91) Since Strauss, if not Xenophon, has identified the tyrant with the citizen through a series of intermediate steps passing through the concept of ruling, this is a remarkable comment on political life. Strauss effectively states, through his particular interpretation of Xenophon, that the basis of political life is enmity. War, the distinction between friends and enemies, is essential to the political life and the character of the citizen is essentially the same as that of the tyrant, if either muted or more easily hidden. Thus does Strauss return to the common ground he shared with Carl Schmitt. Where he parts company is in conceptualizing an alternative life, the life of the philosopher, and an alternative concept of justice. The philosopher, because he seeks admiration, which is self-contained, and not love, which goes along with hate and is dependent on others, does not need anyone else and is hence dispassionate toward all others. “The wise man alone is capable of justice in the highest sense,” Strauss claims. When Hiero distinguishes between the wise and the just man, he implies that the just man is the good ruler. Accordingly, he must be presumed to understand by justice political justice, the justice which manifests itself in helping friends and hurting enemies. When Socrates assumes that the wise man is just, he understands by justice transpolitical justice, the justice which is irreconcilable with hurting anyone. The highest form of justice is the preserve of those who have the greatest self-sufficiency which is humanly possible. (OT, 91) Political justice is the justice of helping friends and hurting enemies, which is exactly the common Athenian opinion of justice against which Socrates apparently argued in the Republic. By Strauss’s account, the wise live by a higher conception of justice, but leave this “vulgar” view intact to guide political life. These considerations bring us to Strauss’s positions on patriotism and piety. They are Strauss’s views, even if filtered through Xenophon through Simonides. Clearly, the wise have no grounding for patriotism insofar as patriotism means love of one’s city. The wise do not need love. The city is not the best possession but rather friendship, and friendship knows no borders. More than that, as we have seen, the citizens value the city because it affords them safety. The city liberates its citizens from fear, which is the precondition for experiencing pleasure. That the city liberates its citizens from fear, “does not mean that it abolishes fear; it rather replaces one kind of fear (the fear of enemies, evil-doers, and slaves) by another (the fear of the

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laws or of the law-enforcing authorities). The city, as distinguished from friendship and trust, is not possible without compulsion; and compulsion, constraint, or necessity . . . is essentially unpleasant” (OT, 97). In the dialogue, Hiero is led to value friendship above patriotism, though Hiero is said to represent the political life. But Hiero’s notion of friendship is deficient because, unlike the friendship that is the best possession, it is based on love. Strauss suggests that Hiero makes this assertion placing friendship above patriotism because he is disingenuously trying to persuade Simonides that the private life is superior to the life of the tyrant (or, presumably, the life of the wise man to that of the political man). Simonides does not challenge Hiero, but rather accepts the tyrant’s view both tacitly and “in deed,” by choosing to live as a stranger. “Contrary to Hiero,” Simonides, never praises the fatherland or the city.28 When he urges Hiero to think of the common good, and of the happiness of the city, he emphasizes the fact that this advice is addressed to a tyrant or ruler. Not Simonides, but Hiero, is concerned with being loved by “human beings” in the mass and therefore has to be a lover of the city in order to reach his goal. Simonides desires nothing as much as praise by the small number of competent judges: he can be satisfied with a small group of friends. (OT, ibid.) Strauss adds that the view of honorable praise held by Simonides is one that is entirely directed to the self as the object of praise and entails no sense of duty or benefit to anyone else. Strauss observes that, via his organization of his Memorabilia, with the bulk of it dedicated to Socrates’ character, Xenophon implies that Socrates was more concerned with the self than the city. And Xenophon’s own life indicates that he had no fundamental attachment to his city or to Greece. Against the threat of being “carried away by blind indignation” at Xenophon’s lack of patriotism, Strauss gives the following explanation of “what we might call Xenophon’s theoretical and practical depreciation of the fatherland or the city in the light of his political teaching in general and of the teaching of the Hiero in particular”: If wisdom or virtue is the highest good, the fatherland or the city cannot be the highest good. If virtue is the highest good, not the fatherland as such, but only the virtuous community or the best political order can command a good man’s undivided loyalty. If he has to choose between a fatherland which is corrupt and a foreign city which is well ordered, he may be justified in preferring that foreign city to his fatherland. Precisely because he is a good man, he will not be a good citizen in a bad polity. (OT, 98)

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Strauss relates this position back to Xenophon’s so-called tyrannical teaching, which he summarizes as follows: “We have stated that according to that teaching beneficent tyranny is theoretically superior and practically inferior to rule of laws and legitimate government” (OT, 99). Strauss did not actually phrase it that way in his first formulation of the possibilities of realizing beneficent tyranny. Earlier in his text, he wrote that, “While Xenophon seems to have believed that beneficent tyranny or the rule of a tyrant who listens to the counsels of the wise is, as a matter of principle, preferable to the rule of laws or to the rule of elected magistrates as such, he seems to have thought that tyranny at its best could hardly, if ever, be realized” (OT, 75). The “seems tos” of the earlier formulation have been lost. In that instance, Strauss’s cautions emerged from the rather thin observations that there are no examples of tyrants who were both happy and beneficent in Xenophon’s works, and, further (with a note citing Xenophon’s comment in Anabasis [Ana. 3.2.13] that the Greeks, in defeating Xerxes, showed their refusal to obey a master), that “the chances of tyranny at its best seem to be particularly small among Greeks” (OT, 75). But the main reason for supposing Xenophon’s view of the possibilities of realizing beneficent tyranny is that being called a tyrant rather than a king means that the ruler in question has been unable to transform his rule into legitimate terms and therefore lacks unquestioned authority, which leads to greater instability and oppression than nontyrannical government (OT, ibid.). Only the tyrant needs the guidance of a wise man, and therefore the tyrant is an imperfect ruler. “Reasons such as these,” Strauss concludes, “explain why Xenophon, or his Socrates, preferred, for all practical purposes, at least as far as Greeks were concerned, the rules of laws to tyranny, and why they identified, for all practical purposes, the just with the legal” (OT, 75–6). Strauss presents the tyrannical teaching as having only a theoretical meaning involving questions of law and legitimacy. He claims that when Socrates was charged with teaching his students to be tyrants, “this doubtless was due to the popular misunderstanding of a theoretical thesis as a practical proposal.” But his further comment suggests that there is a practical implication to this theoretical position: Yet the theoretical thesis by itself necessarily prevented its holders from being unqualifiedly loyal to Athenian democracy, e.g., for it prevented them from believing that democracy is simply the best political order. It prevented them from being “good citizens” (in the precise sense of the term)29 under a democracy. Xenophon does not even attempt to defend Socrates against the charge that he led the young to look down with contempt on the political order established in Athens. (OT, 76)

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It was because of this “theoretical” position and the suspicions it aroused, Strauss supposes, that the Athenian demos condemned Socrates to death and Xenophon to exile. To avoid this “practical” consequence, it is necessary to exercise caution in expounding it, which is why it must be disentangled through a reading of Hiero in the context of Xenophon’s entire corpus of writing. Does Strauss, too, accept the tyrannical teaching? It seems pretty obvious to all but Straussian interpreters that he does. The claim that he does not rests on his assertion, previously quoted, that this teaching has been shown to be “theoretically superior and practically inferior to rule of laws and legitimate government.” There is reason to believe that Strauss merely wishes to give that impression, since he had previously hedged this judgment with his “seems tos.” But Strauss also seems to distance himself from this “teaching” when he notes that by pointing to its theoretical superiority and practical inferiority, he writes that in so doing, “we might seem to have imputed to Xenophon the misologist view that a political teaching may be “morally and politically false . . . in proportion as (it is) metaphysically true. But a pupil of Socrates must be presumed to have believed rather that nothing which is practically false can be theoretically true” (OT, 99). The only references Strauss provides for these passage are not to Socrates. Instead, in a single note, he refers, without specifying, to the passage in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France from which he has quoted (albeit reversing Burke’s clauses), to the thirteenth of Blaise Pascal’s Lettres Provinciales, and to Kant’s essay, “On the Common Saying: ‘This May be True in Theory, but it Does not Apply in Practice’.” Burke is specifically referring to the abstract doctrine of universal human rights and is making a polemical point against them and in favor of concrete, historically established rights.30 Kant’s essay contains an apparently direct response to Burke, and argues, against Burke, that the missing link between theory and practice with regard to abstract principles is judgment.31 The reference to Pascal supports Kant’s view, insofar as Pascal is there defending, against ecclesiastical authority, his interpretation of a text and is arguing that the author, Lessius, has claimed that murder in certain circumstances is theoretically justified but that it ought not to be easily permitted in practice.32 That is an argument for judgment. Taken together, these references effectively negate the position Strauss puts forward in the text and revives the practical possibility of the tyrannical teaching.33 To the rhetorical question of why Xenophon might have put forward this teaching if he did not think it practically possible, Strauss replies that, The “tyrannical” teaching, we shall answer, serves the purpose, not of solving the problem of the best political order, but of bringing to light the nature of political things. The “theoretical” thesis which favors

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beneficent tyranny is indispensable in order to make clear a crucial implication of the practically and hence theoretically true thesis which favors rule of law and legitimate government. The “theoretical thesis” is a most striking expression of the problem, or of the problematic character, of law and legitimacy: legal justice is a justice which is imperfect and more or less blind, and legitimate government is not necessarily “good government” and almost certainly will not be government by the wise. Law and legitimacy are problematic from the highest point of view, namely, from that of wisdom. (OT, ibid.) Xenophon’s “cosmopolitanism” is therefore a product of the knowledge that the wisdom of a wise individual is greater than that of the city. But Strauss begs the question, what is “the nature of political things”? And how is it that Strauss has reversed the relationship of the theoretical and the practical? The last section of Strauss’s commentary consists of less than three pages entitled “Piety and Law.” Recall that Strauss gives great importance to the fact that the Hiero is one of only two works, the other being Oeconomicus, in which the words are almost entirely spoken by his characters rather than by Xenophon. Strauss now notes that the Hiero is the only work in which he never speaks in the first person that is silent on the topic of piety. And he suggests that Xenophon has implicitly altered the meaning of piety in so doing. Xenophon’s Socrates is said to have said that “piety is knowledge of the laws concerning the gods: where there are no laws, there cannot be piety,” and tyranny is rule without laws (OT, 104). However, Strauss also notes that in his last characterization of Socrates, Xenophon describes how he would make his companions pious by “making them consider the purposeful character of the universe and its parts. It seems, then, that just as he admits a translegal justice, although his Socrates identifies justice with legality, so he admits a piety which emerges out of the contemplation of nature and which has no necessary relation to law” (OT, ibid.). Strauss concludes that Xenophon’s silence cannot be completely explained by the subject matter of this dialogue. “For a full explanation one would have to consider the conversational situation, the fact that the Hiero is a dialogue between an educated tyrant and a wise man who is not a citizen-philosopher” (OT, ibid.). What Strauss may mean by this can be gleaned from the two paragraphs that conclude his commentary. “While the Hiero is silent about piety, it is not silent about the gods. But the silence about piety is reflected in what it says, or does not say, about the gods” (OT, ibid.). Strauss here compares what Hiero says with what is said by the “perfect gentleman,” Ischomachus, in Oeconomicus. Hiero speaks of a cooperation of nature with law where Ischomachus speaks of a cooperation between the gods and law. Strauss notes that Simonides never “corrects” Hiero, implying, presumably, that

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Ischomachus’s rendering is the conventional one and that Simonides shares Hiero’s heterodox view. Strauss notes the practical difference between the two statements concerning the law: “Ischomachus says that a certain order which has been established by the gods is at the same time praised by the law. Ischomachus, who traces the natural order to the gods, describes the specific work of the law as praising; Hiero, who does not take that step, describes it as compelling” (OT, 105). The dignity of the law is enhanced if it is of divine origin. The notion linking “praise” and “gods” is gentlemanliness. Praise as distinguished from compulsion suffices for the guidance of gentlemen, and the gods delight at gentlemanliness. As we have seen, Hiero’s and Simonides’ gentlemanliness is not altogether beyond doubt. . . . What the attitude of the citizen-philosopher Socrates was can be ascertained only by a comprehensive and detailed analysis of Xenophon’s Socratic writings. (OT, ibid.) And Strauss ends there. *** Where, exactly has he ended? Strauss began with a comparison between Xenophon and Machiavelli, between “Socratic political science and Machiavellian political science.” As noted above, he returns to this comparison only twice later in his commentary. The first of these instances is relevant here. Strauss observes that in Simonides, Xenophon illustrates the fact that “even a perfectly just man who wants to give advice to a tyrant has to present himself to his pupil as an utterly unscrupulous man. The greatest man who ever imitated the Hiero was Machiavelli.” Machiavelli perfectly understood “Xenophon’s chief pedagogic lesson,” and it is this that “accounts for the most shocking sentences occurring in the Prince.” But while he learned the lesson, Machiavelli applied it imprudently. He made immoral statements instead of allowing his silence on moral principles to speak for him. What Xenophon knew is that the teacher of tyrants has to reveal his alleged or real freedom from morality, not by speech but by silence. For by doing so—by disregarding morality “by deed” rather than by attacking it “by speech”—he reveals at the same time his understanding of political things. Xenophon, or his Simonides, is more “politic” than Machiavelli; he refuses to separate “moderation” (prudence) from “wisdom” (insight). (OT, 56)

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What “just” might mean here is ambiguous, of course, because Strauss deploys two meanings of the term: the conventional, or “political,” and the so-called Socratic. But the implication of this comparison is that the differences between Xenophon and Machiavelli have more to do with prudence than with the substance of their respective “political sciences.” This was not Strauss’s last word on the comparison of Xenophon and Machiavelli’s “teachings,” however. In Thoughts on Machiavelli, published in 1958 but based on lectures delivered in 1953, Strauss had much more to say.34 The book is famous for Strauss’s bizarre, numerological approach to Machiavelli’s texts, especially the Discourses and its alleged correspondences to the books of Livy’s History. Of greater importance here is what light this text might shed on Strauss’s contention that by comparing the Prince with Hiero, “one can grasp most clearly the subtlest and indeed the decisive difference between Socratic political science and Machiavellian political science” (OT, 24). What they appear to share is the view of the common man as grounded in fear and the desire for security and of the “real man” as seeking honor. They also share the view that political life is all about friends and enemies. In the Socratic version, though, there is the wise man or the philosopher, whose nature is different from the common human nature, who understands the natures of all and the requirements of natural order, an order that preserves and controls the natures of the common man and the “real man.” In Machiavelli, there are only the first two natures, and Machiavelli consequently looks to institutions to manipulate them and transform them; to make them “good.” In a cryptic summary, Strauss writes that “Xenophon’s thought and work has two foci, Cyrus and Socrates. While Machiavelli is greatly concerned with Cyrus, he forgets Socrates” (TM, 291). *** Strauss began his discussion of tyranny with a claim that there is a fundamental difference between “classical” and “modern” tyranny. The chief characteristics Strauss adduced to signal this difference were ideologies, technology, and a certain view of science, all of which he rendered in scare quotes. Recall, too, that Strauss understands the classical form to be, “in a sense,” the natural form. It all comes down to nature. Modernity is marked by the application of technology to the transformation of nature, including human nature. It seeks to improve the natural condition. The so-called ideology of modernity is focused on progress in this and other senses. Through its effort at universal education, it fosters the belief in human mastery. All of these things are “unnatural.” By bringing the masses into being as a political actor, modernity produces “das Man,” with a resultant uniformity and conformity. In contrast, the classical mode he constructs understands nature as productive of difference. The common man is a

