SOURCE: Gunnell, John G. “Political Theory and Politics: The Case of Leo Strauss and Liberal Democracy.” In The Crisis of Liberal Democracy: A Straussian Perspective, edited by Kenneth L. Deutsch and Walter Soffer, pp. 68-88. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

[In the following essay, Gunnell analyzes “Political Philosophy and the Crisis of Our Time” in order to gain insight into Strauss's notion of the relationship between political philosophy and politics.]

Leo Strauss was the greatest writer of epic political theory in our century. Yet what he was saying, what he was doing by saying what he said, and what he hoped to accomplish remain open issues. If there is a single theme that gives coherency to his work, it is his account of the decline of the tradition of political philosophy and the entailed crisis of the West that is manifest in the crisis of liberal democracy. To understand Strauss requires locating his work within the literary genre to which that account belongs, but this is complicated by the fact that Strauss was one of the creators of that genre.¹ Furthermore, the form of discourse that characterizes this literature is far from explicit. It cannot be categorized as historical, exegetical, philosophical, or political, even though it may employ or partake of each.

I will argue that Strauss's work can best be understood as rhetorical and that it should be approached as an example of political theory as evocation. As such, it raises, at least by implication, questions about the conditions and limits of academic political theory and its relationship to politics. Although these questions were vivid for Strauss, they have become obscure within the contemporary enterprise of political theory.

For Strauss, as for many of the other scholars who immigrated to the United States in the 1930s and contributed to reshaping the character of political theory as an academic discipline, the dilemmas inherent in the relationship between intellectuals and politics and between academic and public discourse were matters of great concern. Strauss insisted that the “crisis of modernity” was “primarily the crisis of modern political philosophy,” and he meant that they were in some sense at once causally linked and identical. Yet, he asked, was it not “strange” that “the crisis of a culture [should] primarily be the crisis of one academic pursuit among many?” His answer was, in part, that “political philosophy is not essentially an academic pursuit: the majority of great political philsophers were not university professors.”² But even if it were not “essentially” such a pursuit, it had historically become one, and this was one of the problems that defined the situation within which a solution must be sought.

This issue is an important element in the context for understanding Strauss's work, and it is one that is crucial for a critical analysis of much of contemporary political theory. The difference is that Strauss, as well as many of the other emigrés, were profoundly aware of the problem and sensitive to the pathos of academic political theory and its relationship to politics. Yet in various ways their work served to sublime and intellectualize the dilemma and contribute to the alienation of political theory.³

Politics, political theory and theorizing, the political theorist, and the relationship between theory and practice have become conceptual objects constituted by academic discourse. Despite its allusions to practical issues, the bulk of academic political theory has little to say about the particularity of politics and even less about what (in Strauss's language) might be called “the nature of political things” or the ontology of political phenomena. Whether it could or should do otherwise is another matter. My immediate concern is with the authenticity of an activity that fails to confront the fact that speaking academically about politics is not the same thing as speaking politically.

In examining Strauss we can understand something of the origins of the problem and gain some new insight into its present manifestations. I will interpret in detail one essay by Strauss [“Political Philosophy and the Crisis of our Time”] that I believe is of special importance for explaining his general intellectual project and his argument about modernity. The essay merits a careful treatment in light of its pivotal place in Strauss's work, but I am also approaching it as a vehicle for exploring his notion of the relationship between political theory and politics. Before turning to that essay, it is necessary to look more generally at Strauss's use of the concept liberal democracy.

I

It would be a mistake to assume that liberal democracy refers to any political phenomena that can be authoritatively disclosed. For Strauss, as for many political theorists who came to prominence in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the crisis of modern liberalism was a practical and historically situated problem, but the relationship between the concept of liberalism or liberal democracy and particular political ideas and institutions is far from unproblematical in his work. Liberal democracy is basically part of a constellation of symbols that play a crucial role in his evocative prose, and it is within that configuration that the principal meaning can be found. My analysis is confined to distinguishing four basic characteristics or aspects of usage: (1) the historical dimension of his symbolism; (2) his paradoxical account of liberal democracy; (3) the abstract nature of his treatment; and (4) the intellectualist emphasis that attaches to his claims.

Sometimes for Strauss, “liberal democracy” has a specific historical reference. One significant instance is his description of Germany and the Weimar regime of the late 1920s; he evokes parallels with, and connections between, Weimar and the contemporary crisis of the West. Weimar was already internally “weak” and exemplified justice without power and will, but at a “critical moment the victorious liberal democracies discredited liberal democracy in the eyes of Germany by the betrayal of their principles through the Treaty of Versailles.” Strauss attributes both the “precarious” situation of the Jews and the social disillustionment that prepared the way for the Third Reich to the “weakness of liberal democracy.”⁴

From the ruins of Weimar sprung the only regime in history based on a principled and “murderous” hatred of the Jews and dedicated to the destruction of both public rights and private freedom. Liberal democracy contained not only the seeds of its own destruction but the basis of a regime that negated its defining values. Strauss argues that the idea of tolerance in liberal democracy not only conceals possibilities of intolerance but leads to the abdication of a basis for defending its own principles. “Absolute tolerance is altogether impossible,” and when liberal democaracy becomes relativistic it leads to an “abandonment of all standards including its own.”⁵

