Posted on 11/10/2003 5:30:35 PM PST by Cosmo
The only way to begin to understand Leo Strauss’s political thought is by studying his writings. This may seem a simple rule of common sense. Yet a glance at the current controversy over Strauss’s supposed influence on contemporary American politics and foreign policy suggests that this rule is easily ignored.
The controversy turns on a legitimate question: “What was Strauss up to?” - or, more precisely, “What was Strauss’s intention?” But it would be misleading to attempt to understand Strauss by ascribing to him an influence, whether beneficial or nefarious, on current policy debates, and then inferring from the alleged influence what his aims really were. It makes far more sense to turn first to Strauss himself - that is, to his writings - in order to understand his political teaching. Then one might evaluate his intentional as well as inadvertent influence on today’s policy debates.
Strauss was born in Germany in 1899 and settled in the United States in the late 1930s. He taught at several schools, most notably the University of Chicago. By the time of his death in 1973, he had written 15 books, most of which comment on the great texts of political philosophy, including the writings of Plato, Xenophon, Machiavelli, and Locke. But Strauss did not restrict himself to the narrow road of a single discipline: His works include interpretations of Thucydides’ history, Aristophanes’ comedies, and Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed. Successful as Strauss was as a teacher, it is above all his books—works such as Natural Right and History (1953), Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), and Socrates and Aristophanes (1966) - that constitute his legacy. His extraordinary body of work makes Strauss more than just one learned voice among many in scholarly debates, worthy of respect perhaps, but not serious engagement. Indeed, it is no doubt some vague sense of Strauss’s status as a thinker that has aroused so much passion both in and out of the academy. His thought is of such a character that it defies indifference.
The rediscovery
Strauss set himself a remarkable task: the revival of Western reading, and therefore, of philosophizing. Strauss claimed that he had rediscovered “a forgotten kind of writing,” and that for almost two centuries the proper manner of reading the greatest works of the past had apparently disappeared. If Strauss in fact rediscovered the art of writing, then he made possible the revival of Western letters. If Strauss’s work is sound, he made it possible for us today to appreciate great books in the spirit and manner in which they were written. And the almost universal vehemence with which his rediscovery was initially denounced and ridiculed by the scholarly world demonstrated just how completely this art had been lost. No passage of Strauss’s more vividly captures what was entailed by this rediscovery than his account of Machiavelli’s art of writing: Time and again we have become bewildered by the fact that the man who is more responsible than any other man for the break with the Great Tradition should in the very act of breaking prove to be the heir, the by no means unworthy heir, to that supreme art of writing which that tradition manifested at its peaks. The highest art has its roots, as he well knew, in the highest necessity. The perfect book or speech obeys in every respect the pure and merciless laws of what has been called logographic necessity. The perfect speech contains nothing slipshod; in it there are no loose threads; it contains no word that has been picked up at random; it is not marred by errors due to faulty memory or to any other kind of carelessness; strong passions and a powerful and fertile imagination are guided with ease by a reason which knows how to use the unexpected gift, which knows how to persuade and which knows how to forbid; it allows of no adornment which is not imposed by the gravity and the aloofness of the subject matter; the perfect writer rejects with disdain and some impatience the demand of vulgar rhetoric that expressions must be varied since change is pleasant.
By recreating with at least equal care the teaching of his ostensible antagonist, Machiavelli, as that of his ostensible guide, Plato, Strauss offers an invitation to open-minded reconsideration, one that consists “in listening to the conversation between the great philosophers, or more generally and more cautiously, between the greatest minds, and therefore in studying the great books.”
Strauss became aware of this unorthodox literary practice, above all, while studying two authors: the medieval rationalist Maimonides and the supposedly naïve student of Socrates, Xenophon. Toward the end of his life, Strauss pointed to the late 1930s as the period in which he fully grasped the character of the forgotten art of writing - what it entailed and what its essential implications were. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, the magnitude of what he had then detected, Strauss waited a decade before publishing his next book. That book was On Tyranny: An Interpretation of Xenophon’s Hiero (1948). Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952) and Natural Right and History (1953) followed soon thereafter. It was primarily by way of these three books that Strauss introduced himself to his contemporary readers.