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different man than the gentleman, and both are distinct from the wise man. They are different by nature and they play different roles. A different thing motivates each type of man: the common man by his passions and by fear; the gentleman by virtue, and the wise man by the quest for knowledge. And they play by different rules. *** Strauss met the Russian-born philosopher Alexandre Kojève (nee Kojevnikov) in Berlin in the 1920s and again in Paris after both had left Germany and before Strauss moved on to England. From 1933 until 1939, Kojève gave a series of justly famous lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (although the course was entitled “The Religious Philosophy of Hegel”) at L’École pratique des Hautes Études in Paris.35 Strauss included a footnote in The Political Philosophy of Hobbes indicating that he and Kojève (whom he called Kojevnikoff) intended “to undertake a detailed investigation of the connexion between Hegel and Hobbes,” but that intention was never realized.36 It was an unlikely pairing in the first place, since Kojève’s Marxist-inspired reading of Hegel put him at an opposite pole politically and theoretically from Strauss, but the two maintained a long intellectual engagement and correspondence. Kojève published a review of On Tyranny in 1950, one of two (the other was by Eric Voegelin), that prompted a “restatement” of his position by Strauss, which he originally published in translation in the 1954 French edition of the book and then in English in 1959 in his collection of essays, What Is Political Philosophy? In his review, Kojève latches onto the notion that the form of “ideal tyranny” proposed by Simonides is presented as a “utopia” because it lacks the means by which it can be brought about. Kojève takes issue with this notion, proposing instead that, “when one reads the last three chapters of the Dialogue, in which Simonides describes the ‘ideal’ tyranny, one finds that what might have appeared utopian to Xenophon has nowadays become an almost commonplace reality” (OT, 138). Kojève cites Salazar’s Portugal as an example. But more importantly, Kojève also takes issue with the notion, expressed in the dialogue and clearly accepted by Strauss, that only a certain class of human beings—and that class being the “real men”— struggle for honor and glory. He takes the discussion over and transforms it in Hegelian terms into one about recognition, which Kojève thinks motivates all human beings (rather than happiness or love): “For the desire to be ‘recognized’ in one’s eminent human reality and dignity (by those whom one ‘recognizes’ in return) effectively is, I believe, the ultimate motive of all emulation among men, and hence of all political struggle, including the struggle that leads to tyranny” (OT, 143, emphases in original). By extension, Kojève argues that the tyrant or head of state desires recognition in the form of recognition of his authority (which

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is recognition devoid of the threat of violence), and, in principle, the desire for that recognition is boundless, both within the state and beyond, extending as it does to all those whom the head of state considers capable and “worthy” of recognizing him (OT, 145). Internally, this leads to the creation of a citizen body that encompasses all of the subjects, making them all capable of authentically recognizing him. Kojève concludes that, the political man, acting consciously in terms of the desire for “recognition” (or for “glory”) will be fully “satisfied” only when he is at the head of a State that is not only universal but also politically and socially homogeneous (with allowances for irreducible physiological differences), that is to say of a State that is the goal and the outcome of the collective labor of all and of each. (OT, 146, emphases in original) Since this homogeneous and universal state has not been realized, it constitutes an ideal, and thus the motivation for the political man to seek advice from a wise man, and that leads Kojève into the question of whether or not the wise man would want to offer it.37 Kojève answers that the philosopher is uniquely suited to give advice, being more adept at discussion, better able to be free of prejudice (which is particularly important where it is an issue of initiating radical change), and more attuned to the concrete than others (OT, 148–9). And here Kojève launches an assault against the “egotistical” notion of the isolated philosopher, or of one surrounded in his garden by a few friends, in favor of one of active engagement in history. Even the bourgeois notion of the “Republic of Letters” is little better than the Epicurean garden, Kojève notes, because “both are populated by a relatively small ‘elite’ with a marked tendency to withdraw into itself and to exclude the ‘uninitiated’ ” (OT, 154). Strauss, Kojève recognizes, holds to this elitist view he is criticizing, and to the notion that, “The philosopher will therefore have recourse to esoteric (preferably oral) instruction which permits him, among other things, to select the ‘best’ and to eliminate those of ‘limited capacity’ who are incapable of understanding hidden allusions and tacit implications” (OT, ibid., emphasis in original). The danger of this practice is the “cloistered mind”; the consolidation of the prejudices of the doctrine that is passed around within the circumscribed group.38 But Kojève nevertheless sees a difficulty in the effort of philosophers to go beyond the cloister and to offer advice to the politician, and the difficulty is insufficient time. They are reluctant to take the time from their philosophical inquiries. Consequently, they are impatient, in a hurry. And so, “if [the philosopher] wants to succeed quickly, he has to address himself to the tyrant rather than to the democratic leader. Indeed, philosophers who

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wanted to act in the political present have, at all times, been drawn to tyranny” (OT, 164). Conversely, the only way to imagine a philosopher becoming a statesman is as “some sort of ‘tyrant,’” moving to implement radical reforms against the received ideas. “In fact, as soon as a philosopher who was not himself involved in affairs of State steered one of his disciples in that direction, the disciple—for example Alcibiades—did immediately resort to typically ‘tyrannical’ methods” (OT, 165). But in fact, the more typical act is for the philosopher to give up on the idea of direct political action. However, it may not matter in the long run. Kojève’s Hegelian framework leads him to propose that the universal and homogeneous state that is the logical end of the quest for recognition is more than a theoretical idea and that the attempt to actualize it can be found in history. He cites the Alexandrine drive for empire, and hypothesizes that this attempt to realize the universal state, as well as the unsuccessful attempt of Alcibiades, “can be traced back to the philosophical teaching of Socrates” (OT, 170–2). As for the homogeneous state, Kojève deploys an Hegelian logic of negation to arrive at the conclusion that its basis lay in a line of religious universalism running from the Egyptian Pharaoh Ikhnaton to Pauline Christianity, an admittedly less direct case of “filiation between philosophy and politics” than in the example of the universal state, but one he finds “absolutely certain” (OT, 173). From this Kojève concludes that, “When history is viewed in this light, it appears as a continuous succession of political actions guided more or less directly by the evolution of philosophy” (OT, 174). In the long run, both philosophers and tyrants act “reasonably” (OT, 175). Strauss’s response to Kojève provides some comments that are of particular interest and which are put in a relatively straightforward manner. Strauss first suggests that Kojève has too narrow a conception of utopia and that it is possible to “speak of the utopia of the best tyranny.” Because under certain conditions it may be impossible to abolish a tyranny, The best one could hope for is that the tyranny be improved, i.e., that the tyrannical rule be exercised as little inhumanely or irrationally as possible. Every specific reform or improvement of which a sensible man could think, if reduced to its principle, forms part of the complete picture of the maximum improvement that is still compatible with the continued existence of tyranny, it being understood that the maximum improvement is possible only under the most favorable conditions. (OT, 187) This position is reflective of Aristotle’s treatment of the “good” methods of preserving a tyranny in book five of the Politics. It is also essentially the logic of the second half of Hiero.

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Strauss also rejects Kojève’s general position concerning recognition, at least as it affects honor. The “real man,” or aner, seeks honor, but the wise man is considered the highest human type by Xenophon, and that type is devoted to a life of virtue or wisdom (OT, 190). It is this latter that corresponds to Kojève’s Hegelian ideal of labor. Then he makes this comment regarding “Hegel’s moral and political teaching”: Hegel continued, and in a certain respect radicalized, the modern tradition that emancipated the passions and hence “competition.” That tradition was originated by Machiavelli and perfected by such men as Hobbes and Adam Smith. It came into being through a conscious break with the strict moral demands made by both the Bible and classical philosophy; those demands were explicitly rejected as too strict. Hegel’s moral or political teaching is indeed a synthesis: it is a synthesis of Socratic and Machiavellian or Hobbesian politics. (OT, 192) Strauss may as well have added Spinoza to the list, as we have seen in the previous chapter, insofar as Strauss is here describing the modern project. What the “Socratic” element in this modern synthesis might mean can be gleaned from Strauss’s initial comments on Kojève’s notion of the universal and homogeneous state. “The classics understand tyranny as the opposite of the best regime, and they hold that the best regime is the rule of the best or aristocracy,” he claims. But Kojève sees aristocracy as rule of a minority and thus as a species of tyranny, while at the same time suggesting that “force or terror are indispensable in every regime.” Strauss summarizes Kojève’s position as being that, “the universal and homogeneous state is the only one which is essentially just; the aristocracy of the classics in particular is essentially unjust” (OT, ibid.). But Strauss argues that, given the fact that the “unwise are very unlikely to force the wise to rule over them,” the universal state will be ruled by the unwise, which is impossible because universal agreement on principles is only possible based on wisdom, whereas the unwise base their knowledge on opinion. Agreement based on opinion can never become universal agreement. Every faith that lays claim to universality, i.e., to be universally accepted, of necessity provokes a counter-faith which raises the same claim. The diffusion among the unwise of genuine knowledge that was acquired by the wise would be of no help, for through its diffusion or dilution, knowledge inevitably transforms itself into opinion, prejudice, or mere belief. The utmost in the direction of universality that one could expect is, then, an absolute rule of unwise men who control about half the globe, the other half being ruled by other unwise men. (OT, 163)

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This is of course a veiled reference to the two Cold War camps, each professing a universal position: the one of the benefits of capitalism and the individual freedoms associated with it; the other the benefits of a command economy and the social egalitarianism associated with it. It is not clear why the rule of opinion would result in just two camps, or these particular camps. But Strauss goes on to say that it is obvious that the limited rule of the unwise is preferable to their unlimited rule, and therefore it is preferable for the rule of the unwise to be limited by law. Strauss then invokes the image of the Legislator together with that of Xenophon’s gentleman: In addition, it is more probable that in a situation that is favorable to radical change, the citizen body will for once follow the advice of a wise man or a founding father by adopting a code of laws which he has elaborated, than that they will ever submit to perpetual and absolute rule of a succession of wise men. Yet laws must be applied or are in need of interpretation. The full authority under law should therefore be given to men who, thanks to their good upbringing, are capable of “completing” the laws (Memorabilia IV 6.12) or of interpreting them equitably. “Constitutional” authority ought to be given to the equitable men (epieikeis), i.e., to gentlemen—preferably an urban patriciate which derives its income from the cultivation of its landed estates. (ibid.) Strauss does not give an indication of what sort of situation he is referring to in a modern context. That he is referring to a modern context, rather than the classical one implied by his reference to Xenophon and the archaic image of an “urban patriciate,” is clear from what follows. After noting that it is somewhat a matter of chance whether someone is born into the requisite class of gentlemen and therefore given the opportunity for a proper education in equity, Strauss adds this: But in the absence of absolute rule of the wise on the one hand, and on the other hand of a degree of abundance which is possible only on the basis of unlimited technological progress with all its terrible hazards, the apparently just alternative to aristocracy open or disguised will be permanent revolution, i.e., permanent chaos in which life will be not only poor and short but brutish as well. It would not be difficult to show that the classical argument cannot be disposed of as easily as is not generally thought, and that liberal or constitutional democracy comes closer to what the classics demanded than any alternative that is viable in our age. In the last analysis, however, the classical argument derives its strength from the assumption that the wise do not desire to rule. (OT, 193–4)

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This is Strauss’s concept and defense of liberal democracy. It is a form that is only nominally democratic. It is a “disguised aristocracy” designed to keep the masses contained. In the absence of such containment, the alternative in an age of abundance is permanent revolution. Under the conditions of modern capitalism and technology, with its delivery of abundance, Strauss will opt for the liberal containment of the demos. There are two other points raised by Strauss that are relevant here. One is his characterization of the philosophical life. Strauss here articulates the refrain that became increasingly prominent in his American writings. We have already seen that Strauss understands philosophy to be the effort to replace opinion by truth, but it is properly the effort that defines the philosopher, not possession of the truth. In his Socratic formulation, “Philosophy as such is nothing but genuine awareness of the problems, i.e., of the fundamental and comprehensive problems” (OT, 196). The philosopher is free of the interest in recognition of which Kojève speaks, but seeks friends. The philosopher, in seeking to grasp the eternal order, seeks out well-ordered souls because such souls are the closest things to that order. “But the souls of men reflect the eternal order in different degrees. A soul that is in good order or healthy reflects it to a higher degree than a soul that is chaotic or diseased. The philosopher who as such has had a glimpse of the eternal order is therefore particularly sensitive to the difference among human souls” (OT, 200–1). We will leave aside the issue of that “glimpse” and note that this leads Strauss to claim that, “The philosopher therefore has the urge to educate potential philosophers simply because he cannot help loving well-ordered souls” (OT, 201). Hence two things in response to Kojève: the philosopher will of necessity address himself to a small minority and be unconcerned with being recognized by others; and the philosopher will indeed “go to the marketplace,” as Kojève desires, but he will do so “to fish there for potential philosophers” (OT, 205). Because he does go into the city, he must develop a “philosophic politics”: In what does philosophic politics consist? In satisfying the city that the philosophers are not atheists, that they do not desecrate everything sacred to the city, that they reverence what the city reverences, that they are not subversives, in short, that they are not irresponsible adventurers but good citizens and even the best of citizens. This is the defense of philosophy which was required always and everywhere, whatever the regime might have been. (OT, 205–6) In Strauss’s estimation, this philosophic politics has been a “resounding success” ever since Plato more or less invented it.

