[In the following review, Hallowell explores Strauss's conception of natural right and its place in ethics and politics.]

Is there any foundation in reality for the distinction between right and wrong in ethics and politics? Professor Strauss believes that there is and in presenting his case [in Natural Right and History] makes a significant contribution towards an understanding of the intellectual crisis in which we find ourselves. Based upon a series of lectures which Professor Strauss delivered at the University of Chicago in 1949 under the auspices of the Charles R. Walgreen Foundation, this book presents a formidable challenge to a positivistically oriented social science.

Modern social science not only admits its inability to help us in discriminating between legitimate and illegitimate, just and unjust objectives but denies that any rational method exists by which such judgments can objectively be made. As a consequence, Professor Strauss points out, “we can be or become wise in all matters of secondary importance, but we have to be resigned to utter ignorance in the most important respect: we cannot have any knowledge regarding the ultimate principles of our choices, i.e. regarding their soundness or unsoundness; our ultimate principles have no other support than our arbitrary and blind preferences. We are then in the position of beings who are sane and sober when engaged in trivial business and who gamble like madmen when confronted with serious issues—retail sanity and wholesale madness.” Such a conception of social science, Professor Strauss declares, not only leads to nihilism but, in fact, “is identical with nihilism.” Modern social scientists not only deny that “men can know what is good” but insist that that denial is required by the demands of tolerance and the cultivation of individuality.

The modern rejection of natural right, i.e. the rejection of the belief that there is a foundation in reality for the distinction between right and wrong in ethics and politics, takes place in the name of history or in the name of the distinction between so-called facts and values. The first two lectures examine each of these critically, with the second being devoted to a brilliant analysis of the meaning and limitations of the methodology of Max Weber. Underlying Weber's methodology, Professor Strauss points out, is the view that “reality is an infinite and meaningless sequence, or a chaos, of unique and infinitely divisible events, which in themselves are meaningless”—all meaning originating in the activity of the knowing subject. Not only is this a view of reality with which few people today would be satisfied, says Strauss, but it is also a view to which Weber himself was unable to adhere consistently. For he “could not deny that there is an articulation of reality that precedes all scientific articulation.” The subsequent lectures discuss the origin of the idea of natural right, the classical doctrine of natural right, the modern idea of natural right especially as conceived by Hobbes and Locke, and the crisis of modern natural right in Rousseau and Burke.

The rejection of natural right in the name of history is historicism, and it is with the rise of historicism and its limitations that the bulk of this book is concerned. Briefly stated, historicism is the doctrine that all thought is historically conditioned and hence relative. There is not, because there cannot be, any knowledge of an eternal, transhistorical order such as is presupposed by the theory of natural right. But historicism is open to the objection that it professes to be a truth of just such an eternal and transhistorical nature. It states that all truths are radically dependent upon the societies in which they emerge and so are relative to those societies; but this most fundamental truth is asserted as valid everywhere and always. Historicism attempts to meet this objection by the assumption of an absolute moment in history. At one moment in history it is given to men to realize the complete dependence of all their thinking upon history. In that moment men perceive that all their ideas of natural right were a delusion.

Professor Strauss suggests that the answer to historicism is to show how it came about. Historicism, he says, is the outcome of the crisis of the specifically modern interpretation of natural right. If this can be shown, then historicism's claim to have arrived at the absolute moment in history will collapse.

The origin of the idea of natural right has its roots, Professor Strauss argues, in the classical philosophers' discovery of the distinction between nature and convention. The discovery of this distinction gives birth to philosophy, or the quest for “the first things.” “In brief, then, it can be said,” Professor Strauss declares, “that the discovery of nature is identical with the actualization of a human possibility which, at least according to its own interpretation, is trans-historical, trans-social, trans-moral and trans-religious.” The philosophic quest for the first things is embodied in metaphysics as the science of being and it is now seen that political institutions have their ultimate explanation in metaphysical presuppositions. Hence the classical philosophers, and notably Aristotle, taught that there is an objective order of human wants determined ultimately by the structure of human nature. The end of man is the perfection of his nature. But since man is by nature a social being he cannot reach his perfection except in society, or more precisely, in civil society. Civil society is thus natural, because demanded by human nature, and can be said to be prior to the individual inasmuch as nature intends not mere human existence but human perfection. Moreover, in order to reach his highest stature, man must live in the best kind of society; hence the preoccupation of classical natural right philosophy with discovering the theoretically ideal order of society based on nature and transcending the flux of history.