In this essay, we allow Strauss, as it were, to reintroduce himself, free of the assumptions and accretions piled on him by 50 years of subsequent work by students, scholars, and critics. We begin with the most famous and most accessible of the three books that constitute his own self-introduction, Natural Right and History.
Historicism and relativism
Natural Right and History opens with a solemn invocation of the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of self-evident truths and unalienable rights. And Strauss reminds his readers of the important role natural right played in making the United States “the most powerful and prosperous of the nations of the earth.” Yet no sooner does he appeal to this heritage than he raises a frightening prospect - that the allies’ military victory over Nazi tyranny is being undermined by German thought. At the least, “American social science has adopted the very attitude” that seemed to characterize prewar German thought. It has abandoned adherence to natural right for relativism and historicism. The latter doctrine holds that all human thought is nothing but the accidental or fortuitous product of its time; and the former that all principles of justice are equally arbitrary. There is no ground in nature by which one can reasonably prefer liberal democracy to tyranny. While our social science claims to be able to tell us how we can attain any ends we might desire, it insists that all ends themselves are wholly without foundation. Strauss diagnoses these twin contentions as “retail sanity and wholesale madness.”
Strauss does not directly refute either the teaching of historicism or relativism. That is to say, Strauss does not counter the historicist or relativist denial of the existence of natural right by attempting straightforwardly to demonstrate that there are in nature universal and unchanging principles of justice discernible to human reason. Rather, he seeks to sow doubt by bringing to light the dogmatic assumptions that underlie historicism and relativism. Strauss’s treatment is negative and preparatory. His intention is to induce us to reflect on the opinions we take for granted, to open us to the possibility that there is a true “philosophic ethics or natural right.”
Strauss deploys historicism’s own arguments against itself. Historicism maintains that every trans-historical teaching - every teaching that claims for itself universal validity - is in the decisive sense mistaken. All human thought, it holds, has been and will always be “historical,” subject to crucial limitations imposed by its age and of which it is necessarily unaware. Yet, Strauss notes, this claim itself is trans-historical: “Historicism thrives on the fact that it inconsistently exempts itself from its own verdict about all human thought. The historicist thesis is self-contradictory or absurd.”
Strauss also employs historicism’s appeal to experience against its claims. According to historicism, the “experience of history” shows that all teachings of the past rest on a dogmatic foundation, that in their origin things were taken “for granted which must not be taken for granted.” Historicism claims that thinkers of the past were characteristically under the spell of their historical situation: Plato could not see beyond the horizon of the Greek city, Hobbes could not look beyond that of the English civil war. Yet Strauss, without taking explicit notice of Martin Heidegger, observes that the most theoretically sophisticated form of historicism, “radical historicism,” does not itself call the “experience of history” into question: That vague and indistinct “experience” is taken for granted. Strauss declares that he (or “we”) cannot even attempt to discuss radical historicism’s critique of classical metaphysics. Instead, he begins to prepare his case for the possible existence of natural right by appealing to his readers’ own experiences - “the evidence of those simple experiences regarding right and wrong which are at the bottom of the philosophic contention that there is a natural right.”
In treating positivism, Strauss turns to Max Weber’s thesis that scientific inquiry is competent to speak only to questions of “fact” as opposed to those of “value.” In so doing, Strauss shifts the focus of his discussion from the possibility of natural right to that of a social science that issues in normative evaluations, and eventually to the question of the philosophic life. In a manner akin to his treatment of historicism, Strauss allows Weber’s practice and common sense to undermine Weber’s own thesis. Strauss is particularly struck by Weber’s professed inability to make a reasoned and reasonable choice between the prospects of spiritual revival and passionless vulgarity. Strauss does not here attempt to supply the reasoning that would underlie such a choice and that Weber asserts cannot be supplied. Instead, Strauss includes examples that illustrate both the nihilistic implications and the amazing philistinism of unqualified relativism: “This amounts to an admission that the way of life of ‘specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart’ is as defensible as the ways of life recommended by Amos or by Socrates.” Strauss’s examples are designed to counter Weber’s assertion by providing his readers with a simple experience of high and low.
