What was Leo Strauss
STEVEN
LENZNER
& WILLIAM
up to?
KRISTOL
THE
only way to begin to
understand
Leo Strauss's political thought is by studying
his writings. This may seem a simple rule of common
sense. Yet a glance at the current controversy over Strauss's
supposed influence on contemporary
American politics and
foreign policy suggests that this rule is easily ignored.
The controversy
turns on a legitimate question: "What
was Strauss
up to?"--or,
more precisely,
"What was
Strauss's
intention?"
But it would be misleading
to attempt to understand
Strauss by ascribing to him an influence, whether beneficial
or nefarious,
on current policy
debates, and then inferring from the alleged influence what
his aims really were. It makes far more sense to turn first
to Strauss himself--that
is, to his writings--in
order to
understand his political teaching. Then one might evaluate
his intentional
as well as inadvertent
influence on today's
policy debates.
Strauss was born in Germany in 1899 and settled in the
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United States in the late 1930s. He taught at several
schools, most notably the University
of Chicago.
By the
time of his death in 1973, he had written
15 books,
most of which comment
on the great texts of political
philosophy,
including
the writings of Plato, Xenophon,
Machiavelli,
and Locke. But Strauss did not restrict himself to the narrow road of a single discipline:
His works
include interpretations
of Thucydides' history, Aristophanes'
comedies, and Maimonides'
Guide of the Perplexed. Successful as Strauss was as a teacher, it is above all his
books--works
such as Natural Right and History (1953),
Thoughts
on Machiavelli
(1958),
and Socrates
and
Aristophanes
(1966)--that
constitute
his legacy. His extraordinary
body of work makes Strauss more than just
one learned voice among many in scholarly debates,
worthy of respect
perhaps,
but not serious
engagement.
Indeed,
it is no doubt some vague sense of Strauss's
status as a thinker
that has aroused
so much passion
both in and out of the academy. His thought is of such a
character that it defies indifference.
The rediscovery
Strauss set himself a remarkable
task: the revival of
Western reading, and therefore, of philosophizing.
Strauss
claimed that he had rediscovered
"a forgotten
kind of
writing,"
and that for almost two centuries
the proper
manner of reading the greatest works of the past had
apparently disappeared.
If Strauss in fact rediscovered
the
art of writing, then he made possible the revival of Western letters. If Strauss's
work is sound, he made it possible
for us today to appreciate
great books in the spirit and
manner in which they were written. And the almost universal vehemence with which his rediscovery
was initially
denounced
and ridiculed by the scholarly
world demonstrated just how completely this art had been lost.
No passage of Strauss's
more vividly captures
what
was entailed
by this rediscovery
than his account
of
Machiavelli's
art of writing:
Time and again we have become bewildered by the fact that
WHAT WAS LEO STRAUSS UP TO?
21
the man who is more responsible
than any other man for the
break with the Great Tradition
should in the very act of
breaking
prove to be the heir, the by no means unworthy
heir, to that supreme art of writing which that tradition manifested at its peaks. The highest art has its roots, as he well
knew, in the highest necessity.
The perfect book or speech
obeys in every respect the pure and merciless laws of what
has been called logographic
necessity.
The perfect speech
contains nothing slipshod; in it there are no loose threads; it
contains no word that has been picked up at random; it is
not marred by errors due to faulty memory or to any other
kind of carelessness;
strong passions
and a powerful
and
fertile imagination
are guided with ease by a reason which
knows how to use the unexpected
gift, which knows how to
persuade
and which knows how to forbid; it allows of no
adornment which is not imposed by the gravity and the aloofness of the subject matter; the perfect writer rejects with
disdain and some impatience
the demand of vulgar rhetoric
that expressions
must be varied since change is pleasant.
By recreating
with at least equal
ostensible
antagonist,
Machiavelli,
care the teaching
as that of his
of his
osten-
sible guide,
Plato,
Strauss
offers
an invitation
to openminded
reconsideration,
one that consists
"in listening
to
the conversation
between
the great philosophers,
or more
generally
and more cautiously,
between
the greatest
minds,
and therefore
in studying
the great books."
Strauss
became
aware of this unorthodox
literary
practice, above all, while studying
two authors:
the medieval
rationalist
Maimonides
and the supposedly
naive student
of Socrates,
Xenophon.
Toward the end of his life,
Strauss
pointed
to the late 1930s as the period
in which he fully
grasped
the character
of the forgotten
art of writing-what it entailed
and what its essential
implications
were.
Yet despite,
or perhaps
because
of, the magnitude
of what
he had then detected,
Strauss
waited a decade before publishing
his next book.
That
book was On Tyranny:
An
Interpretation
of Xenophon's
Hiero
(1948).