The other significant historical manifestation of liberal democracy is the United States. This is the most immediate and practical object of Strauss's political commentary. Although the United States is the “bulwark of freedom” in the face of a “contemporary tyranny’ that “has its roots in Machiavelli's thought,” the shadow of Weimar hangs over it.⁶ The fate of liberal democracy and the West as a whole resides in the confrontation between the United States and Russian communism. But the nation is now in danger, though modern social science and other influences, of accepting the “yoke” of German historicism and rejecting the very idea of natural right as well as the rarefied but salvageable ideal embodied in the Declaration of Independence.⁷

Strauss's discussion of liberal or “constitutional” democracy is studiously paradoxical. On the one hand he claims that it may be the best practicable form of regime and the best hope of the modern world. It has historical connections with such elements of “pre-modern thought” as classical republicanism and the notion of the mixed regime in Aristotle's philosophy and “comes closer to what the classics demanded than any alternative that is visible in our age.”⁸ On the other hand its intellectual origins are in part the same as those of modern totalitarianism with which it shares certain principles and tendencies. In Strauss's dramatic historical cycle recounting the decline of the tradition of political philosophy and the rise of contemporary political institutions, “the theory of liberal democracy, as well as of communism, originated the first and second waves of modernity.”⁹ Strauss insists that liberal democracy and communism are not the same, even though, from a distance, they look very much alike. But one of his aims is to demonstrate that they are more alike than we might tend to assume. Furthermore, the historical degeneration of liberal democracy, with its growing “conformism” and “invasion of privacy,” into something akin to communism is an eminent, imminent, and immanent danger.¹⁰ Sometimes Strauss depreciates the difference—suggesting that it is largely just a matter of degree or a difference in means (since they are both dedicated to the creation of a “universal and homogeneous state”) and that what separates the two are such particular factors as the freedom under liberal democracy to “to criticize the government.”¹¹ But at other times he nurtures the image of opposition and claims that the furute of liberal democracy rests on a coice between “true” and “perverted” liberalism.¹²

Apart from limited and ambivalent historical symbols, Strauss offers little in the way of concrete institutional and ideological analysis. Liberal democracy appears largely as a bundle of abstact qualities. It is presented as a political manifestation of the demonic humanism that animates the hubristic “modern project” of attempting to master and control nature, including human nature, for the purpose of serving the material needs and desires of humankind.¹³ As close as he comes to specifying substantive attributes of liberal democracy are references to such things as “mass culture,” the rule of an uneducated majority, and the belief in the freedom of individuals to live according to their private passions.¹⁴

At times, Strauss educes the image of liberal democracy by way of a contrast model based on classical ideas and institutions. The ancients, he claims, had little hope that an aristocracy or rule by the best citizens would, or could, come into existence. They settled for the idea of a practical solution whereby either the best, the “gentlemen,” would be elected by the people or the constitution would be a mixed regime. Strauss indicates that there are historical connections between these notions and modern liberal democracy, but the connections have become attenuated. “Modern republicanism,” starting from the principle of natural equality and popular sovereignty, seeks, for example, to guarantee prepolitical natural rights and achieve material prosperity, and its elite is commercial and industrial. From at least Locke through the Federalist Papers, there was a generally steady decline of the principles of classical republicanism into those of liberal democracy that, Strauss implies, was paralleled by similar institutional tendencies.¹⁵ Modern democracy (which Strauss seldom distinguishes from liberal democracy) presupposes a “distinction between state and society” with the former an instrument of the latter, “a fundamental harmony between philosophy and the people” as well as between philosophy (or science) and politics, and “egalitarianism.”¹⁶

Strauss's description of liberal democracy is basically ideational. The problem of its crisis is located within a cosmic battle of “isms,” and the causes of the crisis, both historically and in the present, are attributed to the ideas of certain individuals. The solutions are of the same character. Liberal democracy may in some sense be the best hope of the West, but if it is to fulfill this function, and even survive, it requires purification. This is not a matter of any simple choice between liberalism and conservatism. Even though conservatism may represent some of its better tendencies,¹⁷ liberal democracy encompasses both poles.

This intellectualist emphasis indicates what for Strauss was a matter of great concern, but a concern that he seldom discussed very directly or fully. This was the problem of the relationship between the intellectual (particularly the academic) and politics. Intellectuals had betrayed politics, but politics had also shunned and betrayed them. Strauss's dramatic rendition of the past is complemented by a projection of this relationship onto the present and into the future, and in an important sense it is this problem that informs his enterprise.

Strauss often speaks of Machiavelli as the turning point not only in the tradition of political thought but also in the whole development of modern institutions. Hobbes is portrayed as one of the “founders” of the modern project, and Rousseau and Nietzsche mark the crests of the last two waves of modernity. But it was Spinoza, through his restatement of “classical republicanism,” who was “the philosopher who founded liberal democracy, a specifically modern regime. Directly and through his influence on Rousseau, who gave the decisive impulse to Kant, Spinoza became responsible for that version of modern republicanism” and was the “first philosopher who was both a democrat and a liberal.”¹⁸ It is far from apparent how, exactly, one could respond to Strauss's claims about this intellectual patrimony, let alone its impact on political thought and practice in the contemporary world. The initial problem is to grasp precisely what kinds of claims are involved.

