SOURCE: Smith, Gregory Bruce. “Who Was Leo Strauss?” American Scholar 66, no. 1 (winter 1997): 95-104.

[In the following essay, Smith examines the critical controversy surrounding Strauss's philosophy and reputation.]

More than twenty years after his death, Leo Strauss remains an enigmatic and controversial figure. Commentators, both friendly and hostile, have variously found the pivot point of Strauss's thought in a desired return to Greek thought—in some permutations complete with the elitism of the rule of philosopher-kings; or in a conservative defense of modern, liberal democracy, especially against Marxist communism; or in a furtive, esoteric, historicist, Nietzschean nihilism hidden behind a clever, rhetorical public teaching on the one hand, or in a dogmatic, hierarchical, inegalitarian understanding of unchanging Nature on the other; in the reflections of a fundamentally Jewish thinker, or in a Socratic skepticism; and on and on.

Since his death Strauss has even been attacked in the popular press, an odd phenomenon for a man who seldom declaimed in public and, despite a sense of professional obligation to his university and his students, clearly preferred the withdrawn, quiet, private, contemplative life. It would be difficult to find a man less likely to want to be a philosopher-king, or to want to have any public persona whatsoever. That Strauss has become so controversial has to be traced ultimately to the untimely nature of his thinking, and his willingness to question openly the philosophical orthodoxies of his time. But to an equal extent, the controversies surrounding Strauss must be traced to the idiosyncracies of unpredictable changes in moral, cultural, and political fashions. Because of the unpredictable nature of such fashions, how Strauss's influence will evolve in the future is difficult to predict.

Leo Strauss was born in Kirchhain, Hessen, Germany, in 1899. He received a traditional gymnasium education. He reports that as a young man he read and re-read the works of Nietzsche. He was also much attracted to Zionism. After serving in the German army during World War I, he returned to study philosophy, mathematics, and natural science at the universities of Marburg, Frankfurt, Berlin, and Hamburg. Upon completing his formal education, he was a researcher in the reform institute for Jewish studies in Berlin, where he examined seventeenth-century biblical criticism, especially that of Spinoza. From these studies came Strauss's first major work, Spinoza's Critique of Religion. After completing his doctorate, Strauss sat in on the courses offered by the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), who was teaching at Freiburg. Husserl was famous for the philosophical injunction to get “to the things themselves,” a premise that, in altered form, Strauss himself adopted. It was at Freiburg that Strauss also sat in on the courses of Husserl's assistant, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), whose influence on Strauss was far greater than is usually seen. Heidegger, like Nietzsche, had launched a theoretical critique of the origins of late-modern nihilism. In a parallel fashion, Strauss was much preoccupied with the “Crisis of the West.”

In 1932 Strauss left Germany to avoid Nazi oppression, returning thereafter for only a brief period. After two years in France on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, and four lean years in England, he came to the United States in 1938, where he remained until his death in 1973. Between 1949 and 1968 Strauss taught political philosophy at the University of Chicago; there he wrote an impressive number of terse and intensely erudite books and articles about such authors as Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Fârâbî, Maimonides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Nietzsche, and Husserl. Even a cursory attempt to confront these works presents one with themes that lie far from contemporary public debates: the relation between Reason and Revelation, the battle between the ancients and the moderns, the nature of esoteric philosophic writing, the origins of late-modern historicism. It is an odd legacy for such a man to have somehow become taken as the arch-enemy of democracy and be made responsible for controversial positions on everything from multiculturalism to Supreme Court nominations to debates about social justice.

It is always dangerous to try to deduce too much from the origins and personal history of a thinker. In the classic model of philosophy, especially as Strauss understood it, the thinker seeks to stand outside his place and time, not in order to negate the world he lives in but to gain the widest possible perspective on it. Strauss strove for that detachment. But he hardly could have avoided being influenced by his experience as a German Jew, born to an orthodox family. From the very beginning, Leo Strauss was a profound, fervent supporter of liberal democracy as the best political dispensation available in the modern world. He had seen the inadequacies of other modern regimes, such as fascism, at first hand, and he viewed communism as straightforward tyranny.

