[In the following review, Momigliano places Socrates and Aristophanes within the context of Strauss's oeuvre and political philosophy.]

Leo Strauss is right in reminding us that we must not assume too easily that the philosophers started the war against poetry. To the best of our information, the first shot came from the other side. It was fired by Aristophanes against Socrates. Yet Aristophanes was a friend of Socrates. Plato's Symposium ends with Aristophanes and Agathon falling asleep in the late hours while Socrates is trying to convince them that the writer of tragedies is also the writer of comedies. There is no personal animosity against Socrates in Aristophanes's Clouds. Indeed, there is not even unambiguous evidence that Aristophanes condemns Socrates. It is only when we analyze Aristophanes's other comedies (as Leo Strauss would argue) that we are led to the conclusion that there is something radically incompatible between Socrates and Aristophanes. But even so, it is not a personal incompatibility. It is the incompatibility between political wisdom and philosophy in the way that Socrates practiced it—or Aristophanes thought he did. Political wisdom means that you accept reality as it is, and at the same time laugh at it: common sense is the sense of laughing at the absurdity of what exists. But Socrates—as painted by Aristophanes—tries to be better than reality. He is unpolitical and consequently unerotic and consequently unable to handle human beings.

Take the least inspired comedy by Aristophanes, the Ploutos. What is true of the Ploutos will a fortiori apply to the other comedies. Aristophanes seems to argue that all the troubles of Athens come from Ploutos's blindness. The god of wealth distributes his benefits blindly, and therefore wrongly. Give back his eyesight to Ploutos and all will be well. Many philosophers have more or less expressed the same idea and have disqualified themselves as utopists. Aristophanes is not open to this charge, because he knows that he is joking. His order is the perfect order because it is comic. Against the Platonist Burnet who claimed that “statements of fact are not funny,” Leo Strauss simply remarks: “a premise that would be true only if there were never any funny facts.”

Strauss takes the opposition between Aristophanes and Socrates as seriously as Nietzsche took that between Dionysus and Socrates, but he replaces Nietzsche's tragic understanding of the world by the “comic understanding” of the world. He does not allow irrelevant jokes in Aristophanes. Anything Aristophanes says must make sense in terms of Aristophanes's own assumptions. Take the Ploutos again. There Poverty, Penia, argues that we owe all the good things to her, because she makes people work. Chremylos, the champion of Wealth, throws her out without having produced any reasonable answer to her arguments. According to Strauss, Penia's “reasonable thesis is rendered manifestly absurd by the mere existence of Ploutos. … Chremylos's design implies that human life as it is now is very imperfect and therefore in need of a radical change; this imperfection is rendered manifest by the fact that there are gods.” Any criticism of Penia, of poverty, is therefore a criticism of the divine order. The fact that the criticism is not realistic detracts nothing from its relevance.

If Aristophanes is correct in his representation of Socrates, comedy is an alternative to philosophy. As Socrates was the founder of political philosophy, the consequences for the Great Western Tradition would be alarming. Nietzsche would have been right in maintaining that Socrates had been shown up by Aristophanes. But Leo Strauss leaves it open whether Aristophanes gave a correct picture of the true Socrates. Judging from the inconclusive conclusion of this book, there is still hope for the Great Western Tradition of Political Theory.

If we now return to Leo Strauss's complementary book—The City and Man—which preceded Socrates and Aristophanes by only two years, we can assess the significance of this open verdict. In The City and Man Strauss states that in Plato “the impossible or a certain kind of the impossible—if treated as possible—is in the highest sense ridiculous or, as we are in the habit of saying, comical. The core of every Aristophanean comedy is something impossible of the kind indicated. The Platonic dialogue brings to its completion what could be thought to have been completed by Aristophanes.” In other words, not only Aristophanes but Socrates and Plato underline the paradox, the mystery which is inherent in the first principles of political life. We now understand why Strauss has warned us so many times that classical political thought is essentially utopistic—wise because utopistic and therefore dependent on exceptional circumstances, almost on chance, to create the good State. (“Because they saw how limited man's power is,” he wrote in On Tyranny, “they held that the actualization of the best regime depends on chance.”) Whether in the jester's dress of Aristophanes or in the philosopher's mantle of Socrates, classical political thought can only indicate what is good against all the odds.

In his lifelong fight for classical political thought and natural law against Machiavelli, Hobbes, and their more modern followers—the historicists, the political scientists—Leo Strauss has never intended to provide an easy road to success: he has intended to warn us that the alternative to paradox is inhumanity. In modern conditions, “the more we cultivate reason, the more we cultivate nihilism” (Natural Right and History).

There is a religious implication in this warning. Political philosophy—as Strauss states in the final words of his The City and Man—leads to the question quid sit deus. Even Thucydides could not quite escape the question when he brought Melians and Athenians face to face to discuss the legitimacy of annihilating the enemy. But Leo Strauss is no more prepared to give us an easy assurance about God than he is to give us an assurance about the best political constitution. To judge by his interpretation of the book to which he has returned again and again during the last thirty-five years with ever loving care—Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed—there is no assurance that the question quid est deus can be answered by any philosopher in a satisfactory way: “It is therefore a question whether monotheism strictly understood is demonstrable.” Have we simply to conclude that for Strauss being a believer and being a philosopher are two incompatible things—or more precisely have we to accept “the old Jewish premise that being a Jew and being a philosopher are two incompatible things”?

The first of many difficulties raised by this conclusion would be that Leo Strauss has never given up either the quality of being a philosopher or the quality of being a Jew.

I do not know whether Leo Strauss would still accept the theistic premises which seem to be at the basis of his two early books on Spinoza (1930) and Maimonides (1935); see especially the famous chapter of the later book on J. Guttmann's interpretation of Jewish philosophy. Strauss has repeatedly emphasized that there are three reasons why a philosopher may not make his inner thoughts explicit: he may be reticent because he lives in times of persecution, or because “there are basic truths which would not be pronounced in public by any decent man”; or because there is a religious duty not to reveal the truth. According to Ibn Ezra, in a passage known to Spinoza and quoted by Strauss, “he who understands should be silent.” I can only register a personal impression if I say that Strauss's present position still seems to me akin to that of Maimonides who—in Strauss's words—“pursued the philosophic approach up to its end. … If he had not brought the greatest sacrifice, he could not have defended the Torah against the philosophers so admirably as he did in his Jewish books” (What Is Political Philosophy?).