In describing Weber’s position as “noble nihilism,” Strauss indicates that his relativism stems not from simple indifference to the high, but from his passionate though fruitless search to discover grounds for the experience of the noble or high. Strauss vindicates Weber’s intelligence at the expense of Weber’s own formal position. He shows that Weber consistently violates - indeed, had to violate - his own injunction against using terms of normative evaluation. In fact, as Strauss develops his discussion, we see that Weber’s position - his despair of the very “idea of science” - is due not to his blindness to the lives recommended by the prophet or the philosopher, but to his inability to justify the life of science or philosophy against the claim of divine revelation. In any event, Strauss is not tempted by Weber’s path of despair. He instead uses the moment of natural right’s complete abandonment to see if its origin can be successfully reproduced.
Nature and natural right
In his attempt to recover the possibility of natural right, Strauss sought to recover the origin of the idea of nature through the medium of politics, and to find a ground or basis for justice in nature.
“Natural right” is the manner in which “nature” shows itself in politics. But what is nature? In Natural Right and History, Strauss does not offer a simple definition of nature but proceeds dialectically through prephilosophic political life to show how nature first came to sight or was discovered. This procedure does justice to what Strauss identifies as “the two most important meanings of ‘nature’: ‘nature’ as the essential character of a thing or a group of things and ‘nature’ as ‘the first things.’” Prephilosophic life answers questions about the first things by recourse to authority, to the way we have always done things or the ancestral way. But the experience of prephilosophic life can also lead one, Strauss explains, to doubt what one has been told of the first things. Men always, for example, have preferred what they see for themselves to what they have merely been told. If and when men apply this preference for the seen over the heard to the authoritative accounts of the first things, they come to doubt the ancestral way, or authority, and become aware of “the possibility that the first things originate all other things in a manner fundamentally different from all origination by way of forethought.” By providing an account of how such doubt first arises in prephilosophic life and then proceeding step by step through the manner of its refinement, Strauss reproduces the discovery of the idea of nature understood as the necessary and permanent ground underlying all change and contingency.
What then of the nature of right or justice? The just is typically equated with the legal. But laws result from human agreement or human conventions. And the natural as the permanent is to be fundamentally distinguished from the conventional. The way of dogs - “barking and wagging the tail” - is natural; the way of Jews - “not eating pork” - is conventional. The fundamental distinction between the natural and the conventional seems to call into doubt the existence of natural right or justice before it can even be discovered. How can one discover a standard that is everywhere and always just if the just is everywhere different?
According to Strauss, the idea of natural right emerges when one takes the differing accounts of what is held to be just as an incentive to discover whether anything may in truth be said to be right or just: Differences regarding things which are unquestionably conventional do not arouse serious perplexities, whereas differences regarding the principles of right and wrong necessarily do. The disagreement regarding the principles of justice thus seem to reveal a genuine perplexity aroused by a divination or insufficient grasp of natural right—a perplexity caused by something self-subsistent or natural that eludes human grasp.
The classic natural right teaching arises in response to that perplexity, and in particular, in response to the claim that all right or justice is merely conventional. Strauss calls this view “conventionalism.”
In place of that which is right or just by nature the conventionalist substitutes that which is by nature good: “By nature everyone seeks his own good and nothing but his own good. Justice, however, tells us to seek other men’s good.” Conventionalism, more specifically, identifies the good with the pleasant: All men prefer the pleasant to the painful. The pleasant is unquestionably good. Classic natural right—the teaching of, above all, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—maintains on the contrary that there is an essential difference between the good and the pleasant. The good is more fundamental than the pleasant because there are a variety of pleasures and those pleasures correspond to wants that have a natural order or rank. As Strauss remarks: Different kinds of beings seek or enjoy different kinds of pleasure: the pleasures of an ass differ from the pleasures of a human being. The order of the wants of a being points back to the natural constitution, to the What, of the being concerned; it is that constitution which determines the order, the hierarchy, of the various wants or of the various inclinations of a being.
Everyone acknowledges that human beings stand higher than the brutes by virtue of their possession of “speech or reason or understanding.” This natural capacity elevates man, and it is the cultivation of this capacity that perfects him. “The good life is the perfection of man’s nature. It is the life according to nature.” The classic natural right teaching accordingly culminates in a defense of the philosophic life as the best and truly just life.