Strauss was especially impressed with the American variant of liberal democracy and studied its history, its Constitution, and the writings of its founders and statesmen. While he never wrote on these subjects, he saw a rare genius in the practice of American political life. But his scholarly work on modern political philosophy forced him to conclude that the modern philosophical premises that supported liberal democracy were inadequate; and if not transcended, they would weaken attachment to a fundamentally just and decent way of life. Beginning with his work on Hobbes—The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, completed while he was still in England—and proceeding through his studies of Locke and Machiavelli, as well as in his pivotal Natural Right and History, Strauss tried to understand the essence of modern political philosophy and how it could lead to such radically different offspring as liberal democracy, fascism, and Marxist communism. Eventually Strauss was led back to Greek thought in hopes of finding an alternative to the nihilism he saw as implicit in modern thought. This led to his attempt to give life back to the confrontation between the ancients and the moderns. It is by addressing the major philosophical themes that occupied Strauss's scholarly efforts that his influence can be confronted at the deepest and least accidental level.

Strauss's scholarly work initially tried to confront the nihilism of what he would eventually call the “third wave of modernity” by addressing itself to that component of Nietzsche's claim that “God is dead,” which implied that belief in a transcendent God and His revelations had become impossible for future humanity. In Spinoza's Critique of Religion, Strauss tried to show that none of the modern critiques of the possibility of revealed religion was definitive. Thus the possibility of taking revealed religion and its wisdom seriously remained open. From Spinoza, Strauss was led to the great medieval Jewish thinker Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), whom Spinoza had taken as one of his major opponents. It was from Maimonides that Strauss learned about the esoteric or secret writing that became one of his major scholarly themes. Thereafter, he never left behind the question of the relation between Reason and Revelation, or “Athens and Jerusalem.”

In the face of late-modern irrationalism, which he saw as the inevitable outcome of modern rationalism, Strauss also tried to reconsider the other central component of Western civilization, Greek rationalism. He repeatedly made clear that the heart and soul of Western civilization was to be found in the irresolvable tension between Revelation and Rationalism. Strauss's argument was that the modern philosophical attacks on Reason and Revelation were not conclusive; he never claimed much more certainty than that. Strauss hoped to reopen questions that had been presumed conclusively closed. He did not presume to substitute a new closure for that openness. Despite his discussions of Natural Right and Natural Law, Strauss never asserted the existence of rigid moral absolutes. It is especially paradoxical, therefore, that Strauss should be seen as a dogmatic partisan.

Strauss did make clear, however, that in his mind the viability of Western civilization—with Western liberal democracy being one of its central components—rested on the everrenewed reinvigoration of the West's distinctive tension between Reason and Revelation. Both were under assault in his time. Strauss was equally clear that the tension could never be resolved in favor of either Reason or Revelation. In general terms, Strauss encouraged an openness to this tension, not dogmatism or irrationalism—or what comes close to the same thing as irrationalism, secret writing and esoteric misdirection.

Modern philosophy and modern political philosophy had attempted to transcend both Greek rationalism and biblical Revelation. Strauss invested a major part of his scholarly life in trying to understand the nature of the break modernity attempted. He eventually concluded that the primary change that took place at the dawn of modernity was a moral change—one that rested on a transformed conception of the good for mankind. From the beginning, and this could be seen clearly in Machiavelli, the moderns tried to “lower the sights.” Rather than aim at the grand and inspiring virtues that pre-modern thought—in both its Greek and biblical variants—took as the appropriate end of political action, the moderns were prepared to emancipate and channel the spontaneously occurring passions and emotions, among them fear, ambition, and greed. The hope was that a more accessible and egalitarian goal could be substituted for the grand aims of the pre-moderns, which ultimately were accessible only to a few.