Just as the origins and character of liberal democracy are highly intellectualized, so is its contemporary predicament. The Cold War, Strauss argues, came down to a “qualitative difference, which amounts to a conflict, between liberal democracy and communism.”¹⁹ Although (American) liberal democracy possesses characteristics and tendencies that make it potentially regenerate, social science, the most important intellectual and educational force in the modern world, has not only failed to nourish these better elements but also has reflected and reinforced “the most dangerous proclivities of democracy.” Strauss suggests that this is no accident. The two are historically and culturally entwined and “there is then more than a mysterious pre-established harmony between the new political science and a particular version of liberal democracy.”²⁰ Social science, with its “generous liberalism” or excessive tolerance, which is only a step away from nihilism, not only fails as a critical force but also constitutes part of the modern project and serves as both its apologist and impetus.²¹

Strauss argues that to a large degree the “new political science” teaches doctrines that are simply incorrect. But it also teaches what might be understood as “inappropriate” truths when it blurs the line between liberal democracy and communism. Although Strauss himself acknowledges that “there is only a difference of degree” between the two,²² social and political science allows this knowledge to enter the public mind and, worst of all, neither provides nor admits a standard of comparative judgment. Through its propagation of the fact-value distinction and the idea of the equality of all values, it denies the very possibility of any such standard. But the uncritical “methodological” character of social science is not the end of the problem. It incorporates a tacit, substantive commitment to a vision of “rational society” that is coincidental with that of liberal democracy.

Strauss argues that the new political science, typified by Lasswell and the behavioral movement, “came into existence” as “a revolt against” an earlier “democratic orthodoxy” that failed to recognize “the irrationality of the masses and the necessity of elites.” It could, he suggests, have learned from classical political science that there was “no compelling case for liberalism (for example, for the unprincipled freedom of such speech as does not constitute a clear and present danger) nor for democracy (free elections based on universal suffrage).”²³ But political science had such an “unfaltering commitment” to liberal democracy that, rather than facing up to the implications of its criticism, it merely declared that no rational or objective value judgments are possible and that “no iron-clad argument in favor of liberal democracy ought in reason to be expected.” Thus, “the crisis of liberal democracy” has been concealed by “almost willful blindness.” It is, he says, “no wonder then that the new political science has nothing to say against those who unhesitatingly prefer surrender, that is, the abandonment of liberal democracy, to war” and that it merely “fiddles” while the West writhes in the throes of crisis.²⁴

Since Strauss describes the crisis of liberal democracy in basically intellectual, and even academic, terms, it is not surprising that his solution falls into the same category. It would be a mistake, however, to fail to recognize that he was poignantly aware of the gap between thought and action or between the academy and politics. For this reason alone it is necessary to be somewhat wary of taking too literally his attribution of great efficacy to the ideas of past thinkers. But although distance between philosophy and politics is inevitable, and even desirable, Strauss does not deny important relationships or the possibility of contact. His purposes were far from merely scholarly, and many of his arguments can only be understood as rhetorical moves that are, at least in purpose, “political” and not simply a form of symbolic action.

Strauss sympathized with Weber regarding the tension between the vocations of science and politics. His own reluctance about joining theory and practice reflects some of the same concerns that informed Weber's distinction between fact and value. It is rooted less in his exposure to classical wisdom (which serves to justify his claims) than in experiences indicating what happens when intellectuals get involved in politics. Marx's and Lenin's dreams of making ideals a reality ended in totalitarianism, and Heidegger violated the philosophical calling by giving intellectual legitimacy to the Nazi regime.²⁵ Strauss's tale about the modern project being created by philosophers who believed in the practicality of their millenarian schemes is designed to tell us something about theory and practice and the unresolvable conflict between them. To cross the line is to cease to be a true philosopher, and this is the fate of modern philosophy.²⁶

The answer to the crisis of liberal democracy, in the sense of what should be done, is not for philosophers to become political actors. There are natural and eternal structures and demands that are impervious to human action and convention and prevent the direct translation of theory into practice. Philosophy cannot become esoteric and forget practice, but neither can it become politicized and submerged in life without corrupting both philosophy and politics.²⁷ The just city is one that reflects philosophy, but politics cannot bear philosophical rule without mutal destruction. At least this is how Strauss reads the Republic.

Strauss's solution to the modern crisis is the development of an “antidote” that consists of what he understood himself as doing—maintaining the basis of a liberal education, in the classical sense, in a society that devalues it. Part of the purpose of this liberal education would be to reawaken the conservative elements in liberal democracy that are most akin to classical philosophy. Such an education would in some measure help “to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society.”²⁸ Wisdom must in part speak the language of politics, since it is neither insulated from the city nor irrelevant to it. But those who possess this wisdom and teach it should not be part of that practical aristocracy. Theoretical and prudential wisdom are, and must be, two different things. Only through the medium of propagating liberal education can the intellectual achieve a hearing in the “market place,” and thus the intellectual “seeks light and therefore shuns the limelight.” Strauss points to what he considers to be the “grandiose failures” of Marx, “the father of communism,” and Nietzsche, “the stepgrandfather of fascism.” These individuals had an exemplary liberal education in the best sense, but they did not link their wisdom to “moderation,” which, in practical terms, means “loyalty to a decent constitution and even the cause of constitutionalism,” that is, to liberal democracy, whose crisis is the crisis of our time.²⁹

II

In discussing Strauss's essay on “the crisis of our time,”³⁰ my emphasis is on Strauss's emphasis, and my purpose is to bring his argument into full view where it can be examined and understood in terms of structure, content, and type. The first part of his essay deals with the character of the modern crisis and its origins; the second part focuses on the confrontation between the old and new political science or between political philosophy and social science; the third part is devoted to Aristotle and a discussion of the relevance of his teaching for understanding and dealing with the crisis.

