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Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy
By Michael P. Zuckert, Catherine H. Zuckert The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-13587-8
CHAPTER 1
Introductory
Political Philosophy and Its Enemies
Like many other of the outstanding political theorists of his era Strauss was an émigré from Germany, driven into exile by the disastrous events of the 1930s in his homeland. Born a Jew in an out-of-the way part of Germany, Strauss was of course vulnerable to the anti-Jewish Nazi regime. He left Germany just as Hitler was coming to power, traveling first to France, then to England, and, finally, to the United States, where he eventually became a citizen and established himself as one of the major political philosophers of the twentieth century.
Strauss described his family home as one deeply immersed in Jewish observance but lacking in Jewish learning. In his early years he was much engaged in the political Zionist movement, but at the same time procured a standard German secular philosophic education. Two events were probably most decisive for setting him on the path that led to his mature philosophic orientation. The first was his education. He was primarily educated in the neo-Kantian tradition, the leading light of which in Strauss's younger years was the German Jewish thinker Hermann Cohen. Cohen died before Strauss reached the university. His successor as leader of the neo-Kantian movement was Ernst Cassirer. Strauss ended up writing his dissertation at the University of Hamburg under Cassirer.
Although Strauss worked under Cassirer, Cassirer does not appear to have had a major impact on him. Even as he was studying neo-Kantianism Strauss was attracted by more modern, more philosophically radical movements. He started reading Nietzsche while in gymnasium and remained in thrall to him until age thirty or so. He was also exploring more formally some of the newer philosophic movements. Thus he went to Freiburg for a postdoctoral year in 1922 to study with Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. At that time he became aware of Husserl's young assistant, Martin Heidegger, who was ten years Strauss's senior. Strauss always admired Husserl, but the young Heidegger swept him away. He heard the latter lecture on Aristotle and was awed by the seriousness and penetration of Heidegger as a reader of old texts and thinker of new thoughts. Strauss was apparently not present at the famous debate at Davos in 1929 between Cassirer and Heidegger, a battle of titans representing the old and the new thinking, respectively, but he was greatly impressed by reports of Heidegger's performance. At Marburg he also met Hans-Georg Gadamer and Karl Löwith, two lifelong friends.
He continued to pursue his Jewish interests by affiliating with Franz Rosenzweig's Free Jewish House of Study in Frankfurt. He left that post in 1925 when he moved to the German Academy of Jewish Research in Berlin, where he began writing his first book, Spinoza's Critique of Religion. In 1932 he received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation that enabled him to do research first in Paris, where he met Alexandre Kojève (with whom he subsequently published an exchange in Strauss's volume On Tyranny), and then in Britain, where he completed his classic study The Political Philosophy of Hobbes.
Three thinkers of his formative years—Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger—always remained important for Strauss, and elements of what he learned from them remained in his mature thought. But he did not end up a follower of any of them any more than of neo-Kantianism. The three turned out to be a springboard for an attempt by Strauss to recover earlier Greek thought. The effort was midwifed by his longtime friend Jacob Klein, who had studied with Husserl and was influenced by Heidegger, but who saw in them a possibility they had not seen in themselves—the possibility of recapturing ancient Greek thought, in Klein's case ancient mathematical thinking. Klein sought to recapture ancient thought not merely in a more historically adequate way, but as a truer grasp of the nature of mathematical reality than modern mathematics contained. In the 1930s Strauss set off on a similar path—to return to ancient political philosophy. This meant breaking with two of his early philosophical guides, Nietzsche and Heidegger, whose historicism in effect decreed such a return to be impossible and unworthy.
Strauss's philosophic reorientation coincided to a considerable extent with the political disaster unfolding around him. The late 1920s made clear to all who could see, as Strauss might say, that the liberal democratic Weimar Republic established in Germany after the German defeat in World War I was collapsing. It lurched from crisis to crisis, and the moderate liberal center seemed powerless when caught in the pincers of the communist left and the ultranationalist right, the most determined representative of which was Hitler's National Socialist Party (LAM, 225).