Persecution
and the Art of Writing (1952) and Natural
Right and History (1953)
followed
soon thereafter.
It was primarily
by
way of these three books that Strauss
introduced
himself
to his contemporary
readers.
In this essay,
we allow Strauss,
as it were, to reintro-
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duce himself, free of the assumptions
and accretions piled
on him by 50 years of subsequent work by students, scholars, and critics. We begin with the most famous and most
accessible of the three books that constitute his own selfintroduction,
Natural Right and History.
I-listorieism
and relativism
Natural Right and History opens with a solemn invocation of the Declaration of Independence's
assertion of selfevident truths and unalienable rights. And Strauss reminds
his readers of the important
role natural right played in
making the United States "the most powerful and prosperous of the nations of the earth." Yet no sooner does he
appeal to this heritage than he raises a frightening
prospect--that
the allies' military victory over Nazi tyranny is
being undermined by German thought. At the least, "American social science has adopted
the very attitude"
that
seemed to characterize prewar German thought. It has abandoned adherence
to natural right for relativism
and historicism. The latter doctrine holds that all human thought
is nothing but the accidental
or fortuitous
product of its
time; and the former that all principles
of justice are
equally arbitrary. There is no ground in nature by which
one can reasonably
prefer liberal democracy
to tyranny.
While our social science claims to be able to tell us how
we can attain any ends we might desire, it insists that all
ends themselves
are wholly without foundation.
Strauss
diagnoses
these twin contentions
as "retail
sanity and
wholesale madness."
Strauss does not directly refute either the teaching of
historicism
or relativism.
That is to say, Strauss does not
counter the historicist or relativist denial of the existence
of natural right by attempting
straightforwardly
to demonstrate that there are in nature universal
and unchanging
principles of justice discernible
to human reason. Rather,
he seeks to sow doubt by bringing to light the dogmatic
assumptions
that underlie
historicism
and relativism.
Strauss's treatment is negative and preparatory.
His intention is to induce us to reflect on the opinions we take for
granted, to open us to the possibility
that there is a true
WHATWASLEO STRAUSSUP TO?
23
"philosophic
ethics or natural right."
Strauss deploys historicism's
own arguments against itself. Historicism maintains that every trans-historical
teaching--every
teaching that claims for itself universal validity--is in the decisive sense mistaken. All human thought,
it holds, has been and will always be "historical,"
subject
to crucial limitations
imposed by its age and of which it
is necessarily
unaware. Yet, Strauss notes, this claim itself is trans-historical:
"Historicism
thrives on the fact
that it inconsistently
exempts itself from its own verdict
about all human thought. The historicist
thesis is selfcontradictory
or absurd."
Strauss also employs historicism's
appeal to experience
against its claims. According to historicism,
the "experience of history" shows that all teachings of the past rest
on a dogmatic foundation,
that in their origin things were
taken "for granted which must not be taken for granted."
Historicism
claims that thinkers of the past were characteristically
under the spell of their historical
situation:
Plato could not see beyond the horizon of the Greek city,
Hobbes could not look beyond that of the English civil
war. Yet Strauss, without taking explicit notice of Martin
Heidegger,
observes that the most theoretically
sophisticated form of historicism,
"radical historicism,"
does not
itself call the "experience
of history" into question: That
vague and indistinct
"experience"
is taken for granted.
Strauss declares that he (or "we") cannot even attempt to
discuss radical historicism's
critique of classical metaphysics. Instead, he begins to prepare his case for the possible
existence of natural right by appealing to his readers' own
experiences--"the
evidence of those simple experiences regarding right and wrong which are at the bottom of the
philosophic contention that there is a natural right."
In treating positivism,
Strauss turns to Max Weber's
thesis that scientific inquiry is competent to speak only to
questions of "fact" as opposed to those of "value." In so
doing, Strauss shifts the focus of his discussion
from the
possibility
of natural right to that of a social science that
issues in normative evaluations, and eventually to the question of the philosophic
life. In a manner akin to his treat-
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ment of historicism,
Strauss
allows
common
sense to undermine
Weber's
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Weber's
practice
and
own thesis. Strauss is
particularly
struck by Weber's
professed
inability
to make a
reasoned
and reasonable
choice
between
the prospects
of
spiritual
revival
and passionless
vulgarity.
Strauss
does not
here attempt
to supply
the reasoning
that would
underlie
such a choice
and that Weber
asserts
cannot be supplied.
Instead,
Strauss
includes
examples
that illustrate
both the
nihilistic
implications
and the amazing
philistinism
of unqualified
relativism:
"This amounts to an admission
that the
way of life of 'specialists
without spirit or vision and voluptuaries
without heart'
is as defensible
as the ways of life
recommended
by Amos or by Socrates."