Strauss argues that at the “core” of the modern crisis is the “doubt of what we can call the ‘modern project.’” Part of the crisis, or at least a catalyst, is the external threat of communism, but the basic problem is the internal disability of modern liberal democracy. The character of the modern project is defined by its rejection of classical notions of natural right and their replacement by an attempt to dominate nature for the purpose of creating a universal society dedicated to material advancement. Strauss claims that this project was “originated by modern political philosophy,” but along the way led to the decline of political philosophy itself and its transformation into “ideology or myth.” Thus, any solution must begin with a “restoration” of political philosophy. This requires a historical exercise in destruction, recollection, and recovery and particularly a return to the point of that crucial quarrel between the ancients and moderns so that the “old answers” can be given an opportunity now that the “modern answers” have failed.

Strauss urges that the existence and symptoms of the crisis are self-evident and require no detailed description or “proof.” All the little crises that, he suggests, we note and experience everyday are merely manifestations of “one great crisis” that was first diagnosed by Spengler. The problem is in large part psychological—a failure of nerve and a crisis of confidence. The West has “become uncertain of its purpose.” Strauss is not an unqualified way committed to that purpose or its ultimate validity, but he maintains that the loss of “faith” has left society “completely bewildered.” The West, as demonstrated in the “famous declarations made during the two world wars,” had understood itself as the embodiment and “future” of mankind, and any society that understands itself in these terms cannot relinquish the vision without “despair” and “degradation.” This universalism was, however, merely an expression of a “purpose stated originally by the most successful form of modern philosophy: a kind of political philosophy which aspired to build on the foundation laid by classical political philosophy, a society superior in truth and justice to the society toward which the classics aspired.”

The goal of the modern project was to overcome the gap between theory and practice and remove “philosophy or science” from the realm of contemplation and employ it as an instrument in the service of human prosperity. This also meant that the philosopher became a scientist or social actor and descended into the cave. Strauss implies that this was early liberalism, Marxism, and the Hegelian dream of the coincidence of the rational and the real. The mastery of nature was to be the key to universalism, since it would make it possible for everyone to achieve their “natural right” to what Locke called “comfortable self-preservation.” This would result in “freedom and justice” and would eventually lead to, and require, a society of global dimensions or at least a society of democratic nations.

Strauss argues that in recent years the “experience of Communism” has brought this project up short. It has demonstrated that, “in the foreseeable future, there cannot be a universal state” of any kind and that “political society remains what it has always been: a partial or particular society whose most urgent and primary task is self-preservation and whose highest task is its self-improvement.” This confrontation with communism has only brought to light truths already accessible in classical political philosophy. Human nature is not infinitely malleable or perfectable, and there are natural limits on the scope of political society. The experience has not only provided a practical or political lesson but a “lesson regarding the principle of politics” that has cut deeply into the beliefs of the West, including its “belief that affluence is a sufficient or even necessary condition of happiness.” The modern project, as opposed to the classical view of life, assumed that social progress could be achieved through external or institutional means rather than through “the formation of character” and that there could be a separation of law and morality. Such “heroes” of the project as Hobbes even suggested that morality could be supplanted by “enlightened absolute sovereigns.” The lessons learned have been ones of means as well as of ends.

The general crisis of the West is, according to Strauss, “repeated” in the crisis of “modern liberal democracy.” This kind of regime “claims to be responsible government,” in the sense of government responsible to the governed and having “no secrets” (in Woodrow Wilson's sense of open covenants). Here Strauss is alluding to the democratic, or, in his view, egalitarian aspect of liberal democracy. It is also “limited government,” with a sharp “distinction between the public and the private.” This represents its liberal or permissive dimension, which in effect means that the private (and secret) is above (below, or outside) the law and, like the act of the indicivual voter, outside the realm of political responsibility in the classical sense. The contradiction within liberal democracy is that this “irresponsible individual” is also “sovereign,” and Strauss's implication is that it is not really responsible government at all but something closer to a Hobbesian tyranny.

This, he claims, was not “the original notion of liberal democracy,” which had entailed the idea of a “sovereign individual” who was “limited and guided by his conscience.” But, as with Hobbes's despot who stood outside political society, there was no way to define, create, or provide for such qualities as conscientiousness. Just as a Hobbes's despot would, in practice, probably not be enlightened, liberal democracy, which makes no place for moral education, has degenerated into “permissive egalitarianism,” and “the change is well known to all.” Strauss's account is abstract, and it is not clear whether this “moral decline,” whereby the conscientious individual has been replaced by “the individual with his urges,” is a theoretical or practical decline (or a movement from theory to practice). Strauss also suggests, without explication, that the decline is paralleled by or connected with the relativization and pluralization of the concept of culture. Its meaning has been transformed (largely through the medium of the social sciences) from “the culture of the human mind” to simply a designation for any mode of thought and action including that in a “lunatic asylum.”

Strauss suggests, with obvious irony, that the modern sense of crisis “is not merely a strong but a vague feeling.” It “acquired the status of scientific exactitude” when social science renounced its dream of a “universal and prosperous society” as “the rational solution of the human problem” because of practical difficulties and its avowed “inability to validate any value judgments.” The modern project, the purpose of the West, and the core of liberal democracy were reduced to nothing more than an ideology. The “Olympian freedom” of social science “overcomes the crisis of our time” only by ignoring and subtly reinforcing it. The greatest paradox is that concern with scientific objectivity may in the end serve to “destroy the conditions of social science,” since social science is more concerned with the “validity of its findings” than with the crisis of the West.

