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Leo Strauss's Conception of Political Philosophy: A Critique

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Hwa Yol Jung
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Extract

The political thought of Leo Strauss commands the respect and admiration of even his critics. His critical intellectual carpentry is sharp, cutting, and often rebuking. His criticism of modernity, whether it be that of Machiavelli, Max Weber, an existentialist, or a scientific political scientist, is inspired by and deeply rooted in the Greek intellectualistic essentialism, particularly that of Aristotle, and the age-old tradition of nature and natural right as is shown in his work, Natural Right and History

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , October 1967 , pp. 492 - 517
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1967

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References

* This paper had already been accepted for publication in this journal before I came to Yale University as a visiting fellow in philosophy during the academic year 1966–67 at which time, however, a few minor additions were inserted. I am particularly grateful to Professor John Wild for having shown to me his unpublished paper "Is There an Existential A Priori?" and for having been kind enough to permit me to quote two passages from it.

1 (Chicago, 1953).Google Scholar

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5 See particularly “On Classical Political Philosophy,” in What Is Political Philosophy? pp. 78–94Google Scholar and “An Epilogue,” in Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics, ed. Storing, Herbert J. (New York, 1962), pp. 307–27.Google Scholar

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9 Ibid

10 Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, 1958), p. 295.Google ScholarCf. History of Political Philosophy, eds. Strauss, Leo and Cropsey, Joseph (Chicago, 1963), p. 245.Google Scholar

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15 Ibid., p. 21.

16 Ibid., p. 23.

17 Ibid., p. 22.

18 Ibid., p. 60.

19 Werner Marx says of Aristotle that “Things are so ordered that, while accessible to all sorts of common-sense ‘natural’ acting and knowing, they also have a qua structure which makes them accessible, as noeta, to philosophical noesis that contemplates them qua be-ings. In seizing on the qua structure, the philosopher does not deny that they have other ways-to-be.… [T]here are two ways of acting and knowing, i.e., the natural way and the philosophical way. [Things] are so structured that they are accessible in two ways. This seems to us to be the Aristotelian position. They may be accessible in more than two ways, but man may not, or not yet, have developed the faculty by which to reach them” (op. cit., p. 26).

20 The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. McKeon, Richard (New York, 1941), p. 942.Google Scholar

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33 The terms “monological” and “dialogical” are Buber's. For the clarification of these terms, see particularly I and Thou, tr. Smith, Ronald Gregor (2nd ed., New York, 1958);Google Scholar“Elements of the Interhuman” (tr. Smith, Ronald Gregor), in The Knowledge of Man, ed. Maurice Friedman (London, 1965), pp. 72–88;Google Scholar and Philosophical Interrogations, eds. Sydney, and Rome, Beatrice (New York, 1964), pp. 16–45.Google ScholarThe terms “egocentric” and “heterocentric” are coined by Macmurray, John who is one of the outstanding “philosophers of action” today, and his philosophy is most closely related to Buber's “philosophy of dialogue.”Google ScholarFor the clarification of these terms, see particularly The Self as Agent (New York, 1957), pp. 62–103103 and Persons in Relation pp. 15–43.Google Scholar

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36 Strauss's critique of the scientific school of politics is highlighted, albeit in a rhetorical way, when he writes: “Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic: it has n o attributes peculiar to fallen angels. It is not even Machiavellian, for Machiavelli”s teaching was graceful, subtle, and colorful. Nor is it Neronian. Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns” (“An Epilogue,” p. 327). Eric Voegelin lists three principles of today's scientific creed: “( 1 ) the assumption that the mathematized science of natural phenomena is a model science to which all other sciences ought to conform; (2) that all realms of being are accessible to the methods of the sciences of phenomena; and (3) that all reality which is not accessible to sciences of phenomena is either irrelevant or, in the more radical form of the dogma, illusionary.” “The Origins of Scientism,” Social Research, XV (12, 1948), p. 462.Google ScholarCf. Hallowell, John H., “Politics and Ethics,” American Political Science Review, XXXVIII (08, 1944), pp. 639–55.Google Scholar

37 The New Science of Politics (Chicago, 1952), p. 8.Google Scholar

38 For example, see Patka, Frederick, Value and Existence (New York, 1964).Google Scholar

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41 Nature, History, and Existentialism, ed. Levison, Arnold (Evanston, 1966), p. 36.Google Scholar

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53a “Is There an Existential A Priori?” a lecture delivered at Michigan State University in 04, 1966, p. 10.Google Scholar

54 What Is Political Philosophy? p. 17. In a seminar given in honor of the late Kurt Riezler, Strauss makes a few passing comments on the thought of Heidegger and says that “Heidegger surpasses all his contemporaries by far” (Ibid., p. 246). It might also be added that the Straussian leap to Plato and Aristotle is likened in spirit, although entirely different in aim and result, to Heidegger's return to the pre-Socratic Greek thinkers Parmenides and Heraclitus in search of the origins of the meaning of being in Western thought. I have briefly commented on this point in “A Post-Polemic,” American Political Science Review, LVIII (June, 1964), pp. 400–401.

55 Natural Right and History, p. 79Google Scholar

56 Ibid., p. 77.

57 Ibid.

58 Ibid., p. 79.

59 Ibid., pp. 79–80.

60 Existence and the World of Freedom, p. 41.Google Scholar

61 Merleau-Ponty, , op. cit., pp. ix and viii. Cf. The Primacy of Perception, ed. Edie, James M. (Evanston, 1964), p. 13.Google Scholar

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65 Ibid., p. 67.

66 See Alfred Schutz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: Einleitung in die verstehende Sociologie (Vienna, 1932 and 2nd ed., 1960). This work is scheduled for translation in the “Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy” under the general editorship of John Wild.Google Scholar

67 Op. cit., pp. 103–104.Google Scholar

68 Ibid., p. 104.

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73 “Metaphysics, Historicity and Historicism,” The Personalist, XLVI (01, 1965), p. 45. Fackenheim's argument is different from that of Strauss. Fackenheim argues that the doctrine of historicity presupposes the idea of self-making, that is, “in acting man makes or constitutes himself” and that the doctrine of self-making can develop into three different directions: (1) historicism, (2) Hegelianism, and (3) existentialism. The existentialist position, he comments, “is Hegelian and anti-historicist enough to assert that human being can rise to radical philosophical self-reflection, while at the same time being anti-Hegelian enough to deny the Hegelian transcendence of situatedness.”Google ScholarIbid., pp. 47–48. According to Fackenheim, then, existentialism takes the middle ground between historicism and Hegelianism

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75 What Is Political Philosophy? p. 26. Strauss notes the difference between positivism and historicism in that the latter has the following four characteristics: “(1) It abandons the distinction between facts and values, because every understanding, however theoretical, implies specific evaluations. (2) It denies the authoritative character of modern science, which appears as only one form among many of man's thinking orientation in the world. (3) It refuses to regard the historical process as fundamentally progressive, or, more generally stated, as reasonable. (4) It denies the relevance of evolutionist thesis by contending that the evolution of man out of non-man cannot make intelligible man's humanity.” Idem.Google Scholar

76 Ibid., p. 57.

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82 Op. cit., pp. 23 and 135.Google Scholar

83 Ibid., p. 137.

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