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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2020
Leo Strauss is most well known for his thesis on the philosophic practice of exotericism. One of strangest aspects of his work is the amount of attention he devoted to Xenophon. This article attempts to explain how these two important facets of Strauss's thought are connected by examining their connection in his first published treatment of them both: “The Spirit of Sparta or the Taste of Xenophon.”
1 The final chapter of Strauss's The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, written in 1936, contains a preliminary sketch of the classical approach to politics found in Plato and Aristotle and that was rejected by Hobbes. Strauss makes no mention of Xenophon there.
2 Strauss published the following works devoted directly to the study of Xenophon: “The Spirit of Sparta or the Taste of Xenophon,” Social Research 6 (1939): 502–36; On Tyranny: An Interpretation of Xenophon's “Hiero” (New York: Political Science Classics, 1947); “Restatement on Xenophon's Hiero,” first published in French with the more revealing title “L'action politique des philosophes” in Critique (Oct.–Nov. 1950), expanded into “Mise au point” in De la tyrannie (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), then in English and revised slightly for What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959), 95–133, and later editions of On Tyranny; “Greek Historians,” Review of Metaphysics 21 (1968): 656–66, a review of W. P. Henry's Greek Historical Writing in which Strauss also gives a brief interpretation of Xenophon's Hellenica; Xenophon's Socratic Discourse: An Interpretation of the “Oeconomicus” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970); and Xenophon's Socrates (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972). “Xenophon's Anabasis” was published posthumously in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), chap. 5. In addition, an unpublished essay from 1938 on esotericism that takes Xenophon's Education of Cyrus as its primary text has recently been transcribed and edited by Christopher Lynch, “On the Study of Classical Political Philosophy,” in Toward “Natural Right and History”: Lectures and Essays by Leo Strauss, 1937–1946, ed. J. A. Colen and Svetozar Minkov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), chap. 4.
3 Strauss to Klein, February 16, 1939, quoted and translated in Lampert, Laurence, “Strauss's Recovery of Esotericism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss, ed. Smith, Steven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 69–70Google Scholar. The German original can be found in Strauss, Leo, Gesammlte Schriften, ed. Meier, Heinrich and Meier, Wiebke, vol. 3 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001), 567Google Scholar.
4 Leo Strauss, “Spirit of Sparta,” 536. Parenthetical citations in the text are to this article.
5 Strauss, “Spirit of Sparta,” 521–22; Vivienne Gray, editor's introduction to Xenophon, Oxford Readings in Classical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 4–5; Louis-André Dorion, “The Straussian Exegesis of Xenophon,” in Gray, Xenophon, 310, 322. Dorion singles out this aspect of Strauss's work as particularly noteworthy: “Strauss’ great merit with respect to these philological ‘solutions’ is his attempt to comprehend the text as it has come to us, as a coherent whole in spite of the [obvious] contradictions detected” (291). For an earlier version of Strauss's objections to the “higher criticism” approach, see Leo Strauss, “On the Study of Classical Political Philosophy,” 128.
6 See, e.g., Higgins, W. E., Xenophon the Athenian: The Problem of the Individual and the Society of the Polis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Tuplin, Christopher, The Failings of Empire (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1993)Google Scholar; Danzig, Gabriel, “Why Socrates Was Not a Farmer: Xenophon's Oeconomicus as a Philosophical Dialogue,” Greece & Rome 50, no. 1 (2006): 57–76Google Scholar.
7 Gray, Vivienne, “Xenophon's Hiero and the Meeting of the Wise Man and Tyrant in Greek Literature,” Classical Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1986): 116CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Sarah Pomeroy, Oeconomicus: A Social and Historical Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 24n11.
9 Dorion, “Straussian Exegesis,” 283–323. This is a revised and much expanded version in English of an article that first appeared as “L'exégèse strausienne de Xénophon: Le cas paradigmatique de Mémorables IV 4,” Philosophie antique 1 (2001): 87–118.
10 Dorion “Straussian Exegesis,” 285.
11 Ibid., 283–84. See also 321.
12 Gray, Vivienne, “Xenophon's Symposium: The Display of Wisdom,” Hermes 120, no. 1 (1992): 58Google Scholar.
13 Gray, introduction to Xenophon, 5.
14 Dorion, “Straussian Exegesis,” 294–95, 316; Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 76.
15 Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy?, 101. Henceforward WIPP.