Unlike their contemporary progeny, the philosophers who created the modern project were sure of their purpose. They did not accept classical natural right, but they believed that their plan was “required by nature, by natural rights,” and designed to serve “the most powerful and natural needs of men.” But another paradox (in Strauss's increasingly paradoxical story) was that the conquest of nature also demanded the “conquest of human nature,” which in turn meant “the questioning of the unchangeability of human nature” that had made it possible to define the ends of the modern project. Finally, science and philosophy were separated with the former dedicated to achieving power over nature, but at the same time precluded from making rational value choices about the exercise of that power. With reason limited to the objective “is,” the goal or end of the project to which society had committed itself became merely an “ought” or “subjective ideal.”

Strauss argues that social science is out of phase with the world of common sense and practical life. The average citizen does not, in everyday life, make a hard distinction between fact and value or feel unable to make rational value judgments. A problem emerges only when common sense is replaced by modern scientific understanding. Since science, however, depends on common sense and is a refinement of it, it should comprehend that “primary understanding” before modifying it. Strauss admits that it is not an easy task to achieve the primary understanding that is necessary for the social sciences to become “truly sciences, rational enterprises,” but, fortunately, “the most basic work” was accomplished by Aristotle. Thus, a solution, or the basis of a solution, to the crisis is, in principle, accessible, but this requires escaping the dominance of modern scientific thought.

In the second part of his essay, Strauss takes up the problem of the relationship between social science and political philosophy. The decay of political philosophy into ideology has been accompanied by the replacement of “research and teaching in political philosophy” with the history of political philosophy. He does not disclose precisely how and when this took place or what was replaced, but he claims that since this transformation involves replacing a “doctrine” that claims to be true with a “survey of errors,” it is “absurd” and really impossible. Although much of Strauss's own work might be characterized as such a survey, his point is to “demonstrate” how the position of modern social science is internally contradictory and necessarily turns back upon itself.

According to Strauss, what, functionally, has taken the place of political philosophy is “logic,” which claims to show, on the basis of the invidious fact-value distinction, the impossibility of political philosophy. Many of the matters once considered by political philosophy are now the province of “non-philosophic political science.” Its search for timeless general laws of political behavior identifies it, he claims, as part of a (Hegelian, neo-Marxist?) “comprehensive enterprise called universal history.” Strauss, parenthetically, enters his doubts that history can be modeled on the natural sciences, but his basic purpose is to locate social science within this historicist framework and thereby suggest that if it followed its own inner logic, it would be forced to look not only at behavior and institutions but also at the “ideologies” that inform them. At this point Strauss's argument becomes conspicuously ironic.

He suggests that some ideologies (we may assume, at least, Marxism and liberal democracy) are “known to have been originated by outstanding men.” To grasp the crude understandings, which are those that are in practice politically effective, one must understand the source from which they were derived, and, consequently, “it becomes necessary to consider whether and how the ideology as conceived by the originator was modified by its adherents.” Since “one kind of ideology consists of the teachings of the political philosophers,” it is necessary to understand them as they understand themselves in order to assess the effect of these ideas. “Surely,” he says, “every one of them was mistaken in believing that his teaching was a sound teaching regarding political things,” since “through a reliable tradition we know this belief forms part of a rationalization.” But “in the case of the greatest minds,” this “process” and the manner in which the ideas were understood (by adherents of various types, adversaries, and just plain observers) is worth studying. The activity of behavioral science requires, then, the study of history of political philosophy, and this, fortuitously, has been “rendered possible today by the shaking of all traditions” in the wake of the modern crisis. The crisis “may have the accidental advantage of enabling us to understand in an untraditional, a fresh manner what was hitherto understood only in a traditional, derivative manner.”

According to Strauss's hypothetical account, modern political science would eventually be forced to conduct a study of the classics, and this, in turn, would require it to confront reflectively its own premises and “consider the possibility that the older political science was sounder and truer.” It would, in this way, come to transcend its own limitations and even transform itself into a study of the history of political philosophy that would be more than a survey of errors. Such a revitalized understanding of classical political philosophy would not provide “recipes” for dealing with our “present-day predicament.” The “success” of modern philosophy has resulted in a new type of society to which classical principles do not directly apply, but a grasp of these principles “may be the 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.”

After this exploration of the limits of social science, Strauss's next move is to confront objections that might be raised to seeking wisdom from the classics, and particularly Aristotle. This final section of the essay is sophistic and opaque, and it requires careful explication. Its intention, however, is basically to present an indirect critique of the image of liberal democracy that he has evoked and to call into question certain aspects of contemporary political, thoughtful politics by associating them with this image.

Strauss does not say precisely who claims that Aristotle's political philosophy has been refuted, but the assumption of refutation is, he suggests, tied to the notion that Aristotle's cosmology has been discredited by modern science and philosophy. Strauss never claims that it has not been, or does not deserve to be, discredited, but he argues that the core principle of classical metaphysics has not been refuted. This is “the face of essential differences” and the existence of “essences” as well as the entailed proposition that the “whole consists of heterogeneous beings.” He suggests that we can, for example, deduce from this principle that there is an “essential difference between the common good and the private good.” From this point, Strauss's text moves on like a Platonic dialogue with the interlocutors absent.