Strauss's
examples
are designed
to counter
Weber's
assertion
by providing
his
readers with a simple experience
of high and low.
In describing
Weber's
position
as "noble
nihilism,"
Strauss
indicates
that his relativism
stems not from simple
indifference
to the high, but from his passionate
though
fruitless
search
to discover
grounds
for the experience
of
the noble or high. Strauss
vindicates
Weber's
intelligence
at the expense
of Weber's
own formal position.
He shows
that Weber consistently
violates--indeed,
had to violate-his own injunction
against
using terms of normative
evaluation. In fact, as Strauss
develops
his discussion,
we see
that Weber's
position--his
despair
of the very "idea of
science"--is
due not to his blindness
to the lives recommended
inability
the claim
tempted
moment
its origin
by the prophet
or the philosopher,
but to his
to justify
the life of science
or philosophy
against
of divine revelation.
In any event, Strauss
is not
by Weber's
path of despair.
He instead
uses the
of natural
right's
complete
abandonment
to see if
can be successfully
reproduced.
Nature
and
natural
right
In his attempt to recover
the possibility
of natural right,
Strauss sought to recover the origin of the idea of nature
through
the medium
of politics,
and to find a ground or
basis for justice
in nature.
"Natural right" is the manner in which "nature"
shows
itself in politics.
But what is nature? In Natural
Right and
WHAT WAS LEO STRAUSS UP TO?
25
History,
Strauss does not offer a simple definition
of nature
but proceeds
dialectically
through
prephilosophic
political
life to show how nature first came to sight or was discovered. This procedure
does justice
to what Strauss identifies
as "the two most important
meanings
of 'nature':
'nature'
as
the essential
character
of a thing or a group of things and
'nature'
as 'the first things.'"
Prephilosophic
life answers
questions
about the first things by recourse
to authority,
to
the way we have always clone things or the ancestral
way.
But the experience
of prephilosophic
life can also lead one,
Strauss explains,
to doubt what one has been told of the first
things. Men always,
for example,
have preferred
what they
see for themselves
to what they have merely been told. If
and when men apply this preference
for the seen over the
heard to the authoritative
accounts
of the first things,
they
come to doubt the ancestral
way, or authority,
and become
aware
other
of "the possibility
that the first things originate
all
things
in a manner
fundamentally
different
from
all origination
by way of forethought."
account
of how such doubt first arises
life and then proceeding
of its refinement,
Strauss
idea of nature
understood
By providing
an
in prephilosophic
step by step through
the manner
reproduces
the discovery
of the
as the necessary
and permanent
ground
underlying
all change
and contingency.
What then of the nature
of right or justice?
typically
equated
human
agreement
as the permanent
the conventional.
The just
is
with the legal.
But laws
result
from
or human
conventions.
And the natural
is to be fundamentally
distinguished
from
The way of dogs--"barking
and wag-
ging the tail"--is
natural;
the way of Jews--"not
eating
pork"--is
conventional.
The fundamental
distinction
between the natural
and the conventional
seems to call into
doubt the existence
of natural
right or justice
can even be discovered.
How can one discover
that is everywhere
where different?
and
always
According
to Strauss,
the
when one takes the differing
just
if the
just
before
it
a standard
is every-
idea of natural
right emerges
accounts
of what is held to
be just as an incentive
to discover
in truth be said to be right or just:
whether
anything
may
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Differences regarding things which are unquestionably conventional do not arouse serious perplexities, whereas differences regarding the principles of right and wrong necessarily
do. The disagreement regarding the principles of justice thus
seem to reveal a genuine perplexity aroused by a divination
or insufficient grasp of natural right--a perplexity caused by
something self-subsistent or natural that eludes human grasp.
The classic natural right teaching
arises in response
to
that perplexity, and in particular,
in response to the claim
that all right or justice is merely conventional.
Strauss
calls this view "conventionalism."
In place of that which is right or just by nature the
conventionalist
substitutes that which is by nature good: "By
nature everyone seeks his own good and nothing but his
own good. Justice, however, tells us to seek other men's
good." Conventionalism,
more specifically, identifies the good
with the pleasant: All men prefer the pleasant to the painful.
The pleasant is unquestionably
good. Classic natural right-the teaching of, above all, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle-maintains on the contrary that there is an essential difference between the good and the pleasant. The good is more
fundamental than the pleasant because there are a variety of
pleasures and those pleasures correspond to wants that have
a natural order or rank. As Strauss remarks:
Different kinds of beings seek or enjoy different kinds of
pleasure: the pleasures of an ass differ from the pleasures of
a human being. The order of the wants of a being points
back to the natural constitution, to the What, of the being
concerned; it is that constitution which determines the order,
the hierarchy, of the various wants or of the various inclinations of a being.