The break with this tradition of natural right, Professor Strauss argues, was first made by Hobbes, whose intention was to put natural right on a scientific basis. Civil society, as Hobbes conceives it, is not natural; it is merely an artificial construction designed to preserve the individual's original right to his own existence. Whereas in Aristotle's philosophy society is prior to the individual, in Hobbes' philosophy the individual is in every sense prior to society. Professor Strauss goes on to show how John Locke accepted Hobbes' shift in emphasis from natural duties to natural rights and carried it even further.

But it is in Rousseau's theory that “the modern natural right teaching reaches its critical stage. By thinking through that teaching, Rousseau was brought face to face with the necessity of abandoning it completely. If the state of nature is subhuman, it is absurd to go back to the state of nature in order to find in it the norm for man. Hobbes had denied that man has a natural end. He had believed that he could find a natural or nonarbitrary basis of right in man's beginnings. Rousseau showed that man's beginnings lack all human traits. On the basis of Hobbes' premise, therefore, it became necessary to abandon altogether the attempt to find the basis for right in nature, in human nature. And Rousseau seemed to have shown an alternative. For he had shown that what is characteristically human is not the gift of nature, but is the outcome of what man did, or was forced to do, in order to overcome, or to change nature; man's humanity is the product of the historical process. For a moment—the moment lasted longer than a century—it seemed possible to seek the standard of human action in the historical process.” Professor Strauss's thesis then, is briefly this: by abandoning metaphysics and a teleological view of human nature, the modern interpretation of natural right brought upon itself a crisis which issued in historicism. Historicism's claim to have arrived at the absolute moment in history therefore falls, because the genesis of historicism can be traced to an intellectual crisis which adequately explains it.

Professor Strauss brings to his task an admirable scholarship and a brilliant, incisive mind. His style reflects the lucidity of his thinking and as a consequence his book deserves a wide audience, not only among political theorists, for whom it is indispensable, but among political scientists generally.

Any reservations I have about the book would refer to the author's initial presuppositions rather than to the details of his analysis. Professor Strauss approaches the problem of natural right from the perspective of classical paganism; he interprets the modern revolt against the tradition of natural right, not primarily as a revolt against the Christian tradition, but as a revolt against the classical tradition. And it is not to the Christian tradition but rather to the classical tradition that he would have us return. The natural law doctrines of the Middle Ages appear to him to be a distortion of the classical tradition caused by the introduction of beliefs imported from revelation. One may contrast with this view the study of natural law by A. P. D'Entreves and Erich Voegelin's New Science of Politics, to mention but two recent works that would challenge that interpretation. It seems to me that Professor Strauss dismisses with insufficient evidence and argument the contention so ably defended by Etienne Gilson that Christian philosophy is not only possible but that St. Thomas Aquinas went a long way towards achieving the harmony between reason and revelation that Professor Strauss would deny is possible. To interpret the crisis of our times primarily as a revolt against the classical tradition is to interpret that crisis as being primarily the result of an intellectual mistake. And it is suggested, by implication at least, that intellectual conversion to Aristotle would effect the cure. That intellectual mistakes may well have been made and need correction, and that we can learn much from Aristotle can be conceded; but intellectual mistakes themselves have a cause and to some of us it would seem that St. Paul had a more profound understanding of man's predicament and need than did Aristotle. Which is not to deny the wisdom of the Greeks but only to say that it is insufficient.