Strauss next takes up the belief “that Aristotle has been refuted because he was anti-democratic.” Strauss does not want to argue that he was a democrat but rather to explain why he was not one. He preemptorily defines democracy as “majority rule” and notes Aristotle's claim that there are always two groups—the rich and poor—in every society and that the poor, or those who must “earn their living,” constitute the majority and do not have the leisure to acquire the education to rule well. Strauss concedes that today “the economy of plenty” might make it possible for the majority to be educated, but he argues that these current circumstances are the product of modern technology and science. This “new interpretation of science,” as existing “for the sake of human power,” which appeared in the “works of Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes,” rejected Aristotle's idea that science existed for the sake of “contemplation.” Strauss maintains that we have now (e.g., because of the atom bomb) become “doubtful whether the unlimited progress of science and technology is something unqualifiedly good.” If the modern notion of science is dubious, then so, he implies, is the status of the economy of plenty and majority rule. Aristotle's undemocratic principle of justice remains intact.

Another reason for considering Aristotle as something other than a democrat is his assumption that people are naturally “unequal in politically relevant respects.” Strauss argues that this “can hardly be denied,” as, for example, in the cases of “natural inequality regarding understanding.” This aspect of the human condition is in fact still “recognized” in modern democracy and its idea of “equality of opportunity,” which “implies” that people should pursue that for which they are best suited. The same idea is embodied in modern “representative,” as opposed to “direct,” democracy, “which elects people whom it believes are above average.” It is difficult to be certain about what Strauss means here. He may, for example, be pointing to the residue of earlier republican principles in liberal democracy, or the force may be ironic and sardonic. Few would accept this as either an accurate or adequate interpretation of equality of opportunity and representative democracy.

Finally, Strauss considers the objection “that Aristotle's whole political philosophy is narrow, or provincial.” He rejects this on the historical grounds that the concept of the “city-state” was neither merely nor essentially Greek and that polis is best translated not as state (which implies, for exasmple, a distinction between state and society) but as country. He wants to stress the universal significance of Aristotle's analysis of the polis and his notion of happiness.

Strauss claims that Aristotle embraced a “reasonable” notion of happiness, which is still the “ordinary” one that “all men understand” (i.e., an “enviable” life or “reasonable contentedness”). Substantively, “happiness means the practice of moral virtue above everything else, the doing of noble deeds,” and the “complete human good” that is the end of the city. Yet in “scientific circles,” especially since the time of the seventeenth century “founders of modern political philosophy,” this notion has been questioned on the basis that “happiness is entirely subjective.” Since this threatened to destroy any basis of political judgment, individuals such as Locke and Madison substituted the “conditions” of happiness, such as “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,” that they took to be objective. The end of political society or the state was to create and maintain these conditions or “natural rights of men.” They forsook the idea of imposing public criteria of human happiness and maintaining its superiority over the private and subjective search for happiness in society. This inevitably implied that society was superior to the state, and the “solution” to the persistent “theoretical” ambiguity about this relationship was to conceive of “culture or civilization” as a “matrix for both.”

Strauss insists on a sharp distinction between the modern (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) concept of natural rights (or the rights of man) and the traditional (classic and medieval) teaching about natural law. The transformation was one in which the idea of rights was given priority over the ideas of law and duty in which “‘nature’ was replaced by ‘man’.” This antoropocentric shift and the rejection of a “hierarchic order” corresponded to Descartes's epistemology.

In Aristotle's philosophy of the polis, political society was naturally limited in size and conformed to the nature of man by taking account of the limits on such human powers as “knowing” and “caring” for others. This philosophy, was also concerned with the politeia (constitution, political order, or regime), its types (which determined the character of society), and ultimately with the question of their ranking and the best form. “Aristotle is animated by the political passion, the concern for the best regime.” But this lead to “a grave political and moral problem” manifested in Aristotle's discussion of the difference between a good man and a good citizen.

The constitution (form) determines the character and end of society (matter), and every society (even a materialistic one) has a hierarchy of values, including one primary value that represents its character. In the case of democracy, this value is equality. Aristotle (according to Strauss) also claimed that there must be a “harmony” between the primary value and the regime or the “preponderant” or “authoritative” part of society (possibly, but not necessarily, the majority) that gives form or “tone” to society. Although it “runs counter to our notions,” Aristotle held, and our “experience” confirms, that the identity of a city if a function of the regime. “Moderate and sober people reject” the “partisan” or “extreme view” that a city in only truly a city if it corresponds to a particular kind of regime, but “patriots” are also incorrect in insisting that a “change of regime is a surface event which does not affect the being of a city at all.” Aristotle is “much more rational” than a patriot and “less radical” than a partisan. For Aristotle a change in regime does not, for example, necessarily cancel obligations, but it constitutes another city in its “most important respect.” The highest possible value would be “human excellence,” and nothing would be a greater change than to turn to “baseness.” Aristotle is a “partisan of excellence.”

Strauss suggests that Aristotle's “thesis regarding the supremacy of the regime” can be clarified in terms of the phenomenon of “loyalty.” Loyalty should be directed toward not simply the “country” but also “the country informed by the regime.” This principle would, for example, invalidate the argument of a fascist or communist who would claim to be a loyal citizen and set out to undermine the Constitution “out of loyalty to the United States.” No on “who knows what he is doing” would, out of loyalty to liberal democracy, say or “teach” that the “Constitution should be changed constitutionally so that the regime would cease to be a liberal democracy.” Strauss argues that a specific notion of justice (democratic, aristocratic, and soon) embraced by the “preponderant part of society” and, again, “not necessarily the majority,” is the “principle of legitimacy” or “public or political morality,” which is in turn the “source of all law.” Even if a society (such as liberal democracy) should be “characterized by extreme permissiveness,” this principle must be “established and defended.” But this particular principle “necessarily has its limits,” since “a society that permits its members every sort of non-permissiveness will soon cease to be permissive” and, in fact, will soon cease altogether. Strauss's message is once again that liberal democracy should be defended, but that it is, or has become, however, internally defective.

