Leo Strauss |
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| Full name | Leo Strauss |
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| Born | September 20, 1899 Kirchhain, Prussia, German Empire |
| Died | October 18, 1973 Annapolis, Maryland, United States |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Continental Philosophy, Platonism |
| Main interests | Metaphysics, Epistemology, Greek philosophy, History of philosophy, Philosophy of religion, Political philosophy, Nihilism, Continental philosophy, Politics, Islamic philosophy, Jewish Philosophy |
| Notable ideas | Esotericism |
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Influenced by
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Leo Strauss (September 20, 1899 – October 18, 1973) was a political philosopher and classicist who specialized in classical political philosophy. He was born in Germany to Jewish parents and later emigrated to the United States. He spent most of his career as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he taught several generations of students and published fifteen books.
Originally trained in the Neo-Kantian tradition with Ernst Cassirer and immersed in the work of the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Strauss later focused his research on the Greek texts of Plato and Aristotle, retracing their interpretation through medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy, and encouraged application of their ideas to contemporary political theory.
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Leo Strauss was born in the small town of Kirchhain in Hessen-Nassau, a province of the Kingdom of Prussia (part of the German Empire), on September 20, 1899, to Hugo Strauss and Jennie Strauss, née David. According to Allan Bloom's 1974 obituary in Political Theory, Strauss "was raised as an Orthodox Jew," but the family does not appear to have completely embraced Orthodox practice.[1] In "A Giving of Accounts", published in The College 22 (1) and later reprinted in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, Strauss noted he came from a "conservative, even orthodox Jewish home," but one which knew little about Judaism except strict adherence to ceremonial laws. His father and uncle operated a farm supply and livestock business that they inherited from their father, Meyer (1835–1919), a leading member of the local Jewish community.
After attending the Kirchhain Volksschule and the Protestant Rektoratsschule, Leo Strauss was enrolled at the Gymnasium Philippinum (affiliated with the University of Marburg) in nearby Marburg (from which Johannes Althusius and Carl J. Friedrich also graduated) in 1912, graduating in 1917. He boarded with the Marburg Cantor Strauss (no relation); the Cantor's residence served as a meeting place for followers of the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen. Strauss served in the German army during World War I from July 5, 1917 to December 1918.
Strauss subsequently enrolled in the University of Hamburg, where he received his doctorate in 1921; his thesis, "On the Problem of Knowledge in the Philosophical Doctrine of F. H. Jacobi", was supervised by Ernst Cassirer. He also attended courses at the Universities of Freiburg and Marburg, including some taught by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Strauss joined a Jewish fraternity and worked for the German Zionist movement, which introduced him to various German Jewish intellectuals, such as Norbert Elias, Leo Löwenthal, Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin. Strauss' closest friend was Jacob Klein but he also was intellectually engaged with Karl Löwith, Gerhard Krüger, Julius Guttman, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Franz Rosenzweig (to whom Strauss dedicated his first book), Gershom Scholem, Alexander Altmann, and the Arabist Paul Kraus, who married Strauss' sister Bettina (Strauss and his wife later adopted their child when both parents died in the Middle East). With several of these friends, Strauss carried on vigorous epistolary exchanges later in life, many of which are published in the Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Writings), some in translation from the German. Strauss had also been engaged in a discourse with Carl Schmitt. However, when Strauss left Germany, he broke off this discourse when Schmitt failed to answer his letters.
In 1931 Strauss sought his post-doctoral (Habilitation) with the theologian Paul Tillich, but was turned down. After receiving a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1932, Strauss left his position at the Academy of Jewish Research in Berlin for Paris. He returned to Germany only once, for a few short days 20 years later. In Paris he married Marie (Miriam) Bernsohn, a widow with a young child whom he had known previously in Germany. He adopted his wife's son, Thomas, and later his sister's child; he and Miriam had no biological children of their own. At his death he was survived by Thomas, his sister's daughter Jenny Strauss Clay, and three grandchildren. Strauss became a lifelong friend of Alexandre Kojève and was on friendly terms with Raymond Aron, Alexandre Koyré, and Étienne Gilson. Because of the Nazis' rise to power, he chose not to return to his native country. Strauss found shelter, after some vicissitudes, in England, where in 1935 he gained temporary employment at University of Cambridge, with the help of his in-law, David Daube, who was affiliated with Gonville and Caius College. While in England, he became a close friend of R. H. Tawney, and was on less friendly terms with Isaiah Berlin.