Yet this conclusion - one implication of which is that the only valid title to rule is wisdom and that the best regime is that in which the wise rule absolutely—is impracticable. It is even against nature. The wise do not wish to rule, and the unwise do not wish to be ruled. From this it follows that “the political problem consists in reconciling the requirement for wisdom with the requirement for consent.” The best way to give wisdom its due in a manner that meets the necessity for consent is for a wise legislator or founder to draft a code, one that the citizen body can be persuaded to adopt without coercion. By recognizing, or carving out, a sphere for genuine political excellence and achievement, the classical philosophers succeed in according to political life nobility and dignity.
As noted above, Strauss approaches “nature” by way of “right” or justice, and approaches justice through “nature”: When nature is approached through the medium of right or justice, philosophy is compelled to take notice of politics, to become politically responsible. Philosophy as political philosophy, moreover, is able to consider the link between the common good and the natural whole that it seeks to know. By treating “right” by way of “nature,” philosophy is able to moderate the dangerous impulses of those who seek sources of political guidance in that which is purportedly superior to or above reason and nature. In the age of Heidegger and the Nazis, such responsibility and moderation can only be considered a welcome development.
Ancients and moderns
What struck Strauss’s contemporaries most upon picking up Natural Right and History was Strauss’s evident preference for classical to modern political philosophy, or his openness to the seemingly fantastic possibility that premodern thought was superior to that of their day. For those who took for granted the superiority of present-day thought to that of the past, or who believed in “progress,” Natural Right and History was either an incitement to indignation or an illuminating flash in a dark night.
Having presented the classic natural-right teaching, Strauss turns to the modern doctrine of natural right. His presentation brings forth several points of contrast between the classics and the moderns. First, the classics view moral and political matters “in the light of man’s perfection” or his end, whereas the moderns take their bearings from man’s origin or from man in “the state of nature.” Second, according to the classics, “man is by nature a social being” or political animal, while to the moderns, the individual is prior to society. Third, for the classics, political activity is properly directed at the cultivation of virtue; for the moderns, the aim of political life is to replace the insecurity of man’s natural state by a secure liberty.
A fourth contrast concerns what the fundamental political phenomenon is: to the classics, it is the “regime” understood as the “way of life of a society” as exemplified by what society most looks up to or that from which it takes its bearings. For example, a democracy takes its bearings from equality and regards as the authoritative human type “the common man.” Strauss comments: When the authoritative type is the common man, everything has to justify itself before the tribunal of the common man; everything which cannot be justified before that tribunal becomes, at best, merely tolerated, if not despised or suspect. And even those who do not recognize that tribunal are, willy-nilly, molded by its verdicts.
The moderns, in contrast, minimize the centrality of the regime in light of what they maintain is the fundamental moral or political fact: the right of self-preservation.
Other contrasts include, fifth, that for the classics, the best regime provides the standard to guide political life, and “it is of its essence to exist in speech as distinguished from deed”; for the moderns, the “legitimate” or constitutional political order that protects rights provides the standard for political life, and it is meant to be actualized everywhere. Sixth, “according to the classics, political theory proper is essentially in need of being supplemented by the practical wisdom of the statesman on the spot”; generally speaking, the moderns reduce the need for prudence and statesmanship by lowering the goals of politics and emphasizing what can be attained by the right kind of institutions in conjunction with “enlightenment.” Finally, classical teaching identifies the life according to nature or the simply best life as the philosophic life and defends it, while the moderns, by divorcing natural right from “the idea of man’s perfection,” blur the status of the philosophic life.
If one considers even briefly these contrasts, one sees why Strauss elsewhere characterizes the classical writers as being “for almost all practical purposes what now are called conservatives.” And if one considers Strauss’s apparent preference for the classics, one can see why Strauss once remarked that his teaching was held to be “in the odor of conservatism.” At the same time, reading Natural Right and History, one is also struck by Strauss’s emphasis on the moderate character of classical political thought - its “sensible flexibility” and recognition of the necessary imperfections of political life, even its view of political justice as resembling what we today call equality of opportunity. Strauss brings forth the classical concern for virtue, but he also makes clear how far the classics are from a doctrinal moralism or an ideological conservatism.