The moderns came to see comfort, affluence, and the avoidance of death as fundamental to the good life, secured by a new science that saw its end not as perfecting the rational faculty by striving for understanding but as gaining power over nature. The good life, they claimed, could be actualized for all in a prosperous society supported by modern science. The pre-moderns rejected, before the fact, this idea of the good because they saw human desires as unlimited. Hence prosperity alone would not make human beings happy; it would merely lead to the invention of new desires, an endless round whereby human beings would become moral slaves. Further, the mere possession of scientific power, without knowledge of ends other than vulgar hedonism, could never be a simple good. In fact, such power could transform itself into a threat to our very humanity. The reduction of humanity to desirous slaves armed with a powerful new science pointed toward a never before seen tyranny rather than emancipation—a conclusion reached by many on both the right and the left.

Less visibly, Strauss also confronted the philosophical component of modernity posited by Descartes. To lay the foundation for the new science that could master nature, Cartesian Idealism tried to abstract from the data of the senses and ground itself in the thinking self, or the abstract ego. From the beginning, the moderns doubted the reliability of the data of the senses as well as the veracity of common sense or “the way things appear for all”—what Strauss came to call the natural, pre-theoretical, or pre-scientific articulation of things. It was necessary for the moderns, therefore, to substitute conscious theoretical constructions for the natural awareness present to all in everyday life. Much of Strauss's scholarly labors went into an attempt to transcend this modern “constructivism” and find a way back to what he believed was the natural articulation of reality.

For Strauss, modern political philosophy had by stages moved from a more or less benign beginning to a final intensification and radicalization in late modernity. An initial peak was reached in Lockean liberal democracy, which represented the culmination of the first wave of modernity. But with the thought of Rousseau, modern political philosophy took a more radical turn and Strauss's second wave was initiated. The first wave of modernity still believed in the existence of a fixed human nature that had to be accommodated because it could not be transcended. It saw quitting the natural condition as good, but nature still remained as a guide or limit for human affairs. Strauss's second wave posited the malleability, changeability, and historicality of human existence. In doing so, Rousseau initiated an understanding that, after passing through Kant, culminated in Hegel's depiction of an inevitable movement of history that brought with it an inevitable transformation of man and of the natural environment. This “progressive” understanding—shared by Marx—saw human history as linear, inevitable, and moving from lower to higher stages.

With the commencement of Strauss's third wave of modernity, faith in the changeability and historicality of human existence remained but was now stripped of any linearity, necessity, or progressivity. This was the wave initiated by Friedrich Nietzsche. With Nietzsche, the problem Strauss designated “historicism” raised its head. Nietzsche asserted that all knowledge—especially of good and evil—was dependent upon the altogether arbitrary historical perspective into which one was thrown. And all perspectives were transitory. With Nietzsche, history came to be accidental in its unfolding, if not regressive and nihilistic. All past understandings of reality came to be seen as merely human constructions, albeit unconscious ones. But with the insight that all past conceptions of reality were merely human constructions came the possibility that in the future those constructions could be consciously willed. The third wave brought with it the age of what Nietzsche called the politics of the Will to Power—actually competing wills to power with no possible arbiter other than force more or less overtly deployed. Everyone would compete to posit his construction of reality—a fundamental premise that underlies many contemporary phenomena.

Malleable man himself could now be consciously transformed. But there was no guidance for this transformation other than an entirely arbitrary contest of wills, eventually won by the momentarily strongest. With this premise, Strauss believed that Nietzsche opened the door to Heidegger's even more thoroughgoing historicism, where faith in the self-conscious will waned, to be replaced by the hegemony of the blind, overpowering fate and destiny of the nihilism of universal, global, technological civilization. And after Heidegger, Strauss predicted that we would see the spectacle of even more radical relativisms—which would have been Strauss's understanding of everything from deconstructionism to various forms of feminism.

According to Strauss, the inevitable outcome of modern thought was a humanity that no longer believed in Divine Revelation, eternal Nature, or inevitable History as providing any standards for judgment. In such an intellectual environment, Strauss believed that liberal democracy, despite all its practical decency, would come to be seen as just one moral and political dispensation among many, and theoretically no better than its alternatives. Strauss believed that this would inevitably sap the commitment to liberal democracy that was needed in the face of the immoderate political dispensations that were the result of the second and third waves of modernity—communism and fascism respectively.