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The second point has to do once again with the universal and homogeneous state. Strauss questions whether no one would have any reason to be dissatisfied in such a state. In the first instance, even if no one had a good reason for being dissatisfied, that would not prevent dissatisfaction, since “men do not always act reasonably. Does Kojève not underestimate the power of the passions? Does he not have an unfounded belief in the eventually rational effect of the movements instigated by the passions?” (OT, 207). But in the second instance, such a state would be the end of humanity. Strauss quotes Kojève’s book of lectures on Hegel to the effect that in a universal and homogeneous state, there would be nothing to do. But Kojève had argued that struggle marks the human life, and this state represents the end of struggle and therefore the loss of one’s humanity. “It is the state of Nietzsche’s ‘last man.’ ” Thus if history is moving toward such a state, history is truly tragic (OT, 208). Yet there is no reason for despair as long as human nature has not been conquered completely, i.e., as long as a sun and man still generate man. There will always be men (andres) who will revolt against a state which is destructive of humanity or in which there is no longer a possibility of noble action and of great deeds. They may be forced into a mere negation of the universal and homogeneous state, into a negation not enlightened by any positive goal, into a nihilistic negation. While perhaps doomed to failure, that nihilistic revolution may be the only action on behalf of man’s humanity, the only great and noble deed that is possible once the universal and homogeneous state has become inevitable. (OT, 209) But Strauss steps back from this forecast of the nihilist negation, of the noble deed without goal, to invoke his familiar tropes. The classical authors saw that the best regime could only come about as a result of chance while the moderns gave up on utopias and lowered the bar and substituted recognition for moral virtue and satisfaction for happiness. The classics had a stable standard, the moderns destroyed the idea of one (OT, 210–11). In the universal and homogeneous state, the Final Tyrant, an unwise man, will rule and he will suppress philosophy in the name of a final and true philosophy. He must “forbid every teaching, every suggestion, that there are politically relevant natural differences among men which cannot be abolished or neutralized by progressing scientific technology” (OT, 211). In the past, the philosophers would go underground and deploy their methods of exoteric teaching “in such a way as to guide the potential philosophers toward the eternal and unsolved problems” (OT, ibid.). And they could always flee to another place, but you cannot flee the Final Tyrant. Philosophy would come to an end.

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Thus does Strauss indulge his fantasy of persecution and raise both the specter and the hope of nihilism. As we will see in the next chapter, it is that specter and that hope that have proved to be a significant part of his political legacy.

Chapter 6

Nihilism and the Straussian justification of imperial power

In January 1949, having published his book on Xenophon and his essay on how to read Spinoza the previous year, Leo Strauss moved from the New School for Social Research in New York City to the University of Chicago. He wrote to Alexandre Kojève the following May and mentioned the move, noting that he had gone as “Professor of Political Philosophy,” putting the title in quotation marks.1 That same year, he delivered the Charles R. Walgreen Foundation Lectures at the same university. These provided the basis for Natural Right and History, published in 1952, ostensibly dealing with American values.2 This text has a special place within Strauss’s writings. It has likely been the most widely read of his books, and yet, as we noted above in chapter 1, some recent defenders of Strauss have attempted to distance themselves, and him, from it. Steven B. Smith, in a positive assessment, thinks that the book “set [Strauss’s] work on a new a distinctive path.”3 He does not say what the path was previously, only that in this book, “Strauss offered a deliberately provocative account of what might be called the ‘modernity problem’ that had been widely debated in prewar European circles, but which was still relatively unknown to Americans of that era.”4 He does not say how he knows the provocation was deliberate or why Strauss deliberately provoked. Smith does say that Strauss attacked social science, arguing that the dynamics of modern philosophy and value-free social science, were moving not toward freedom and well-being, but to a condition he diagnosed as nihilism. In Strauss’s counternarrative of decline, the foundations of constitutional government were gradually being sapped and eroded by the emergence of German-style historicism according to which all standards of justice and right are relative to their time and place.5 He adds that Strauss, “regarded modernity as a mixed blessing that required certain premodern classical and biblical supports to rescue it from its own destructive tendencies.”6 Smith’s description of Strauss’s assessment of

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modernity is familiar from what we have already examined, as is his turn toward attacking modern social science. What, then, is unique about this book? In Smith’s account of it, the new element is Strauss’s focus on nihilism as the outcome of modernity. But it is this very element of Natural Right and History that troubles others who are sympathetic to Strauss. Recall that Anne Norton, in distancing herself, the students of Strauss (whom she distinguishes from “Straussians”), and even, in a way, Strauss himself from this text, remarks that: “For Straussians, for Strauss in Natural Right and History, the world is full of nihilists.”7 And Mark Lilla, too, fears that this book, with its apparent argument that the United States is the last best hope of avoiding the general western decline into nihilism, detracts from Strauss’s greater achievements and has had a “stultifying” effect on his American “disciples.”8 Thus Smith, Norton, and Lilla are all in agreement that there is something unique about this book, for better or ill. My argument will be that there is nothing substantively unique about Natural Right and History when seen against Strauss’s writings that preceded it since his “change of orientation.” Some themes are exaggerated, others played down, but the political substratum of this book is fundamentally consistent with the critique of modernity Strauss had already developed and with the view of nature, and the authoritarian impulse that derives from it, that was already firmly established in his political theory. However, it is this text that provides the clearest point of contact between Strauss and the so-called neoconservative program to which he has been linked. After examining the rhetorical action of this text, we will be better able to see where the “influence” of Leo Strauss on a generation of foreign policy makers actually lies. *** To borrow the sort of passive construction so often used by Leo Strauss, it may be said that it is a characteristic of heterodox writers that they present the most common views, which are not necessarily their actual views, at the beginning of works, where they will get the attention of all readers, the careless as well as the careful. Only the latter will put those common views in suspension as they read on.9 It appears that this became Strauss’s practice in the books he published in the United States. In the introduction to his commentary on Xenophon’s Hiero, Strauss puts forward what appears to be a common view: namely, that we presently face a tyranny of historic proportions, with the implication that the tyranny in question is common to both Communism and Nazism. What he actually means, I have argued, is anything but common. In his Thoughts on Machiavelli, after claiming to embrace the “old-fashioned” view of Machiavelli as a teacher of evil, Strauss declares, in his typically passive-voiced way, that, “the United States of America may be said to be the only country in the world which was founded

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in explicit opposition to Machiavellian principles” (TM, 13). The rest of the book systematically undermines the certainty of both views. We should not therefore be surprised that in the “Introduction” to Natural Right and History, Strauss begins by quoting the passage from the Declaration of Independence enumerating the “self-evident” truths contained within it, which include the rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Do Americans still believe in these self-evident truths, he asks. The question is rhetorical because Strauss makes no attempt to answer it. Instead, he quotes the German theologian Ernst Troeltsch to the effect that, while Americans still believed so fundamentally in the idea of natural rights that they simply assumed their existence, German thought, under the influence of the “historical sense,” had become so relativistic that Germans had to have the American presuppositions spelled out to them. Strauss writes that Troeltsch’s remark occurred “about a generation ago” and quotes it from an essay published in English translation in 1934. Strauss then remarks that, “Whatever might be true of the thought of the American people,” American social science, Catholic social science excepted, had by this time adopted the German attitude. “It would not be the first time,” Strauss concludes, “that a nation, defeated on the battlefield and, as it were, annihilated as a political being, has deprived its conquerors of the most sublime fruit of victory by imposing on them the yoke of its own thought.”10 Obscured in Strauss’s opening salvo is his subtle manipulation of the timing and circumstances of Troeltsch’s essay. By citing its English publication Strauss reinforces his generational timeframe and sets the essay after Hitler’s assumption of power. The implication ties the notion of German historicism to Nazism, the defeated nation. Historicism then becomes the yoke imposed on the somewhat naïve conquerors. But Troeltsch died in 1923 and his criticisms of historicism were framed in the aftermath of Germany’s defeat in the Great War. Having been a defender of historical criticism in theology before the war, afterwards he wrote of the “crisis of historicism,” and described the intellectual climate in Germany as itself a battle between various combatants: culture and progress, skepticism and aesthetics against Christianity, and above all against the long-standing association of culture and Protestantism; realists, modernists, Völkists, expressionists against antiquity, venerators of Christianity with one another and against modern culture, the Dionysian and Apollonian renewers of antiquity against Christianity and modernity together.11 Troeltsch attempted to salvage the situation not through a dogmatic rejection of historicism, but rather through a reconciliation of history and philosophy. However, in the period between Troeltsch’s death and the Nazi regime, it was historicism that was predominantly under attack from both

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Right and Left. As we have seen, Strauss himself had been a participant in that assault on historical method, Enlightenment rationality, and political liberalism from the political right until his emigration to the United States.12 Strauss elides his own intellectual past by effectively post-dating Troeltsch’s comment and ignores the actual philosophical and political debates of Weimar Germany by reducing German thought to historicism. There is purpose to this elision. This curious denial of his own identity allows Strauss to pose as a defender of perhaps forgotten American principles against the very tradition that he will deploy in his text to undermine those principles. The key to unraveling Strauss’s book is his polemic against historicism and those he identifies as its principal avatars: Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Max Weber, who plays the fall guy in the morality tale that ensues. The central term in this polemic is “nihilism.” *** Until the neoconservative counter-countercultural revolution of the past twenty years, the question of nihilism had not been a particularly American obsession. It was, however, a central question first for German, and then later European, social and political philosophy. Although it was Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, the anti-Enlightenment philosopher who was the subject of Strauss’s dissertation, who first coined the term “nihilism,” Nietzsche was the first to make it the core question as he investigated the aftermath of the French Revolution and its attendant intellectual trends.13 Strauss follows Nietzsche in his condemnation of what Strauss calls historicism. The socalled historical school, Strauss notes, emerged in reaction to the French Revolution “and to the natural right doctrines that had prepared that cataclysm” (NRH, 13). Strauss makes a fundamental distinction between these “doctrines,” which he calls modern natural right doctrines, and “premodern” or “classical” natural right doctrines, a distinction that will be crucial to understanding the implicit criticism of the American version. The latter, he notes, “did not sanction reckless appeal from the established order, or from what was actual here and now, to the natural or rational order” (NRH, ibid.). But the historical school “seemed to have realized somehow” that the appeal to universal principles has an unsettling effect “as far as thought is concerned” with reference to the established order. “The recognition of universal principles thus tends to prevent men from wholeheartedly identifying themselves with, or accepting, the social order that fate has allotted to them. It tends to alienate them from their place on the earth. It tends to make them strangers, and even strangers on the earth” (NRH, 13–14). Strauss thus notes that, while premodern natural right might produce an unsettling effect in thought, it also contains some content that prevents “reckless” abandonment of the established order, unlike modern

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natural right’s universalism. The real question then becomes one of properly distinguishing between the two doctrines of natural right. The historical school, influenced by Edmund Burke, sought to avoid the revolutionary implications of modern natural right’s appeal to universal rights by substituting instead the notion of historical rights. However, this effort produced even more drastically radical consequences than the universalist doctrine it opposed, since it sought to find objective standards in the historically contingent. The historical school proved incapable of establishing the basis for any universal principle that would compel the individual to accept the particular historical situation in which she found herself. Thus the individual was in principle free to choose her own standards. “No objective criterion henceforth allowed the distinction between good and bad choices,” Strauss observes. “Historicism culminated in nihilism. The attempt to make man absolutely at home in this world ended in man’s becoming absolutely homeless” (NRH, 14). Strauss “suspects” that historicism is the dogmatism of our times (NRH, 22). Historicism undermines itself by denying all trans-historical truths except the truth that all truth is historical. However, Strauss also quietly introduces a variant of historicism that he terms “radical historicism.” The basis for radical historicism was laid by Nietzsche. In Strauss’s reading, Nietzsche declared that a theoretical position acknowledging the relativity of all comprehensive world views “would make human life impossible, for it would destroy the protecting atmosphere within which life or culture or action is alone possible. . . . The theoretical analysis of life is noncommittal and fatal to commitment, but life means commitment.” Strauss continues: To avert the danger to life, Nietzsche could choose one of two ways: he could insist on the strictly esoteric character of the theoretical analysis of life—that is, restore the Platonic notion of the noble delusion—or else he could deny the possibility of theory proper and so conceive of thought as essentially subservient to, or dependent on, life or fate. If not Nietzsche himself, at any rate his successors adopted the second alternative. (NRH, 26) In the paragraph that follows, Strauss outlines the basic principles of radical historicism: all knowledge presupposes a frame of reference or horizon; reason cannot disclose that horizon, since it is its presupposition; consequently there are a variety of comprehensive views and we must simply choose one; however, our choice is constricted by fate, by the horizon of our own historical situation; hence, “we are free either to choose in anguish the world view and the standards imposed on us by fate or else to lose ourselves in illusory security or in despair.” Strauss then summarizes the essence of

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the radical historicist position: “The radical historicist asserts, then, that only to thought that is itself committed or ‘historical’ does other committed or ‘historical’ thought disclose itself, and, above all, that only to thought that is itself committed or ‘historical’ does the true meaning of the ‘historicity’ of all genuine thought disclose itself” (NRH, 26–7). The radical historicist thesis is that it is given to fate for a particular historical period to discover the essential historicity of all thought, thus avoiding the problem of relativism that characterized nineteenth-century historicism. Though Strauss never mentions his name in Natural Right and History, it clear to anyone familiar with the relevant texts that the principal “successor” to Nietzsche in question is Martin Heidegger.14 The importance of all this becomes clearer if we see that Strauss never attempts to repudiate the radical historicist position. He notes that while Hegel may be read as having postulated the achievement of an absolute historical moment in which the “fundamental riddles” have been solved, “according to historicism . . . the absolute moment must be the moment in which the insoluble character of the fundamental riddles has become fully manifest or in which the fundamental delusion of the human mind has been dispelled” (NRH, 29). He notes that the implication of this position is that if philosophy is understood as the effort to “replace opinions about the whole by knowledge of the whole,” and this is the way Strauss consistently defines philosophy,15 then philosophy is absurd, since philosophy itself rests on opinion. And then Strauss blinks. “We cannot even attempt to discuss these theses,” he writes. We must leave them with the following observation. Radical historicism compels us to realize the bearing of the fact that the very idea of natural right presupposes the possibility of philosophy in the full and original meaning of the term. It compels us at the same time to realize the need for unbiased reconsideration of the most elementary premises whose validity is presupposed by philosophy. The question of the validity of these premises cannot be disposed of by adopting or clinging to a more or less persistent tradition of philosophy, for it is of the essence of traditions that they cover or conceal their humble foundations by erecting impressive edifices on them. (NRH, 31) The notion that a reconsideration of the possibility of philosophy rests on an “unbiased” return to its origins Strauss owes precisely to Nietzsche and Heidegger. By following the first of the two paths open to Nietzsche, toward Plato and the “noble delusion,” normally termed the “noble lie,” Strauss leaves the second path intact. ***

