Can anyone help us understand the madness afflicting Western civilization? Art, for all its power, is usually better at reflecting or illuminating—rather than explaining—the human condition. Psychology can at best clarify what appears to be a metastasizing global derangement syndrome. (I can recommend, in this field, Mattias Desmet’s The Psychology of Totalitarianism.) If Aristotle is right, politics offers the most comprehensive view of human affairs. Yet most academic political scientists—and psychologists, for that matter—seem to be more a part of the problem than the solution. Let me suggest, then, the work of Leo Strauss, who combined the study of the soul with the study of politics. Strauss (1899–1973) almost singlehandedly recovered the wisdom and enduring relevance of classical political philosophy, and he may offer unexpected insights regarding our dilemma.
Last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of Strauss’s death. With the notable exception of a tribute by the (now retired) Harvard professor Harvey C. Mansfield in the Claremont Review of Books, this occasion went largely unremarked. Strauss—a refugee from Hitler’s Germany who spent most of his career at the University of Chicago—wrote for the few (or even the very few). He might not, therefore, have minded this neglect by the larger world. His scholarship, however, continues to exert an influence far out of proportion to his relative anonymity among the general public.
A new volume of essays, Leo Strauss’ Published but Uncollected English Writings, edited by Steven J. Lenzner and Svetozar Minkov (St. Augustine’s Press), is the latest of several new Strauss-related books.1 This collection includes important essays that can be found in other volumes (perhaps the most essential is “Farabi’s Plato”) as well as several that are obscure or hard to find (e.g., “On a New Interpretation of Plato’s Political Philosophy,” “Liberal Education and Mass Democracy,” “Greek Historians,” and “Machiavelli and Classical Literature”).
Last year, Minkov and Hannes Kerber published a welcome volume of Strauss’s scattered writings on a key Platonic dialogue: Leo Strauss on Plato’s “Euthyphro”: The 1948 Notebook, with Lectures and Critical Writings (Penn State University Press). In addition, Minkov (who seems to be spearheading a Strauss revival) is editing a collection of Strauss’s correspondence with his brilliant student Seth Benardete (forthcoming from Mercer University Press). Books about Strauss continue to roll out as well, including Rasoul Namazi’s Leo Strauss and Islamic Political Thought (Cambridge University Press) last year and Timothy Burns’s Leo Strauss on Modern Democracy, Technology, and Liberal Education (suny Press) in 2022.
In raising the question of why Strauss continues to generate such interest, I should note that there is disagreement about what makes Strauss relevant. Some of his students disparage any attempt to look to Strauss for answers to contemporary controversies and even doubt that he had a practical project. This dispute concerns what exactly is meant by political philosophy—which in turn raises the great question (never far from Strauss’s mind) of “the problem of Socrates.” One prominent Straussian, in a lecture in Claremont, California, some decades ago, declared that “Socrates didn’t give a shit about Athens.” It would be closer to the truth, in my estimation, to say that Athens was all Socrates cared about. This is not to deny that Socrates was devoted above all else to philosophy, but rather to suggest that Socratic philosophy seemed to be connected in a particular way with Athens. Plato tells us that when Socrates was awaiting execution in prison, some of his friends suggested he escape and find refuge in another city. Socrates rejected the idea. Strauss remarks, in his essay “What Is Political Philosophy?”:
We are entitled to infer that if Socrates had fled, he would have gone to Crete. [Plato’s] Laws tells us what he would have done in Crete after his arrival: he would have brought the blessings of Athens, Athenian laws, Athenian institutions, banquets, and philosophy to Crete. . . . But Socrates chose to die in Athens. Socrates preferred to sacrifice his life in order to preserve philosophy in Athens rather than to preserve his life in order to introduce philosophy into Crete. If the danger to the future of philosophy in Athens had been less great, he might have chosen to flee to Crete. His choice was a political choice of the highest order.
By the same token, one might say that Strauss, far from being indifferent to our political distress (fully evident to him in the middle of the twentieth century), was almost wholly occupied with what he often called “the crisis of the West”—which he understood to be both political and philosophic. Political philosophy, according to Strauss, had fallen into a “state of decay or perhaps putrefaction” and been replaced with ideology. “This fact may be said to form the core of the contemporary crisis of the West”—which Strauss also described as “the self-destruction of reason.”