Strauss dedicated his mature scholarly efforts to trying to find a non-historicist alternative that could help provide the basis for a defense for liberal democracy that he thought could not be found within modern thought. In this search he turned to a painstaking attempt to understand those non-historicist Greek authors at the origins of the Western philosophic tradition in hopes that they would provide insights into how to transcend our late-modern impasse. This led to Strauss's most mature works on Thucydides, Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle, works that have to a significant degree been ignored by both the scholars and Strauss's polemical detractors.

Strauss had discovered the idea of esoteric writing in his studies of Maimonides, so that when he went back to the Greeks to find an alternative to late-modern irrationalism, he arrived at a very novel reading of Plato—in his mind a more authentic understanding of Plato than that contained in conventional, Anglo-American scholarship. When reflecting on the esoteric writing style of Plato, Strauss reached a slightly different conclusion than in his studies of Maimonides. Instead of concentrating on the confrontation between philosophy and revealed religion, Plato dealt with the tension between open philosophical inquiry and the needs of a closed political community. Political communities, according to Strauss's Plato, were always closed and particular and could not withstand the glare of the universal truth, which was the object of philosophy. Political communities were caves; philosophers longed to transcend the cave. This unavoidable tension between political life and philosophy—after all, the Athenians had condemned Socrates to death—led Plato to use the dialogue form, embellished by beautiful myths, as his distinctive mode of speech.

Similarly, Strauss applied his understanding of esoteric writing to the texts of Fârâbî (873-950), the Islamic medieval philosopher par excellence. Strauss's Fârâbî also saw the need to adopt an esoteric mode of speech and engage in secret writing. He used yet another set of devices to confront his special environment. Strauss's conclusion seems to have been that different environments required the use of different literary devices, which were needed to accomplish the same end of simultaneously speaking to different audiences while conveying more than one message—but not for the sake of conveying the identical message.

Yet it was the Greek authors who remained central for Strauss. When the Greek philosophers were read carefully, Strauss thought that they offered a non-historicist alternative to the nihilism encountered by late-modern thought. The moderns had constructed an abstract relation to life; Strauss believed that the ancient Greeks were still in contact with a rich, concrete, and “natural” understanding of life. Strauss saw in the Socratic dialectical method—which begins from concrete questions and answers—the only way of approaching that concrete richness without destroying it. Hence much of Strauss's later scholarly work centered on an attempt to understand Socrates and what his new philosophic method represented, approached not only from the perspective of Plato, but through the eyes of such contemporaries as Aristophanes and Xenophon.

For Strauss, the Platonic dialogues were not primarily ontological or metaphysical documents but rich articulations about the things that interest human beings most, including the nature of the best life and the best regime, the meaning of virtue, the possibility of happiness. In the Platonic dialogues, one finds the presentation of various distinctive kinds of lives, all of which present themselves as the best—the private life of virtue, the public life of the statesman or sophist, the life of philosophy, the life devoted to physical pleasure, and so on. Since there were different political communities, political life also came to light as a debate between different regimes, each pursuing a different conception of the good. In Strauss's understanding, nature articulates itself through different human beings with different aspirations, and through different regimes that prefer different ends. Within these natural limits, life presents itself—without the imposition of willed human constructions. The modern attempt to transcend these limits using constructivist interventions ultimately led to an alienated and nihilistic life within a very abstract world. Strauss concluded that the ancient Greeks demonstrated that there was an unchanging, natural articulation of reality that could be recovered. When this task of recovery was accomplished, it would become apparent that there were always a number of unchanging givens that could nonetheless be ordered in a variety of ways. It was the diverse, natural, human possibilities, not a specific ordering of those possibilities, that Strauss wanted to recover.

According to Strauss, the nature of the best regime depends on the circumstances. Strauss believed that the Greeks had adequately articulated the essence of our various natural perceptions and aspirations. They did not necessarily offer the best articulation of all possibilities, an issue that cannot be addressed except in light of present circumstances. What is always needed is flexibility; there is no one best regime everywhere and always, but there are natural possibilities that should always be allowed to manifest themselves. Hence, in Natural Right and History, Strauss tried to differentiate his understanding of a flexible “Natural Right” teaching from the more dogmatic and rigid “Natural Law” teachings of such philosophers as Aquinas and Hobbes.