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Before embarking on his path to Plato, Strauss assaults what he considers a lesser foe than Heidegger; namely, Max Weber. According to Strauss, contemporary social science is unable and unwilling to assert that we can have any basis for our “ultimate principles” other than personal preference. He takes natural right to be a standard against which the ideals of any society, including our own, can be judged. So he draws the conclusion that, “The contemporary rejection of natural right leads to nihilism—nay, it is identical with nihilism” (NRH, 5). Since Max Weber “is the greatest social scientist” of the twentieth century, Strauss makes him the focus of his critique (NRH, 36). But Strauss acknowledges that Weber did not reject “timeless values”; this “distinguishes Weber’s position most significantly from historicism” (NRH, 39). But the timeless values Weber accepts are not those of standards, but rather those of science. And since Strauss claimed the impossibility of genuine knowledge of “Ought,” he maintains that “Weber’s thesis necessarily leads to nihilism or to the view that every preference, however evil, base, or insane, has to be judged before the tribunal of reason to be as legitimate as any other preference” (NRH, 42). And then Strauss once again misdirects his readers. He undertakes to explain how it was that Weber concealed the nihilistic consequences of his position from himself, and in tracing out the trajectory of Weber’s thought, “we shall inevitably reach a point beyond which the scene is darkened by the shadow of Hitler.” He adds: “Unfortunately, it does not go without saying that in our examination we must avoid the fallacy that in the last decades has frequently been used as a substitute for the reductio ad absurdum: the reductio ad Hitlerum. A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler” (NRH, 42–3). How is it that Weber, who died in 1920, is connected to Hitler? What idea did they share? Strauss does not say; the allusion to Hitler is left to do its discrediting work. Nietzsche, whom the Nazis claimed as their own, and Heidegger, who actually joined the National Socialist Party in 1933, are displaced by Weber. Is the criticism of the reductio ad Hitlerum meant to spare the social scientist Weber, or the two philosophers whom Strauss took as his critical touchstones? *** The assault on relativism as nihilism sets up Strauss’s description of classical natural right and his critique of modern natural right. The elementary point about classical natural right is that it is a doctrine discovered by reason that accords with nature. Socrates, Strauss writes, is “said” to have been the first political philosopher, and “to the extent to which this is true,” he originated “natural rights teachings” (NRH, 120). Socrates began his investigations into “the natures of things” from the opinions of his fellow citizens, ascending from opinion to true knowledge. True knowledge is therefore the consistent view, as opposed to the inconsistent views represented in opinions. Strauss

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emphasizes that this inquiry uncovers a natural hierarchic ordering of the human soul to which corresponds a “natural law” consisting of rules circumscribing the good life constituting the correct ordering of life. “The life according to nature,” Strauss concludes, “is the life of human excellence or virtue, the life of a ‘high-class person,’ and not the life of pleasure as pleasure” (NRH, 127). Starting from this premise, Strauss makes a number of assertions regarding classical natural right that are particularly important. “Since the classics viewed moral and political matters in the light of man’s perfection, they were not egalitarian,” he notes. “Not all men are equally equipped by nature for progress toward perfection, or not all ‘natures’ are ‘good natures’.” And Strauss draws the necessary conclusion: “Since men are then unequal in regard to human perfection, i.e., in the decisive respect, equal rights for all appeared to the classics as most unjust. They contended that some men are by nature superior to others and therefore, according to natural right, the rulers of others” (NRH, 134–5). It is in the context of unequal rule that Strauss introduces the concept of regime. It is his translation for the Greek politeia. Strauss emphasizes that politeia is not synonymous with law or constitution. Instead, “the politeia is more fundamental than any laws; it is the source of all laws. The politeia is rather the factual distribution of power within the community than what constitutional law stipulates in regard to political power” (NRH, 136). Regime then stands for something like a way of life of a society determined by, but not equivalent to, its form of government. And since classical natural right doctrine stipulates that what is right is what is in accordance with nature, this doctrine “is identical with the doctrine of the best regime. For the question as to what is by nature right or as to what is justice finds its complete answer only through the construction, in speech, of the best regime. The essentially political character of the classic natural right doctrine appears most clearly in Plato’s Republic” (NRH, 144). Why the caveat, “in speech”? The answer goes to the heart of Strauss’s political theory. Classical natural right, he claims, establishes the notion of human excellence and the best regime would be one that realizes that excellence in accordance with nature. It would be a regime in which “the best men,” those who combine wisdom with virtue, ruled the polity absolutely in a perfect natural order. However, “virtue exists in most cases, if not in all cases, as an object of aspiration and not as fulfillment. Therefore, it exists in speech rather than in deed” (NRH, 146).16 The rule of the best men is impractical. The best practical regime is one in which the wise act as legislators, establishing the rule of law according to wisdom, and then entrusting the administration of the law to a type of man who can be trusted to apply it in situations unforeseen by the wise. “The classics felt that this type of man is the gentleman” (NRH, 142). The gentleman is “experienced in things noble and beautiful” and this sets them apart from the wise, who have knowledge of the noble and beautiful, on the one hand, and the vulgar,

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who have neither such knowledge nor experience, on the other. This schema of best and second-best regimes has as its common characteristic natural inequality. *** Classical natural right in Strauss’s construction, then, is an orientation toward nature conceived as hierarchically structured with virtue at the top. The polity built in accordance with it will be similarly structured. This contrasts radically, in his reading, with modern natural right. In contrast to the inegalitarian notion of right in the classical formulation, the modern one is built on individualist and egalitarian grounds. Machiavelli’s admonition to cease talking about how men ought to live in favor of how they actually do live, what Machiavelli called the “effectual truth” of things, is highlighted by Strauss as a key turning point. It dictated, Strauss thinks, the move from an attitude toward natural law that was purely rational to one that would seek a grounding in the passions in order to be fully effective. It was Hobbes who accomplished this by basing the notion of natural right in the most powerful of passions, the desire for self-preservation and the fear of violent death. This shifts the focus from the duties required by virtue to the rights demanded by self-preservation (NRH, 180–1). This is a shift from natural law as the foundation from which duties follow to the view that natural rights are fundamental and that laws of nature follow from them. This was Hobbes’s position and, in a controversial move, Strauss argues that it was essentially also Locke’s (NRH, 202–51). Given the presumption that the “self-evident truths” articulated in the Declaration are grounded in a Lockean understanding of natural right, Strauss’s interpretation of Locke discloses the rhetorical game of musical chairs that he plays in his text. The critique of “value-free” nihilism, ostensibly in the name of universal truth, will end with the modern doctrine of natural right left without any support. In his reading of Locke, Strauss sees the effects of the modern natural right doctrine leading to a political society without purpose other than self-preservation and public happiness. But he also shows that the accumulation of property is essential to that purpose. So Locke had to argue, against the traditional moral argument, that the unlimited accumulation of wealth is morally just. In a much-quoted passage, Strauss has this to say about Locke’s deployment of the virtue of acquisition: the burden of his chapter on property [in the Second Treatise of Government] is that covetousness and concupiscence, far from being essentially evil or foolish, are, if properly channeled, eminently beneficial and reasonable, much more so than “exemplary charity.” By building civil society on “the low but solid ground” of selfishness or of certain “private

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vices,” one will achieve much greater “public benefits” than by futilely appealing to virtue, which is by nature “unendowed.” One must take one’s bearings not by how men should live but by how they do live. (NRH, 247) Strauss’s quotation marks refer not to Locke but rather enforce Strauss’s view that Locke is a central figure in a more or less seamless modernity stretching from Machiavelli and Spinoza to Hobbes to Bernard de Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees: Or private vices, publick benefits (1714) to Adam Smith and beyond. “Locke’s doctrine of property,” Strauss notes, “is directly intelligible today if it is taken as the classic doctrine of ‘the spirit of capitalism’ or as a doctrine regarding the chief objective of public policy” (NRH, 246). And that spirit Strauss characterizes as a contradictory hedonism, one that demands the deferment of pleasure in constant labor. “Hobbes identified the rational life with the life dominated by the fear of fear, by the fear which relieves us from fear,” namely, the fear of sovereign power that dispels the fear of the state of nature. “Moved by the same spirit, Locke identifies the rational life with the life dominated by the pain which relieves pain.” For Locke, as for Hobbes, The way toward happiness is a movement away from the state of nature, a movement away from nature: the negation of nature is the way toward happiness. And if the movement toward happiness is the actuality of freedom, freedom is negativity. Just like the primary pain itself, the pain which relieves pain “ceaseth only in death.” So Strauss concludes: “The painful relief of pain culminates not so much in the greatest pleasures as ‘in the having those things which produce the greatest pleasures.’ Life is the joyless quest for joy” (NRH, 250–1). The coincidence of this phrase with Weber’s “iron cage” signals that Strauss has come full circle from the critique of the alleged nihilism of value neutrality to the gilded nihilism of liberal-capitalist society and its endless, and unfulfilling, acquisitiveness. Recall that Strauss claimed that Nietzsche laid open two possible paths to follow in responding to the nihilistic threat posed by historicism. Strauss followed the path back to the “strictly esoteric character of the theoretical analysis of life—that is, restore the Platonic notion of the noble delusion.” This refers to the fact that what is right by nature can only be discerned by reason, and thus knowable only to a few. These few, in turn, must devise means by which to gain the consent of the many, who live according to opinion and convention. “Natural right would act as dynamite for civil society” if not mediated through the noble guile of the rulers (NRH, 153). Strauss’s guile has produced a rhetorical claim on behalf of what are said to

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be foundational American principles while he has laid the dynamite carefully between the lines. *** Judging “influence” is a tricky game. I have described what I called the Straussian network in chapter 1 and have given my account of Strauss’s political theory in subsequent chapters. In what remains, I will track one strand of what can plausibly be considered a direct influence Strauss’s thought has had on the substance and rhetoric of American foreign policy as developed and defended by a specific group of intellectuals, all of whom have been identified as so-called neoconservatives. I do not claim that all elements of neoconservative ideology are traceable to Strauss. I will focus here solely on the theme of nihilism that is so prominent in Natural Right and History and the role that that theme has assumed within the body of ideas associated with neoconservatism. *** Whenever a definition of neoconservatism is needed, Irving Kristol can be relied upon to deliver one, while at the same time professing insecurity as to whether or not the term has any meaning. In 2003, in an article published in The Weekly Standard, edited by his son William, the elder Kristol decided that neoconservatism constitutes a “persuasion” rather than a movement. This persuasion, he claimed, has as its “historical task and political purpose” to “convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy. That this new conservative politics is distinctly American is beyond doubt.” Though by no means dominant within the Republican party, it is neoconservative policies, Kristol argued, that must be credited with the popular success of Republican presidents.17 What is this new, peculiarly American form designed to govern a “modern democracy”? Kristol emphasizes its “hopeful,” “forward-looking,” and “cheerful” qualities that apparently mark it as in “the ‘American grain’.” He links it to the two Roosevelts and Ronald Reagan rather than Coolidge, Hoover, Eisenhower, and Goldwater, the latter group curiously expunged from the “American grain.” Neocons support tax cuts as the engine of economic growth, tolerating budget deficits when necessary, because only such growth gives “modern democracies their legitimacy and durability.” “It is a basic assumption of neoconservatism,” he writes, “that, as a consequence of the spread of affluence among all classes, a property-owning and taxpaying population will, in time, become less vulnerable to egalitarian

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illusions and demagogic appeals and more sensible about the fundamentals of economic reckoning.” And while neoconservatives “do not like the concentration of services in the welfare state and are happy to study alternative ways of delivering these services,” they do not oppose a strong state. Neocons are inspired by Tocqueville’s “democratic wisdom” in regard to the state. If the state is not providing “welfare services,” then whither its strength? These are concentrated in two areas. The first is the area of “culture.” Neocons support government action to address “the steady decline in our democratic culture” in the areas of education, “the relations of church and state, the regulation of pornography, and the like.” These policies unite neocons to traditional conservatives as well as “religious traditionalists.” The second area is of course foreign policy. Mirroring his notion that neoconservatism is not a movement but a persuasion, Kristol claims that while the neocon influence on foreign policy has gotten the greatest share of media attention, it is surprising because “there is no set of neoconservative beliefs concerning foreign policy, only a set of attitudes derived from historical experience.” (He then notes that, thanks to the influence of Leo Strauss and Donald Kagan, Thucydides is “the favorite neoconservative text on foreign affairs.”) The “attitudes” consist of the claim that “patriotism is a natural and healthy sentiment,” world government can lead to world tyranny, the view that “statesmen should, above all, have the ability to distinguish friends from enemies,” and, finally, for a great power “whose identity is ideological,” such as the United States, national interest is “not a geographical term” and entails “ideological interests in addition to more material concerns.” Kristol’s description of neoconservatives is vacuous, but illuminating just the same. Illuminating in its vacuity, in fact. His account itself cuts against the “American grain” it claims to describe. Tocqueville, a problematical ally in any event, brought a European, if not distinctly French, perspective to bear on the American democracy of the 1830s. And Thucydides? But there is more. Leo Strauss, who, we remember, emigrated to the United States in 1937, aged thirty-eight, brought with him from Germany a distinctly European Weltanschauung, which included the concern with world government and its resultant “tyranny,” as well as perhaps less obvious notions that underlay Kristol’s account but may now be apparent. And finally, the necessity of distinguishing friend from enemy as a fundamental attribute of the statesman is immediately recognizable as one of the core concepts—indeed, the core concept of “the political” — bequeathed by the German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt, of course, became a high official in the National Socialist state. That distasteful fact may account for Kristol’s reluctance to name names in Schmitt’s case, but the hardly “American” intonation remains. The nativity of Kristol’s rendition of neoconservatism can be set aside for the moment; its rhetorical function will become evident. A more historical

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genealogy would go something like this. Neoconservatism was originally used to describe an amorphous group of political journalists, such as Irving Kristol, and social theorists, such as Daniel Bell, who had identified with the Left, often with the Trotskyist Left, in their earlier days but moved to the Right due to a conflation of three factors. The first of these was their anti-Soviet Cold War stance, a position these figures then shared with the anticommunist liberals around such journals as Encounter, co-founded by Kristol and the English poet Stephen Spender, and Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary. The second and third factors are more closely related and crucial to their emerging worldview. These are a reaction to the so-called cultural revolution of the 1960s and to the welfare state. Together, these phenomena were taken to constitute a crisis of values well described in the title of Bell’s important book, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, where Bell argued that the very affluence produced by capitalist economies and redistributed through welfare provisions threatened to undermine the ethic of deferred gratification that formed capitalism’s disciplined core. A culture of consumption, fueled by advertising and raising pleasure to the highest rung of individual and collective pursuit, thus endangered the social system itself.18 Various of the future neocons took opposing positions on the Vietnam War and many of them identified with the Democratic Party into the 1960s, at least until the nomination of George McGovern in 1972. (Most of the neocons who remained in the Democratic ranks, such as Ben Wattenberg, Richard Perle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Elliot Abrams, were in the Henry “Scoop” Jackson camp that combined a liberal domestic policy with a hawkish foreign one.) It was the rise of the New Left and the cultural politics they associated with it that appalled the likes of Kristol & Co. The French journalists Alain Frachon and Daniel Vernet, in a recent book on the neocons, quote an unidentified member of the persuasion as saying that they wanted “to rebel against the rebellion of the sixties.”19 Frachon and Vernet, focused on the “messianism” underlying neoconservative foreign policy, emphasize the harsh tone of the New Left’s politics, its denunciation of America as a racist, imperialist, and violent country, and the reaction to it by a group consisting mostly of the sons and daughters of Jewish and Irish immigrants. They quote Wattenberg, for example, as telling them that he responded to the New Left’s “declinism” with “an immigrant’s optimism,” and “historical optimism,” they write, “is a very neoconservative quality.”20 Irving Kristol’s emphasis on the cheerful optimism of the neoconservative persuasion echoes in this reaction to “declinism.” Whatever criticisms the neocons might have of domestic and foreign policies were balanced with an embrace of the possibilities of American power. But this optimism is in apparent tension with the neoconservatives’ own analysis of democratic cultural decline, the beginnings of which they associate not so much with the New Left’s political critique as with the cultural radicalism of the 1960s.