The variety of regimes and principles of legitimacy inevitably raises the question of the best regime. Aristotle said that the highest end of man, happiness, was the same for both the individual and society, yet the highest kind of happiness for the individual was contemplation and not politics or the “doing of noble deeds.” The city can, at best, achieve a kind of analogous status. Strauss suggests that this “seeming self-contradiction” or “apparent result” is the consequence of the fact that the idea of the best regime is “an explicit abstraction … from the full meaning of the best life of the individual.” Such an abstraction is “appropriate to a political inquiry, strictly and narrowly conceived,” because it indicates the limits of political life and the life of the citizen. Strauss, also, by implication, indicates his notion of the limits of theory and philosophy in its relationship to political life.

Strauss claims that it is significant that Aristotle has examples “of men of the highest excellence” but no examples of such cities. There is always and everywhere a tension between philosophy and politics and between the good person and good citizen, but that tension is especially pronounced in the case of liberal democracy. An individual can only transcend this city through “what is best in him” or by pursuing “true happiness” as opposed to subjective happiness, but subjective happiness, Strauss has insisted, is at the core of liberal democracy. Not only is full self-realization impossible in such a regime, but there is a deep conflict between liberal democracy and both the pursuit and content of philosophical knowledge. Yet, for various reasons, philosophy must seek to sustain this kind of regime.

III

It should be apparent to a sensitive reader that the essay (in its discussion of loyalty, communism, the limits of the politics, egalitarianism, and various other matters) is not only a theoretical critique of the idea of liberal democracy, or its fallen condition, but a response to some of the concrete international and domestic political issues of the 1960s. We would surely fail to grasp the point, then, if we did not identify it in certain important respects as political commentary.³¹ It is about politics; its intention and purpose are political; it is often ideological in tone and substance; it displays political passion; and it is intensely rhetorical and evocative. Furthermore, in view of the extensive educational influence and the latent political effects that might, and probably do in the recent administration of govenment in the United States, attach to Strauss's work, it must be considered politically consequential to an extent that goes well beyond most academic political theory. Yet, in an equally important sense, it cannot be understood as political unless the real difference and intricate relationship between public and academic discourse is obscured.

Strauss was more attuned to this disparity and complexity than much of contemporary political theory, which has largely translated this practical issue into a philosophical problem and treated it accordingly. But awareness and concern did not allow or impel him to achieve an authentic position. In the end, Strauss's analysis of liberal democracy and its crisis is only an intimation that can neither be part of either philosophical or political discourse nor some intelligible intermediate ground. The argument is as elusive as its object. It is consistently elliptical, consciously ambiguous, broken by aporian moments, moved forward by spurious allusions, characterized by a strategic or mock-strategic style, laced with irony and sarcasm, and held together by arcane thematic connections. It is a fascinating object of exegesis, but there is no clear basis on which it can be substantively engaged either politically or philosophically.

Evocation, rhetoric, and obscurantism are the stuff of politics, but there is a paradox when political speech is conducted in an academic context and addresses philosophical themes. The point is not that it is ultra vires. It does, however, lack or avoid a primary audience, unless it is assumed that dissembling is an acceptable form of education and scholarly exchange. And its nobility of purpose and belief in the ultimate service of truth cannot insulate it from subjection to critical description and analysis, which destroys it as a medium of expression. It seeks, without leaving the security of the academy, to speak politically in the language of philosophy and to philosophize rhetorically. It cannot in the end do either effectively or genuinely, but it justifies its antimonian pursuit in terms of some vague notion of a seemless web of social life that makes actual differences between philosophy and politics nugatory.

What, then is the status of philosophical claims to political knowledge that lack political authority? This was a great problem for Strauss, and even if he did not solve it, he understood it. Like Weber, he was committed to the autonomy of both politics and philosophy, yet he insisted on the relevance of philosophy and on rescuing political theory from academic impotence. The dilemma propelled his project into a kind of inauthenticity where philosophy held itself academically aloof, but comprised truth in the service of political purpose. More than once Strauss reveals his willingness to accept the noble lie not only in politics but also in the relationship between philosophy and politics. His saga of the decline of the tradition and the crisis of modernity falls into this category, but so do his claims about the existence and rediscovery of natural right.

Although Strauss talks a great deal about transcendental standards of political judgment and the need to accept this regulative assumption in both philosophy and politics, he knew that philosophy could posit no such transcontextual grounds. There was no philosophical solution to philosophical relativism and historicism. His claim that there was a tradition of thought and action that accepted these principles and his analysis of individuals such as Aristotle at best only make a case for a past belief in natural law. Even less convincing are his arguments for a version of pragmatic univeralism or the notion that evidence for such principles is indirectly accessible in the practice of everyday life where people make value judgments and assume criteria of validity. And his claim about the internal contradiction of value relativism is far from a compelling basis for embracing absolutism.

What cannot be doubted, however, is that Strauss recognized that political society required transcendental beliefs and a belief in transcendentalism. There must be a belief in truth in politics even if truth and politics were ultimately incompatible. His mistake was to assume that it was within the province and capacity of academic philosophy to save the appearances and underwrite political values either specifically or generically.

