Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T10:06:38.273Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Thoughts on Leo Strauss's Interpretation of Aristotle's Natural Right Teaching

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 July 2016

André Luiz Cruz Sousa
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The essay discusses the interpretation of Aristotle's natural right teaching by Leo Strauss. This interpretation ought to be seen as the result of an investigation into the history of philosophy and of an attempt to philosophically address political problems. By virtue of this twofold origin, the Straussian commentary is unorthodox: it deviates from traditional Aristotelianism (Aquinas and Averroes) and it seems alien to the text of the Nicomachean Ethics. Strauss's criticism of medieval variants results from their incapacity—shared by contemporary political thought—to address a perplexing issue: political exception. He sees in Aristotle's political teaching a way to escape from this failure: the unification, in natural right, of the requirements of statesmanship and ethics. The discovery of this way allowed Strauss to produce an interpretation of natural right that articulates important points pertaining to Aristotelian political science.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 78 , Issue 3 , Summer 2016 , pp. 419 - 442
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). Hereafter NRH.

2 Other studies of Strauss's commentary on Aristotle include Roberts, William Clare, “All Natural Right Is Changeable: Aristotelian Natural Right, Prudence, and the Specter of Exceptionalism,” Review of Politics 74 (2012): 261–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Drury, S. B., “Leo Strauss’ Classic Natural Right Teaching,” Political Theory 15, no. 3 (1987): 299–315Google Scholar; Stephen B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 195–99.

3 See Politica 1252b12–1253a4 for the coming into being of the city from the combination of smaller associations. See Ethica Nicomachea 1134b8–18 for the “similar” (homoion) nature of the just relations between members of the household compared to the fully just relations existing between citizens. Quotations of Aristotle's texts are from the following editions: Aristotelis Ethica Eudemia, ed. R. R. Walzer and J. M. Mingay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Aristotelis Ethica Nicomachea, ed. I. Bywater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1894); Aristotelis Politica, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957).

4 See Roberts, “All Natural Right,” 267.

5 Summa Theologiae I-II, qq. 94 and 95. Quotations of the Summa Theologiae taken from Thomae Aquinatis Opera Omnia, Tomus Septimus: Prima Secundae Summae Theologiae; A Quaestione LXXI ad Quaestionem CXIV (Romae ex Typographia Polyglotta, 1892). Hereafter ST.

6 Smith, Reading Leo Strauss, 197. This is the point of most of his commentary on Strauss's study of Aristotelian natural right.

7 See Leo Strauss, “On Natural Law,” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 137–46.

8 ST I-II, q. 90, art. 1.

9 See Eth. Nic. 1107a8–17.

10 ST I-II, q. 94, art. 5.

11 Leo Strauss, “On Natural Law,” 138.

12 Roberts, “All Natural Right,” reconstructing Strauss's reading of Aristotle (267–72), suggests that the concrete decisions of natural right constitute an exercise of perfect justice within which each concrete decision would instantiate “What would a perfectly just person do in x (y,z,…) situation?” (267); natural right, according to such a reading, is counterfactual much of the time, since not every concrete decision does instantiate (perfect) justice. Roberts's reading, in which Strauss's essay on Halevi's Kuzari plays a large role, seems to me—in part as a consequence of this interpretative choice—to disagree both with Aristotle's understanding of right and with Strauss’ interpretation of Aristotle in NRH. According to the Nicomachean Ethics, distributive and commutative justice are not principles inductively obtained by generalization from previous particular decisions about what is perfectly just in each circumstance—distributive and commutative justice are rather instantiated in each city-state by legislation and it is the content of the legislation that is, then, applied to particular circumstances by concrete decisions (see 1130b30–1131a9; 1131a25–29; 1131b32–1132a10). Strauss echoes this Aristotelian understanding by affirming that “a law which solves justly a problem peculiar to a given country at a given time may be said to be just to a higher degree than any general rule of natural law which, because of its generality, may prevent a just decision in a given case” (NRH, 159): what he opposes to the general rule of natural law is not a principle obtained from several concrete decisions about what is simply just, but the concrete decisions taken by the legislature (= the adoption of a certain rule) and the judges (= the enforcement of the same rule).

13 See ST, I-II, q. 91, art. 1 and art. 2.

14 ST I-II, q. 91, art. 3.

15 See ST I-II, q. 94, art. 4 and art. 5.

16 See Eth. Nic. 1137a31–1138a3.

17 See, respectively, ST I-II, q. 94, art. 4 and q. 95, art. 2.

18 Aquinas, Sententia quinti libri Ethicorum, XII.187–96. Quoted from Sancti Thomae de Aquino Opera Omnia, Iussu Leonis XIII PM edita, Tomus XLVII, Sententia Libri Ethicorum, volumen II, libri IV–X (Romae ad Sanctae Sabinae, 1969).

