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Leo Strauss and the Dignity of American Political Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Wilson Carey McWiliams
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Extract

Leo Strauss wrote only rarely about American thought, but he pointed his students and readers toward the “high adventure” of the American political tradition as a serious encounter with the great questions of political philosophy. Strauss saw American theory as a contest—one fought less between Americans than within them—pitting modernity's “first wave”, with its appeal to reason and natural right, against the more radical individualism and the historicism of later modern doctrine. Religion and classical rationalism, offering their own standards of a right above opinion, had been historically the allies of “first wave”, modernity, but those voices, Strauss recognized, were growing weaker in American life. In recent American teaching and culture, by contrast, Strauss saw that the increasingly dominant ethics of self—interest and success, other political inadequacies aside, were incapable of speaking to the highest aspirations or winning the deepest allegiance of the young. By reviving classical teaching, Strauss also sought to contribute to the rearticulation and reanimation of the American ideal.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 60 , Issue 2 , Spring 1998 , pp. 231 - 246
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1998

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References

1 Gordon Wood correctly identified my position in these quarrels when he described me as a self-identified Straussian “fellow-traveler” (“The Fundamentalists and the Constitution”, New York Review of Books, 18 February 1988, pp. 33–40).

2 For those of Strauss's books that I have cited frequently, I use the following abbreviations: LAM = Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York and London: Basic Books, 1968)Google Scholar; NRH = Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953)Google Scholar; PAW = Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952)Google Scholar; RCPR = The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Pangle, Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)Google Scholar; SPP=Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, ed. Pangle, Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)Google Scholar; WPP = What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959)Google Scholar.

Strauss reviewed Dewey's German Philosophy and Politics (New York: Putnam, 1942)Google Scholar in Social Research 10 (1943): 505–507. Strauss did write in response to behavioral political science in Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics, ed. Storing, Herbert J. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), pp. 307–327Google Scholar (reprinted in LAM 203–223), but Allan Bloom tells us that Strauss regarded the new social science as intellectually important only for its roots in German philosophy (Giants and Dwarfs [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990], p. 237).Google Scholar

3 Bloom's comment is taken from his introduction to Confronting the Constitution (Washington: The AEI Press, 1990), p. 6Google Scholar; see also Giants and Dwarfs, p. 238.

4 Strauss, Leo and Cropsey, Joseph, eds., History of Political Philosophy (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963)Google Scholar; Sabine, George H., History of Political Theory (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1961), pp. 529, 670, 725, 789.Google Scholar It is worth noting that, since Strauss and Cropsey refer (p. vi) to their decision to exclude Dante, More, Bodin and Harrington, among others, and to include Alfarabi and Maimonides, their History is self-consciously less European and Christian than Sabine's.

5 Strauss saw the belief in progress as a middle ground, akin to philosophy in holding to the idea of universal standards, but like historicism in neglecting “eternity” and the trans-historic (WPP, p. 66; RCPR, pp. 238–39). As far as I know, his only reference to an American historian of the Progressive school—Beard—is generally approving (NRH, p. 92).

6 Boorstin, Daniel, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953)Google Scholar; Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955)Google Scholar; Hofstadter, Richard, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Knopf, 1948).Google Scholar

7 Arnold, Thurman, The Folklore of Capitalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937).Google Scholar

8 Shklar, Judith, “Redeeming American Political Theor“, American Political Science Review 85 (1991): 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 14–15.

9 PAW 36; see also 32, 34, 35; Strauss, Leo, The City and Man (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964), pp. 37–38Google Scholar. Harry V. Jaffa's elegant exposition of the political teaching implicit in Lincoln's Lyceum and Temperance addresses pointed to one commonly recognized exception to this rule: Americans know that persuasive political speech is likely to have its subtleties. Jaffa refers to the comment by Roy Basler, the editor of Lincoln's Collected Works, that in the Lyceum speech, Lincoln was not simply avoiding direct reference to the lynching of Elijah Lovejoy, but seeking an indirect, less defended route to his audience's conscience. Crisis of the House Divided, 3rd. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, orig. 1959), pp. 183–272, esp. p. 196Google Scholar; Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Basler, Roy P. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 1:111, n. 3.Google Scholar

