[In the following positive review of What Is Political Philosophy?, Wilhelmsen describes Strauss's interest in classical political philosophy and its place in the modern world.]

The very suggestion of a restoration within political philosophy must seem archaic, if not downright perverse, to the bulk of those academicians who practice the discipline of politics within the American academy today. I say that the suggestion must seem archaic because historicism, a first principle of most contemporary political theory, precludes the very possibility of any kind of restoration within political theory: a restoration would imply that political meaning does not take its departure from, and is not identified with, the historical moment in which that meaning is born and within which it must play out whatever role it has within human history. This last, of course, is a cardinal doctrine within historicism.

And I say that the suggestion must seem perverse because that same historicism can see in the restoration of classical political theory little more than the sterile paradox of a band of willful men who have refused to meet what is euphemistically called “the challenge of history.” And a meeting of the challenge of history”—that Crowned Ghost in the words of Gabriel Marcel—is the only ethical imperative for historicist political theory.

Professor Leo Strauss of the University of Chicago in his last of an impressive series of profound studies—What Is Political Philosophy?—stands squarely in opposition to this historicism which so dominates the Western mind today. But in his attempt to restore classical political philosophy, Professor Strauss does not fall into the very error he so quietly excoriates in the pages of these carefully written essays. Strauss nowhere maintains that political philosophy as understood in the classical tradition must find itself restored and thus made effective in our day.

Avoiding even that form of determinism which might give comfort to the friends of wisdom, Strauss candidly admits that the modern state may well be irreconcilable with classical political theory because the Western mind today is dominated by a conviction utterly at odds with the tradition: i.e. by the conviction that a world state is desirable. The possibility of a world state—itself discussed theoretically by the classical philosophers—was rejected by them because the material conditions necessary for the world state can come into existence only provided that technology be released from the control exerted by the moral order.

This last was unthinkable to both Plato and Aristotle and to the medieval tradition that followed them because that tradition insisted that all art be subordinated to ethical considerations which often run cleanly opposed to artistic, and thus technical, perfection as such:

The difference between the classics and us with regard to [world] democracy consists exclusively in a different estimate of the virtues of technology. But we are not entitled to say that the classical view has been refuted. Their implicit prophecy that the emancipation of technology, of the arts, from moral and political control would lead to disaster or to the dehumanization of man has not yet been refuted.

Applauding as “both sober and manly” Yves Simon's contention that Western man must act within the structure of technological civilization as it is given him today, Strauss nonetheless adds that “we have no right to applaud a situation that was created by a decision which, however well intentioned, was not evidently virtuous and wise.” But the corporate mind of the West seems to accede to just this very proposition which was so foreign to the classical political temper. Strauss draws the only possible conclusion: a further unleashing of the Pandora's box of technics would be the death of classical political philosophy as an effective agent within western civilization.

The earlier essays in the book are given over to tracing just what happened to classical political doctrine within post-medieval civilization. Professor Strauss draws a parallel between the birth of modern science which makes “One World” a possibility and the birth of the new science of politics in Machiavelli. The classical and medieval mind was not unaware of a kind of science that would give man a practical mastery over reality, but it considered such a science to be peripheral to wisdom, an exception to the normal exercise of the human intelligence.

So too the classics were not unaware of the role of power and chance, of selfishness and greed, within the total economy of political life. Nonetheless, the tradition refused to build either its epistemology or its ethics around these extreme cases, these end situations. As wisdom remained the norm for science so did virtue remain the norm for politics. With Bacon the old epistemology was toppled and “the notion of torturing nature, i.e., of the controlled experiment” was placed at the center of the intellectual life and made the very meaning of wisdom itself. Knowledge is power and power is knowledge.

How would one guide the contemporary American ship of state according to Strauss' classical politics? It is difficult to deduce with any precision an exact application of Strauss' doctrine to the contemporary scene. He might reject such a deduction on the grounds that principles must be applied prudentially and one cannot legislate in the abstract for the concrete. Nonetheless some guesses can be made along these lines. Strauss stands firmly against the welfare state but from this one cannot conclude to any version of laissez-faire economics. Strauss has accepted the world of mass technology simply because it exists and because we must work within what is given us. Strauss is an enemy of the concept of “One World” because this concept would involve a further subordination of morals to art (i.e. of the political to the technical). Strauss is a friend of that often amorphous thing called the “Jewish-Christian” tradition, but we look in vain for a theology of the political in his writings. Strauss is certainly a conservative but his thought seems distant from the popular conception of conservatism in American politics.

Leo Strauss' preoccupation with politics stems from his preoccupation with wisdom. From the standpoint of statesmanship, political philosophy is indispensable for virtue, he says; from the standpoint of philosophy politics was an introduction into wisdom. It is here, at the point where political philosophy merges into wisdom, that a Catholic philosopher might find himself constrained to reach beyond the classical framework within which Leo Strauss works. I say “might find himself constrained” because there are indications within What Is Political Philosophy? that Professor Strauss might one day honor us with his reflections on the possibility of history in so far as that theology bears upon the political order.

I forbear from expanding the issue because it takes us beyond a consideration of Professor Strauss' study. I nonetheless introduce the issue deliberately and make it my conclusion for the following reason: have we not heard enough in recent years of a spurious “theology of history”, itself heavily influenced by Marxism, that would negate classical politics by justifying in the name of “historical necessity” every brutally existent situation within the modern world? Has not the very mind of Christendom been infiltrated by an historicism that refuses to call into judgment the dehumanization and progressive devitalizing of western civilization because this historicism believes in the “irreversibility” of history? Professor Strauss has traced for us, with the fine eye of a detective, the murder of classical political philosophy. It would be instructive were a comparable figure to trace the role Christians have played in the same destruction.