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Leo Strauss (September 20, 1899 – October 18, 1973) was a political philosopher 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 later acquainted with phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Strauss later focused his research on Greek texts of Plato and Aristotle, and encouraged application of their ideas on contemporary political theory. Leo Strauss was born in the
small town of Kirchhain in Hesse - 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. 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." 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. 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". 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. 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. 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. 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." 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. 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." 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.
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." Strauss
argued that the city - in - speech was unnatural,
precisely because "it is rendered possible by the
abstraction from eros". 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. 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. 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. 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:
Although Strauss espoused the utility of religious belief, there is some question about his views on its truth. In some quarters the opinion has been that, whatever his views on the utility of religion, he was personally an atheist. 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." 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. Werner Dannhauser, in analyzing Strauss' letters, writes, "It will not do to simply think of Strauss as a godless, a secular, a lukewarm Jew." As one commenter put it:
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. 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". 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. 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." Strauss has also been criticized by some conservatives. According to Claes Ryn, the "new Jacobinism" of the "neoconservative" philosophy, a philosophy that Ryn controversially attributes to Strauss, is not "new, it is 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. Noam Chomsky has argued that Strauss's theory is a form of Leninism, in which society should be led by a group of elite vanguards, whose job is to protect liberal society against the dangers of excessive individualism, and creating inspiring myths to make the masses believe that they are fighting against anti - democratic and anti - liberal forces. Journalists, such as Seymour Hersh,
have opined that Strauss endorsed noble lies,
"myths used by political leaders seeking to
maintain a cohesive society". 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.” 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." 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. 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:
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." 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. 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. |