Unable to find permanent employment in England, Strauss moved in 1937 to the United States, under the patronage of Harold Laski, who bestowed upon Strauss a brief lectureship. After a short stint as Research Fellow in the Department of History at Columbia University, Strauss secured a position at The New School, where, between 1938 and 1948, he eked out a hand-to-mouth living in the political science faculty. In 1939, he served for a short term as a visiting professor at Hamilton College. He became a U.S. citizen in 1944, and in 1949 he became a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he received, for the first time in his life, a good wage. In 1954 he met Löwith and Gadamer in Heidelberg and delivered a public speech on Socrates. Strauss held the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professorship in Chicago until 1969. He had received a call for a temporary lectureship in Hamburg in 1965 (which he declined for health reasons) and received and accepted an honorary doctorate from Hamburg University and the Bundesverdienstkreuz (German Order of Merit) via the German representative in Chicago. In 1969 Strauss moved to Claremont McKenna College (formerly Claremont Men's College) in California for a year, and then to St. John's College, Annapolis in 1970, where he was the Scott Buchanan Distinguished Scholar in Residence until his death from pneumonia in 1973.
For Strauss, politics and philosophy were necessarily intertwined. He regarded the trial and death of Socrates as the moment when political philosophy came into existence. Strauss considered one of the most important moments in the history of philosophy Socrates' argument that philosophers could not study nature without considering their own human nature, which, in the words of Aristotle, is that of "a political animal."[2]
Strauss distinguished "scholars" from "great thinkers", identifying himself as a scholar. He wrote that most self-described philosophers are in actuality scholars, cautious and methodical. Great thinkers, in contrast, boldly and creatively address big problems. Scholars deal with these problems only indirectly by reasoning about the great thinkers' differences.[3]
In Natural Right and History Strauss begins with a critique of Max Weber's epistemology, briefly engages the relativism of Martin Heidegger (who goes unnamed), and continues with a discussion of the evolution of natural rights via an analysis of the thought of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. He concludes by critiquing Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Edmund Burke. At the heart of the book are excerpts from Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. Much of his philosophy is a reaction to the works of Heidegger. Indeed, Strauss wrote that Heidegger's thinking must be understood and confronted before any complete formulation of modern political theory is possible.
Strauss wrote that Friedrich Nietzsche was the first philosopher to properly understand relativism, an idea grounded in a general acceptance of Hegelian historicism. Heidegger, in Strauss' view, sanitized and politicized Nietzsche, whereas Nietzsche believed "our own principles, including the belief in progress, will become as relative as all earlier principles had shown themselves to be" and "the only way out seems to be...that one voluntarily choose life-giving delusion instead of deadly truth, that one fabricate a myth".[4] Heidegger believed that the tragic nihilism of Nietzsche was a "myth" guided by a defective Western conception of Being that Heidegger traced to Plato. In his published correspondence with Alexandre Kojève, Strauss wrote that Hegel was correct when he postulated that an end of history implies an end to philosophy as understood by classical political philosophy.
In 1952 Strauss published Persecution and the Art of Writing, commonly understood to advance the argument that some philosophers write esoterically in order to avoid persecution by political or religious authorities. A few readers of Strauss suggest esoteric writing may also seek to protect politics from political philosophy – the reasoning of which might negatively affect opinions undergirding the political order. Stemming from his study of Maimonides and Al Farabi, and then extended to his reading of Plato (he mentions particularly the discussion of writing in the Phaedrus), Strauss proposed that an esoteric text was the proper type for philosophic learning. Rather than simply outlining the philosopher's thoughts, the esoteric text forces readers to do their own thinking and learning. As Socrates says in the Phaedrus, writing does not respond when questioned, but invites a dialogue with the reader, thereby reducing the problems of the written word. One political danger Strauss pointed to was the acceptance of dangerous ideas too quickly by students. This was perhaps also relevant in the trial of Socrates, where his relationship with Alcibiades was used against him.
