Fifty years have passed since the death of one of the most influential 20th-century political philosophers, Leo Strauss (1899–1973), whose major legacies included reviving interest in the eternal truths (as well as the enduring problems) presented by pre-modern political philosophers of classical antiquity and the Middle Ages and calling into question the erroneous historicism prevalent among progressives, that is, the belief that all standards of justice and right are relative only to their time and place.
One of the main contentions of Strauss was that, without political philosophy, there can be no real understanding of practical politics. The modern decoupling of philosophy and politics betrays human nature, which is permanent and unchanging. Modern-era liberalism emphasizes the pursuit of individual liberty as its highest goal, but Strauss wanted the focus to return to human excellence and political virtue. He was a firm critic of positivism, relativism, and historicism. If there are no transhistorical standards and truths, then all values are subjective, and we will gradually slide into nihilism.
Strauss was born into an orthodox Jewish family in Germany, and after receiving his education in that country, he moved to the United States in 1937. In the U.S., he embarked on an academic career spanning three decades as a scholar of political philosophy at Columbia University, the New School for Social Research, and, finally, the University of Chicago. He was also the author of 15 books, the most famous of these being The City and Man, What Is Political Philosophy?, Thoughts on Machiavelli, and Natural Right and History.
Early in his academic career, Strauss was especially drawn to Heidegger, Husserl, Carl Schmitt, and more broadly to Jewish thought. In the 1930s, he turned his attention to early modern philosophy, in which Strauss saw parallels between political philosophy and the conflict between reason and revelation, a conflict between Athens and Jerusalem. His ‘theologico-political problem’ grappled with the question of where final authority rests: with the claims of revelation or with man’s autonomous human reason as the foundational guide to life.
Once in the U.S., his interest expanded to the history of political philosophy, which he divided into the classical and modern ages and referred to as “the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns.” The man to whom Strauss pointed as being the one responsible for the break with the classical age was Niccolò Machiavelli.
Strauss on Machiavelli
It was with this topic that the conference entitled “Philosophy as Knowledge of the Whole: A Conference on the Fifty-Year Remembrance of Leo Strauss’s Death,” held on the 12th of October, 2023, at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest, began. The keynote speech was given by Michael Anton, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and former senior national security official in the Trump administration, and was entitled “Strauss on the Ancients and the Moderns in Thoughts on Machiavelli.”
Anton, a self-confessed Straussian, distilled the basic thought of Strauss into the notion that the ancients were good (Plato and Aristotle were especially close to his thinking) and that moderns were bad. The fundamental break with the ancients came in the early 16th century with Machiavelli, whom Strauss called a “teacher of evil.” The main problem with Machiavelli for Strauss, according to Anton, was that he “lowers the goal from the pursuit of virtue.” Machiavelli reduced problems of politics to technical problems, and he saw politics as a pursuit of self-interest, thus going against Plato’s idea of the common good. Strauss wanted to go back to the ancients to show how bad the moderns were and that the ancients were in no way outdated. Anton did note that Strauss became more positive about Machiavelli over time, and, in a 1972 essay, he curiously claimed that Machiavelli had saved political philosophy.
According to Strauss, with the Roman conquest of the Greek world, philosophy as an autonomous discipline became captured by religion, and Strauss was firmly against the instrumentalist subordination of philosophy to religion and its interpreters. Strauss accepted currents in modernity as politically necessary but deemed his age philosophically and spiritually tragic. Moreover, if the modern age was to be rescued from its own self-destructive tendencies, it needed to be attentive to certain ancient teachings, both classical and biblical.
Strauss, contemporary conservatism, and the modern age
Andreas Kinneging, professor of philosophy of law at the University of Leiden, followed with an assessment of the conservatism of Leo Strauss. According to Kinneging, conservatism is the opposite of progressivism, and Strauss is the opposite of a progressive, being, as he was, pessimistic about the developments in the modern world, the perfectibility of human nature, or any mention of ‘the arc of history.’ Strauss sided with the ancients over the moderns, but he did not recognize one source of truth—the existence of which marks a modern assumption, to say the least.
Kinneging noted that Strauss preferred the ancient rationalists over believers in divine revelation. Strauss had no anti-religious feelings but was not himself a believer. Despite this, he saw religion as an ally of philosophy in the quest for truth. The pursuit of the truth, according to Strauss, is indirect and depends on the work of great thinkers finding meaning in great works. Strauss humbly considered himself “only a scholar” and not a philosopher (i.e., a great thinker). He was trying to understand great philosophers, largely serving as a commentator rather than giving an account of what he deemed the truth to be. However, as Kinneging pointed out, Strauss did pass judgment in his writing, which shows that he was trying to grasp the truth after all. Lastly, for Strauss, contemporary mass, democratic, egalitarian education meant that great philosophers were no longer possible to produce.
Next, Zbigniew Janowski, a former professor at Towson University (Maryland, USA), proceeded with his talk entitled “Is Leo Strauss Still Worth Reading?” Despite claiming that “Straussians are a philosophical sect” and that he was not a Straussian, Janowski made a compelling case for reading Strauss today. Janowski emphasized the ‘noble lie’ of equality in modern democratic societies, a lie that cannot be criticized in the West today without grave repercussions. Democracy veers into anarchy because of a lack of authority, after which there is a dissolution of the social order and a slide into tyranny. Strauss was not convinced of the veracity of religious claims, but he saw that religion could be needed to guarantee social order. According to him, “Philosophers have a moral obligation to lie nobly.” Strauss was an atheist who mourned the demise of the natural law theories that had played such a crucial role in the wider religious ethics of the West, since he saw a genuine need for them in our own age, but essentially, he remained unconvinced by them.
Timothy Burns, professor of political science at Baylor University (Texas, USA), continued the conference with the theme of democracy in Strauss’s writing. Burns’ presentation was entitled “Leo Strauss on the Origin and Character of Modern Democracy.” Strauss understood that the goal of the Enlightenment—which he felt was, overall, a civilizing force—was that revelation would be outlawed in favor of exclusively relying on human reason. This direction originated from Hobbes and his notion of pre-political natural rights. According to Hobbes, rights exist, and duties come as ways by which we socially calculate the rights we want to secure. Hobbes believed that absolute monarchy could best secure these rights, which is why Hobbes leads to liberalism but not necessarily democracy.
According to Strauss, Spinoza was the first philosopher who was both a democrat and a liberal, and this is the origin of modern republicanism. Spinoza’s democracy afforded more freedom for human passions than Hobbes’ model and thus lacked the necessary safeguards of moral virtue. Burns argued that Strauss was a “friend of liberal democracy,” since he thought that everyone was a better judge of his own interests than any wise man. However, Strauss recommended an aristocracy within democracy as a way out of our modern predicament. Perhaps surprisingly, according to Burns, Strauss did not subscribe to the ‘secularization thesis,’ namely that traditional religions are in terminal decline in our industrialized world.
The crisis of the West
To conclude, one of the reasons why the scholarship of Leo Strauss is of importance to conservatives comes from his book The City and Man.
It is not self-forgetting and pain-loving antiquarianism nor self-forgetting and intoxicating romanticism which induces us to turn with passionate interest, with unqualified willingness to learn, toward the political thought of classical antiquity. We are impelled to do so by the crisis of our time, the crisis of the West.
If the West was considered to have been in crisis in Strauss’s time, then we have moved closer to civilizational collapse in our time. The hour is late, and time is running short.