16 Dorion “Straussian Exegesis,” 294, 304.
17 Xenophon, Education of Cyrus 1.3.18. See Strauss, “On the Study of Classical Political Philosophy,” 145.
18 For Strauss's understanding of the limits of his claim, see Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 30. Henceforward PAW. Strauss also addressed this difficulty in the first essay on Xenophon: “Since [Socrates and Xenophon] uttered their unbelief only in a manner that the large majority might in no circumstances become aware of it, proofs of their unbelief necessarily are of such a character that they will not convince the majority of readers” (“Spirit of Sparta,” 532).
19 Dorion, “Straussian Exegesis,” 304, 305n62.
20 Ibid., 294n34, 320.
21 Ibid., 322.
22 Strauss deals with this passage in a much less complicated way in “The Spirit of Sparta”: “The argument that the interlocutor [Hippias] advances against Socrates’ assertion that justice is identical with the obedience to the laws misses the point, as is shown by a parallel argumentation used by a more intelligent and franker man [Alcibiades] which occurs within the same work [the Memorabilia]” (520–21). Dorion neglects this account.
23 Dorion, “Straussian Exegesis,” 306.
24 Strauss, PAW, 30.
25 Dorion, “Straussian Exegesis,” 309–10 (emphasis added).
26 Strauss, Xenophon's Socratic Discourse, 92; Xenophon's Socrates, 58 (emphasis added).
27 Strauss, PAW, 30.
28 Dorion, “Straussian Exegesis,” 320.
29 Ibid., 291, 293, 299.
30 Ibid., 308, 319–20.
31 Ibid., 292n29 (emphasis added).
32 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Second Discourse, in The First and Second Discourses, trans. Roger D. Masters and Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin's, 1964), 103.
33 See Xenophon, Memorabilia 4.6.14–15 and Cynegeticus 13.6.
34 Dorion, “Straussian Exegesis,” 292.
35 Leo Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), 460.
36 Strauss, Leo, “Correspondence: Karl Löwith and Leo Strauss,” Independent Journal of Philosophy 5–6 (1988): 182–84Google Scholar.
37 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. Maudemarie Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 3.
38 For Strauss's view of Rousseau at this time, see Leo Strauss, “Exoteric Teaching,” in Reorientation: Leo Strauss in the 1930s, ed. Martin D. Yaffe and Richard S. Ruderman (New York: State University of New York Press, 2014), 285. This text, written around the time Strauss completed “The Spirit of Sparta,” also demonstrates Strauss's familiarity with and debt to the passage from Nietzsche's Daybreak quoted above. It is important to note that Strauss subsequently changed his understanding of Rousseau and even ascribed to him the view that prevents one from believing in a political solution to the problem of civilization: “We may therefore express the thesis of the Discours [the first Discourse] as follows: since the element of society is opinion, science, being the attempt to replace opinion by knowledge, essentially endangers society because it dissolves opinion” (Strauss, Leo, “On the Intention of Rousseau,” Social Research 14 [1947]: 274Google Scholar).
39 Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 290, 294; Leo Strauss, On Nietzsche's “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” ed. Richard Velkley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 46.
40 Leo Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza's Critique of Religion,” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basis Books, 1968), 224; Strauss, Leo, “Preface to Hobbes politische Wissenschaft,” Interpretation 8, no. 1 (1979): 1Google Scholar.
41 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 332.
42 Benito Musolini, in The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe, by Michael Oakeshott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 167–68.
43 Strauss, WIPP, 126–27.
44 Leo Strauss, Spinoza's Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 31.
45 Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, trans. Elsa Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 141, 145.
46 Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law, trans. Eve Adler (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), 21.
47 Leo Strauss, “On Abravanel's Philosophic Tendency,” in Leo Strauss on Maimonides: The Complete Writings, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 582–84.
48 Strauss to Klein, January 20 and February 16, 1938, quoted and translated by Laurence Lampert, in Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss, 63–64. The German original can be found in Gesammelte Schriften, 3:545, 550. Hereafter GS.
49 Strauss to Klein, October 15 and November 2, 1938, in Cambridge Companion, 66–67; GS, 3:556, 558.
50 Strauss to Klein, November 27, 1938, in Cambridge Companion, 68; GS, 3:559.
51 Strauss to Klein, February 16, 1939, in Cambridge Companion, 69.
52 Strauss to Klein, August 18, 1939, in Cambridge Companion, 73; GS, 3:579–80.
53 Consider Strauss, On Tyranny, 26: “Xenophon uses far fewer devices than Plato uses even in his simplest works. By understanding the art of Xenophon, one will realize certain minimum requirements that one must fulfill when interpreting any Platonic dialogue, requirements which today are so little fulfilled they are hardly known.”