There was an uncanny and important coincidence between these two major formative forces in Strauss's life, for the philosophers to whom he was attracted, especially Nietzsche and Heidegger, were at the forefront of challenging the kind of liberal/Enlightenment thought that inspired Weimar in its noblest aspirations. From the failure of Weimar at the hands of the political extremes and the failure of Enlightenment philosophy revealed by Nietzsche and Heidegger, Strauss inferred that the liberal Enlightenment project was not viable. At first he seems to have concluded that the vacuum caused by the failure of liberalism could be filled only by a movement of the right, like Mussolini's early Fascism: in a now-infamous letter to his friend Karl Löwith Strauss wrote that only a movement of the right, not the old and now discredited appeal to "the rights of man," could fend off the "shabby" Nazis or the communists. Strauss believed at the time, on the basis of the Weimar experience unfolding before his eyes and the testimony of the philosophers he most admired, that the liberal democratic experiment had proved a failure. His subsequent experience in England and the United States, and their experience in World War II, would later lead him to greatly revise his opinion, especially when, as his understanding of classical philosophy deepened, he came to see that liberal democracy, viewed in the perspective of the classics rather than the moderns, had much greater potential than he had at first believed. His perspective was never the same as that of the ordinary champion of liberal democracy, but on the basis of classical political science he came to affirm it as the best regime possible for the modern world.
After leaving Germany and finally settling in the United States, Strauss led a much less eventful life, at least in its externals. His first regular position was at the New School for Social Research in New York, as one of the army of émigrés employed by that haven for émigrés. He left the New School for the University of Chicago in 1947, personally recruited by its president, Robert Maynard Hutchins. Strauss spent the bulk of his remaining career at Chicago, publishing his best-known books while there, including Natural Right and History, Thoughts on Machiavelli, and The City and Man. He retired at the then-mandatory time in 1967, moving first to Claremont Men's College as a colleague of his former student Harry Jaffa and then to St. John's College (MD), where he was reunited with his old friend and onetime mentor Jacob Klein. His post-Chicago years were productive—he completed several studies of Xenophon and his posthumous book The Argument and the Action of Plato's "Laws"—but they were also years of ill health, to which he finally succumbed in 1973.
The "Crisis of Our Times"
Strauss often began his books, articles, and classroom presentations with an evocation of "the crisis of our times." By that phrase he meant, in part, the obvious political dislocations of the day—the rise of the totalitarian regimes, World War II, the Cold War, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and the bevy of other threats posed by technology. But he also meant a more strictly intellectual crisis: the dominance of positivism and historicism. These movements represented intellectual threats, in that they rendered political philosophy incredible; they also posed practical threats, in that they undermined the confidence of the West in itself and fueled a flight from rationalism, with results that became manifest in twentieth-century political life.
Positivism maintained that modern science is the highest form of knowledge and thus the model or standard for all knowledge; in its most mature form positivism announced that there is a fundamental difference between facts and values and that only factual judgments are within the competence of science. These positivist declarations meant the death of political philosophy, for "political philosophy is the attempt truly to know both the nature of political things and the right, or the good, political order" ("WIPP," 12).
Historicism rejects both claims of positivism, the paradigmatic and authoritative character of modern science and the distinction between facts and values. Historicism nonetheless also rejects the possibility of political philosophy, "because of the essentially historical character of society and of human thought" ("WIPP," 26). In this view there can be no knowledge of the truly good society, for all thought is historically bounded and cannot determine what the good society as such is.
These two doctrines provoke a practical or political crisis because they rob their adherents of the capacity to accept as a rational truth the goodness of their (or any particular) society or its aspirations and goals. Both lead to a kind of relativism, which goes beyond toleration of differences and amounts to a sense of a lack of defensible grounds for attachment to one's society, moral code, or way of life. Strauss believed that he had seen the deleterious effects of this loss of confidence in moral and political truth in the ineffectual reactions of the decent democratic center to the threats posed by fanatical adherents of the left and right in Weimar Germany. As a result of the "flight from scientific reason" resulting from the doctrine that reason cannot pronounce on value questions, explicitly irrational "commitment" took the place of both reason and moderation. Strauss thus concluded that the restoration of the possibility of political philosophy was the precondition for the sober defense of liberal democratic regimes marked by rule of law and, more generally, for the support of moderate regimes. But positivism and historicism were not merely moral and political errors; they also stood in the way of the pursuit of wisdom or philosophy, which, Strauss thought, was the highest good for a human being. Positivism, with its narrowing of the sphere of rational inquiry to the scientific paradigm, and historicism, with its dogmatic insistence on the historical provenance of all thinking, prevented the kind of inquiry the awakening to philosophy requires.