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Kristol’s wife, the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, in an article published in The Public Interest in 1998, referred to problems besetting “our democratic society” as “diseases” of a moral and cultural nature rather than political ones: “the collapse of ethical principles and habits, the loss of respect for authorities and institutions, the breakdown of the family, the decline of civility, the vulgarization of high culture, and the degradation of popular culture.”21 She characterizes the “virus” that produced this disease as “the ethical and cultural relativism that reduces all values, all standards, and all authority to expressions of personal will and inclination,” making it clear that “the counterculture of yesteryear is the dominant culture today.” And she invokes the usual initiators of this virus by citing elites in the universities and media. To the extent that the neoconservative persuasion can be said to have managed its dialectic of cultural decline and political optimism it has done so by an elaborate rhetorical construction. The elements of that construction can be glimpsed in the recent accounting of what went wrong in the post-9/11 world presented by Francis Fukuyama, the self-styled apostate neoconservative. Fukuyama announces his departure from the fold in America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy. In a sign that Irving Kristol’s insistence on an American heritage is not peculiar to him, Fukuyama also claims that, “the key principles of neoconservativism as they developed from the mid-twentieth century to the present are deeply rooted in a variety of American traditions.”22 Fukuyama delineates four strands to this tradition, the first being the morphing of pre-war Trotskyites into postwar anticommunists. A second, related, strand he locates in the founding of The Public Interest in 1965, which focused on domestic policy and which quickly became a line of resistance against the welfare-statism of the New Left, on the one hand, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, on the other. The legacy of Leo Strauss forms the third strand, though Fukuyama is at pains to argue that Straussianism had little influence on the mindset that led to the Iraq war. “More nonsense,” he writes, “has been written about Leo Strauss and the Iraq war than on virtually any other subject.”23 Far more important with regard to specific foreign policy ideas was the fourth strand descending from the theorist of so-called second-strike nuclear capability, Albert Wohlstetter. Wohlstetter’s advocacy of military strategy taking precision targeting of nuclear and conventional weapons into account reverberates in former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s advocacy of a lighter, more mobile military, an “instrument” that makes military intervention more attractive. And Wohlstetter shared with Strauss one overlapping concern that did contribute to neoconservative foreign policy in general and Iraq in particular. Wohlstetter shared with the Straussians a belief “born out of a distrust of the Soviet Union that regimes mattered to foreign policy.”24 “Regime,” we know, is a Straussian term of art that refers to the way of life that sustains particular political institutions. It is the central term in

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Fukuyama’s reading of Strauss and reveals more about Straussianism and its central place within neoconservatism than he realizes. Fukuyama notes in his book’s preface that, “I was a student of Allan Bloom, himself a student of Leo Strauss and the author of The Closing of the American Mind ” by way of establishing his intellectual links with this strand of neoconservative thought.25 That lineage is important, because it links three books that are central to understanding the place that Straussianism has assumed within neoconservatism: Strauss’s Natural Right and History, Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, and Fukuyama’s own bestseller, The End of History and the Last Man. *** Two surprisingly successful books appeared in 1987 that bear directly on the twinning of political optimism and cultural decline. One was Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Decline of the Great Powers. Kennedy argued that the history of great powers showed a pattern of overstretching military commitments that ultimately led to decline because their military requirements placed impossible burdens on their economies. America, he thought, was on the verge of a similar fate. With the book’s unexpected popularity, the Reagan administration began a public campaign to rebut the notion that the US should cut back on its military bases abroad.26 The second of those 1987 books was Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. While Kennedy provided the impetus to a rebuttal, to an affirmation of America’s global power, Bloom provided the rhetorical armature for the neoconservative cultural discourse that has also proved so politically effective.27 Coming as it did toward the end of the Reagan presidency, Bloom’s book should be seen as a consolidation of already prominent misgivings about the cultural landscape of post-1960s America rather than as a creator of them. Indeed, the book’s fantastic success indicates that the audience was already primed for a high-minded diatribe aimed at the state of the “souls” of the nation’s youth. What caught the attention of this public was perhaps less the opening salvo directed at the belief that truth is relative, the one certainty Bloom professed to discover in his students, than the attack on rock music and popular culture in general that followed. Here Bloom’s sardonic, titillating style showed itself in full bloom. He imagines a teen-age boy doing his homework while wearing headphones or watching MTV, and what does Bloom see in this, his own fantasy? He sees this boy as the inheritor of the progress bequeathed by philosophy and heroism and science: “A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into

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a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.”28 In this sort of language, as one of Bloom’s critics on the Right, Harry V. Jaffa, pointed out, there is “a great deal of prurient denunciation of immorality.”29 And no doubt at least part of the book’s success can be thus accounted for. But the flamboyance and prurience of the book’s opening sections, with their emphasis on culture, served, perhaps purposely, to obscure the denser argument concerning philosophy and politics later on in the book, and in particular its theoretical, as opposed to polemical, claims regarding nihilism. A number of persons are mentioned only once in Bloom’s book, including Buddha, Margaret Dumont, who played Groucho’s matronly amour in Marx Brothers movies, Michael Jackson, and Pericles. Carl Schmitt is another. Bloom quotes Schmitt, who is unidentified except for his name, as proclaiming, “Today Hegel died in Germany” on the day of Hitler’s assumption of power. Bloom wants his readers to think that this denotes the death of the German university, since “Hegel was arguably the greatest university man there ever was,” but Schmitt was no Hegelian and in fact joined the Nazi party three months later, an event and an association Bloom manages not to mention.30 But, as many reviewers observed at the time, the most notable notable among the single-referenced is Leo Strauss. When Bloom descries the superficiality of contemporary American nihilism, he calls it “nihilism with a happy ending” or “nihilism without the abyss,” to distinguish it from its Old World version.31 The light-hearted language of “value judgments,” he claims, can be attributed primarily to the books of Max Weber and Sigmund Freud taught by the university professors of the post-war period who were themselves either German or had studied in Germany or with the émigré German professors. These professors repressed the “darker side” of Weber and Freud, namely the debt each owed to Nietzsche. The irony here, of course, is that Bloom’s professor was the German émigré Leo Strauss, who did not repress the dark side. While Kristol gladly mentions Strauss as a teacher and inspiration, Bloom’s ironic omission is characteristic of a certain obfuscation that one frequently encounters in accounts of Strauss’s German period including his own, as we have seen. An example of the former is Fukuyama’s assertion that, Leo Strauss was a German Jewish political theorist who studied under Ernst Cassirer and who, fleeing the Nazis, emigrated to the United States in the 1930s and taught mostly at the University of Chicago until shortly before his death in 1973. Much of his work can be seen as a response to Nietzsche and Heidegger, who had undermined the rationalist tradition of Western philosophy from within and left modernity without a deep philosophical grounding for its own beliefs and institutions.32

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It is true that Strauss did his doctoral work in philosophy under Cassirer’s direction, but he was so little influenced by him that, in the autobiographical account he gave at St. John’s College in 1970, Strauss did not even mention him. Instead, Strauss emphasized the impact of Heidegger, whose lectures he attended in the mid-1920s. As a result of what he heard in Heidegger’s lectures, Strauss says he remarked at the time that, “compared to Heidegger, Max Weber, till then regarded by me as the incarnation of the spirit of science and scholarship, was an orphan child.”33 Fukuyama’s undoubtedly intentional distorted representation is meant to obscure Strauss’ deep-seated anti-Enlightenment sentiments. While it is certainly true that Strauss was in some sense “responding” to Nietzsche and Heidegger, the nature of that response is very much in question. *** In his essay largely devoted to insulating Strauss from the use some Straussians and others have made of him, Mark Lilla emphasizes the longterm impact of Natural Right and History. The crucial date in assessing that impact is 1968. The upheavals within American universities that began in earnest in that year had a traumatic effect on many of Strauss’s current and former students, he writes. Thanks to Natural Right and History, they were “prepared to see the threat of ‘nihilism’ lurking in the interstices of modern life, waiting to be released, turning America into Weimar.”34 This premise, Lilla notes, underlay Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. Illustrating Lilla’s point, Bloom there uses Louis Armstrong’s popularization of the Brecht–Weill song, “Mack the Knife,” as a sign of the “astonishing Americanization of the German pathos.” Bloom links the song’s concept to Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and to the “supra-moral attitude of expectancy” that “appealed to Weimar and its American admirers.” Its American version becomes “less dangerous, although not less corrupt.” “Our stars,” he continues, “are singing a song they do not understand, translated from a German original and having a huge popular success with unknown but wide-ranging consequences, as something of the original message touches something in American souls. But behind it all, the master lyricists are Nietzsche and Heidegger.”35 Bloom’s one mention of Strauss comes at the end of a section of several pages in which he largely reiterates his teacher’s teaching about Locke. Hobbes, Bloom says, invented the notion of rights and Locke gave it respectability. Rights, to an American, “are our common sense. Right is not the opposite of wrong, but of duty. It is a part of, or the essence of, freedom. It begins from man’s cherished passion to live, and to live as painlessly as possible.” Rights represent “a new kind of morality solidly grounded in selfinterest.”36 The irony with which Bloom articulates these points was likely lost on many readers. However, against the background of Strauss’s Natural

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Right and History, Bloom’s paragraph that begins with “Americans are Lockeans” and ends with the sentence, “As Leo Strauss put it, the moderns ‘built on low but solid ground,’” displays its fully ironic sense.37 But aside from the Straussians among them, the neoconservatives largely ignored the irony and figures such as William Bennett generated and exploited Bloom’s commercial success, mindlessly jumbling Plato and Locke, Socrates and Jefferson together while failing to see the worst of Nietzsche threading his way through Bloom’s glib and unreasoned pronouncements. It made for attention-grabbing headlines and initiated a largely vacuous but politically astute “debate” on cultural values that proceeded on terms set by the neocons. *** It was one of Bloom’s students who managed to synthesize various elements of the Straussian liturgy into a useful neoconservative sermon on history and politics. Francis Fukuyama’s principal contribution to neoconservative political theory is his much-discussed 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. In it, Fukuyama beats the Weberian horse one more time. “While Max Weber,” he writes, “took a despairing and pessimistic view of the increasing rationalism and secularism of mankind’s historical ‘progress,’ postwar modernization theory gave his ideas a decidedly optimistic and, one is tempted to say, typically American cast.”38 But Fukuyama’s text represents a skillful sublimation of the European and American, despairing and optimistic motifs. Whereas Strauss dwelt upon what he saw as the disastrous effects of modern science and technology, Fukuyama emphasizes two social aspects of their development: technology allows for advances in military strength and in economic capacity. Thus science provides the means for people “to gratify their desire for security, and for the limitless acquisition of material goods.”39 Security and the accumulation of wealth are the foundations of the modern notion of right examined and ultimately rejected by Strauss. Fukuyama highlights the limitations of this notion of right, but with a more strategic view toward its needed supplement in the present historical period. Fukuyama discusses Hobbes and Locke under the rubric of “the first man,” focusing on their conceptions of the so-called state of nature.40 His purpose is to contrast the safety-seeking, acquisitive, rights-bearing liberal individual of Locke with the individual who seeks recognition above all else. Fukuyama derives this “first man” from Hegel’s depiction of the struggle for recognition in the Phenomenology of Spirit, a struggle that results in the establishment of masters and slaves. The master-type is able to overcome the natural fear of death and risk everything in the struggle, while the slavetype ultimately clings to life. Thus Locke’s individual is the type of the slave, who puts the desire for self-preservation first. And Fukuyama, notes,

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“Thomas Jefferson’s ‘self-evident’ truths about the rights of men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were not essentially different from Locke’s natural rights to life and property.” The problem for politics was seen by Locke, Jefferson, and others like them, Fukuyama says, “as being in some sense the effort to persuade the would-be masters to accept the life of the slave in a kind of classless society of slaves.”41 The “first man” of the liberal imagination is at the same time the “last man” of Fukuyama’s title. While he emphasizes his reading of Hegel, as mediated by Alexandre Kojève, Fukuyama’s larger conception of recognition is indebted to Bloom’s idiosyncratic interpretation and translation of Plato’s Republic.42 The crucial notion here is that there is a part of the soul that is characterized by “spiritedness” (thymos) that drives individuals to seek recognition. It is a passion and distinct from desire. The Lockean individual elevates desire for self-preservation and material comfort over this passion. Figuratively, Fukuyama characterizes this, insofar as it is successful, as the victory of the bourgeois over the aristocrat.43 Nietzsche called the victor the “last man” in Thus Spake Zarathustra and described him as an unselfreflective, small man who “makes everything small” while proclaiming himself the inventor of “happiness.”44 The success of science, technology, and liberal democracy, a society of “slaves,” poses the problem of the last man for Fukuyama, as it did for Strauss in his response to Kojève. Liberal democracy is understood by Fukuyama to be the only long-term political option in the world after the collapse of the Soviet empire. In the short term, forms of authoritarian rule may prevail, but liberal democracy is the only system that provides the possibility of the universal recognition that will increasingly be demanded as education levels increase in accordance with technological (including military and economic) advances. These latter are inevitable, given the processes of globalization. But despite this assertion, Fukuyama’s analysis is plagued by the specter of the last man. “Liberal principles,” he writes, “can be destructive of the highest forms of patriotism which are necessary for the very survival of the community. For it is a widely recognized defect of Anglo-Saxon liberal theory that men would never die for a country based merely on the principle of rational selfpreservation.”45 Liberal democracy requires irrational passions to sustain it. The “noble” features of Strauss’s critique of modernity return. And so does the troubling specter of the nihilist redemption of humanity. *** In an influential article published in 1996 in Foreign Affairs, William Kristol and Robert Kagan drew the consequences of the preceding trajectory of thought from Strauss to Fukuyama. They claimed that American military officers worried that “while they serve as a kind of foreign legion, doing the hard work of American-style ‘empire management,’ American civilians at

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home, preoccupied with the distribution of tax breaks and government benefits, will not come to their support when the going gets tough.”46 So they called for greater “moral clarity” in American foreign policy by promoting the “American principles” of “democracy, free markets, respect for liberty.”47 Then they drew the connection: “The remoralization of America at home ultimately requires the remoralization of American foreign policy.”48 The Straussian element in the neoconservative agenda thus contributed to a political project that aimed at exploiting America’s unrivalled global military power in order to reverse its cultural decline. The regime it sought to alter was the American regime. 9/11 presented the opportunity to enact this noble delusion. *** Fukuyama’s fear of the universal and homogeneous state becoming a reality in the post-Cold War era has presumably been abated, at least for now, by the discovery of a new opponent with universal aspirations in “fundamentalist” Islam. This new opponent has a usefully polymorphous character, appearing now simply as “terrorists” or “evil-doers” when needed and not requiring too much in the way of knowledge in order to observe it lurking about. It is ironic that those among the policy makers who count Leo Strauss as an influence on their think-tank or government resumés should be so ignorant in this regard, given Strauss’s love and respect for the rationalism of medieval Islamic philosophy and his deep knowledge of Arabic. But Strauss would still undoubtedly consider those who govern our half of the divide as “not wise” in any event. And though much is unclear about this polymorphous opponent, it is unlikely that it is predicated on a view of human nature that gives excessive scope to the passions. But still, an opportunity has been given to those who will exploit it to strengthen imperial power, “to rule the peoples . . . to spare the conquered and subdue the proud.” And that, after all, was Strauss’s point.