Everyone
acknowledges
that human beings stand higher
than the brutes by virtue of their possession of "speech or
reason or understanding."
This natural capacity elevates
man, and it is the cultivation
of this capacity that perfects
him. "The good life is the perfection
of man's nature. It
is the life according to nature." The classic natural right
teaching accordingly culminates
in a defense of the philosophic life as the best and truly just life.
Yet this conclusion--one
implication
of which is that
WHATWASLEO STRAUSSUP TO?
27
the only valid title to rule is wisdom and that the best
regime is that in which the wise rule absolutely--is
impracticable.
It is even against nature. The wise do not
wish to rule, and the unwise do not wish to be ruled.
From this it follows
that "the political
problem
consists in reconciling
the requirement
for wisdom with
the requirement
for consent."
The best way to give
wisdom
its due in a manner that meets the necessity
for consent is for a wise legislator or founder to draft a
code, one that the citizen body can be persuaded to adopt
without coercion. By recognizing,
or carving out, a sphere
for genuine political excellence and achievement, the classical philosophers succeed in according to political life nobility and dignity.
As noted above, Strauss approaches "nature" by way of
"right" or justice,
and approaches
justice through "nature": When nature is approached through the medium of
right or justice, philosophy is compelled to take notice of
politics, to become politically
responsible.
Philosophy
as
political
philosophy,
moreover,
is able to consider
the
link between the common good and the natural whole that
it seeks to know. By treating "right" by way of "nature,"
philosophy is able to moderate the dangerous impulses of
those who seek sources of political guidance in that which
is purportedly
superior to or above reason and nature. In
the age of Heidegger
and the Nazis, such responsibility
and moderation
can only be considered a welcome development.
Ancients
and moderns
What struck Strauss's
contemporaries
most upon picking up Natural Right and History was Strauss's
evident
preference for classical to modern political philosophy,
or
his openness
to the seemingly
fantastic
possibility
that
premodern thought was superior to that of their day. For
those who took for granted the superiority of present-day
thought to that of the past, or who believed in "progress,"
Natural Right and History
was either an incitement
to
indignation
or an illuminating
flash in a dark night.
Having presented
the classic
natural-right
teaching,
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Strauss turns to the modern doctrine of natural right. His
presentation
brings forth several points of contrast between the classics
and the moderns.
First, the classics
view moral and political
matters "in the light of man's
perfection"
or his end, whereas the moderns take their
bearings from man's origin or from man in "the state of
nature."
Second,
according
to the classics,
"man is by
nature a social being" or political
animal, while to the
moderns, the individual is prior to society. Third, for the
classics, political activity is properly directed at the cultivation of virtue; for the moderns, the aim of political life
is to replace the insecurity
of man's natural state by a
secure liberty.
A fourth contrast concerns what the fundamental
political phenomenon
is: to the classics,
it is the "regime"
understood
as the "way of life of a society" as exemplified by what society most looks up to or that from which
it takes its bearings. For example, a democracy
takes its
bearings
from equality
and regards as the authoritative
human type "the common man." Strauss comments:
When the authoritative type is the common man, everything
has to justify itself before the tribunal of the common man;
everything which cannot be justified before that tribunal becomes, at best, merely tolerated, if not despised or suspect.
And even those who do not recognize that tribunal are, willynilly, molded by its verdicts.
The moderns,
in contrast, minimize the centrality
of the
regime in light of what they maintain is the fundamental
moral or political fact: the right of self-preservation.
Other contrasts include, fifth, that for the classics, the
best regime provides the standard to guide political life,
and "it is of its essence
to exist in speech as distinguished from deed"; for the moderns, the "legitimate"
or
constitutional
political order that protects rights provides
the standard for political life, and it is meant to be actualized everywhere.
Sixth, "according
to the classics, political theory proper is essentially
in need of being supplemented by the practical wisdom of the statesman
on the
spot"; generally
speaking,
the moderns reduce the need
for prudence and statesmanship
by lowering the goals of
WHATWASLEO STRAUSSUP TO?
29
politics and emphasizing
what can be attained by the right
kind of institutions
in conjunction
with "enlightenment."
Finally, classical teaching identifies the life according to
nature or the simply best life as the philosophic
life and
defends it, while the moderns, by divorcing natural right
from "the idea of man's perfection,"
blur the status of the
philosophic
life.
If one considers even briefly these contrasts,
one sees
why Strauss elsewhere
characterizes
the classical
writers
as being "for almost all practical purposes what now are
called conservatives."
And if one considers Strauss's
apparent preference for the classics, one can see why Strauss
once remarked that his teaching was held to be "in the
odor of conservatism."
At the same time, reading Natural
Right and History, one is also struck by Strauss's
emphasis on the moderate
character
of classical
political
thought--its
"sensible
flexibility"
and recognition
of
the necessary
imperfections
of political life, even its view
of political justice as resembling what we today call equality of opportunity.