Strauss's Critique of Positivism
Strauss probably gave his most thorough presentation and critique of positivism and historicism in a lecture course he offered in 1965. His presentation in this course was more historical than most of his treatments of these themes. He set out to show that both positivism and historicism depend upon claims about the history of human thought that need to be tested by an independent examination of that history.
Like most scholars, Strauss identified the specific origins of positivism in the works of Auguste Comte and Georg Simmel. He acknowledged that the Comtean position is by no means identical to current positivism, but he declared that "we cannot understand the positivism of today without having first understood Comte."
Comte's "positive philosophy" consisted of an argument about the history of the development of the human mind and the necessarily comprehensive, self-reflective character of social science. In his two chief works, Strauss explained, Comte traced the intellectual development of humanity in three stages. In the first, "theological" stage, human beings thought they could answer the greatest questions and exercise unlimited control over the world by imbuing the things of the world with wills that they could influence. In the second, "metaphysical" stage, these willing beings were replaced by abstract forces or "entities." But in the third, "positive" stage, man abandoned the question of the origin and destiny of things, i.e., the why, and began asking merely how things are related.
Although the theological and metaphysical approaches retained a certain practical appeal because they claimed to answer all questions, Comte thought that the victory of positive philosophy was inevitable. He observed that the human mind is powerfully disposed to unity of method. However, as a result of the metaphysical critique of religion and the development of the modern sciences—beginning with mathematics, but then extending to physics, chemistry, and biology—human beings at his time (the early nineteenth century) lived in a state of intellectual and, therefore, moral and political anarchy. The development of a comprehensive science of man was thus imperative, both theoretically and practically. This science, for which Comte coined the terms "sociology" and "positive philosophy," was not merely the last science to develop. Although it presupposes biology in the way biology presupposes chemistry and physics presupposes mathematics, Comte also recognized that his positive philosophy had to be the science of science, because he saw that science is a human activity and requires an explanation as much as any other phenomenon. He also observed that human beings cannot live together except on the basis of certain fundamental agreements, and that the critiques leveled by "metaphysical" philosophy in the seventeenth century had destroyed belief in Catholicism, i.e., the hitherto reigning belief. Science had become the only possible source of intellectual authority; but the goal and character of the science of science had not become clear until the French Revolution and its aftermath showed that humanity had a common progressive destiny.
Like our contemporary positivists, Strauss pointed out, Comte insisted that science is the only form of true knowledge. Unlike contemporary positivists, however, Comte also thought that science could discover the best form of government. His "positive philosophy" was not value free, and Comte continued to describe his investigations as "political philosophy." Comte's scientific approach did lead him to deny that there is any essential difference between human beings and animals. Like earlier modern philosophers he observed that human beings are driven primarily by their passions. But he opposed the "metaphysical," abstract notion of a "state of nature," in which individuals contract with one another to construct a government, by observing that human beings live in society with one another at all times and in all places and that these societies are not the products of intentional design so much as spontaneous growths. Comte's positivism was thus both a development from and a reaction against the preceding Enlightenment forms of modern philosophy.
Comte thought that the progressive development of the distinctively human rational faculty would gradually change the way in which human beings organize their common life. As the division of labor that constitutes society becomes greater, individuals lose a sense of the common good. Coercive authority thus becomes necessary to check the selfish, asocial passions of individuals. In earlier times the subordination of the productive classes to the rule of warriors had to be justified by theology; but with the advance of science and industry, religion could be replaced by positive philosophy and the military by captains of industry and bankers. Positive philosophers would not hold political offices, but they would tend to the spiritual development of their people by shaping public opinion and using a free press to critique the government.
Strauss concluded that Comte had vastly overestimated the power of reason. Comte's vision of an ever more pacific, prosperous, and rational future was not consonant with his own understanding of human nature as basically passionate. Although Comte acknowledged the natural right of every human being to be treated in accord with the dignity of man, his emphasis on the intellectual development of a few individuals in a system of ever greater specialization meant that human beings would become increasingly unequal. He also thought that the fate of half the human race, the female half, was biologically determined.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy by Michael P. Zuckert, Catherine H. Zuckert. Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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