Notes

Introduction

1 M. F. Burnyeat, “Sphinx without a Secret,” New York Review of Books 32:9 (May 30, 1985). 2 Nicholas Xenos, “Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror,” Logos 3, no. 2 (Spring 2004), reprinted in Stephen Eric Bronner and Michael J. Thompson, eds., The Logos Reader: Rational Radicalism and the Future of Politics (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006). 3 The letter can be found in Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 3: Hobbes politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften – Briefe (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001), 624–5. Emphasis in original. It is reproduced in Eugene R. Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 2007), 156 n. 25. For a lengthy extract from this letter in English translation, see chapter 1, below. A different translation, by Scott Horton, is available online at http://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/07/letter_16.html. 4 It was from an unpublished paper of Prof. Sheppard’s that I first learned of this letter. 5 Catherine and Michael Zuckert, The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 292 n. 25 and 293 n. 33. The Zuckerts criticize me first for offering no proof for my claim that Strauss’s real subject in On Tyranny is a tyranny he sees as coequal with modernity and, secondly, for attributing to Thrasymachus an argument made by Polemarchus in Plato’s Republic. Chapter 4, below, is my response to the first charge. I plead no contest to the second. 6 Mark Lilla, “Leo Strauss: The European,” New York Review of Books 51:16 (October 21, 2004). 7 See Richard Wolin, “Leo Strauss, Judaism, and Liberalism,” The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Chronicle Review 52:32 (April 14, 2006), B13. The response, from David Lewis Schaefer, appears in The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Chronicle Review 52:38 (May 26, 2006), B17. 8 Steven B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), ix.

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1 Allan Bloom, “Leo Strauss,” Political Theory 2, no. 4 (1974): 372. 2 For a critical essay on Bloom’s book that describes its Straussian themes, see Sheldon S. Wolin, “Elitism and the Rage against Postmodernity,” in Wolin, The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 47–65. I discuss Bloom’s book in chapter 6, below. 3 Louis Menand remarks in his review of the novel that the figure of Ravelstein is “the least novelized character in the book,” so closely is he modeled on Bloom, even though “not a single incident or character feels truly fictional.” See Louis Menand, “Bloom’s Gift,” The New York Review of Books 47:9 (May 25, 2000). 4 Saul Bellow, Ravelstein (Penguin Books: New York, 2001), 101. 5 Ibid., 163. 6 Ibid., 10. 7 Ibid., 12. 8 Ibid., 50–1. 9 Ibid., 14–15. 10 Ibid., 20, 44. 11 Ibid., 25–6. George Anastaplo, after noting that the so-called first generation of Strauss’s students was predominantly male, observes that, “The specialness, if not exclusivity, of the Strauss circle was not lost upon spouses who sensed that they could no longer share the most important things with their husbands.” George Anastaplo, “Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago,” in Kenneth L. Deutsch and John A. Murley, eds., Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Regime (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 6. 12 Bellow, Ravelstein, p. 59. 13 Ibid., 47–8. 14 Ibid., 25. 15 Ibid., 52. 16 Ibid., 58. 17 While crediting Bloom with impressing the seriousness of the study of politics upon him at Cornell, Wolfowitz himself minimizes the influence of Strauss in favor of the mathematically minded military strategist Albert Wohlstetter during his studies at Chicago. Wolfowitz dismisses the notion of a link between Strauss and the Iraq war, a link in part derived from his academic background, as “a product of feverish minds.” See Sam Tannenhaus, “Bush’s Brain Trust,” Vanity Fair, July 2003, 118. 18 Interestingly, Bellow briefly attended graduate school in anthropology. 19 Jenny Strauss Clay, “The Real Leo Strauss,” New York Times, June 7, 2003. 20 James Atlas, “A Classicist’s Legacy: New Empire Builders,” New York Times, Sunday, May 4, 2003, sec. 4; Jeet Heer, “The Philosopher,” Boston Globe, May 11, 2003; William Pfaff, “The Long Reach of Leo Strauss,” International Herald Tribune, May 15, 2003. 21 Seymour M. Hersh, “Selective Intelligence,” New Yorker, May 12, 2003. 22 Robert J. Lieber, “The Neoconservative-Conspiracy Theory: Pure Myth,” Chronicle of Higher Education May 2, 2003. Of the “more extreme versions of the

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23

24 25

26

27 28 29

conspiracy theory,” Lieber writes, without naming names: “there are conspicuous manifestations of classic anti-Semitism: claims that a small, all-powerful but little-known group or ‘cabal’ of Jewish masterminds is secretly manipulating policy; that they have dual loyalty to a foreign power; that this cabal combines ideological opposites (right-wingers with a Trotskyist legacy, echoing classic anti-Semitic tropes linking Jews to both international capitalism and international communism); that our official leaders are too ignorant, weak, or naïve to grasp what is happening; that the foreign policy upon which our country is now embarked runs counter to, or is even subversive of, American national interest; and that if readers only paid close attention to what the author is saying, they would share the same sense of alarm.” Robert L. Bartley, “Joining LaRouche In the Fever Swamps: The New York Times and the New Yorker go off the deep end,” Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2003. While Bartley’s bait and switch rhetoric is unsurprising, it is depressing to see it shamefully reproduced in an allegedly scholarly book published by the University of Chicago Press. In The Truth About Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), a title that itself should be a warning, Catherine and Michael Zuckert, who studied with Strauss and who dedicate their book to four Straussian teachers, including Alan Bloom, find LaRouche lurking behind the journalistic accounts, but provide evidence that would not even qualify as circumstantial for their claim. See ibid., 11–17. Joshua Muravchik, “The Neoconservative Cabal,” Commentary, September 1, 2003. The Pentagon released a transcript of Tannenhaus’s interview with Wolfowitz. The full text is available at http://dod.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030509depsecdef0223.html. These comments do not appear in the published article. See Tannenhaus, “Bush’s Brain Trust.” M. F. Burnyeat, “Sphinx Without a Secret,” New York Review of Books 32:9 (May 30, 1985). Letters from Allan Bloom, Clifford Orwin and Thomas L. Pangle, Ernest J. Weinrib, Harry V. Jaffa, and Joseph Cropsey appeared in the issue of October 10, 1985. Werner J. Dannhauser’s letter appeared in the issue of October 24, 1985, and Paul Sunstein’s in the issue of April 24, 1986. Burnyeat responded to each letter. Harry V. Jaffa, “Strauss at One Hundred,” in Deutsch and Murley, eds., Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Regime, 41. Ibid., 42. George Anastaplo, “Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago,” ibid., 11. Not everyone who knew Strauss was quite so taken with him. In 1954, when the German philosopher Karl Jaspers asked Hannah Arendt what had become of Strauss, whom he had met before in Germany, she replied, “Leo Strauss is a professor of political philosophy in Chicago, highly respected. Wrote a good book about Hobbes as well as the one about Spinoza,” which was a book he wrote in the 1920s that Jaspers knew. “Now another about natural law. He is a convinced orthodox atheist. Very odd. A truly gifted intellect. I don’t like him.” Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers: Correspondence 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 244.

148 Notes

30 Jason DeParle, “Goals Reached, Donor on Right Closes Up Shop,” New York Times, May 29, 2005. 31 Stephen Toulmin, “The Evolution of Margaret Mead,” New York Review of Books 31:19 (December 6, 1984). 32 Nathan Tarcov, “Evolving Margaret Mead,” New York Review of Books 32:3 (February 28, 1985). 33 Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), ix. 34 Ibid., 2. 35 Ibid., 6 36 Ibid., 58. 37 Ibid., 161. Elsewhere, Norton seems to distinguish between “the canon” and “a canon,” though the distinction is unclear. Ibid., 29–31. 38 Ibid., 75. 39 Ibid., 118. 40 Ibid., 118–20. Curiously, Norton thinks that Strauss is following an Hegelian logic here, but there is nothing teleological about Strauss’s formulation. 41 Ibid., 120 42 Mark Lilla, “Leo Strauss: The European,” New York Review of Books 51:16 (October 21, 2004) and “The Closing of the Straussian Mind,” New York Review of Books 51:17 (November 4, 2004). In the second installment Lilla discusses a book by Carnes Lord as well as Anne Norton’s. 43 Among these: Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, trans. Marcus Brainard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Daniel Tanguay, Leo Strauss: Une biographie intellectuelle (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2003); and Steven B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Lilla’s review essay includes the Meier and Tanguay books. 44 As Meier demonstrates in Leo Strauss. Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics, 2nd edition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 112, claims that, “No competent student of Leo Strauss was ever in doubt as to his teacher’s choice” in the confrontation between philosophy and revealed religion; i.e., he chose philosophy. 45 Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 155. 46 Gary J. Schmitt and Abram N. Shulsky, “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous),” in Deutsch and Murley, eds., Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Regime. 47 Ibid., 409–10. 48 Smith, Reading Leo Strauss, 12. 49 Eugene R. Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 2007), 56–7. 50 Virgil, Aeneid, 6, 851–3. In a piece on Robert Fagles’s translation of the Aeneid, Edward Rothstein, a free-wheeling cultural critic for the New York Times who has demonstrated a notable affection for Straussians, quotes these lines from the poem, reading them as instituting the rule of law. New York Times, December 11, 2006. Strauss’s ellipses, however, drop the words “pacique imponere

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51

52

53

54

55

morem,” which means, in the context, to impose the law on peace, or, in Fagles’s translation, “to put your stamp on the works and ways of peace.” Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking, 2006), 210. Virgil is referring to the Pax Augustana, a peace imposed by the law of the conqueror. Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 3: Hobbes politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften – Briefe (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001), 624–5. Emphases in original. The German word for swastika is Hakenkreuz, or hooked cross. In the letter, Strauss seems to be playing on the elements of this word. A different translation, by Scott Horton, is available at http://balkin.blogspot.com/ 2006/07/letter_16.html. An exception is Eugene R. Sheppard, “Exile and Accommodation: Leo Strauss 1932–1937” (paper presented to the Working Group in Modern European Jewish History, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, February 2003). See now Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile, 60ff. I am indebted to Prof. Sheppard for bringing this letter to my attention. Originally published in English translation in The Independent Journal of Philosophy 2 (1978): 5–12 and 4 (1983): 105–19. This selection begins in December 1935 and ends in August 1946. A somewhat fuller selection, beginning in February 1935 and ending in November 1946, is available in Italian translation in Karl Löwith and Leo Strauss, Dialogo sulla modernità (Rome: Donzetti, 1994). Strauss’s correspondence with Löwith continued until Strauss’s last letter to him in 1971. See Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 3, 607–97. For Strauss’s comments on de Lagarde, see his 1924 essay, “Paul de Lagarde,” in Leo Strauss, The Early Writings (1921–1932), trans. and ed. Michael Zank (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 90–7. On Maurras, see Strauss’s final letter to Carl Schmitt, written on July 10, 1933, in which he states that he had been “somewhat occupied” with the French writer and asks Schmitt for a letter of introduction to him. The letter is translated in Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 127–8. In his memoir, the philosopher Hans Jonas, who knew Strauss since their student days, says of him that he was an early supporter of Mussolini, albeit when Mussolini was free of anti-Semitism. See Hans Jonas, Erinnerungen (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 2003), 262.

2 Becoming Leo Strauss (I)

1 Leo Strauss, “Preface,” Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 1. Originally published in Germany in 1930, this translation appeared from Schocken Books in 1965. The new preface was actually written in 1962. Subsequent page references to this preface will be given in the text, denoted by PSCR. Page references to the original text will be denoted by SCR. 2 “A Giving of Accounts: Jacob Klein and Leo Strauss,” in Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 457.

150 Notes

3 Ibid., 459–60. 4 Leo Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political,” in Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 119. 5 Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law: Contributions to the Understanding of Maimonides and His Predecessors, trans. Eve Adler (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 102. Emphases in original. This book was first published in German in 1935 and consists of three essays. Only the last of these, quoted here, was previously published. 6 Ibid., 104–5. Strauss made the same point, connecting it to a tradition begun by the Islamic philosopher Averroës, in Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 48. 7 Ibid., 95–6. 8 Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 22. This book collects essays written by Strauss between 1941 and 1948. Subsequent page references to this book will be given in the text, denoted by PAW. 9 While Strauss’s father died shortly before the deportation of Kirchain’s Jews in 1942, and his stepmother and the rest of his immediate family perished afterwards in the camps, it is estimated that from around 525,000 German Jews in 1933, there remained only 185,000 by the end of 1939. Strauss could hardly have been unaware of this decline. By September 1944, the number was reduced to 14,574. For these figures and the details of Strauss’s family, see Eugene R. Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 2007), 82. 10 Strauss’s reading of fifth and fourth century B.C. Athens as “liberal” is idiosyncratic, to say the least. See his preface to Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 11 Leo Strauss, “On a Forgotten Kind of Writing,” in What is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (New York: The Free Press, 1959), 221–2. Strauss is responding to a review of his book, Persecution and the Art of Writing, by George W. Sabine. 12 Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts,” 463. For a claim that Strauss did not hold the view that philosophers are beyond good and evil, see Catherine and Michael Zuckert, The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 90. 13 Aristotle, Eth. Nic. 1140a24–b20. 14 The problem posed for interpreting his writing by the issue of esotericism is discussed in Daniel Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 2–5. Tanguay, however, treats Strauss’ autobiographical accounts without skepticism. His readings of Strauss’ early texts are nonetheless valuable. By contrast, John G. Gunnell, “Strauss before Straussianism: Reason, Revelation, and Nature,” The Review of Politics, 53, no. 1 (Winter 1991), relies excessively on Strauss’s account of himself. See also David N. Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in GermanJewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), chap. 4; Pierre Bouretz, Témoins du future: Philosophie et messianisme (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), chap. 7. The most reliable biography of Strauss’s life until 1937 is Sheppard,

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15

16

17 18 19 20 21

22

23 24

25 26 27 28 29

Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile. A careful account of Strauss’s early writings on Zionism is given in Michael Zank’s “Introduction” to Leo Strauss: The Early Writings (1921–1932), trans. and ed. Michael Zank (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). Strauss does use the term to denote the modern period in a letter to Gerhard Krüger dated July 22, 1933, apparently never sent. See Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 3: Hobbes politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften – Briefe (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001), 432–3. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (New Brunswick, N.J.; Rutgers University Press, 1976), 69. The distinction between liberalism and democracy is more extensively argued in the 1926 preface to the second edition and in the first chapter of the original 1923 edition of Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985). Ibid., 22–5. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 135–43; Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 45–9. Quoted in Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London and New York: Verso, 2000), 187. For a comprehensive treatment of Strauss’s relationship to Nietzsche, and particularly to Beyond Good and Evil, see Laurence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). This is apparently a reference to the last part of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, entitled “Of the Kingdom of Darknesse.” As we will see later, Strauss considered Hobbes to be one of the founders of the liberal, and hence modern, worldview. Strauss was himself an informal student of Heidegger. Hannah Arendt (who was also briefly, and now notoriously, Heidegger’s lover), Hans George Gadamer, and Karl Löwith, all Jews, were among Heidegger’s inner circle of students. Written in 1843, Marx’s essay was published, along with other of his so-called early writings, in a series of volumes under the title Karl Marx—Friedrich Engels: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe between 1927 and 1935. For a general critique of foreshadowing in narrative, see Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). Bernstein notes that Strauss once referred to such rhetoric as a reductio ad Hitlerum (ibid., 61) without citing the source of the comment, which is in Natural Right and History, but the use to which Strauss puts it is itself rhetorical, as will be seen below in chapter 6. Zank, “Introduction,” 3–4. George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, Universal Library, 1964), 180–1. Ibid., 183. Ibid. Leo Strauss, “Response to Frankfurt’s ‘Word of Principle’,” Leo Strauss: The Early Writings, 65. See the editor’s notes for background on Moses and BlauWeiss and “Introduction,” 3–6.