Ultimately, Strauss believed that philosophers offered both an "exoteric" or salutary teaching and an "esoteric" or true teaching, which was concealed from the general reader. For maintaining this distinction, Strauss is often accused of having written esoterically himself. Moreover he also emphasized that writers often left contradictions and other excuses to encourage the more careful examination of the writing. Leo Strauss's favorite novelist was Jane Austen.[5]
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According to Strauss, modern social science is flawed because it assumes the fact-value distinction, a concept which Strauss finds dubious, tracing its roots in Enlightenment philosophy to Max Weber, a thinker whom Strauss described as a "serious and noble mind.” Weber wanted to separate values from science but, according to Strauss, was really a derivative thinker, deeply influenced by Nietzsche’s relativism.[6] Strauss treated politics as something that could not be studied from afar. A political scientist examining politics with a value-free scientific eye, for Strauss, was self-deluded. Positivism, the heir to both Auguste Comte and Max Weber in the quest to make purportedly value-free judgments, failed to justify its own existence, which would require a value judgment.
While modern liberalism had stressed the pursuit of individual liberty as its highest goal, Strauss felt that there should be a greater interest in the problem of human excellence and political virtue. Through his writings, Strauss constantly raised the question of how, and to what extent, freedom and excellence can coexist. Strauss refused to make do with any simplistic or one-sided resolutions of the Socratic question: What is the good for the city and man?
Two significant political-philosophical dialogues Strauss had with living thinkers were those he held with Carl Schmitt and Alexandre Kojève. Schmitt, who would later become, for a short time, the chief jurist of Nazi Germany, was one of the first important German academics to positively review Strauss's early work. Schmitt's positive reference for, and approval of, Strauss's work on Hobbes was instrumental in winning Strauss the scholarship funding that allowed him to leave Germany.[7] Strauss's critique and clarifications of The Concept of the Political led Schmitt to make significant emendations in its second edition. Writing to Schmitt in 1932, Strauss summarised Schmitt's political theology thus: "[B]ecause man is by nature evil, he therefore needs dominion. But dominion can be established, that is, men can be unified only in a unity against - against other men. Every association of men is necessarily a separation from other men... the political thus understood is not the constitutive principle of the state, of order, but a condition of the state."[8] Strauss, however, directly opposed Schmitt's position. For Strauss, Schmitt and his return to Hobbes helpfully clarified the nature of our political existence and our modern self-understanding. Schmitt's position is therefore symptomatic of the modern liberal self-understanding. Strauss believed that such an analysis, as in Hobbes' time, served as a useful "preparatory action", revealing our contemporary orientation towards the eternal problems of politics (social existence). But for Strauss, Schmitt's reification of our modern self-understanding of the problem of politics into a political theology was not an adequate solution. Strauss instead advocated a return to a broader classical understanding of human nature, and a tentative return to political philosophy, in the tradition of the ancient philosophers.[9]
With Alexandre Kojève, Strauss had a close and lifelong philosophical friendship. They had first met as students in Berlin. The two thinkers shared a boundless philosophical respect for each other. Kojève would later write that, without befriending Strauss, "I never would have known[...] what philosophy is."[10] The political-philosophical dispute between Kojève and Strauss centred on the role that philosophy should and can be allowed to play in politics. Kojève, who as a senior statesman in the French government was instrumental in the creation of the EU, argued that philosophers should have an active role in shaping political events. Strauss, on the contrary, believed that philosophy and political-conditions were fundamentally opposed, and believed that philosophers should not, and must not, have a role in politics, noting the disastrous results of Plato in Syracuse. Strauss believed that philosophers should play a role in politics only to the extent that they can ensure that philosophy, which he saw as mankind's highest activity, can be free from political intervention.[11]