Strauss limits his treatment of modern natural right in Natural Right and History to a consideration of Hobbes and Locke, and treats “the crisis of modern natural right” by way of Rousseau and Burke. In treating the various modern thinkers, he seeks to explicate their own teachings, and also to explain their historical “influence.” In Strauss’s presentation, all four modern thinkers radicalized the efforts of their predecessors, wittingly or not. Strauss provides a narrative account of modernity according to which Hobbes first sought to construct a political order that, by being in accord with man’s most powerful passion - fear of violent death - is capable of universal actualization. Locke, “on the basis of Hobbes’s view of the law of nature” and “moved by the same spirit” as Hobbes, opposed Hobbes’s absolutism and in so doing advanced the latter’s promotion of “political hedonism.” Locke did this, above all, through his “doctrine of property” and his “emancipation of acquisitiveness” or his justification of the “unlimited acquisition of wealth.”
According to Strauss, the “crisis of modern natural right” arose from a reaction to the modern natural-right doctrine of Hobbes and Locke. Rousseau initiated that crisis by “thinking through Hobbes’s critique of the traditional view” of man’s natural sociality. According to Rousseau, Hobbes was right in seeking to discover the roots of justice in man’s natural presocial condition, but he did not go far enough back. For natural man is not only presocial but prerational as well; he is subhuman. Rousseau thus had to provide an account of the historical evolution of man’s humanity. And this, in turn, gave critical impetus to the rise of historicism - a development complemented by elements of Burke’s thought.
Yet at the same time as he offers this portrait of the unfolding of modern thought, Strauss furnishes indications that it was not fated or inevitable. In his chapter on Rousseau and Burke, Strauss draws attention to the manner in which each contributed “one of the two most important elements in the ‘discovery’ of History.” If less emphatically, Strauss also notes that “the impression grows that Rousseau sought to restore the classical idea of philosophy,” and that “Burke may be said to have restored the older view according to which theory cannot be the sole, or the sufficient, guide of practice.” Between these two restorations, or near-restorations, one has the elements of both classical theory and practice, or a complete classical teaching. Strauss almost suggests, or plays with the possibility, that if only the restorative rather than the radicalizing elements of Burke and Rousseau had been put together, historicism could have been averted and classic natural right restored. A century and a half later, after we had experienced historicism in theory and practice, Natural Right and History brought home to its readers the seriousness of the need for a recovery of natural right without in any way minimizing the problematic character of such a recovery.
The art of writing
Though Natural Right and History and Persecution and the Art of Writing were published within a year of each other, they seem to have little in common. Natural Right and History does not contain much explicit discussion of the philosophic art of writing, and has almost nothing to say about the medieval Islamic and Jewish thinkers discussed in Persecution. Natural Right and History emphasizes the contrast between classical and modern natural right; in Persecution, the emphasis falls not on the fundamental divide in the philosophic tradition, but rather on its continuity.
Persecution and the Art of Writing is Strauss’s only book explicitly devoted to his rediscovery of the forgotten art of writing, of writing “between the lines,” or, more precisely, exotericism. According to Strauss, awareness of exotericism disappeared with the emergence of historicism toward the end of the eighteenth century. In Thoughts on Machiavelli, Strauss identifies the post-Werther Goethe as “the last great man who rediscovered or remembered” the connection between persecution and the art of writing. After Goethe, this insight was lost, and with it “the last vestiges of the recollection of what philosophy originally meant” were destroyed.
In Persecution’s first two chapters, Strauss presents a general account of the causes requiring, and the purposes informing, the practice of exoteric writing. An exoteric work contains a popular or edifying teaching that is accessible to all, and a secret or esoteric teaching that reveals itself only after careful and thoughtful study - study that to begin with is at least as concerned with literary questions as philosophic problems. An exoteric work is written with the utmost precision. It may come in a variety of forms - dialogue, commentary, and treatise, among others. Its author has at his disposal countless literary devices in order simultaneously to conceal and to reveal his true teaching. These “obtrusively enigmatic features,” Strauss notes, include “obscurity of the plan, contradictions, pseudonyms, inexact repetitions of earlier statements, strange expressions, etc.” To understand an exoteric writing properly, one must connect the literary details with the explicit arguments, a process that often yields unexpected turns to the argument as a whole.