To appreciate the twin danger, it is helpful to consider a remark by Benardete, who observed that philosophy “goes through the city.” Socrates started his philosophic career as a kind of natural scientist, but in a famous “turn” he found that the wisdom he was seeking required him to examine the opinions of his fellow citizens regarding the just, the noble, and the good. Following this Socratic example, Strauss could not be wholly indifferent to the political pathologies of our time, because modern conditions had in a certain sense blocked philosophy’s passage through the city. In an allusion to the famous metaphor in Plato’s Republic, Strauss sometimes compared modernity to an artificial cave beneath the natural cave of political life.
Strauss’s profound reflections on the idea of nature, and the corruption of natural political life by modern ideology, are developed in his most famous book, Natural Right and History. Let me point up one aspect of that complicated story, which goes to the root of our contemporary tribulations. It was Rousseau, Strauss explains, who fundamentally transformed the meaning and relationship of nature, freedom, and the self. For Rousseau, “freedom is identical with goodness; to be free, or to be one’s self, is to be good.” In this new understanding, “it is not virtue which makes man free but freedom which makes man virtuous.” Here we find the source of today’s celebration of the uninhibited self, the notion of the “ultimate sanctity of the individual as individual, unredeemed and unjustified,” bound to nothing higher than the self-conscious conception of his freedom.
In a coruscating passage from an essay titled “Perspectives on the Good Society,” Strauss takes aim at the impotent rage that is the inevitable consequence of this flight from all authority. The self, Strauss explains, “is obviously a descendant of the soul”—meaning “it is not the soul.” The soul “is a part of an order which does not originate in the soul.” Those who believe in the self, however, see it as sovereign. It “does not defer to anything higher than itself; yet it is no longer exhilarated by the sense of its sovereignty, but rather oppressed by it.” Finding no purpose within or without, the self becomes “nothing but the accusation or the scream.” Strauss certainly seems to anticipate the oppressive negativity of today’s ideologues of systemic racism, who “constitute themselves by this condemnation; they are nothing but this condemnation or rejection.”
Rather than leave the matter there, Strauss connects the psychological to the political (and the philosophic). Those who can only scream about cosmic injustice behave as if they are in hell, and for them, Strauss notes, hell is “life in the United States.” They act as if they are rebelling against “a holy law; but of this they appeared to be wholly unconscious.”
Strauss’s reference here to law, and especially holy law, is critical. Human beings, when not deranged by ideology, do in fact find their purpose in and through a community that sees itself as holy. Every premodern society was grounded in a sacred law that insisted, as Strauss explains, that “not everything is permitted.” (This sacred community could well be, by the way, a polity deriving its authority from “the laws of nature and nature’s god.”) It is the confrontation with these divine codes, which define all premodern regimes, that first made political philosophy possible. Strauss famously referred to this as “the theological-political problem.”
Modern liberalism’s attempt to create the rational state repudiated all such holy laws as superstition. Methodological science, it was presumed, would bring universal enlightenment and a global order of liberal democracies. But this conceit, as Strauss showed, has instead given us the nihilistic rage of the hollow self. To reverse this condition—to escape from the cave beneath the cave—it is not enough simply to wish for, or even work toward, a revival of Christianity. Virtually every Christian institution today operates within the horizon of modern liberalism; it preaches “humanitarian morality.” What is necessary, Strauss suggested in a famous response to Carl Schmitt, is to escape that horizon and undertake a “radical critique of liberalism.”
That critique, of course, is only a first step. Strauss offered no simple solutions. His recovery of the principles of classical philosophy was only the “indispensable starting point for an adequate analysis, to be achieved by us, of present day society in its peculiar character, and for wise application, to be achieved by us, of these principles to our tasks.” But this is, in fact, a ground for hope. In a review of a book by Yves Simon, Strauss notes that modern philosophy’s audacious project for the liberation of the autonomous self through science “was not evidently virtuous or wise.” But while we may deplore this situation, we cannot ignore it, and he concurs with Simon’s warning about the danger of “trying to escape ‘into anti-social dreams.’” Our duty, Strauss concludes, is to see the crisis clearly and “to act virtuously and wisely in it.” Among Strauss’s greatest achievements was to show how virtue and wisdom can still be understood, and thus how it is at least possible that we may, once again, become virtuous and wise.
Leo Strauss’ Published but Uncollected English Writings, edited by Steven J. Lenzner and Svetozar Minkov; St. Augustine’s Press, 575 pages, $45. ↩