Strauss taught that liberalism in its modern form contained within it an intrinsic tendency towards extreme relativism, which in turn led to two types of nihilism[12] The first was a “brutal” nihilism, expressed in Nazi and Marxist regimes. In On Tyranny, he wrote that these ideologies, both descendants of Enlightenment thought, tried to destroy all traditions, history, ethics, and moral standards and replace them by force under which nature and mankind are subjugated and conquered.[13] The second type – the "gentle" nihilism expressed in Western liberal democracies – was a kind of value-free aimlessness and a hedonistic "permissive egalitarianism", which he saw as permeating the fabric of contemporary American society.[14][15] In the belief that 20th century relativism, scientism, historicism, and nihilism were all implicated in the deterioration of modern society and philosophy, Strauss sought to uncover the philosophical pathways that had led to this situation. The resultant study led him to advocate a tentative return to classical political philosophy as a starting point for judging political action.[16]
According to Strauss, Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies had mistaken the city-in-speech described in Plato's Republic for a blueprint for regime reform. Strauss quotes Cicero, "The Republic does not bring to light the best possible regime but rather the nature of political things – the nature of the city."[17] Strauss argued that the city-in-speech was unnatural, precisely because "it is rendered possible by the abstraction from eros".[18] The city-in-speech abstracted from eros, or bodily needs, and therefore could never guide politics in the manner Popper claimed. Though skeptical of "progress", Strauss was equally skeptical about political agendas of "return" (which is the term he used in contrast to progress). In fact, he was consistently suspicious of anything claiming to be a solution to an old political or philosophical problem. He spoke of the danger in trying to finally resolve the debate between rationalism and traditionalism in politics. In particular, along with many in the pre-World War II German Right, he feared people trying to force a world state to come into being in the future, thinking that it would inevitably become a tyranny.
Strauss constantly stressed the importance of two dichotomies in political philosophy: Athens and Jerusalem (Reason and Revelation) and Ancient versus Modern. The "Ancients" were the Socratic philosophers and their intellectual heirs, and the "Moderns" start with Niccolò Machiavelli. The contrast between Ancients and Moderns was understood to be related to the unresolvable tension between Reason and Revelation. The Socratics, reacting to the first Greek philosophers, brought philosophy back to earth, and hence back to the marketplace, making it more political.
The Moderns reacted to the dominance of revelation in medieval society by promoting the possibilities of Reason very strongly. They objected the merger of natural right and natural theology proposed by Thomas Aquinas which resulted in the vulnerability of natural right to theological disputes along with Aquinas' moral rigidity highlighted by the prohibition of divorce and birth control.[19] Thomas Hobbes, under the influence of Francis Bacon, re-oriented political thought to what was most solid but most low in man, setting a precedent for John Locke and the later economic approach to political thought, such as, initially, in David Hume and Adam Smith.
As a youth, Strauss was a political Zionist, belonging to the German Zionist youth group, along with friends Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, who were both strong admirers of Strauss, and would continue to be so throughout their lives.[20] When he was 17, as he said, he was "converted" to political Zionism as a follower of Vladimir Jabotinsky. He served several years in the activities of the German Zionist youth movement, writing several essays pertaining to its controversies, but had left these activities behind by his early twenties.[21]
While Strauss maintained a sympathy and interest in Zionism, he later came to refer to Zionism as "problematic" and became disillusioned with some of its aims.
He taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for 1954–55 academic year. In his letter to a National Review editor, Strauss asked why Israel is called a racist state in an article in that journal. He argues that the author did not provide enough proof for his argument. He ends up his essay with the following statement:[22]
Political Zionism is problematic for obvious reasons. But I can never forget what it achieved as a moral force in an era of complete dissolution. It helped to stem the tide of "progressive" leveling of venerable, ancestral differences; it fulfilled a conservative function.