152 Notes

30 Ibid., 65–6. 31 Ibid., 66. Zank points out that this attitude towards belief is a refutation of the one Strauss maintained in his doctoral dissertation, written under the supervision of Ernst Cassirer, where he advocated belief as against critical reason (and was therefore at odds with Cassirer’s own position). Thus this intervention has a self-critical element as well. Zank, “Introduction,” 6–7. However, it should be noted that in his dissertation Strauss was defending Jacobi’s critique of Enlightenment rationalism, a critique Strauss would later mount on different grounds. See also Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile, 21–5. 32 Strauss, “Response to Frankfurt’s ‘Word of Principle’,” 69. 33 Ibid., 70. 34 Ibid., brackets in original. 35 Ibid. 36 On Lagarde see Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 31–9. 37 Ibid., 39. 38 Strauss, “Paul de Lagarde,” Leo Strauss: The Early Writings, 90. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 93. 41 Ibid., 94. 42 Ibid., 96–7. 43 Ibid., 97. 44 Ibid., 98. 3 Becoming Leo Strauss (II)

1 Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 35. Subsequent page references to this book, other than its Preface, will be given in the text, denoted as SCR. The claim that modern biblical criticism begins with Spinoza (and/or Hobbes) is disputed in Noel Malcolm, “Hobbes, Ezra, and the Bible,” in Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 429–31. 2 For example, see Steven B. Smith, “Strauss’s Spinoza,” in his Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 65–83. Strauss’s book receives a fuller treatment in relation to the “theological-political predicament” theme in Daniel Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 22–45. On the general context of Strauss’s early writings on Spinoza and Judaism, see Eugene R. Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press/ University Press of New England, 2007). 3 Ibid., 33. 4 Strauss writes that, “When we meet in this period [i.e. the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries] with the theory that religion is a deception practiced by princes and priests, one can take it that this is certainly to a great extent due to the persisting Averroist tradition.” In his book on Machiavelli, published some thirty years later, Strauss mentions Averroës only once in the

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6 7 8 9 10

11

12

text itself, and there in the context of arguments concerning God as the efficient and final cause of the world and on the immortality of the soul. When Machiavelli refers to “those philosophers” who held such views, Strauss claims that he is referring to the Averroists. “The fundamental tenets of Averroism were as well known to intelligent men of Machiavelli’s age as the fundamental tenets of, say, Marxism are in the present age,” he claims, in justifying a turn toward Averroës in order to explain various elements of Machiavelli’s writings. Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 202–3. However, there is no textual support in Machiavelli’s published or unpublished writings for the claim that the writings of the Averroists were known to him and no reference to Averroës or to his school appears in any of the many biographies of Machiavelli. Predictably, Strauss’s claim is repeated by Harvey Mansfield, Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders: A Study of the Discourses on Livy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 202–3. That Mansfield’s reference should occur on exactly the same pages of his book as does Strauss’s in his would presumably be more than a coincidence only to Straussians. In his Introduction to Book III of the Ethics, Spinoza, after dismissing “most of those who have written about the affects,” admits that “there have been some very distinguished men (to whose work and diligence we confess that we owe much), who have written many admirable things about the right way of living, and given men advice full of prudence. But no one, to my knowledge, has determined the nature and powers of the affects, nor what, on the other hand, the mind can do to moderate them.” Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics, in The Collected Works of Spinoza: Vol. 1, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 491. “Conatus” is generally translated as “striving” in Spinoza’s work and signifies a striving to exist: “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being,” ibid., 498. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1976), 19. Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 2000), 103ff. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 27–8. Leo Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political,” in Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 94. Subsequent page references to this work will be given in the text, denoted by N. Schmitt appears to do this when he asserts that, “The political must therefore rest on its own ultimate distinctions, to which all action with a specifically political meaning can be traced. Let us assume that in the realm of morality the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable. The question then is whether there is also a special distinction which can serve as a simple criterion of the political and of what it consists. The nature of such a political distinction is surely different from that of those others. It is independent of them and as such can speak clearly for itself.” Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 26. Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt,” emphases in original.

154 Notes

13 Strauss notes that this means that, in Schmitt’s sense, “Hobbes is the antipolitical thinker,” ibid., 102 n. 2, emphasis in original. 14 John P. McCormick, “Fear, Technology, and the State: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and the Revival of Hobbes in Weimar and National Socialist Germany, Political Theory 22:4 (November 1994): 629. 15 The three extant letters from Strauss to Schmitt are included in Meier, The Hidden Dialogue, 123–8. 16 Ibid., 124, emphases in original. 17 Ibid., 125. 18 McCormick, “Fear, Technology, and the State,” 629 ff. 19 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), 98. 20 Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Phoenix Books, 1973). Subsequent references to this book will be given in the text as PPH, followed by the page number. 21 McCormick, “Fear, Technology, and the State,” 631–2. 22 Among those post-classical writers whom Strauss identifies as still within the orbit of “traditional natural law” doctrines are Hooker, Suarez, Grotius, and “even” Leibniz. As he indicates in the later preface to the 1952 American edition, Strauss came to see Machiavelli rather than Hobbes as the initiator of the new doctrine (PPH, xv). This may have been suggested to him as early as 1937, since Michael Oakeshott pointed out, in his review of The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, that Machiavelli’s Discorsi already manifested a break with philosophical and theological tradition along the lines suggested by Strauss’s reading of Hobbes. See Oakeshott’s “Dr. Leo Strauss on Hobbes,” reprinted in Michael Oakeshott, Hobbes On Civil Association (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 144. 23 See also PPH, 5. 24 McCormick, “Fear, Technology, and the State,” 633, notes that Strauss emphasizes fear of death more than any other interpreter of Hobbes and that “Strauss makes the source of that fear more extreme than it appears in Hobbes himself, or even in Schmitt.” 25 Ibid., 636. 26 The scholarly character of Strauss’s Political Philosophy of Hobbes is noted by Allan Bloom, who claims that Strauss had not yet broken clear of modern thought. Thus, “It is no accident that the Hobbes book, the book he liked the least, remains the one most reputed and uncontroversial in the scholarly community.” Allan Bloom, “Leo Strauss,” Political Theory 2, no. 4 (November 1974): 282. Bloom is right that this book alone of Strauss’s works has had any real impact outside Straussian circles in the area of the history of political thought, though not without controversy. See Oakeshott, “Dr. Leo Strauss on Hobbes,” 132–49. More recently, and perhaps surprisingly, see the notes referencing Strauss’s book in Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Notes 155

27 Strauss makes one reference to Hobbes hiding his true opinion with regard to religious belief: “The fact that Hobbes accommodated not his unbelief but his utterances of that unbelief to what was permissible in a good, and, in addition, prudent subject justifies the assumption that in the decades before the Civil War, and particularly in his humanist period, Hobbes for political reasons hid his true opinions and was mindful of the maintenance of theological convention” (PPH, 75). This observation leads to no consequence with regard to the way Strauss reads him. Strauss does suggest an esoteric doctrine in Hobbes in some later writings. See Miguel Vatter, “Strauss and Schmitt as Readers of Hobbes and Spinoza: On the Relation between Political Theology and Liberalism,” CR: The New Centennial Review 4:3 (Winter 2004): 197–201. 28 In fact, Oakeshott criticized Strauss for failing to link Hobbes to the Epicurean tradition. Oakeshott, “Dr. Leo Strauss on Hobbes,” 144–5, 148. 29 “The logical outcome of Strauss’s turning of Schmitt’s view of man to one which views him simply in need of ‘being ruled,’ is a theory of state that consistently instills in citizens the fear of the ‘human situation’ by constantly reminding them of it proximity. If this is to be achieved without technology, without the apparatus of physical domination, something else must hold sway. The myth of the state—the Leviathan, the sea monster after which Hobbes named his greatest work on the state—must invoke uniformly and in a controlled manner the terror that each citizen felt individually and overwhelmingly in the state of nature. Myth is the element which can maintain the state’s separation from society while simultaneously keeping it in check. Thus, for the state to keep from integrating too extensively within society and hence weakening itself, myth must hold sway.” McCormick, “Fear, Technology, and the State,” 636. 30 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 69. 31 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Allen Lane, 1973), xvi. 32 McCormick, “Fear, Technology, and the State,” 643. 4 Leo Strauss comes to America: politics between the lines

1 Leo Strauss, “Preface,” Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 31. Subsequent references to the 1962 preface will be given in the text as PSCR, followed by the page number. 2 Jenny Strauss Clay, “The Real Leo Strauss,” New York Times, June 7, 2003. 3 Leo Strauss, “How to Study Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise,” in Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 143. For the sake of consistency with the procedure in chapter 2, above, subsequent page references to this essay will be given in the text, denoted by PAW. It was of course conventional for writers to use an exclusively masculine pronoun when referring to individuals when Strauss wrote. However, that I will use gender-neutral phrases in commenting on Strauss’s writing should not obscure the fact that, to my knowledge, Strauss never interpreted a text by a female author. Indeed, the suggestion is overwhelming in his work that only

156 Notes

4

5 6 7

8 9

10

11

12 13 14 15 16 17

men, and then only some men, are capable of philosophy and therefore of authoring philosophically interesting texts. See Leo Strauss, “Review of Julius Ebbinghaus, On the Progress of Metaphysics,” in Michael Zank, trans. and ed., Leo Strauss: The Early Writings (1921–1932) (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 215; Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law: Contributions to the Understanding of Maimonides and His Predecessors, trans. Eve Adler (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 140 n. 16. Strauss references Plato’s so-called Seventh Letter as well as Maimonides’s Guide to the Perplexed. Benedictus de Spinoza, “The Emendation of the Intellect,” The Collected Works of Spinoza: Vol. 1, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 12. Strauss’s complete translation of this passage is, “To speak with a view to the capacity of the vulgar and to practice all those things which cannot hinder us from reaching our goal (sc. the highest good). For we are able to obtain no small advantage from the vulgar provided we make as many concessions as possible to their capacity. Add to this that in this way they will lend friendly ears to the truth” (PAW, 177). Benedict de Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1951), 11. Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 136–7. Strauss himself recognized this in Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 111–12, citing the same letter from Spinoza to Oldenburg as does Yovel in establishing Spinoza’s intent and intended audience. Letter to Oldenburg, quoted in translation in The Collected Works of Spinoza: Vol. 1, 350. For the Latin, see Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 111, where Strauss observes that this purpose “led Spinoza into frequently softening and obscuring his opposition to revealed religion,” but that the principal aim of the Treatise was the freedom of philosophizing, which presupposed that opposition. Yovel notes that while Spinoza was born a Jew, “most of the community around him consisted of former Marranos, who brought with them from Iberia the weight and richness of the Marrano experience, including their Catholic education and symbolism.” Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason, 19. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 128–9. Ibid., 144. Ibid., 151, emphasis in original. Ibid., 152. Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chap. 10.