Strauss brings forth the classical concern for virtue, but he also makes clear how far the classics are from a doctrinal moralism or an ideological
conservatism.
Strauss limits his treatment of modern natural right in
Natural Right and History to a consideration
of Hobbes
and Locke, and treats "the crisis of modern natural right"
by way of Rousseau and Burke. In treating the various
modern thinkers,
he seeks to explicate their own teachings, and also to explain their historical
"influence."
In
Strauss's
presentation,
all
four
modern
thinkers
radicalized
the efforts of their predecessors,
wittingly
or not. Strauss provides
a narrative
account of modernity according
to which Hobbes
first sought
to construct a political
order that, by being in accord with
man's most powerful passion--fear
of violent death--is
capable of universal actualization.
Locke, "on the basis of
Hobbes's view of the law of nature" and "moved by the
same spirit" as Hobbes, opposed Hobbes's absolutism and
in so doing advanced the latter's promotion
of "political
hedonism."
Locke did this, above all, through his "doc-
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and his "emancipation
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of acquisitiveacquisition
of
According to Strauss, the "crisis of modern natural right"
arose from a reaction to the modern natural-right
doctrine
of Hobbes and Locke. Rousseau initiated
that crisis by
"thinking through Hobbes's critique of the traditional view"
of man's natural sociality. According to Rousseau, Hobbes
was right in seeking to discover the roots of justice in
man's natural presocial condition,
but he did not go far
enough back. For natural man is not only presocial but
prerational
as well; he is subhuman. Rousseau thus had to
provide an account of the historical
evolution
of man's
humanity. And this, in turn, gave critical impetus to the
rise of historicism--a
development
complemented
by elements of Burke's thought.
Yet at the same time as he offers this portrait of the
unfolding of modern thought, Strauss furnishes indications
that it was not fated or inevitable.
In his chapter
on
Rousseau and Burke, Strauss draws attention
to the manner in which each contributed
"one of the two most
important elements in the 'discovery'
of History." If less
emphatically,
Strauss also notes that "the impression grows
that Rousseau
sought to restore the classical
idea of
philosophy,"
and that "Burke may be said to have restored the older view according
to which theory cannot
be the sole, or the sufficient,
guide of practice."
Between these two restorations,
or near-restorations,
one
has the elements of both classical theory and practice, or
a complete classical
teaching.
Strauss
almost suggests,
or plays with the possibility,
that if only the restorative rather than the radicalizing
elements
of Burke
and Rousseau
had been put together,
historicism
could
have been averted and classic natural right restored.
A
century and a half later, after we had experienced
historicism in theory and practice, Natural Right and History
brought home to its readers the seriousness
of the need
for a recovery of natural right without in any way minimizing the problematic
character of such a recovery.
WHAT
WAS
LEO
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UP TO?
31
The art of writing
Though Natural Right and History and Persecution
and
the Art of Writing were published
within a year of each
other, they seem to have little in common. Natural Right
and History does not contain much explicit discussion
of
the philosophic
art of writing, and has almost nothing to
say about the medieval Islamic and Jewish thinkers discussed in Persecution.
Natural Right and History emphasizes the contrast between classical
and modern natural
right; in Persecution,
the emphasis falls not on the fundamental divide in the philosophic
tradition,
but rather on
its continuity.
Persecution
and the Art of Writing is Strauss's
only
book explicitly devoted to his rediscovery
of the forgotten
art of writing, of writing "between
the lines," or, more
precisely, exotericism.
According to Strauss, awareness of
exotericism
disappeared
with the emergence of historicism
toward the end of the eighteenth
century. In Thoughts on
Machiavelli,
Strauss identifies the post-Werther
Goethe as
"the last great man who rediscovered
or remembered"
the
connection
between persecution
and the art of writing.
After Goethe, this insight was lost, and with it "the last
vestiges of the recollection
of what philosophy
originally
meant" were destroyed.
In Persecution's
first two chapters,
Strauss presents a
general account of the causes requiring, and the purposes
informing,
the practice of exoteric writing. An exoteric
work contains a popular or edifying teaching that is accessible to all, and a secret or esoteric teaching that reveals itself only after careful and thoughtful
study--study
that to begin with is at least as concerned
with literary
questions
as philosophic
problems.
An exoteric work is
written with the utmost precision. It may come in a variety of forms--dialogue,
commentary,
and treatise, among
others. Its author has at his disposal countless
literary
devices in order simultaneously
to conceal and to reveal
his true teaching. These "obtrusively
enigmatic features,"
Strauss notes, include "obscurity
of the plan, contradictions, pseudonyms,
inexact repetitions of earlier statements,
strange expressions,
etc." To understand
an exoteric writ-
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ing properly, one must connect the literary details with
the explicit arguments,
a process that often yields unexpected turns to the argument as a whole.