Although Strauss espoused the utility of religious belief, there is some question about his views on its truth.[23] In some quarters the opinion has been that, whatever his views on the utility of religion, he was personally an atheist.[24] Strauss, however, was openly disdainful of atheism, as he made apparent in his writings on Max Weber. He especially disapproved of contemporary dogmatic disbelief, which he considered intemperate and irrational and felt that one should either be "the philosopher open to the challenge of theology or the theologian open to the challenge of philosophy." [25] One interpretation is that Strauss, in the interplay of Jerusalem and Athens, or revelation and reason, sought, as did Thomas Aquinas, to hold revelation to the rigours of reason, but where Aquinas saw an amicable interplay, Strauss saw two impregnable fortresses.[26] Werner Dannhauser, in analyzing Strauss' letters, writes, "It will not do to simply think of Strauss as a godless, a secular, a lukewarm Jew."[24] As one commenter put it:
Strauss was not himself an orthodox believer, neither was he a convinced atheist. Since whether or not to accept a purported divine revelation is itself one of the “permanent” questions, orthodoxy must always remain an option equally as defensible as unbelief.[27]
Feser's statement, quoted above, invites the suspicion that Strauss may have been an un-convinced atheist, or that he welcomed religion as merely (practically) useful, rather than as true. The supposition that Strauss was an unconvinced atheist is not necessarily incompatible with Dannhauser's tentative claim that Strauss was an atheist behind closed doors. Hilail Gildin responded to Dannhauser's reading in "Déjà Jew All Over Again: Dannhauser on Leo Strauss and Atheism," an article published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy.[28] Gildin exposed inconsistencies between Strauss's writings and Dannhauser's claims; Gildin also questioned the inherent consistency of Dannhauser's admittedly tentative evaluation of Strauss's understanding of divinity and religion.
At the end of his The City and Man, Strauss invites his reader to "be open to the full impact of the all-important question which is coeval with philosophy although the philosophers do not frequently pronounce it--the question quid sit deus" (p. 241). As a philosopher, Strauss would be interested in knowing the nature of divinity, instead of trying to dispute the very being of divinity. But Strauss did not remain "neutral" to the question about the "quid" of divinity. Already in his Natural Right and History, he defended a Socratic (Platonic, Ciceronian, and Aristotelian) reading of divinity, distinguishing it from a materialistic/conventionalist or Epicurean reading (see especially, Ch. III: "The Origin of the Idea of Natural Right"). Here, the question of "religion" (what is religion?) is inseparable from the question of the nature of civil society, and thus of civil right, or right having authoritative representation, or right capable of defending itself (Latin: Jus). Atheism, whether convinced (overt) or unconvinced (tacit), is integral to the conventionalist reading of civil authority, and thereby of religion in its originally civil valence, a reading against which Strauss argues throughout his volume. Thus Strauss's own arguments contradict the thesis imputed to him post mortem by scholars such as S. Drury who profess that Strauss approached religion as an instrument devoid of inherent purpose or meaning.
Critics of Strauss accuse him of being elitist, illiberalist and anti-democratic. Shadia Drury, in Leo Strauss and the American Right (1999), argues that Strauss inculcated an elitist strain in American political leaders linked to imperialist militarism, neoconservatism and Christian fundamentalism. Drury argues that Strauss teaches that "perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what's good for them." Nicholas Xenos similarly argues that Strauss was "an anti-democrat in a fundamental sense, a true reactionary. According to Xenos, "Strauss was somebody who wanted to go back to a previous, pre-liberal, pre-bourgeois era of blood and guts, of imperial domination, of authoritarian rule, of pure fascism."[29]
Strauss has also been criticized by some conservatives. According to Claes Ryn, Strauss's anti-historicist thinking creates an artificial contrast between moral universality and "the conventional," "the ancestral," and "the historical." Strauss, Ryn argues, wrongly and reductionistically assumes that respecting tradition must undermine reason and universality. Contrary to Strauss's criticism of Edmund Burke, the historical sense may in fact be indispensable to an adequate apprehension of universality. Strauss's abstract, ahistorical conception of natural right actually distorts genuine universality, Ryn contends. Strauss does not consider the possibility that real universality becomes known to human beings in concretized, particular form. Strauss and the Straussians have paradoxically taught philosophically unsuspecting American conservatives, not least Roman Catholic intellectuals to reject tradition in favor of ahistorical theorizing, a bias that flies in the face of the central Christian notion of the Incarnation, the latter being an example of the possibility of synthesis between the universal and the historical. According to Ryn, the propagation of a purely abstract idea of universality has contributed to the neoconservative advocacy of allegedly universal American principles, which neconservatives see as justification for American intervention around the world. Strauss's anti-historical thinking connects him and his followers with the French Jacobins, who also regarded tradition as incompatible with virtue and rationality.[30] What Ryn calls the "new Jacobinism" of the "neoconservative" philosophy is, writes Paul Gottfried, also the rhetoric of Saint-Just and Trotsky that the philosophically impoverished American Right has taken over with mindless alacrity. Republican operators and think tanks apparently believe they can carry the electorate by appealing to yesterday’s leftist clichés.[31][32]
Journalists, such as Seymour Hersh, have opined that Strauss endorsed noble lies, "myths used by political leaders seeking to maintain a cohesive society".[33][34] In The City and Man, Strauss discusses the myths outlined in Plato's Republic that are required for all governments. These include a belief that the state's land belongs to it even though it was likely acquired illegitimately and that citizenship is rooted in something more than the accidents of birth.