10 PAW 34,37; WPP 222. Zuckert, Catherine H., Postmodern Platos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 164.Google Scholar

11 PAW 34, n. 14. As examples of the sort of interpretation he seeks to correct, Strauss also refers to two American scholars, James T. Shotwell on Gibbon and George Sabine on The Spirit of the Laws (which Sabine found to be studded with irrelevancies and without coherent arrangement). More favorably, Strauss praises Harry Austryn Wolfson's “judicious remarks” on Halevi and cites him as an authority on Spinoza, and he quotes a few words of Salo Baron's on the Torah. Works by several American authors are also noted, without quotation, as secondary sources (PAW 28, 29; 108, n. 14,188–89; 50).

12 Eric Goldman discusses MacLeish's discontent with intellectual “irresponsibles” in the '30s as part of his broader argument that Progressive appeal to the relativism of “reform Darwinism” undermined its own democratic faith (Rendezvous with Destiny [New York: Knopf, 1953], p. 383).Google Scholar

13 NRH 296; see my essays, “The Bible in the American Political Tradition”, in Religion and Politics, ed. Aronoff, Myron (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1984), pp. 22–24Google Scholar and “The Anti-Federalists, Representation and Party“, Northwestern University Law Review 84 (1989): 19–20.Google Scholar

14 Thoreau, Henry David, Walden, ed. Shanley, J.Lydon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 100–101.Google Scholar

15 Hubbard, Stanley, Nietzsche und Emerson (Basel: Verlag fur Rechts und Gesellschaft, 1958)Google Scholar; Strauss's students have also tended to slight Puritan and colonial thinking (see Oscar Handlin's review of Lorraine Smith Pangle and Pangle, Thomas L., The Learning of Liberty: Educational Ideas of the American Founders [Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1993]Google Scholar, in The Washington Times, 6 June 1993, Bl).

16 NRH 1.

17 RCPR xxiv, 72, 270; see also NRH 74–75, SPP 147–73.

18 WPP 47.

19 History of Political Philosophy, p. 6; WPP 65.

20 WPP 51,54; as Strauss noted, although the term philosophy of history was known among the Framers, the establishment of the United States antedates the advent of historicism (WPP 58).

21 NRH 245; on Locke's teaching, see NRH 216–19,226–30,249; see also, on Lincoln, NRH 70, n. 29.

22 “Property”, National Gazette, 29 March 1792, reprinted in The Mind of the Founder, ed. Marvin Meyers (Hanover and Landrum: University Press of New England, 1981), p. 186. Madison's comment involves a not very oblique hint in the direction of slavery.

23 For example, see Ketcham, Ralph, Framed for Posterity: The Enduring Philosophy of the Constitution (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1993).Google Scholar

24 NRH 233, n. 104, referred to in NRH 245, n. 122.

25 On Rousseau's view, see NRH 277, 281. Strauss, Thomas G. West writes, “was persuaded that Rousseau's critique of Lockean natural right on Locke's own premise was sound” (“Leo Strauss and the American Founding“, Review of Politics 53 [1991”: 171)Google Scholar. In that sense, Madison was following the logic of modernity: Strauss refers to the status of “individuality” as the omega and possibly the alpha of the “quarrel between ancients and moderns”. NRH 323. For a similar argument, see Schaar, John H., “And the Pursuit of Happiness“, Virginia Quarterly 46 (1970): 1–27.Google Scholar

26 For Burke's position, see NRH 311–313.

27 NRH 314, 322.

28 NRH 318. Michael Kammen describes the Framers' doctrine as a “blend of cultural relativism … with theoretical universalism”. (A Machine That Would Go of Itself [New York: Knopf, 1986], p. 65).Google Scholar

29 WPP 113.

30 NRH 81; for the idea of natural right in the Christian Scriptures, see Romans 2:14–15,11: 21, 24Google Scholar and Galatians 4: 8.Google Scholar

31 NRH 4; this despite the fact that, methodologically if not by personal conviction, social science seemed to reflect a “dogmatic atheism” (LAM 218).