Strauss's
basic argument in regard to persecution
may
be summarized
as follows: Most societies of the past and
many of the present are nonliberal. As a rule, such societies are more than willing to employ persecution to uphold
the prevailing
political
or religious
orthodoxies.
As the
aim of a philosopher
is to replace opinion with knowledge, he necessarily
stands in tension with the ruling opinions of his day. Therefore,
if he wishes to communicate
his thoughts in writing, he must find a way to do so that
avoids the wrath of the authorities.
Hence the necessity
for exoteric writing.
The prominence
Strauss accords "persecution"
in the
title Persecution
and the Art of Writing contrasts markedly with his treatment
of the subject with'in the book
itself. In his Introduction,
Strauss states almost in passing
that the fact that "philosophy
and the philosophers
were
in 'grave danger'"
in medieval times was only "the most
obvious and the crudest reason why this antiquated
or
forgotten distinction
was needed."
Strauss sets forth two
less obvious, though ultimately
more important,
reasons
for the practice of exoteric writing: political responsibility
and philosophic
education.
Since, for example, "to deny
that religion is essential to society is difficult ... for anyone who puts any trust in the accumulated
experience of
the human race," philosophers,
who reject belief as arbitrary or unevident, refrain from expressing
directly or unambiguously
the reasoning that underlies their doubt. Most
important, clearly speaking the philosophic
truth would be
apt to impair what the classical
and medieval
philosophers sought to promote by the writing of their books: to
make it possible for their would-be
students to philosophize, not merely to have correct opinions.
They want
their students to discover truths by themselves,
to think
on their own. Of the uses of exoteric literature in a liberal
society, Strauss comments that philosophic
education
"is
the only answer to the always pressing question, to the
political question par excellence,
of how to reconcile or-
WHAT WAS LEO STRAUSS UP TO?
der which
license."
is not
oppression
33
with
freedom
which
is not
If persecution
is ultimately
of secondary
importance
as
a reason
for exoteric
writing,
why does Strauss
highlight
it in his title? The answer
has to do with the biases
of
modern
readers,
and Strauss's
effort to present
a case that
would be intuitively
plausible
to such an audience.
Since
he knows that "every decent
modern
reader is bound to be
shocked
by the mere suggestion
that a great man might
have deliberately
deceived
the large majority
of his readers," Strauss needs to find a means by which to transform
the shock of the intelligent
reader into a potentially
fruitful wonder.
Focusing
on persecution
allows
Strauss
to
begin to effect
such a transformation.
Precisely
because
persecution
is "the most obvious
and the crudest
reason"
for the practice
of exoteric
writing,
it could serve as the
most effective
point of departure
for the reader's
philosophic education.
The two
faces
of tyranny
In the first book of his introductory
trilogy,
On Tyranny:
An Interpretation
of Xenophon's
"Hiero,"
Strauss
seeks to revive
classical
political
philosophy
through
a
careful study of Xenophon's
art of writing.
Strauss shows
that one can reach unexplored
heights
through
reading an
old text from a most unlikely
source:
for Xenophon
was
widely
assumed
to be at best a gentleman
worthy
of indulgence,
at worse a simpleton.
Strauss's
study renders
incredible
these then-common
views.
At the very outset of On Tyranny,
Strauss identifies
his
immediate
addressees:
He is submitting
his "detailed
analysis of a forgotten
dialogue
on tyranny to the consideration
of political
scientists."
Strauss
indicts
the political
science of his day for a massive
intellectual
failure:
its inability
to recognize
for what they were the tyrannies
of
Hitler
and Stalin.
Contemporary
"haunted"
by its belief
in the
political
fact-value
science
was
distinction--a
belief
that forbade
calling
a spade a spade. But Strauss
quickly turns away from what the classics may have to teach
us about political tyranny to less immediately
political con-
34
THE PUBLIC INTEREST / FALL 2003
cerns. He focuses instead on the problem of freedom of
thought, and seeks to show how study of the Hiero can be
an indispensable aid to understanding
that problem.
The Hiero is a product of Socratic rhetoric. "Society
will always try to tyrannize
thought,"
Strauss explains,
and "Socratic rhetoric is the classic means for ever again
frustrating
those attempts."
Socratic rhetoric is a special
form of exoteric teaching, the perfection
of which is the
well-written
dialogue. By relating the author's thought "in
an indirect or oblique way," it places specific demands
upon the reader who wishes to understand
it. Strauss's
simple summary of those demands consists of two lessons: First, one must give the closest possible attention to
even the smallest details and, in particular,
the unthematic
ones. Second, one must always keep in mind the end or
function of genuinely Socratic speech or the purposes of
exotericism.