In his 2009 book, Straussophobia, Peter Minowitz provides a detailed critique of Drury, Xenos, and other critics of Strauss whom he accuses of “bigotry and buffoonery.”[35] In his 2006 book review of Reading Leo Strauss, by Steven B. Smith, Robert Alter writes that Smith "persuasively sets the record straight on Strauss's political views and on what his writing is really about."[36] Smith refutes the link between Strauss and neoconservative thought (a link that some commentators have controversially made), arguing that Strauss was never personally active in politics, never endorsed imperialism, and questioned the utility of political philosophy for the practice of politics. In particular, Strauss argued that Plato's myth of the Philosopher king should be read as a reductio ad absurdum, and that philosophers should understand politics, not in order to influence policy, except insofar as they can ensure philosophy's autonomy from politics.[37] Additionally, Mark Lilla has argued that the attribution to Strauss of neoconservative views contradicts a careful reading of Strauss' actual texts, in particular On Tyranny. Lilla summarizes Strauss as follows:
Philosophy must always be aware of the dangers of tyranny, as a threat to both political decency and the philosophical life. It must understand enough about politics to defend its own autonomy, without falling into the error of thinking that philosophy can shape the political world according to its own lights.[38]
Finally, responding to charges that Strauss's teachings fostered the neoconservative foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration, such as "unrealistic hopes for the spread of liberal democracy through military conquest," Professor Nathan Tarcov, Director of the Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago, in an article published in The American Interest asserts that Strauss as a political philosopher was essentially non-political. After an exegesis of the very limited practical political views to be gleaned from Strauss's writings, Tarcov concludes that "Strauss can remind us of the permanent problems, but we have only ourselves to blame for our faulty solutions to the problems of today."[39] Likewise Strauss's daughter, Jenny Strauss Clay, in a New York Times article defended her father against the charge that he was the "mastermind behind the neoconservative ideologues who control United States foreign policy." "He was a conservative," she says, "insofar as he did not think change is necessarily change for the better." Since contemporary academia "leaned to the left" with its "unquestioned faith in progress and science combined with a queasiness regarding any kind of moral judgment," Strauss questioned the tenets of the left. Had academia leaned to the right he'd have questioned—and did question—the tenets of the right as well.[40] In sum, to the charge of fostering political ideology, whether of the Bush administration or any other, Strauss would plead not guilty—according to him the perennial problem remains whether those already ill-disposed could give political philosophy a fair hearing.[41]
Notable people who studied under Strauss, or attended his lecture courses at the University of Chicago, include Hadley Arkes, Seth Benardete, Allan Bloom, Werner Dannhauser, Murray Dry, William Galston, Victor Gourevitch, Harry V. Jaffa,[42] Roger Masters,[43] Thomas Pangle, Stanley Rosen, Abram Shulsky (Director of the Office of Special Plans),[33] Susan Sontag,[44] and Paul Wolfowitz (who attended two lecture courses by Strauss on Plato and Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws at the University of Chicago). Harvey C. Mansfield, though never a student of Strauss, is a noted "Straussian" (as some followers of Strauss identify themselves). Richard Rorty described Strauss as a particular influence in his early studies at the University of Chicago, where Rorty studied a "classical curriculum" under Strauss.[45][46]