Strauss’s basic argument in regard to persecution may be summarized as follows: Most societies of the past and many of the present are nonliberal. As a rule, such societies are more than willing to employ persecution to uphold the prevailing political or religious orthodoxies. As the aim of a philosopher is to replace opinion with knowledge, he necessarily stands in tension with the ruling opinions of his day. Therefore, if he wishes to communicate his thoughts in writing, he must find a way to do so that avoids the wrath of the authorities. Hence the necessity for exoteric writing.
The prominence Strauss accords “persecution” in the title Persecution and the Art of Writing contrasts markedly with his treatment of the subject within the book itself. In his Introduction, Strauss states almost in passing that the fact that “philosophy and the philosophers were in ‘grave danger’” in medieval times was only “the most obvious and the crudest reason why this antiquated or forgotten distinction was needed.” Strauss sets forth two less obvious, though ultimately more important, reasons for the practice of exoteric writing: political responsibility and philosophic education. Since, for example, “to deny that religion is essential to society is difficult … for anyone who puts any trust in the accumulated experience of the human race,” philosophers, who reject belief as arbitrary or unevident, refrain from expressing directly or unambiguously the reasoning that underlies their doubt. Most important, clearly speaking the philosophic truth would be apt to impair what the classical and medieval philosophers sought to promote by the writing of their books: to make it possible for their would-be students to philosophize, not merely to have correct opinions. They want their students to discover truths by themselves, to think on their own. Of the uses of exoteric literature in a liberal society, Strauss comments that philosophic education “is the only answer to the always pressing question, to the political question par excellence, of how to reconcile order which is not oppression with freedom which is not license.”
If persecution is ultimately of secondary importance as a reason for exoteric writing, why does Strauss highlight it in his title? The answer has to do with the biases of modern readers, and Strauss’s effort to present a case that would be intuitively plausible to such an audience. Since he knows that “every decent modern reader is bound to be shocked by the mere suggestion that a great man might have deliberately deceived the large majority of his readers,” Strauss needs to find a means by which to transform the shock of the intelligent reader into a potentially fruitful wonder. Focusing on persecution allows Strauss to begin to effect such a transformation. Precisely because persecution is “the most obvious and the crudest reason” for the practice of exoteric writing, it could serve as the most effective point of departure for the reader’s philosophic education.
The two faces of tyranny
In the first book of his introductory trilogy, On Tyranny: An Interpretation of Xenophon’s “Hiero,” Strauss seeks to revive classical political philosophy through a careful study of Xenophon’s art of writing. Strauss shows that one can reach unexplored heights through reading an old text from a most unlikely source: for Xenophon was widely assumed to be at best a gentleman worthy of indulgence, at worse a simpleton. Strauss’s study renders incredible these then-common views.
At the very outset of On Tyranny, Strauss identifies his immediate addressees: He is submitting his “detailed analysis of a forgotten dialogue on tyranny to the consideration of political scientists.” Strauss indicts the political science of his day for a massive intellectual failure: its inability to recognize for what they were the tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin. Contemporary political science was “haunted” by its belief in the fact-value distinction - a belief that forbade calling a spade a spade. But Strauss quickly turns away from what the classics may have to teach us about political tyranny to less immediately political concerns. He focuses instead on the problem of freedom of thought, and seeks to show how study of the Hiero can be an indispensable aid to understanding that problem.
The Hiero is a product of Socratic rhetoric. “Society will always try to tyrannize thought,” Strauss explains, and “Socratic rhetoric is the classic means for ever again frustrating those attempts.” Socratic rhetoric is a special form of exoteric teaching, the perfection of which is the well-written dialogue. By relating the author’s thought “in an indirect or oblique way,” it places specific demands upon the reader who wishes to understand it. Strauss’s simple summary of those demands consists of two lessons: First, one must give the closest possible attention to even the smallest details and, in particular, the unthematic ones. Second, one must always keep in mind the end or function of genuinely Socratic speech or the purposes of exotericism.
Strauss diagnoses two distinct dangers to which we are subject today: Confronted by the appalling alternative that man, or human thought, must be collectivized either by one stroke and without mercy or else by slow and gentle processes, we are forced to wonder how we could escape from this dilemma. We reconsider therefore the elementary and unobtrusive conditions of human freedom.