Strauss diagnoses two distinct dangers to which we are
subject today:
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 reconsider therefore the elementary and unobtrusive conditions of human freedom.
Though one should not underestimate
the practical utility
of Strauss's
recovery of the term "tyranny,"
the tyranny
that On Tyranny is chiefly designed to counter is of the
unobtrusive
kind. Strauss went on to write in his 1970
study Xenophon's
Socratic Discourse:
"Our age boasts of
being more open to everything
human than any earlier
age; it is surely blind to the greatness of Xenophon. Without
intending it, one might make some discoveries
about our
age by reading and rereading
Xenophon."
To fulfill this
dual purpose of opening our eyes to Xenophon's
greatness
as well as to the limits of our age, Strauss offers in On
Tyranny less an argument than a display: for the character
of Xenophon's
achievement
reveals itself above all in the
product of his art.
WHATWASLEO STRAUSSUP TO?
Socrates
35
and Machiavelli
The Hiero seems to be an unprepossessing
22-page dialogue between a disheartened
tyrant, Hiero, and a wellmeaning poet, Simonides.
The tyrant denounces tyranny.
The poet urges the tyrant to rule justly. Simple; edifying;
dull. To read Strauss's
interpretation
and to find out instead that the work is a subtle psychological
drama between a wary tyrant and a wise and politic teacher of the
art of ruling--a
drama that masks a broad teaching on the
relation between politics and wisdom--is
to undergo
a
sobering lesson in humility.
Strauss parades before us one telling detail after another to persuade us of his author's
rhetorical
mastery,
providing
seemingly
countless
examples
of Xenophontic
literary devices. Among these, to name a few, are: various
types of meaningful
silences, intentional
ambiguity,
dissimulation,
the significance
of centrally placed speeches,
inexact repetitions of earlier statements,
use or non-use of
the first person singular, concealment
of a work's plan,
and so forth. All the more sobering thus is Strauss's
introductory
statement that "Xenophon
uses far fewer devices than Plato uses even in his simplest works."
No modern reader of any sensitivity
can come away
from On Tyranny without feeling something
like awe at
the power of Strauss's exegesis--his
ability in a non-arbitrary manner to get so much out of what seems so little. On
Tyranny thus teaches the reader how to study a classic text,
while inducing in him a sense of the need to do so.
The tyrant Hiero is wary of the poet Simonides: tyrants
always fear those of great abilities. As for the wise in
particular,
Hiero says the tyrant "fears that 'they might
contrive something.'"
Thus when Simonides questions him
on the desirability
of tyrannical
life, Hiero takes the opportunity
to highlight tyranny's
drawbacks,
if mildly at
first: He aims to nip in the bud any temptation
for tyranny that the wise poet may possess. Simonides
is not
impressed. As the poet shows greater and greater indifference to the drawbacks of tyranny, Hiero becomes increasingly alarmed. The tyrant thus gradually ratchets up the
defects of his way of life. They so fail to move Simonides
36
THE PUBLIC INTEREST / FALL 2003
that a point is reached at which, half in despair, Hiero
declares that "the tyrant can hardly do better than to hang
himself." At this point, Simonides--as
befits "a humane
poet"--takes
over the conversation
and begins to teach
Hiero how to rule well as a tyrant.
Strauss maintains
that what brings Hiero to this point
of seeming desperation
is not something Simonides says,
but something he fails to say. For after Hiero had listed at
length the horrible crimes the tyrant must commit,
Simonides declares that in spite of everything that the tyrant
has said, tyranny is highly desirable because it leads to supreme honor. As regards the toils and dangers pointed out
by Hiero, Simonides pauses to allude to them; as regards the
moral flaws deplored by Hiero, he simply ignores them .... It
is by thus silently, i.e., most astutely, revealing a complete
lack of scruple that the poet both overwhelms Hiero and
convinces him of his competence to give sound advice to a
tyrant.
One sees from this summary of the action of the dialogue why Strauss suggests that the Hiero can help us to
understand "the deepest roots of modern political thought,"
for Simonides appears to be more than a tad "Machiavellian." Strauss contends that the Hiero can even be said to
provide "the point of closest contact" between Socratic or
premodern political science and Machiavellian
or modern
political science. He further speculates that a sufficiently
careful study of the Prince would lead one to conclude that
that work's most shocking statements are precisely the product of "Machiavelli's
perfect understanding
of Xenophon's
chief pedagogic lesson."
But it is also the case that "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."