Strauss argued for the need to recover a Socratic, dialectical understanding of philosophy, which when turned loose on a transformed modern world—transformed, as Strauss argued repeatedly, by the successes of modern political philosophy—would yield entirely different theoretical articulations than those reached by previous thinkers.

We cannot reasonably expect that a fresh understanding of classical political philosophy will supply us with recipes for today's use. For the relative success of modern political philosophy has brought into being a kind of society wholly unknown to the classics, a kind of society to which the classical principles as stated and elaborated by the classics are not immediately applicable. 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.

Strauss believed that there was a natural fabric to human existence, even though late-modern human beings had become alienated from it. But that natural articulation of reality was not always operative or immediately available at all times. This understanding represented Strauss's more concrete manifestation of the Heideggerian thought contained in the idea of “the withdrawal of Being.” Strauss was explicit that late-modern life was contra naturum. His was a scholarly attempt to open a path to a recovery of what had become substantially absent for his contemporaries. This experience of absence was one that Strauss ironically shared with a diverse group of thinkers that included not only Heidegger but many of Heidegger's descendants down to Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstructionism. But Strauss's response was far more concrete.

Strauss first became controversial among academics in the 1950s as part of his critique of the then dominant behavioralism in the social sciences, especially as it manifested itself in academic political science, which, technically, was Strauss's departmental home. Behavioralist political science began from the modern Cartesian premise that in order to understand political life it was necessary to project consciously constructed, “scientific” categories in place of the categories that arise in the marketplace of everyday, commonsense discussion. Strauss tried to show—especially in his essay “Epilogue”—that the behavioralist attempt to substitute an “objective,” scientific account of reality for the one embedded in common sense was a mistake. Far from arriving at an understanding that was deeper and more profound, this undertaking was trivial, reductionist and distorting. It could never arrive at the scientific detachment and objectivity it desired, because it always began by taking for granted commonsense, pre-theoretical pre-suppositions from which it could never emancipate itself. This was the basis of Strauss's critique of the dominant fact-value dichotomy.

There are no such things as value-free facts. Facts first present themselves to us as part of our acting, doing, and making, which are always evaluative. Without this evaluative, commonsense criteria of relevance embedded in our shared experience, no science could ever judge the difference between the relevant and the trivial.

According to Strauss, our primary, natural relation to life is always determined by the regime in which we live and by our shared understandings of the just, the noble, and the good—especially as those principles are articulated in constitutions, public documents, and the speeches of great statesmen. This natural world is better understood by citizens and statesmen than it is by detached scientific observers. Strauss concluded that, far from being superior to the older political science that emanated from Aristotle and included the traditional political philosophers, the new political science was in fact not only trivial, but deluded about its own foundations and ultimately incapable of clarity. All it could do was undermine the pre-scientific perspective shared by citizens.

With these arguments, Strauss first came to be seen as a conservative. Behavioralist political science was almost exclusively the preserve of a liberal academic establishment. It was a method by which all substantive moral debates could be put aside in favor of discussing the means to ends that were already built into the political system. It represented a surreptitious way of defending a moral position without having to do so substantively. Having pre-supposed one's understanding of the best life and the best regime—the modern progressivist understanding—one tried to limit debate to allegedly factual observations. It is no small irony that, after Strauss had made his critique of behavioralism, a similar critique was made by the New Left, which was that behavioralist political science operated under a hidden conservative agenda. This is only one among many areas where Strauss made common cause with thinkers customarily seen to be of the left.

According to Strauss, the real danger of behavioralist political science was that it shielded itself from the truly fundamental questions of the day. For those who lived in the West, especially after World War II, everyday political reality was determined by the confrontation between liberal democracy and Marxist despotism. Only by an abstraction that led in the direction of less rather than more clarity could one conclude, as behavioralist political science did, that the difference between democracy and totalitarianism was a difference between quantums of coercion, or a difference in the nature of the group interactions that determined policy.