Though one should not underestimate the practical utility of Strauss’s recovery of the term “tyranny,” the tyranny that On Tyranny is chiefly designed to counter is of the unobtrusive kind. Strauss went on to write in his 1970 study ,i>Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse: “Our age boasts of being more open to everything human than any earlier age; it is surely blind to the greatness of Xenophon. Without intending it, one might make some discoveries about our age by reading and rereading Xenophon.” To fulfill this dual purpose of opening our eyes to Xenophon’s greatness as well as to the limits of our age, Strauss offers in On Tyranny less an argument than a display: for the character of Xenophon’s achievement reveals itself above all in the product of his art.
Socrates and Machiavelli
The Hiero seems to be an unprepossessing 22-page dialogue between a disheartened tyrant, Hiero, and a well-meaning poet, Simonides. The tyrant denounces tyranny. The poet urges the tyrant to rule justly. Simple; edifying; dull. To read Strauss’s interpretation and to find out instead that the work is a subtle psychological drama between a wary tyrant and a wise and politic teacher of the art of ruling - a drama that masks a broad teaching on the relation between politics and wisdom - is to undergo a sobering lesson in humility.
Strauss parades before us one telling detail after another to persuade us of his author’s rhetorical mastery, providing seemingly countless examples of Xenophontic literary devices. Among these, to name a few, are: various types of meaningful silences, intentional ambiguity, dissimulation, the significance of centrally placed speeches, inexact repetitions of earlier statements, use or non-use of the first person singular, concealment of a work’s plan, and so forth. All the more sobering thus is Strauss’s introductory statement that “Xenophon uses far fewer devices than Plato uses even in his simplest works.”
No modern reader of any sensitivity can come away from On Tyranny without feeling something like awe at the power of Strauss’s exegesis—his ability in a non-arbitrary manner to get so much out of what seems so little. On Tyranny thus teaches the reader how to study a classic text, while inducing in him a sense of the need to do so.
The tyrant Hiero is wary of the poet Simonides: tyrants always fear those of great abilities. As for the wise in particular, Hiero says the tyrant “fears that ‘they might contrive something.’” Thus when Simonides questions him on the desirability of tyrannical life, Hiero takes the opportunity to highlight tyranny’s drawbacks, if mildly at first: He aims to nip in the bud any temptation for tyranny that the wise poet may possess. Simonides is not impressed. As the poet shows greater and greater indifference to the drawbacks of tyranny, Hiero becomes increasingly alarmed. The tyrant thus gradually ratchets up the defects of his way of life. They so fail to move Simonides that a point is reached at which, half in despair, Hiero declares that “the tyrant can hardly do better than to hang himself.” At this point, Simonides - as befits “a humane poet” - takes over the conversation and begins to teach Hiero how to rule well as a tyrant.
Strauss maintains that what brings Hiero to this point of seeming desperation is not something Simonides says, but something he fails to say. For after Hiero had listed at length the horrible crimes the tyrant must commit, Simonides declares that in spite of everything that the tyrant has said, tyranny is highly desirable because it leads to supreme honor. As regards the toils and dangers pointed out by Hiero, Simonides pauses to allude to them; as regards the moral flaws deplored by Hiero, he simply ignores them.… It is by thus silently, i.e., most astutely, revealing a complete lack of scruple that the poet both overwhelms Hiero and convinces him of his competence to give sound advice to a tyrant.
One sees from this summary of the action of the dialogue why Strauss suggests that the Hiero can help us to understand “the deepest roots of modern political thought,” for Simonides appears to be more than a tad “Machiavellian.” Strauss contends that the Hiero can even be said to provide “the point of closest contact” between Socratic or premodern political science and Machiavellian or modern political science. He further speculates that a sufficiently careful study of the >Prince would lead one to conclude that that work’s most shocking statements are precisely the product of “Machiavelli’s perfect understanding of Xenophon’s chief pedagogic lesson.”
But it is also the case that “by confronting the teaching of the Prince with that transmitted through the Hiero, one can grasp most clearly the subtlest and indeed the decisive difference between Socratic political science and Machiavellian political science.” For unlike Machiavelli, Xenophon’s Simonides does not give voice to the evil teaching. It is enough for him simply to show sovereign indifference to moral principles to establish himself as a “teacher of tyrants”: “Xenophon, or his Simonides, is more ‘politic’ than Machiavelli; he refuses to separate ‘moderation’ (prudence) from ‘wisdom’ (insight).” Strauss does not proceed to elaborate further in On Tyranny on this contrast between the Socratic Xenophon and the founder of modernity. For a full treatment of this point, one must turn to Strauss’s later works on the only two thinkers he elevated to the status of being a “problem”: Machiavelli and Socrates.