19 ST I-II, q. 96, art. 6.

20 In view of this remark, the opinion expressed by Drury, “Leo Strauss’ Classic Natural Right Teaching,” concerning Strauss's reading of classic natural right—“It seems to me that this way of speaking allows us to do injustice with a clear conscience” (308)—is not tenable. Drury's failure in observing the reluctance of the statesman who takes the unusual action needed to face the extreme situation is a consequence of a mistaken notion that the urgency of this situation implies that it is a recurrent phenomenon: “Natural Right provides man not with principles of conduct, but with a hierarchy of ends. Peace, stability and preservation of the city are lower than justice. . . . Strauss indicates that the lowest, being the most urgent, frequently takes precedence over the higher” (307). In opposing the extreme situation to the normal situation—the usual circumstances in which natural right corresponds to action according to law—Strauss points very clearly to the exceptionality of the extreme situation: “By saying that in extreme situations the public safety is the highest law, one implies that the public safety is not the highest law in normal situations; in normal situations the highest laws are the common rules of justice” (NRH, 161).

21 For an argument that making the lawless exception a permanent political condition is the hallmark of totalitarianism, see the chapter “Totalitarianism in Power” in Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 376–428.

22 Michael Zuckert and Catherine Zuckert, Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 217–32, in emphasizing the fundamental differences between Strauss and Schmitt, take care to highlight Strauss's discussion of Aristotelian natural right as most resembling the German jurist's concerns.

23 Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1963), hereafter DBP; Strauss, Leo, “Anmerkungen zu Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 67 (1932): 732–49Google Scholar.

24 Carl Schmitt, Über die drei Arten des rechtswissenschaftlichen Denkens (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1934), 10–20.

25 Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1922), 18. Hereafter PT.

26 Strauss suggests, for example, the influence of Aristotle's morals on Hobbes's political philosophy by pointing out important textual similarities between Aristotle's Rhetoric and Hobbes's writings. See Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 30–43.

27 DBP, 68–78; PT, 18–20.

28 PT, 18; DBP, 19.

29 DBP, 25.

30 DBP, 27–28.

31 DBP, 26.

32 See DBP, 25 and Strauss, Anmerkungen, 734.

33 Strauss, Anmerkungen, 742, 741.

34 In his thorough study of the Strauss-Schmitt debate, Heinrich Meier shows that the changes Schmitt made in the different editions of DBP were intended to complete Schmitt's teaching by pointing out the fundamental nature of the political domain and thus meet Strauss's criticism. In the version commented upon by Strauss, the political is presented as one of the “different and relatively independent [relative selbstständigen] domains of human thought and action,” whereas the 1933 edition describes the political as “independent” (selbstständig) and its founding distinction between friend and enemy as a “far deeper distinction.” See Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss und “Der Begriff des Politischen”: Zu einem Dialog unter Abwesenden, expanded ed. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998), 20–25.

35 Strauss, Anmerkungen, 740–42.

36 Ibid., 741.

37 Ibid., 742.

38 Ibid., 748.

39 Ibid., 745.

40 See DBP, 49 and Anmerkungen, 742.

41 Strauss, Anmerkungen, 748.

42 Ibid., 742.

43 Ibid., 748.

44 Ibid., 749.

45 DBP, 63–72; DZNE, 73–87.

46 See DBP, 87 (DZNE) and Strauss, Anmerkungen, 749.

47 See Eth. Eud. 1248b8–1249b25 for the treatment of kalokagathia.

48 See Eth. Nic. 1095b22–1096a4 and Eth. Eud. 1216a19–27.

49 See Eth. Eud. 1216b32–33 for the formula “truly said but lacking in precision” characteristic of the common opinions regarding eudaimonia. For the lack of prudence of the young people see Eth. Nic. 1142a11–20.

50 Smith, Reading Leo Strauss, 196, refers to a letter addressed to Karl Löwith in which Strauss mentions Winston Churchill as an example of megalopsuchia.

51 Eth. Nic. 1124a16–20 emphasizes the little importance this man sees in being awarded the honors he knows he deserves. Needless to say, such a man is liberated to exercise the most exalted political actions by knowing that the honorability of his actions is independent of the common opinion about it.

52 Pol. 1295a25–b1, 1323a14–21, 1337a11–35; Eth. Eud. 1216b35–1217a10, 1218b11–14; Eth. Nic. 1094a18–b11, 1130b25–29, 1179a33–1180b28.