Despite his profound respect for Heidegger's philosophical mind, Strauss ultimately offered a criticism of his thought similar to that which he made of behavioralism. Heidegger had reached the conclusion that the liberal democratic West and the Marxist communist East—“Washington and Moscow”—were “metaphysically equal.” For Strauss, this abstract conclusion was an affront to what was obvious—the clear superiority of living in a liberal democracy rather than a Marxist despotism. According to Strauss, our natural, pretheoretical, commonsense relation to reality had to be defended and its primacy had to be justified and taken seriously. If there is one key that unlocks Strauss's difficult corpus, it is to be found in his attempt to show the priority of an unchanging, albeit very diverse, natural, pre-theoretical articulation of reality. And for Strauss that always meant the fundamentally political and moral way in which reality is revealed to all.

By contrast, for Heidegger our pre-theoretical relation to reality is determined by a series of fated worldviews that come and go mysteriously and unpredictably. For Strauss, this was pure relativism. Despite his respect for Heidegger's philosophical depth, Heidegger remained for Strauss the ultimate historicist. Just as he had tried to confront the relativism of the fact-value dichotomy of social science behavioralism, Strauss tried to confront the historicism that he saw as the ultimate and inevitable outcome of modern thought. But in many ways, his confrontation with historicism was far more provisional. First, he tried to show how historicism evolved necessarily from previous moments in modern thought. While the first and second waves of modernity were less virulent, they led, unavoidably, to the third historicist moment, and so consequently it was not feasible to simply go back to one of the prior moments of modern thought. Strauss further tried to show that on its own terms historicism had not made a case for its superiority to non-historicist thought. It need not, therefore, be taken as the dogmatic given that it had become for so many of Strauss's contemporaries—a veritable legion since his death.

But Strauss never presumed to have simply transcended historicism; there remain historicist components in Strauss's thought. For example, he never gives any simple invocation of a nature that is always operative. For Strauss, nature does not operate as simple mechanical causality, and it is never immediately available—in the manner of the color green—without study. In fact, there are ages like our own during which nature is occluded and, thereby, to a significant extent inoperative. This is why it was so important for Strauss to try to recover an understanding of the Greek writers who remained in closer touch with nature than the late moderns. This was the basis of Strauss's veneration of the “Great Books.” They provide access to experiences that have been lost as well as to a serious debate about the alternate conclusions regarding the nature of the best life, alternatives that had ceased to be part of present debates.

While not being a simple ahistoricist, Strauss nevertheless saw radical historicism as the greatest problem confronting contemporary humanity. It constituted what he meant by the “Crisis of the West.” According to Strauss, that crisis consisted of the West no longer being able to take itself and its aspirations seriously. Transcending radical historicism was for Strauss the highest task, but that could not be done by rhetoric, mythmaking, or esoteric misdirection—as many of Strauss's detractors claim was his intention. Historicism could only be transcended by engaging in the painstaking scholarly reconstructions that could help us give concrete articulation to the vague intimations with which we are left. Strauss may have been wrong in his perception of our time and of what was required to transcend it, but he never fell back on the abject banality of believing that late modernity could be overcome by what amounted to clever lies.

Like so many twentieth-century thinkers, Leo Strauss's critique of modernity remains far clearer and more telling than the alternative he offers. In the last analysis, I believe Strauss has no concrete recipes to offer. His detractors, and some of his sympathizers, have constructed far more concrete positions for him than he himself would have been willing to accept. But it is around issues concerning the place of religion in Strauss's teaching and his rediscovery of esoteric or secret writing that most of the wilder and more polemical claims brought against him can be found—down to the accusations that Strauss ultimately is an atheist who nonetheless thought it was necessary for the non-philosophic to be told various religious fictions by an elite to keep them in line. Even some of Strauss's students seem to have arrived at a similar point that stresses the central importance of civil religion, which says more about his students than about Strauss.