Strauss’s influence
Strauss did not write his books in such a way as to be immediately relevant to the policy disputes of his day or ours. Rather the reverse. Consider this from the introduction to Thoughts on Machiavelli: “Our critical study of Machiavelli’s teaching can ultimately have no other purpose than to contribute towards the recovery of the permanent problems.” Those permanent problems are far removed from contemporary political interests - but not entirely removed, of course. For in attempting to recover the permanent problems today, Strauss believed he was, like his great philosophic models, “defending the highest interests of mankind.”
One high interest Strauss advanced was the need “to understand that wisdom requires unhesitating loyalty to a decent constitution and even to the cause of constitutionalism.” Strauss was grateful to his adopted country, the United States, for the decencies it managed to preserve amidst the savagery of the twentieth century, and he taught respectful appreciation of the United States’ constitutionalism. That said, the implications of his own teaching were almost always indirect. After all, it was Strauss who noted of his own search for guidance from Plato and Aristotle: We cannot reasonably expect that a fresh understanding of classical political philosophy will supply us with recipes for today’s use.… Only we living today can possibly find a solution to the problems of today. But an adequate understanding of the principles as elaborated by the classics may be the indispensable starting point for an adequate analysis, to be achieved by us, of present-day society in its peculiar character, and for the wise application, to be achieved by us, of these principles to our tasks.
So rather than offer formulas ready-made for implementation, or a “program,” Strauss’s practical influence was at the broad level of how to conceive of politics and matters of public concern.
Strauss, for example, was well aware that the language in which problems are discussed and debated shapes the way they are understood. Accordingly, he sought to ensure that his readers thought and spoke about political matters in a language appropriate to political life. As we have noted, Strauss helped reintroduce the concept of tyranny to political and social science and, thus indirectly, to the broader political debate. And he did so for the best of reasons: “A social science that cannot speak of tyranny with the same confidence with which medicine speaks, for example, of cancer, cannot understand social phenomena as what they are.” Similarly, Strauss’s devastating critique of the distinction between “facts” and “values” has gradually made itself felt within contemporary political discourse: Virtues are now spoken of more often, and values less. And arguments that not too many years ago would have been dismissed as illegitimate attempts to “impose one’s values” - a semantic trick used to end debate on important matters before it can begin—are now more frequently acknowledged to raise serious questions of principle.
One particularly timely example is Strauss’s rehabilitation of the classical understanding of “regime.” To understand political life in terms of regimes is to recognize that political life always partakes of both the universal (principles of justice or rule) and the particular (“our” borders, language, customs, etc.). The concept of regime, properly understood, is one that avoids the unhealthy extremes of utopian universalism and insular nationalism. President Bush’s advocacy of “regime change” - which avoids the pitfalls of a wishful global universalism on the one hand, and a fatalistic cultural determinism on the other - is a not altogether unworthy product of Strauss’s rehabilitation of the notion of regime.
The United States, with its founding by philosophically informed statesmen and possessing an almost providential understanding of its role in the world, was particularly fertile ground for Strauss’s restoration of a political science that places the regime in the forefront of analysis. A natural concern of such an approach is the political thought that informed or shaped the regime at its inception and moments of greatest self-awareness. Strauss, chiefly by way of his students, is in large part responsible for making the thought and principles of America’s founders a source of political knowledge and appeal, and for making political excellence more broadly a subject of appreciation and study. But Strauss’s chief practical concern throughout was to raise the status and reform the character of liberal education. So far, the official keepers of this arena have rather vigorously resisted his generosity. Still, his works continue to educate and to charm. While philosophy ought to guard against the wish to be edifying, Strauss’s example suggests it is of necessity edifying.
Copyright of The Public Interest, No. 153 (Fall 2003), pp. 19-39 © 2003 by National Affairs, Inc.
Steven Lenzner is a fellow at the New Citizenship Project and is writing a book on Leo Strauss. William Kristol is editor of the Weekly Standard.
A bump for Leo Strauss!
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