For unlike Machiavelli,
Xenophon's
Simonides
does not give voice to the evil
teaching. It is enough for him simply to show sovereign
indifference
to moral principles
to establish
himself as a
"teacher of tyrants": "Xenophon, or his Simonides, is more
'politic'
than Machiavelli;
he refuses to separate 'modera-
WHAT WAS LEO STRAUSS UP TO?
37
tion'
(prudence)
from
'wisdom'
(insight)."
not proceed
to elaborate
further
in On
contrast
between
the Socratic
Xenophon
of modernity.
For a full treatment
of this
turn to Strauss's
later works on the only
elevated
to the
and Socrates.
status
of being
Strauss's
Strauss
does
Tyranny
on this
and the founder
point, one must
two thinkers
he
a "problem":
Machiavelli
influence
Strauss did not write his books in such a way as to be
immediately
relevant
to the policy disputes
of his day or
ours. Rather the reverse.
Consider
this from the introduction to Thoughts
on Machiavelli:
"Our critical
study of
Machiavelli's
teaching
can ultimately
have no other purpose than to contribute
towards
the recovery
of the permanent problems."
Those
permanent
problems
are far removed from contemporary
political
interests--but
not entirely removed,
of course. For in attempting
to recover the
permanent
problems
today, Strauss believed
he was, like
his great philosophic
models,
"defending
the highest
interests of mankind."
One
high
interest
Strauss
advanced
was
the
need
"to
understand
that wisdom requires
unhesitating
loyalty to a
decent constitution
and even to the cause of constitutionalism."
Strauss
was grateful
to his adopted country,
the
United States, for the decencies
it managed to preserve amidst
the savagery of the twentieth century, and he taught respectful appreciation
of the United
States'
constitutionalism.
That said, the implications
of his own teaching
were almost always indirect.
After all, it was Strauss who noted
of his own search
for guidance
from
Plato
and Aristotle:
We cannot reasonably expect that a fresh understanding of
classical political philosophy
will supply us with recipes for
today's use .... Only we living today can possibly
find a
solution to the problems of today. But an adequate understanding of the principles as elaborated by the classics may
be the indispensable
starting point for an adequate analysis,
to be achieved by us, of present-day
society in its peculiar
character, and for the wise application,
to be achieved by us,
of these principles to our tasks.
38
THE
PUBLIC
INTEREST
! FALL
2003
So rather than offer formulas ready-made for implementation, or a "program,"
Strauss's
practical influence was at
the broad level of how to conceive of politics and matters
of public concern.
Strauss, for example, was well aware that the language
in which problems are discussed
and debated shapes the
way they are understood.
Accordingly,
he sought to ensure that his readers thought and spoke about political
matters in a language appropriate
to political life. As we
have noted, Strauss helped reintroduce
the concept of tyranny to political and social science and, thus indirectly,
to the broader political debate. And he did so for the best
of reasons: "A social science that cannot speak of tyranny
with the same confidence
with which medicine speaks, for
example, of cancer, cannot understand
social phenomena
as what they are." Similarly,
Strauss's
devastating
critique of the distinction
between "facts" and "values" has
gradually
made itself felt within contemporary
political
discourse:
Virtues are now spoken of more often, and
values less. And arguments that not too many years ago
would have been dismissed as illegitimate attempts to "impose one's values"--a
semantic trick used to end debate
on important
matters before it can begin--are
now more
frequently acknowledged
to raise serious questions of principle.
One particularly
timely example is Strauss's rehabilitation of the classical understanding
of "regime." To understand political life in terms of regimes is to recognize that
political life always partakes of both the universal (principles of justice or rule) and the particular ("our" borders,
language, customs, etc.). The concept of regime, properly
understood,
is one that avoids the unhealthy extremes of
utopian
universalism
and insular nationalism.
President
Bush's advocacy of "regime change"--which
avoids the
pitfalls of a wishful global universalism
on the one hand,
and a fatalistic
cultural determinism
on the other--is
a
not altogether unworthy product of Strauss's rehabilitation
of the notion of regime.
The United States, with its founding by philosophically
informed statesmen and possessing
an almost providential
WHAT WAS LEO STRAUSS UP TO?
39
understanding
of its role in the world, was particularly
fertile ground for Strauss's
restoration
of a political science that places the regime in the forefront of analysis.
A natural concern of such an approach
is the political
thought that informed or shaped the regime at its inception and moments
of greatest
self-awareness.
Strauss,
chiefly by way of his students, is in large part responsible
for making the thought and principles of America's founders
a source of political knowledge and appeal, and for making political excellence more broadly a subject of appreciation and study.
But Strauss's chief practical concern throughout
was to
raise the status and reform the character of liberal education. So far, the official keepers of this arena have rather
vigorously
resisted his generosity.
Still, his works continue to educate and to charm. While philosophy ought to
guard against the wish to be edifying,
Strauss's
example
suggests it is of necessity edifying.