Further, many have concluded—detractors and admirers alike—that a man who spent so much time pointing out the esoteric techniques of others must have written esoterically himself. They have similarly concluded that Strauss must have done so for the same reasons as those who operated in entirely different environments: in other words, primarily because of the inexorable tension between political life and philosophy that Strauss attributed to Plato; or the inexorable tension between philosophy and revealed religion that he found operating in Maimonides; or the need to keep unpalatable moral truths silent, as did Machiavelli. And, they conclude, he must have used the same devices they used. If this is true, Strauss must have had all the subtlety of a magician who explains his trick before performing it. If Strauss was actually engaged in esoteric speech, his real message absolutely must have been something other than what he asserted quite openly. His revelation of previous reasons for esotericism, and previous devices used, must have been the smoke screen under which he hid his deeper truths.

In the present world, where everything is said openly, only an extreme paranoid could think he might be persecuted for observing with Plato that there was a tension between philosophy and politics, or with Maimonides that there was a tension between philosophy and religion. In the contemporary West, we live at a time when we do not have closed political communities, God has been openly proclaimed dead, simple hedonism is advanced as the good life, and many assert we have arrived at the end of philosophy. Precisely what devastating truth is still to be revealed that is not already part of the public domain? That certain realities in Athens, medieval Europe, or Islam, early modernity, or whenever, led to esoteric writing for previous writers seems irrelevant in our changed circumstance. I do not know if Strauss had an esoteric teaching. But I am confident that if he did, his detractors—and more than a few of his admirers—have been taken in by his surface teaching. With more partisanship than insight or honesty, many have laboriously dug up Strauss's perfectly obvious surface teaching and proclaimed it his great secret, or reveled in saying that the sphinx had no secret.

There is no doubt that Strauss was a fervent defender of liberal commercialism. This alone made him anathema to many on the left. That they would search for reasons to attack him—no matter how implausible—is understandable. Strauss certainly ran against the tide of the dominant progressive intellectual currents of his time, all of which accepted uncritically the doctrine that history moves in a linear fashion, with later stages being necessarily more complete and higher than those that had gone before. This notion allowed many to be sympathetic to the claims of not only democratic socialism but also Marxist communism as being higher stages of social and political evolution since they came after the emergence of liberal capitalism. It was even common to see some intellectuals overlook the realities of Stalinist oppression and be mesmerized by the claims of their abstract theory of history. Strauss simply had no patience with the kind of thinking that could so theoretically anesthetize itself that it emerged intellectually numb to obvious oppression and brutality. For many, Strauss was seen, therefore, to make common cause with the devil. If the progressivist view of democracy was the only plausible one, anyone who questioned it must be anti-democratic. That the more fashionable post-modernist Left has come to question those same progressivist presuppositions as did Strauss is another interesting irony.

In this regard, it is pertinent to recall Strauss's famous exchange with Alexandre Kojève, a Russian émigré who settled in Paris at about the time Strauss passed through on the way to the United States. He and Strauss met there before World War II and kept up an active correspondence thereafter. Strauss considered him a significant thinker and sent several of his students to seek out Kojève gave a series of influential lectures on Hegel that were attended by seemingly everyone who became anyone in French academic circles from the 1930s to the 1980s. He developed a unique reading of Hegel that accepted that the end of history had arrived: the final wisdom had been revealed, if not totally actualized; all coherent aspirations could now be satisfied. According to Kojève, the only conclusion that could be reached was that all societies would now strive to actualize the modern, liberal, commercial, bureaucratic state. The outcome would be a cosmopolitan world society along the lines of secular, Western, bureaucratic, technological, liberal, commercial societies.

Strauss concluded that such a universal, cosmopolitan society, far from opening the possibility of a truly human, satisfying existence, created the specter of a universal tyranny in which all man's higher, natural possibilities and aspirations would be strangled. Such a state would have far more resources at its command than Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia and would leave no oases for émigrés. For Strauss a world state would at best be prone to the creeping conformism and gentle slide into “soft despotism” that Tocqueville envisioned, or, at worst, Nietzsche's nightmare of a future dominated by the “last man” who aspires to nothing other than comfortable self-preservation. Strauss did not believe that such a state was possible. But even if it were, it did not represent a coherent object of aspiration.