It was not so much that modern philosphy challenged transcendentalism that was at stake for Strauss as the fact that, in his view, society could not bear the fate of that challenge. He examines in detail the theoretical revolution produced by the three waves of modernity and culminates in Nietzsche's withdrawal of meaning from history and the universe and the call for its human reconstitution.³² But he never really refutes or contradicts Nietzsche's revelation, nor does he quarrel with what he describes as Nietzsche's claim that

the theoretical analysis of human life that realizes the relativity of all comprehensive views and thus depreciates them would make human life impossible, for it would destroy the protecting atmosphere within which life or culture or action is alone possible.³³

It would seem that in an important sense Strauss's and Nietzsche's projects are identical.

Strauss believed, or would have some audiences believe, that modern philosophy contributed significantly to the rise of fascism. But although this particular political “implication” of modern thought had in practice been defeated by liberal democracy, Nietzsche's “critique of modern rationalism or of the modern belief in reason cannot be dismissed or forgotten. This is the deepest reason for the crisis of liberal democracy.” The problem for Strauss was to keep the “theoretical crisis” from becoming a “practical crisis,”³⁴ This required a philosophical concealment of the truth. If the theoretical crisis was not once again to end in a practical catastrophe, philosophy must take up the task of helping to sustain those values that we in practice judge to be superior to communism, but which have been undermined philosophically and ideologically. Philosophy must aid in maintaining the legitimating values of political order that, like the authority of Oz, must remain sacred to be effective. Since, however, the claims of philosophy lack natural political authority, they must be supported by the authority of knowledge if they are to speak, even indirectly, to politics.

Strauss's discussion of the past, present, and future of liberal democracy and the meaning and accessibility of the classical teaching is part of a story that belongs to an ultimately paradoxical and impossible enterprise. It is an enterprise designed to maintain both the myths of political society and the myth of the special authority and ability of academic political theory to speak to such matters.

Notes

1. For a discussion of this genre, and Strauss in particular, see John G. Gunnell; “The Myth of the Tradition,” American Political Science Review, 72 (March 1978): 122-34; and Political Theory: Tradition and Interpretation (Cambridge, England: Winthrop, 1979).

2. Leo Strauss, “The Three Waves of Modernity,” Political Philosophy: Six Essays by Leo Strauss ed. Hilail Gilden (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrille, 1975), 82.

3. See John G. Gunnell, “Encounters of the Third Kind: The Alienation of Theory in American Political Science,” American Journal of Political Science, (August 1981), 440-61; “In Search of the Political Object: Beyond Methodology and Transcendentalism,” What Should Political Theory be Now?, ed. John S. Nelson (Albany: SUNY Press, 1983), 25-52.

4. Leo Strauss, Liberalism, Ancient and Modern 2(New York: Basic Books, 1968), 225.

5. Ibid., 63.

6. Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (New York: Free Press, 1958), 13-14.

7. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 1-2.

8. Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? (New York: Free Press, 1959), 113; Strauss, “The Three Waves of Modernity,” 98.

9. Strauss, “The Three Waves of Modernity,” 98.

10. Strauss, What is Political Philosophy?, 38.

11. Strauss, Liberalism, Ancient and Modern, v, vi.

12. Ibid., 64.

13. Strauss, What is Political Philosophy?, 55.

14. Strauss, Liberalism, Ancient and Modern 5, 12.

15. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 245.

16. Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964), 35, 37, 40.

17. Strauss, Liberalism, Ancient and Modern, 16-18.

18. Ibid., 241.

19. Leo Strauss, “Epilogue,” Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics, ed. Herbert Storing (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1962), 319.

20. Ibid., 326.

21. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 4-6.

22. Strauss, “Epilogue,” 319.

23. Ibid., 326.

24. Ibid., 327.

25. Strauss, Liberalism, Ancient and Modern, 227.

26. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (New York: Free Press, 1963), 218; Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 297-98; Strauss, Natural Right and History, 34.

27. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 26.

28. Strauss, Liberalism, Ancient and Modern, 5.

29. Ibid., 24-25.

30. This essay, “Political Philosophy and the Crisis of Our Time,” was published in The Post-Behavioral Era, ed. George J. Graham and George W. Carey (New York: David McKay, 1972), 217-42. It was adapted from two lectures published in The Predicament of Modern Politics, ed. Herbert Spaeth (Detroit: University of Detroit Press, 1964), 41-54; 91-103. The first lecture was the “Crisis of Our Time” and the second was “The Crisis of Political Philosophy.” Strauss is clear about the connection: “The crisis of our time as a consequence of the crisis of political philosophy” (p. 41). Portions of these essays also form the introduction to The City and Man in which the matieral on Aristotle appears in expanded form as the first chapter. The earlier versions have short but pointed sections that stress the failure of the Western powers in the early part of the century to take a firm stand against totalitarianism, the decline of the West, the Cold War, and the extent to which the crisis is manifest in a retreat from political “honor” and “purpose” in the face of communism. There are also additional short passages that represent characteristic arguments of Strauss regarding the importance of the classical teaching, the possibility of recovering it, and its status as “truer” and more original than modern thought. The essay is also thematically closely related to his essays on “What is Political Philosophy?” and “The Three Waves of Modernity.”

31. See Gunnell, 1978, 1979; Deborah Baumgold, “Political Commentary on the History of Political Theory,” American Political Science Review 75, (December 1981), 928-40.

32. Strauss, “The Three Waves of Modernity,” 94-98.

33. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 26.

34. Strauss, “The Three Waves of Modernity,” 98.