54 Strauss to Klein, February 16, 1939, in Cambridge Companion, 69–70; GS, 3:567.
55 Leo Strauss Papers, Box 4, Folder 8, quoted in Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 24n32. What Strauss says here of On Tyranny may well apply to “The Spirit of Sparta,” his first article on Xenophon, which he wrote at the same time he was working on “The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed.” Strauss's sensitivity to the place Maimonides holds for Jews is reflected in his correspondence with Nahum Norbert Glatzer from 1937–38 (see Suzanne Klingenstein, “Of Greeks and Jews,” Weekly Standard, Oct. 25, 2010). In any case, the two articles, each subdivided into six sections, should be read as companion pieces.
56 Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 142.
57 Strauss to Klein, February 28, 1939, in Cambridge Companion, 72; GS, 3:569. Lampert's translation contains a transcription error. He reads “aristocratic” rather than “Aristophanic,” which is found in both the handwritten letter and Meier's transcription.
58 For the potentially liberating effect of humor, particularly from the opinion that identifies justice with the law, consider Xenophon, Apology, 28.
59 See Laurence Lampert, The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 15–16.
60 “As Faust put it to Wagner, ‘the few who understood something of the world and of men's heart and mind, who were foolish enough not to restrain their full heart but to reveal their feeling and their vision to the vulgar, have ever been crucified and burned’; not everyone belonging to those few failed to restrain his full heart. Goethe was the last great man who rediscovered or remembered this, especially after he had returned from the storm and stress of sentiment to the tranquility of fullness of vision. After him, social reason, sentiment and decision and whatever goes with those dynamic forces united in order to destroy the last vestiges of the recollection of what philosophy originally meant” (Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 174–75).
61 Leo Strauss, transcript of “Xenophon,” University of Chicago, Winter 1963, Session 1 (no date), http://leostrausstranscripts.uchicago.edu/navigate/8/2/.
62 Leo Strauss, Hobbes's Critique of Religion, trans. Gabriel Bartlett and Svetozar Minkov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 28.
63 Cf. Xenophon, Oeconomicus 21.12.
64 Cf. Xenophon, Memorabilia 3.8. For Strauss's understanding of the connection between the idea of the good, the best regime, and the actualization of that regime, see Strauss, Leo, “On a New Interpretation of Plato's Political Philosophy,” Social Research 13, no. 3 (Sept. 1946): 362–63Google Scholar.
65 Strauss to Klein, October 20, 1939, quoted in Lampert, Enduring Importance, 13.
66 See Christopher Nadon, “Philosophic Politics and Theology: Strauss's ‘Restatement,’” in Leo Strauss's Defense of the Philosophic Life: Reading “What Is Political Philosophy?,” ed. Rafael Major (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2013), 94.
67 Consider the mistranslation of the title in the French edition of the work: “L'esprit de Sparte et le goût de Xénophon,” in Le Discours socratique de Xénophon: Suivi de Le Socrate de Xénophon (Paris: Éditions de l’éclat, 1992).
68 See Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 136: “The American Constitution is not the same thing as the American way of life. Politeia means the way of life of a society rather than its constitution.” Cf. Natural Right and History, 84; WIPP, 91; Xenophon's Socratic Discourse, 201; Xenophon's Socrates, 38.
69 For the connection between politeia and education, see Strauss, City and Man, 113.
70 Strauss prepared the way for this recommendation by contrasting first “political life” with “theoretical life” (519), and then “the life of the city” with “the life of the individual” (424).
71 Strauss, WIPP, 77.
72 Ibid., 136.
73 Ibid., 89–90.
74 Ibid., 101.
75 Consider Strauss's intrusive “editorializing” when he remarks that “Xenophon is very anxious for us to realize” that Lycurgus, i.e., the authority of the city, teaches that stealing is both good and bad (“Spirit of Sparta,” 507, 527, emphasis added). Cf. the discussion of “the aim of the life of the city” compared to “the aim of the life of the individual” (524–25).
76 In his own name, Strauss will oppose this belief with his own declaration, “There is no adequate solution to the problem of virtue or happiness on the political or social plane” (WIPP, 100). This premise also justifies the description of the task of political philosophy that Strauss gave in a public lecture at the New School in 1942: “As long as philosophy was living up to its own innate standard, philosophers as such, by their merely being philosophers, prevented those who were willing to listen to them from identifying any actual order, however satisfactory in many respects, with the Perfect order: political philosophy is the eternal challenge to the philistine” (Strauss, Leo, “What Can We Learn from Political Theory?,” Review of Politics 69, no. 4 [2007]: 521Google Scholar).
77 Strauss, WIPP, 70.