Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T16:07:28.608Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Leo Strauss's Conception of Political Philosophy: A Critique

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Hwa Yol Jung
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

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

* 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 I am particularly grateful to Professor John Wild for having shown to me his unpublished paper "Is There an Existential A Priori?"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

2 The City and Man (Chicago, 1964), p. 1Google Scholar

3 What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Glencoe, 1959), p. 11.Google Scholar

4 Natural Right and History, pp. 81–82.Google Scholar

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

6 See Heidegger, , Being and Time, trs. Macquarrie, John and Robinson, Edward (New York, 1962);Google ScholarSartre, , Being and Nothingness, tr.Barnes, Hazel E. (New York, 1956);Google ScholarMerleau-Ponty, , Phenomenology of Perception, tr. Smith, Colin (New York, 1962);Google ScholarRicoeur, , History and Truth, tr. Kelbley, Charles A. (Evanston, 1965);Google Scholar and Wild, , Existence and the World of Freedom (Englewood Cliffs, 1963). Space does not allow me to discuss the relationship between existential philosophy and phenomenology. However, it should be noted that “existential phenomenology” is distinctively a philosophical style here to stay.Google ScholarThe American sociologist Tiryakian, Edward A. has recently noted the relevance of existential phenomenology to a future theory of social existence in “Existential Phenomenology and the Sociological Tradition,” American Sociological Review, XXX (10, 1965), pp. 674–88.Google ScholarAlfred Schutz's phenomenology has had great influence on the sociological writings of Harold Garfinkel and some influence on the political writings of Snyder, Richard C. and his associates. See Garfinkel, “The Perception of the Other: A Study in Social Order” (Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, Harvard University, 1952);Google Scholar“The Rational Properties of Scientific and Common Sense Activities,” Behavioral Science, V (01, 1960), pp. 72“83;Google Scholar“Studies of the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities,” Social Problems, XI (Winter, 1964), pp. 225–50;Google Scholar“Common-Sense Knowledge of Social Structures: The Documentary Method of Interpretation,” in Theories of the Mind, ed. Scher, Jordan M. (New York, 1962), pp. 689–712;Google Scholar and Snyder, , Bruck, H. W. and Sapin, Burton, “Decision-Making as an Approach to the Study of International Politics,” in Foreign Policy Decision-Making (Glencoe, 1962), pp. 14–185.Google Scholar

7 The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), p. 15.Google Scholar

8 What is Political Philosophy? p. 91.Google Scholar

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

11 Thoughts on Machiavelli, p. 295.Google Scholar

12 Politics, tr. Barker, Ernest (Oxford, 1948), p. 289.Google Scholar

13 Marx, Werner, The Meeting of Aristotle's “Ontology” (The Hague, 1954), p. 4.Google Scholar

14 Ibid., p. 15.

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

21 On Tyranny (Rev. and enl. ed.; Glencoe, 1963), p. 214.Google Scholar

22 Politics, p. 103.Google Scholar

23 The City and Man, p. 49.Google Scholar

24 Politics, p. 289.Google Scholar

25 What Is Political Philosophy?, pp. 93–94.Google Scholar

26 On Tyranny, p. 224.Google Scholar

27 Eclipse of God (New York, 1957), pp. 40–41.Google Scholar

28 Persons in Relation (New York, 1961), p. 215.Google Scholar

29 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trs. Swenson, David F. and Lowrie, Walter (Princeton, 1941), p. 176Google Scholar

30 Who Is Man? (Stanford, 1965), p. 81.Google Scholar

31 “Christian Rationalism,” in Earle, William, Edie, James M. and Wild, John, Christianity and Existentialism (Evanston, 1963), p. 58.Google Scholar

32 “The Return to Experience,” The Review of Metaphysics, XVII (03 1964), p. 339.Google Scholar

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

34 Macmurray, Persons in Relation, p. 128.Google Scholar

35 The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trs. Henderson, A. M. and Talcott Parsons (New York, 1947), p, 112Google Scholar

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

39 Existence and the World of Freedom, p. 54.Google Scholar

40 Wild, John, Plato's Modern Enemies and the Theory of Natural Law (Chicago, 1953), pp. 157 ff.Google Scholar

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

42 Existence and the World of Freedom, pp. 50–59, 66–79 and 86–97.Google Scholar

43 Levison, Arnold, “Editor's Introduction” to Lowith, op. cit., p. xx. Wild mentions four kinds of phenomena in the Lebenswelt, one of which is the realm of “nature,” and the other three are “man himself,” “other men and the realm of human culture,” and “the transcendent.” Philosophical Interrogations, p. 177.Google Scholar

44 “An Epilogue,” p. 310.Google Scholar

45 Ibid., p. 315.

46 The City and Man, p. 12.Google Scholar

47 Herbert Spiegelberg states that the two main areas of concern for post-Husserlian phenomenology are the life-world and intersubjectivity. The Phenomenological Movement (Vol. I; The Hague, 1960), p. 157Google Scholar

