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Leo Strauss and the Straussians: An Anti-democratic Cult?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Gregory Bruce Smith
Gregory Bruce Smith*
Affiliation:
Trinity College
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Extract

In both scholarly and popular venues, the political philosopher Leo Strauss has emerged as the alleged father of an anti-democratic cult at odds with the principles of American democracy. The relative suddenness and uniformity of this recently evolving sentiment is intriguing. Certainly, Strauss's name and those of his self-avowed “followers” have surfaced in public before recent years. That Strauss was a controversial and iconoclastic scholar during his lifetime is certainly true, but primarily on issues such as how to read Machiavelli or the appropriate way to approach the study of the social sciences. His recent public impact, especially since his death, was therefore hardly predictable. Strauss simply was not a public man. He seldom declaimed in public, and despite a sense of professional obligation to his university and his students, clearly preferred the withdrawn, quiet, contemplative life. He showed no desire to have a public persona.

It is difficult to explain, therefore, how Strauss could occasion such intemperate remarks as those printed in the New York Times, under the heading “Undemocratic Vistas: The Sinister Vogue of Leo Strauss.” Author Brent Staples stated that “Leo Strauss contended that the Philosopher-kings (himself included) were born to rule, servants were born to serve and that only disaster came of letting the rabble get above its station. Strauss, then, was unapologetically elitist and anti-democratic. His ideas have survived him and crept into vogue in American politics.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , June 1997 , pp. 180 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1997

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References

Notes

1. Clearly, there is growing public interest in Strauss and those he influenced. Allan Bloom, Strauss's publicly best known student, author of the best seller The Closing of the American Mind, became a lightning rod for criticism, especially for his spirited critique of America's liberal culture. Bloom traced the decline of American culture to a turn away from traditional education, especially as it finds a peak in the serious study of the “Great Books.” Others like Francis Fukuyama, in The End of History and the Last Man, also brought Strauss's influence into public view. Fukuyama argued that the end of the Cold War signaled the global victory of liberal capitalism over the “progressive” teachings of communism, democratic socialism, and other leftist aspirations. Fukuyama attracted spirited rejoinders as well. Strauss's press clippings have even gone international. The influential Strauss-Cropsey textbook on the history of political philosophy has been translated into French and reviewed in Le Monde; during the 1992 presidential election Die Zeit even ran a piece on Bill Kristol, Dan Quayle, Murphy Brown, and Leo Strauss.

Students of Strauss, or those influenced by his work, have also been in the public arena for some time—from Harry Jaffa, who worked for Goldwater, to Robert Goldwin in the Ford administration, Paul Wolfowitz in the Bush administration, Bill Galston in the Clinton administration, to Republican strategist Bill Kristol and presidential candidate Alan Keyes who have been the objects of attack pieces in the New Republic for their Straussianism. And Strauss's students teach in numerous colleges and universities and are published widely in scholarly journals.

2. Allan Bloom describes Strauss a man who “knew many interesting men and women and spent much time talking to students, but the core of his being was the solitary, continuous, meticulous study of the questions he believed most important …. He was active in noorganization, served in no position of authority, and had no ambitions other than to understand and help others who might also be able to do so.” Bloom, Allan, “Leo Strauss: September 20, 1899–October 18, 1973,” Giants and Dwarfs: Essays 1960–1990, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 235 Google Scholar.

3. Staples concluded that Strauss believed the ruling philosopher-kings should keep the “rabble” in their place. The conclusion that Strauss wished to see the philosopher-kings rule does not fit with Strauss's reading of Plato's Republic. Strauss presented the controversial argument that Plato intended to show precisely why the rule of the philosopher-king was impossible. Further, Strauss only spoke of the “rabble” while describing Nietzsche's usage of that term to apply to those who live without a sense of honor. He never used it in his own philosophical work.

4. Stephen Holmes, in his recent The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, has given a more scholarly patina to this argument. Charging that Strauss is anti-democratic, he also asserts that Strauss felt that only philosophers like himself and his students could understand the whole truth. Since average citizens could not fully understand truth, they had to be told myths, primarily through religion. In Holmes's eyes, Strauss's students represent a cult purveying these myths. Yet Holmes arrives at his conclusions only by engaging in a rhetorical juxtaposition of Strauss with the likes of Joseph de Maistre and the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt. That method raises some serious questions as to objectivity through its use of guilt by dubious association.

Another version of this line of argument is presented by Shadia Drury in The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss. She goes even further, asserting that Strauss was a furtive atheist and Nietzschean nihilist who thought that the truth of nihilism had to be kept from the unphilosophic. Like Holmes, she focuses on Strauss's studies of esoteric or secret writing, presented in such works as Persecution and the Art of Writing. Holmes, Drury, and others paint a picture of a Strauss who is primarily a conservative, anti-liberal, anti-Enlightenment thinker who believed in the existence of natural hierarchies and who took the distinction between philosophers and non-philosophers as the only interesting human dichotomy.

Not all of the critical responses to Strauss's work have been of a primarily political nature, although even scholarly debates about his work have often become polemical. In another recent debate played out in the popular press—this time the New York Review of Books—Plato scholar Myles Burnyeat took exception with Strauss's iconoclastic reading of the Platonic dialogues. A flurry of responses and counter-responses ensued. Scholars like J.G.A. Pocock have taken Strauss to task for his unique reading of Machiavelli—as presented in Thoughts Concerning Machiavelli—as an esoteric author with a secret teaching. Strauss's students have also begun to debate his influence, debates which at times have likewise spilled over into the popular press, such as the National Review's, debate between Harry Jaffa and Walter Berns.