Notes 157 5 On modernity’s tyranny

1 Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), chap. 4; Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), chap. 3; Shadia B. Drury, Alexandre Kojève: The Roots of Postmodern Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 143–59. 2 Shadia B. Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, updated edition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 95–8. 3 Ibid., lix. 4 Ibid., 97. 5 Ibid., 123. 6 Ibid., 136. 7 Ibid., 136–7. 8 Ibid., 135–6. 9 On this point, see Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 53. 10 Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (New York: Free Press, 1991), 23. Subsequent references to this book will be given in the text as OT followed by the page number. References to the translation of Hiero, or Tyrannicus in On Tyranny will be given by chapter and line followed by OT and the page number. 11 The efforts of political scientists to come to terms with the novelty of National Socialism, at least, was not as bereft of accomplishment as Strauss suggests. One example is Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933–1944 (New York: Harper & Row, 1944). The first edition appeared in 1942. Incidentally, Neumann explicitly criticizes Carl Schmitt’s contributions to National Socialist legal doctrine. 12 Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume 1: The Spell of Plato (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). 13 The full text of Macaulay’s chapter can be found at http://yarchive.net/ macaulay/history/chapter_XXI.html. 14 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 163–8. Although Heidegger presents his argument in ontological terms, his references to public transportation and newspapers in the formation of das Man clearly gives it a grounding in modern experience. 15 For the Greek text I have relied on the version available online at http://www. perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Xen.+Hiero+1.1 16 This conventional Athenian view of justice is given voice most famously by Polemarchus in Plato’s Republic. 17 The difference between dialogue in a play, or the characters in a novel, and the philosophic dialogue as a form is however pointed out by M. F. Burnyeat in his critical essay on Strauss, “Sphinx Without a Secret,” New York Review of Books, 32:9 (May 30, 1985). 18 Aside from his declaration of a “Socratic political science” in On Tyranny, see also, among many examples, Leo Strauss, “On Classical Political Philosophy,” An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss, ed. Hilail Gildin

158 Notes

19

20 21 22

23 24 25

26

(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989). This essay was originally published in 1945. Strauss’s method of citation, and the purpose behind the method, is noted by John W. Yolton in his critique of Strauss’s interpretation of John Locke. See John W. Yolton, “Locke on the Law of Nature,” The Philosophical Review 67:4 (October 1958), 483, n. 10. I follow the translation of the Oeconomicus at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Xen.+Ec.+11.1 I follow the translation of Memorabilia by Anna S. Benjamin in Xenophon, Recollections of Socrates and Socrates’ Defense Before the Jury (Indianapolis: The Library of Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merrill, 1965). Euthydamus is described as a youth who “already thought that he was superior to his contemporaries in wisdom” and had collected the works of poets and sophists (Mem. 4.2.1). Plato wrote a dialogue named after him in which Euthydamus, now older, is presented as being a sophist. I follow the translation of Republic by G. M. A. Grube as revised by C. D. C. Reeve in John M. Cooper, ed., Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1997). The text in this note refers to Memorabilia 2.3.2 and 1.13–15. The latter is obviously a misprint and I assume Strauss means to refer to 1.1.13–15. The first reference is to Xenophon explaining that Socrates counseled those who intended to rule cities to seek the help of divination because of the unforeseen consequences of ruling a city or house: “the gods reserve for themselves the most important part of these activities, and this part man cannot foresee at all. The man who plants a field well does not know who will reap its fruits, and the man who builds a fine house does not know who will live in it. The general does not know if it will be profitable to conduct a campaign, and the politician does not know if it will be profitable to lead his state. The man who marries a beautiful bride in order to be happy does not know whether she will bring him sorrow. The man who has powerful connections in the state does not know whether he will be exiled from the state through them” (Mem. 1.1.8). The second reference is to Xenophon’s description of Socrates’ method of leading claims back to definitions, using as an example the question of who is a good citizen: “‘Do you say that the man you are praising is a better citizen than the man I am praising?’ ‘Yes, I do.’ ‘Then why don’t we first consider what is the question of what the function of a good citizen [politên] is?’ ‘Let us do that!’ ‘In the administration of finance, isn’t the better man the one who makes the city wealthier?’ ‘Certainly!’ ‘In war, isn’t the better man the one who makes the state stronger than the enemy?’ ‘How could it be otherwise!’ ‘In diplomacy, isn’t he better who makes friends for his state instead of enemies?’ ‘Quite likely.’ ‘And in debate,’ continued Socrates, ‘the man who stops rebellion and produces unity?’ ‘I think so.’ By developing the argument in this way, the truth became evident to the men who were arguing against him” (Mem. 4.6.14). Strauss comments that, “The desire for praise and admiration as distinguished and divorced from the desire for love is the natural foundation for the predominance of the desire for one’s own perfection. This is what Xenophon subtly indicates by presenting Simonides as chiefly interested in the pleasures

Notes 159

27 28 29

30 31 32 33

34 35

36

of eating, whereas Hiero appears to be chiefly interested in the pleasures of sex: for the enjoyment of food, as distinguished from sexual enjoyments, one does not need other human beings” (OT, 90). See Eugene R. Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 2007). Since these English words, “fatherland” and “city,” are translations for the same Greek word, patrides, one wonders why Strauss chooses to deploy them both, with their very different English meanings. Strauss inserts a note here to Aristotle’s Politics 1276b29–36, 1278b1–5, 1293b3–7. In the first reference, Aristotle makes the claim that the goodness of a citizen is relative to the specific constitution of a city, whereas the goodness of a man is not. It is therefore possible to be a good man and a bad citizen at the same time. Only in a city in which all the citizens are also good men would the two kinds of goodness coincide. The second reference makes essentially the same point, but Aristotle adds there that the latter case can also mean that, “it is not every citizen but only the statesman, the man who controls or is competent to control, singly or with colleagues, the administration of the commonwealth, that is essentially also a good man.” In the third passage, Aristotle calls a constitution in which the two forms of goodness coincide an aristocracy, “for it is right to apply the name ‘aristocracy’—‘government of the best’—only to the constitution of which the citizens are best in virtue absolutely and not merely good men in relation to some arbitrary standard, for under it alone the same person is a good man and a good citizen absolutely, whereas those who are good under the other constitutions are good relatively to their own form of constitution.” Note that Strauss’s selection of Aristotle’s assertions essentially rules out democracy as a form in which the goodness of citizenship and that of the person can coincide. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), 153. Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 63 and note, 274. http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/pascal/letters-b.html#LETTER %20VIII The Zuckerts cite Strauss’s comment in refutation of Drury’s claim that Strauss is advocating the tyrannical teaching, but they neglect to demonstrate that this presumption is valid. Nor do they explore Strauss’s citations. See Zuckert, The Truth about Leo Strauss, 161. Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli. References to this book will be given in the text as TM, followed by page number. The lectures were transcribed from notes by the novelist Raymond Queneau and published as Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). A radically abbreviated version, edited by Allan Bloom, was published in English as Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1969). Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Phoenix Books, 1973), 58,

160 Notes

note. In November 1936, Kojève wrote to Strauss thanking him for sending a copy of his Hobbes book. Kojève pronounced it “one of the best history of philosophy books I have read,” adding, “admittedly, I do not know Hobbes.” He then proceeds to give Hegel’s account of Hobbes. OT, 231. 37 At this point, Kojève acknowledges that since neither Strauss nor Xenophon seem to accept the existence of a wise man, as opposed to a philosopher, he will speak only of the latter (OT, 147). 38 Kojève adds that remaining within such a circle results in recognition being obtained only from those who have been carefully chosen to provide it (OT, 158). 6 Nihilism and the Straussian justification of imperial power

1 Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (New York: Free Press, 1991), 240, letter of May 13, 1949. 2 Strauss gave the Walgreen Lectures again in 1953. Those lectures resulted in his book on Machiavelli. 3 Steven B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 2. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 120. 8 Mark Lilla, “The Closing of the Straussian Mind,” New York Review of Books 51:17 (November 4, 2004). 9 This seems to be indicated by Strauss’s reading of Spinoza’s Treatise and Machiavelli’s Discourses. See Leo Strauss, “How to Study Spinoza’s TheologicalPolitical Treatise,” in Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 195, where he notes that the first six chapters of the Treatise are contradicted by what follows; and Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 85, where Strauss comments that Machiavelli “is good at the beginning of his works.” 10 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 1–2. Subsequent references to this book will be given in the text as NRH followed by the page number. 11 Quoted in David N. Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 108. 12 Ibid., chap. 4: “Anti-Historicism and the Theological-Political Predicament in Weimar Germany: The Case of Leo Strauss”; Eugene R. Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 2007), chap. 2. 13 See Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,” Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). In 1940, Martin Heidegger gave a lecture series on the theme of nihilism in Nietzsche. These lectures, together with a treatise on the

Notes 161

14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

same theme written between 1944 and 1946, were subsequently published in German in 1961. See Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche. Volume IV: Nihilism, trans. David Farrell Krell (Harper & Row, 1982). See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), Division Two, V and passim. See, for example, Leo Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?,” What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (New York: The Free Press, 1959), 11. This distinguishes the classical natural right doctrine of the Greek tradition from that of “biblical faith,” since, for the latter, the best regime is identical with the City of God and therefore “coeval with Creation and hence always actual; and the cessation of evil, or Redemption, is brought about by God’s supernatural action. The question of the best regime thus loses its crucial significance” (NRH, 144). Irving Kristol, “The Neoconservative Persuasion,” The Weekly Standard 8, no. 47 (August 25, 2003). Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: HarperCollins, 1996). Alain Frachon and Daniel Vernet, L’Amerique messianique: Les guerres des néoconservateurs (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005), 49. Ibid., 54. Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Democratic Remedies for Democratic Disorders,” The Public Interest, Spring 1998. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0377/ is_n131/ai_20632390. Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 13. But he is perhaps transparent where Kristol is opaque, since Fukuyama precedes this assertion by noting that some (unidentified) neoconservatives have charged their (unidentified) critics with a veiled anti-Semitism in the very use of the term “neoconservative.” Ibid., 21. Ibid., 34. The one figure who represents the fusion of Strauss and Wohlstetter is Fukuyama’s former classmate and colleague Paul Wolfowitz. Ibid., ix–x. See James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: the History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), 160–3. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). Ibid., 75. Harry V. Jaffa, “Humanizing Certitudes and Impoverishing Doubts: A Critique of The Closing of the American Mind,” in Robert L. Stone, ed., Essays on The Closing of the American Mind (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1989), 129. Bloom, Closing, 259. Ibid., 147, 155. Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 21–2. Leo Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts,” in Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 461.

162 Notes

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Mark Lilla, “The Closing of the Straussian Mind.” Bloom, Closing, 152. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 167. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Perennial, HarperCollins, 2002), 68–9. Ibid., 80. Fukuyama’s discussion of Hobbes and Locke is derived in its entirety from Strauss’s interpretation in Natural Right and History and several identifiably Straussian scholars. Ibid., 159. For a cogent interpretation of Fukuyama’s book and its inspirations, see Perry Anderson, A Zone of Engagement (London and New York: Verso, 1992), 331–57. Fukuyama, The End of History, 185–7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York and London: Penguin, 1978), 16–19. Fukuyama, The End of History, 324–5. William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 75, no. 4 (July/August 1996): 26. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 31.

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Index

Abrams, Elliot 137 Adorno, Theodor W. 68 Anastaplo, George 9 Arendt, Hannah 59, 147n 29 Bartley, Robert L. 6–7, 147n 23 Bell, Daniel 137 Bellow, Saul xvii, 2–5 Bloom, Allan xiii, xv, xvii, 2, 8–9, 10, 11–12, 139; as model for Abe Ravelstein 2–5; Closing of the American Mind 139–41 Burke, Edmund 113, 129 Burnyeat, M. F. xiv–xv, xvii, 8–9, 11, 157n 17 Bush, George W. x, 5–7, 11 Cabal: as allegedly anti-Semitic term 5–7; as chorus in Embedded 13; as group in Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans 24 Cassirer, Ernst 140–1, 152n 31 Clay, Jenny Strauss 5–6, 7–8, 14–15 Cohen, Hermann 82–5 Cropsey, Joseph 8, 9, 11, 12 democracy: distinquished from liberal democracy xvii, 29 Drury, Shadia B. 87–8, 89 Earhart Foundation 10 Frachon, Alain 137 Freud, Sigmund 68, 140 Fukuyama, Francis 10, 138–9, 140–1, 142–3, 144, 161n 22, 162n 40 Hegel, G. W. F. 31, 32, 117, 120, 123, 130, 140, 142–3

Heidegger, Martin 13, 16, 34, 95, 97, 128, 130, 131, 140, 141, 157n 14, 160–1n 13 Hersh, Seymour 6, 15 Himmelfarb, Gertrude 138 Horkheimer, Max 68 Iraq War x–xi, xiii, xvii, 5, 6, 11, 138 Jaffa, Harry V. 9, 10, 140 John M. Olin Foundation 10 Jonas, Hans 149n 55 Kagan, Donald 136 Kagan, Robert 143–4 Kant, Immanuel 25, 113 Kennedy, Paul 139 Kirkpatrick, Jeane 137 Klein, Jacob 18 Kojève, Alexandre 87; review of On Tyranny 117–19; Leo Strauss’s response to 117–24 Kristol, Irving 135–8, 140 Kristol, William xiv, xv, 11, 143–4 Lagarde, Paul de 17, 40–1 LaRouche, Lyndon 7, 13 Lerner, Ralph 11–12 Lieber, Robert J. 6, 146–7n 22 Lilla, Mark xiv–vi, 13–14, 126, 141 liberal democracy Lord, Carnes xv, 10, 11 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 95–8 Maimonides, Moses 17, 25, 26, 27, 33; Strauss on 20–1, 47, 49–50, 78, 81–2 Mandeville, Bernard de 134 Mansfield, Harvey 10

168 Index Maurras, Charles 17 McCormick, John P. 59, 63, 154n 24, 155n 29 Meier, Heinrich xiv–vi Mosse, George L. 38 Muravcek, Joshua 7 Nadler, Steven 82 National Socialism (Nazism) xv, xviii, 6, 16–17, 21, 22, 30, 33, 36, 58–9, 95, 97, 126–7, 131, 140 Neoconservatives xiv, xviii, 5, 7, 126, 128, 135–9, 142–4, 161n 22 nihilism xviii, 4, 13, 124, 125–6, 128–35, 140 Norton, Anne xiv, 11–13, 126, 148n 40 Pangle, Thomas xiv, 10 Pascal, Blaise 113 Perle, Richard 137 Podhoretz, Norman 137 Popper, Karl 91, 101 Public Interest, The 138 Robbins, Tim xiii Rumsfeld, Donald 138 Schmitt, Carl xviii, 16, 29, 32, 136, 140, 151n 16, 153n 11 Schmitt, Gary 15 Schulsky, Abram xiii, xv Sheppard, Eugene R. xiv, xvi Smith, Steven B. xiv, xvii, 15, 125–6 Spender, Stephen 137 Strauss, Leo: and esoteric writing 19–28, 77–82; as Felix Davarr in Ravelstein 2–4; “How to Study Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise” 66–7, 71–82; May 1933 letter to Karl Löwith xv–xvi, xvii, 16–17, 21, 58–9, 68–9, 70, 144; Natural Right and History 125–35; “Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political” 53–7; on

Aristotle 159n 29; on Averroës 43–4, 152–3n 4; on Epicureanism 43–5; on Hermann Cohen 82–5; on historicism 73–6, 93–4, 127–31, 134; on John Locke 133–34; on Machiavelli 44, 50, 91–93, 115–16, 133, 152–53n 4; on Max Weber 131, 134, 141; on patriotism 110–11; on Plato xiv, 27–8, 63–5, 74, 106–7; on Socratic rhetoric 93–4; On Tyranny 87, 89–124; on Weimar Germany 29–34; on Zionism 18, 34–5, 37, 39–40; The Political Philosophy of Hobbes 59–69; Spinoza’s Critique of Religion 42–53 Straussianism ix, 2, 5, 10, 11, 15, 138–9 Straussians ix–xi, xvii, 6–11, 11–13, 15, 126, 138, 141–2 Sunstein, Paul 9 Tarcov, Nathan 11 Tanguay, Daniel xiv, xv, 150n 14 Tannenhaus, Sam 7 Thucydides 93, 136 Tocqueville, Alexis de ix, 136 Toulmin, Stephen 10–11 Troeltsch, Ernst 127–8 Vernet, Daniel 137 Voegelin, Eric 117 Wattenberg, Ben 137 Weekly Standard, The xiv, 11, 135 Wohlstetter, Albert 138, 161n 24 Wolfowitz, Paul x, xiii, xv, 7, 11, 146n 17, 161n 24; as Philip Gorman in Ravelstein 4–5 Wolin, Richard xvi Yovel, Yirmiyahu 81–2, 156n 11 Zank, Michael 41, 152n 31 Zuckert, Michael and Catherine xiv, xvi, 88–9, 145, 147n 23, 159n 33