48 Husserl, Edmund, Cartesian Meditations, tr. Cairns, Dorion (The Hague, 1960), p. 177.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49 Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Natanson, Maurice (The Hague, 1962), p. 53.Google Scholar

50 Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. Biemel, Walter (2nd ed.; Den Haag, 1962), pp. 123 ff.Google Scholar

51 Wild, John, “Husserl's Life-World and the Lived Body,” in Phenomenology: Pure and Applied, ed. Straus, Erwin W. (Pittsburgh, 1964), p. 10.Google ScholarFor Heidegger's own discussion of the “Being-in-the-world,” see Being and Time, pp. 78–224.Google Scholar

52 Op. cit., p. 56.Google Scholar

53 “Über den ‘Humanismus,’” in Platans Lehre von der Wahrheit (Bern, 1954), p. 53.Google Scholar

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

62 Phenomenology and the Human Sciences (Pittsburgh, 1963), p. 71Google Scholar

62a “Is There an Existential A Priori?” p. 11Google Scholar

63 Collected Papers 11: Studies in Social Theory, ed. Brodersen, Arvid (The Hague, 1964), p. 21Google Scholar and cf. Collected Papers I, pp. 6–7Google Scholar

64 Collected Papers I, p. 34.Google Scholar

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.

69 Schutz, , Collected Papers I, p. 247.Google Scholar

70 (Ed.), Philosophy of the Social Sciences: A Reader (New York, 1963), p. 188.Google Scholar

71 Merleau-Ponty, , Phenomenology of Perception, p. 347.Google Scholar

72 See John Macmurray, Reason and Emotion (2nd ed.; ew York 1962), p. 5Google Scholar and cf. McGill, V. J., Emotions and Reason (Springfield, 1954), pp. 25 ff.Google Scholar

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

74 Natural Right and History, p. 32.Google Scholar

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.

77 Fackenheim, “Metaphysics, Historicity and Historicism,” p. 45Google Scholar and Metaphysics and Historicity (Milwaukee, 1961), p. 11.Google Scholar

78 Löwith, op. cit., p. 18. Cf. also Schrag, Calvin O., Existence and Freedom (Evanston, 1961), pp. 16–17 and 146Google Scholar and Seidel, George Joseph, O.S.B., Martin Heidegger and the Pre-Socratics (Lincoln, 1964), pp. 156 and 15–26Google Scholar. For Heidegger's own analysis, see Being and Time, especially pp. 424 ff.Google Scholar

79 Natural Right and History, pp. 30–31.Google Scholar

80 Existentialism, tr. Bernard Frechtman (New York, 1947), p. 18.Google Scholar

81 Wild, John, The Challenge of Existentialism (Bloomington, 1959), p. 256.Google Scholar

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

83 Ibid., p. 137.

84 The Basic Works of Aristotle, p. 1464.Google Scholar

85 Löwith, op. cit., p. 35.Google Scholar

86 “Love and Justice,” in Ethics and Society, ed. De George, Richard T. (Garden City, 1966), p. 34.Google Scholar

87 Man's Place in Nature, tr. Hans Meyerhoff (New York, 1961), p. 29.Google ScholarCf. Macmurray, Persons in Relation, pp. 45 and 128.Google Scholar

88 See Macmurray, The Self as Agent, pp. 131–35.Google Scholar

89 “Tyranny and Wisdom,” in Strauss, On Tyranny, p. 164.Google Scholar

90 Wild, , “Christian Rationalism,” p. 59.Google Scholar

91 Natural Right and History, p. 12.Google Scholar

92 See The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, tr. Manheim, Ralph (New York, 1949), pp. 45–46;Google ScholarWay to Wisdom, tr. Manheim, Ralph (New Haven, 1951), p. 27;Google Scholar and Reason and Existent, tr. Earle, William (New York, 1955), pp. 77–106.Google Scholar

93 I and Thou, p. 63Google Scholar

94 Strasser, , op. cit., p. 231.Google ScholarCf. Merleau-Ponty, , The Primacy of Perception, p. 13.Google Scholar

95 In Praise of Philosophy, trs. Wild, John and Edie, James M. (Evanston, 1963), p. 59.Google Scholar

96 The Challenge of Existentialism, p. 272.Google Scholar

97 Husserl, , Die Krisis der europdischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, p. 15.Google Scholar

98 On Tyranny, p. 221.Google Scholar

99 Merleau-Ponty, , Phenomenology of Perception, p. 382.Google Scholar

100 See Wild, John, “Authentic Existence: A New Approach to ‘Value Theory’,” in An Invitation to Phenomenology, ed. Edie, James M. (Chicago, 1965), pp. 59, 70, and 76.Google Scholar

101 What Is Philosophy? trs. Kluback, William and Wilde, Jean T. (New York, 1958), p. 59.Google Scholar