5. In Natural Right and History, Strauss presented modernity as a reaction against the dogmatic Natural Law teachings of medieval authors like Aquinas. That reaction brought forth the equally dogmatic teachings of authors like Hobbes and Hegel. Later modernity in turn was in many ways a reaction to this modern dogmatism. Strauss saw the far more flexible Greek Natural Right teachings as an alternative to medieval and modern dogmatism.

6. I deal with this issue at greater length in my Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Transition to Postmodernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

7. Strauss took off from the reflections of Husserl and Heidegger. Husserl's attempt to get to “the things themselves” remained caught in Cartesian Idealism and even Kantian Transcendental Idealism. For Husserl, the things themselves had remained transcendental ideas, grasped by a pure, abstract ego. In Heidegger's critique of Husserl, Strauss saw an attempt to find the basis for approaching the things themselves through “empirical intuition”—i.e., how reality is revealed collectively to the eyes of all in everyday life. Strauss saw this as opening a door to a richer, more concrete relation to “everydayness.”

As part of his complicated deconstruction of the Western philosophic tradition, Heidegger tried to argue that truth has its locus and advent in appearance, not primarily in abstract ideas or logical statements. Strauss too wanted to find truth in appearance, in empirical intuition, his natural, pre-theoretical revelation of reality. Unlike Heidegger, Strauss came to see that possibility already deployed in Socratic dialectic. Strauss thought it was necessary to take seriously the “data of the senses” especially as articulated in ordinary public speech and the common sense articulation of reality toward which everyday speech pointed. For Strauss, the modern philosophy that emanated from Descartes had become too abstract and ceased to interrogate everyday understandings of reality as had Socrates. Heidegger's thought remained too abstract as well by failing to grasp the fundamentally moral and political articulation of natural experience which was so important for Strauss. Strauss hoped to reverse the modern tendency to abstractions.

8. “We cannot reasonably expect that a fresh understanding of classical political philosophy will supply us with recipes for today's use. For the relative success of modern political philosophy has brought into being a kind of society wholly unknown to the classics, a kind of society to which the classical principles as stated and elaborated by the classics are not immediately applicable. 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 the present-day society in its peculiar character, and for the wise application, to be achieved by us, of these principle to our tasks.” Strauss, Leo, City and Man, (Chicago: Rand Mc-Nally, 1964), p. 11 Google Scholar.

9. According to Strauss, our natural relation to life is always determined by the regime in which we live and by our shared understandings of the just, the noble, and the good—especially as those principles are articulated in constitutions, public documents, and the speeches of great leaders. This allegedly natural articulation of reality is better understood by citizens and leaders than it is by detached scientific observers. Hence Strauss concluded that, far from being superior to the older political science that emanated from Aristotle and included the traditional political philosophers, the new political science was deluded about its own foundations and ultimately incapable of clarity.

10. In Strauss's understanding, no thinker in the twentieth century rivaled Heidegger's philosophical acumen and rigorous honesty. Heidegger's thought remained central for Strauss in a way that is seldom appreciated by either his supporters or detractors. As Strauss sat in on Heidegger's lectures in the 1930s, he became especially impressed with the meticulous care Heidegger showed in dissecting every detail of the texts about which he lectured—a method of teaching for which Strauss became famous. Many years thereafter, Strauss observed that nothing so affected his thinking at its most formative period as the thought of Heidegger. Strauss would tell a story of how his lifelong friend Jacob Klein observed that Heidegger had, without attempting to, opened a door back to the ancients that had perhaps never previously been open. Strauss appears to have passed through that door. Throughout his written works, Strauss is clearly responding to Heidegger, even when his name is never mentioned, as it rarely is. An example would be the initial chapters of Natural Right and History.

11. Arguments for “civil religion” almost necessarily presuppose that Revelation is non-existent or false—which Strauss was unwilling to assert. Further, it is hard to see why anyone would need to hide an understanding that law-abidingness and the inculcation of moral habits might benefit from the support of religion. The defense of religion for its usefulness, as opposed to its truth, is a cat that has long been out of the bag. It is hard to fathom why any sensible person would think it necessary to dissemble on this subject and deploy esoteric speech to keep it quiet. Strauss limited himself to the conclusion that no one had succeeded in proving the impossibility of Revelation.

12. While a significant number of prominent students of Strauss have been conservatives, or at least aligned with some causes customarily seen as conservative, I see no necessity for this in Strauss's work. In Strauss's understanding, a great deal always depends on evanescent circumstances. With the end of the Cold War, circumstances have already changed radically since Strauss's death. What Strauss's understanding would be in these changed circumstances is a fascinating subject for conjecture, but I see no reason why he could not easily make cause against those who have now positioned themselves on the right. Further, there is certainly no philosophical basis for historically transient modern dichotomies like left/right or liberal/conservative. While Strauss defended a traditional, Federalist view of liberal democracy as the best available alternative in his time, there is no reason to believe the future will not present other alternatives. Strauss would never have accepted any version of an End of History thesis. He tried philosophically to confront the political and moral possibilities that existed in his time, a task that must be repeated by each generation.

13. One example concerns the charge that Strauss had secret teachings that were atheistic and hedonistic, regarding pleasure as the highest good while believing philosophers, the greatest of the hedonists, should not share this conclusion with non-philosophers. The origin of this assertion may be Bloom's influential essay appended to his translation of Plato's Republic, Bloom stresses that the Republic can be read as a juxtaposition of the tyrannical life and the philosophic life. Socrates allegedly tries to convince Glaucon that the philosophic life is more choiceworthy because its pleasures are more intense, long-lasting, and self-sufficient. Hence the choice turns on which is more hedonistic. One will look long and hard to find a defense of hedonism anywhere in Strauss's writings—certainly not in those writings that repeatedly argue for the natural basis of nobility, shame, inhibition, and the natural sociality of humans. And nothing in the way Strauss led his personal life would be termed hedonistic by the average observer.