Strauss's critique of the end of history thesis—long before Francis Fukuyama brought the subject to public attention—was simultaneously a critique of the modern, cosmopolitan aspirations of the dominant progressivism that accepted a cosmopolitan outcome as the only rational object of political and moral striving. Strauss's objections were taken as prima facie evidence of his anti-progressive and therewith reactionary and anti-democratic tendencies. It was assumed by proponents of progressivist cosmopolitanism that the only alternative to their view was a narrow, parochial, ethnic nationalism, which was defined as, in principle, fascistic. But Strauss did not accept that a cosmopolitan/fascist dichotomy exhausted the available options. He was a proponent of neither. Strauss becomes a reactionary, anti-Enlightenment conservative only for those incapable of escaping the cosmopolitan/fascist dichotomy—a dichotomy that unfortunately remains all too prevalent.

The extent to which a teacher should be held responsible for the deeds of his students or disciples is an open question. Serious thinkers frequently die the death of a thousand students. Since it is impossible for even the greatest of teachers to predict who their disciples will be or in what direction they will strike off, it would seem unreasonable to hold a teacher responsible for everyone who claimed to have been influenced by him. Yet Strauss has been blamed for all manner of things said by his students. Those students have struck off in a variety of directions to explore a variety of themes that Strauss opened up. Even a cursory glance at the work of the so-called Straussians shows such diversity, to say nothing of disagreement, that, at the very least, the Straussians represent a very factious “cult” possessed of an extremely lax policing mechanism.

So diverse are Strauss's students that some have taken his argument for the superiority of Aristotelian political science to its contemporary, behavioralist successor as a simple endorsement of Aristotle as having arrived at the final wisdom. Others, taking off from his observation that the first wave of modernity was more commonsensical than what followed, have tried to reappropriate first-wave authors like Locke and Montesquieu as exemplary of a final wisdom. To put the matter succinctly, Strauss's students include proponents respectively of both the ancients and the moderns. Other Straussians try to generate grand syntheses whereby Locke, for example, is transformed into an Aristotelian. Still others argue that a pastiche of ancient rationalism and modern republicanism can somehow be constructed. Still others see Strauss as a primarily Jewish, religious thinker and plumb those aspects of his work. Some Straussians are ardent supporters of liberal bourgeois civilization; others are critics in the mode of Tocqueville or Nietzsche. In the last analysis, an honest observer would have to conclude that it is impossible to find a unified doctrine lurking in the work of Strauss's students. What one sees is a very diverse body of philosophical literature. Again, what is shared are questions, not answers. Those who thought a great number of those questions had been answered or transcended have not been pleased to see them reopened. That explains a significant part of the hostility to Strauss and his students.

When one looks at Strauss's own large and complicated corpus, one primarily sees a great number of novel thought experiments. One sees a questioning of accepted orthodoxies and a desire to try to approach the phenomena of human existence afresh. That is the philosophic longing that must be ever re-enacted as long as we remain merely mortal beings. That questioning is a sign of the ability to exist in the tension of openness that exhilarates us all, but which, unfortunately, few of us are capable of sustaining for any extended period of time. Philosophic questioning manifests itself in a refusal either to be dogmatic or to give in to a skepticism that is dogmatically relativist.

Leo Strauss reopened many questions that had been presumed closed once and for all. One pays deference to the legacy of Strauss by keeping the questions open, not by trying dogmatically to close them anew. Strauss's thinking points toward a high-level, serious skepticism, albeit absolutely not the kind of skepticism that moves from the openness and tension appropriate to a serious questioning to the banal, flaccid somnambulism of everyday, garden-variety relativism. In the modern world, such philosophical skepticism will not destroy moral and political commitment; the fact that we do not know everything does not mean that we do not know anything.

No serious thinker ever has or ever will be suffered gladly by those who have already arrived at their final truths. From beginning to end, Leo Strauss was an iconoclast and an enigma. He will no doubt remain both as he will no doubt remain controversial. His ultimate influence is impossible to predict. But continuing, open-minded discussion seems to me to constitute the appropriate legacy for such a thinker.