32 NRH 60–62. See also Tarcov, Nathan, “On a Certain Critique of ‘Straussianism’”, Review of Politics 53 (1991): 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In at least one instance, Strauss made an argument strikingly similar to Weber's: in Robinson Crusoe, faith in Providence is crucial in enabling Crusoe to overcome despair and in moving him to “bestir” himself to make use of his talents, but Strauss argued that Defoe's story—in contrast to the work by Ibn Tufayl which was Defoe's model—is best read as depicting a “modern man” using his “natural powers” to lay the basis of a “technical civilization”, implicitly relegating Crusoe's religiosity to the role of an inward foundation for outward achievements (RCPR 218).

33 RCPR 233; LAM 264–266. In a similar spirit, Strauss suggested learning from Judaism the lesson of “fortitude in suffering”, an ability to endure grounded in inner emancipation (LAM 268). Of course, Strauss's argument implicitly assumes that religion, in America as elsewhere, has another side and darker possibilities. My reference to Machiavelli, of course, is to The Prince, chapter 15.

34 LAM 4–5; “On a New Interpretation of Plato's Political Philosophy“, Social Research 13 (1946): 357Google Scholar. This democratic ideal seems indebted to Spinoza's emphasis on human dignity, and hence stands as a nobler but riskier alternative to other democratic possibilities (LAM 241). The phrase “an aristocracy of everyone” is from Barber, Benjamin R., An Aristocracy of Everyone: The Politics of Education and the Future of America (New York: Ballantine, 1992).Google Scholar

35 Adams, Henry, Democracy and Esther: Two Novels, ed. Samuels, Ernest (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 44ff.Google Scholar

36 WPP 37; LAM 15–16.

37 LAM 11,14–16,245; An Introduction to Political Philosophy, ed. Gilden, Hilail (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989), p. 98.Google Scholar

38 LAM 23–24.

39 LAM 20–22, 210–12, 264; WPP 38.

40 LAM 5, 223.

41 LAM 221. Similarly, radical relativism points toward perspectivism, and hence threatens the science which behavioralism champions.

42 WPP 279–81; RCPR 22.

43 RCPR 32, 76; City and Man, pp. 3–7. While praising Adams, Strauss observed that, like all modem historians, Adams differed from Thucydides in feeling compelled to go beyond the specifically political to a discussion of social, economic and cultural life. Strauss comments that Thucydides offered no explanation for the limitation of his work; Strauss does not explain the inclusiveness of modern history. It seems clear, however, that the reason lies in the moral plurality of modern regimes, as contrasted with the relative unity of the polis (RCPR 76; NRH 245, 314, 322).

44 RCPR 22, 23.

45 City and Man, p. 7; NRH 201.

46 Tarcov, Nathan, “Philosophy and History: Tradition and Interpretation in the Work of Leo Strauss“, Polity 16 (1983): 9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47 Strauss's letters to Karl Löwith indicate a strategy of undoing modernity privatissime, but that caution is balanced by his conviction that modern states, in critical respects, run contrary to nature (“Correspondence Concerning Modernity”, International Journal of Philosophy 4 [1983]: 114,108).Google Scholar

48 LAM 204,261.1 have elided Strauss's reference to “the best men” because that language would be apt to jar contemporary sensibilities in a way that distracts from his argument.

49 LAM 24; Deutsch, Kenneth and Sofer, Walter, eds., The Crisis of Liberal Democracy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987), p. 3.Google Scholar

50 LAM 262.

51 LAM 204. This stance has occasioned comment from Strauss's most bitter critics (i.e., Holmes, Stephen, “Aristippus in and out of Athens”, American Political Science Review 73 [1979]: 113)CrossRefGoogle Scholar as well as much shrewder ones (Wood, “Fundamentalists and the Constitution”, p. 36).

52 “Replies to Wolin and Schaar” American Political Science Review 57 (1963): 152.Google Scholar

53 Mansfield, Harvey C. Jr, The Spirit of Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Ultimately, Bloom, Allan wrote, Strauss's politics “were the politics of philosophy and not the politics of a particular regime” (Giants and Dwarfs, p. 240).Google Scholar

54 “All of us contain Music and Truth”, Mark Twain once noted, “but most of us can't get it out” (Notebook 42 [June 1897– March 1900], p. 68), Mark Twain Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. The phrase “souls without longing” comes from the original title of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).Google Scholar