SOURCE: Fuller, Timothy. “Reflections on Leo Strauss and American Education.” In Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Émigrés and American Political Thought after World War II, edited by Hartmut Lehmann, pp. 61-80. Washington, D.C.: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Fuller discusses Strauss's contributions to the debate on American education.]

What follows are reflections on Leo Strauss's role in and contribution to the debates over American education, particularly the character of his defense of liberal education. In entering the American educational scene, Strauss entered a forum in which a revolution in education had been underway since the second half of the nineteenth century, parallel in its own way to educational changes in Great Britain and Europe. Strauss did not invent, and did not claim to invent, the issues about liberal education in a democratic culture on which he spoke. But he did present himself as both a critic and a friend of American democracy and, in so doing, clarified his conception of the role of the philosopher in the polity. His views on both liberal education and the philosopher's role were indicative also of how he understood the practical implications of the issue of natural right and history.

My reflections were stirred not long ago when, as I was composing this essay, I attended the annual August conference of all faculty and staff at my college which starts the new academic year. It is customary on that occasion to introduce new faculty. Among those introduced there were a geologist who specializes in the dynamics of sand dunes, a professor of dance, a specialist in eighteenth-century French literature who also studies contemporary Francophone literature of the Caribbean, a computer scientist, a topologist, specialists in Asian and Middle Eastern politics, Byzantine art, physiological psychology, Soviet history, contemporary U.S. history, eighteenth-century English satire, and genetics, and a philosopher who has translated and written a commentary on Plato's Sophist.

This array, astonishingly broad for a liberal arts college of 1,900 students, but thought by most to be stimulating and exciting in its diversity, would be far exceeded in variety by any large university in the country. Higher education has long since become, to put it mildly, highly specialized and very diverse. This is one of the clearest results of the reform movement in education, begun in the latter half of the last century, that sought, successfully, to transform universities into research institutions dominated by research professors and their research programs as opposed to teachers whose principal task was to transmit the shared heritage of our civilization to undergraduates. Throughout this century institutions of higher learning have accepted that their role is to accumulate and organize knowledge, and to advance the power of science and technology, thus “contributing to society” by fostering progress and enlightenment understood in large measure as the improvement of material life. Daniel Coit Gilman, the first president of Johns Hopkins University—a leader in the late nineteenth century in creating a university that was entirely a research university—laid it down that “in selecting a staff of teachers, the Trustees have determined to consider especially the devotion of the candidate to some particular line of study and the certainty of his eminence in that specialty; the power to pursue independent and original investigations, and to inspire the young with enthusiasm for study and research.”¹

The old concerns for the development of moral character or virtuous conduct are not mentioned in this statement. Johns Hopkins University thus was committed explicitly from its founding to the primacy of graduate research studies leading to the Ph.D. as the symbol of academic success and fulfillment. It solidified by its unequivocal commitment a development that had been emerging since the early 1860s when institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Michigan, and Wisconsin began to remake their traditional structures to accommodate the new emphasis.

Consider, by contrast, this statement of John Henry Newman, written in the midnineteenth century (1852) just as these changes were about to get underway in earnest:

I have said that all branches of knowledge are connected together, because the subject-matter of knowledge is intimately united in itself, as being the acts and the work of the Creator. Hence it is that the Sciences, into which our knowledge may be said to be cast, have multiplied bearings on one another, and an internal sympathy, and admit, or rather demand, comparison and adjustment. They complete, correct, balance each other. This consideration, if well-founded, must be taken into account, not only as regards the attainment of truth, which is their common end, but as regards the influence which they exercise upon those whose education consists in the study of them … to give undue prominence to one is to be unjust to another. … There is no science but tells a different tale, when viewed as a portion of a whole, from what it is likely to suggest when taken by itself, without the safeguard, as I may call it of others.²

Newman's pronouncement appeared alongside the very changes that would undermine his idea of the university, and the academic reformers in Oxford were not sorry when he departed Oxford upon his conversion to Roman Catholicism. For Newman had argued that, while the university's object is the study of literature and science and not religious training, the university:

cannot fulfill its object duly, such as I have described it, without the Church's assistance … it still has the office of intellectual education; but the Church steadies it in the performance of that office.³

Today the nationally recognized liberal arts colleges in America—colleges that remain officially institutions for undergraduate teaching and that were founded mostly by religious denominations—not infrequently refer to themselves as “research colleges.” The term means that, while the faculties of these liberal arts colleges may still devote much of their time to teaching, they expect to compete and to be judged and rewarded by the standards President Gilman announced at Johns Hopkins for the research university a century ago. It is normal today to say that research is essential to good teaching. This reflects both the orientation new faculty bring with them from their graduate training and the tendency to define undergraduate studies as preparation for graduate research. Teaching institutions increasingly offer incentives and special rewards to those of their faculty members who publish scholarly material and engage actively with their professional counterparts outside their home schools.

Moreover, as specialized studies proliferate—a natural outcome of establishing the criteria of original and innovative research buoyed by the belief in the progressive accumulation of useful knowledge—the desire and ability for faculty members to converse with each other, inspired by confidence in a common bond of understanding, shrinks. The “crisis” of higher education is now a central topic of debate, although the crisis has been underway for some time.

It is true that there has been a countervailing movement in higher education. From the 1920s at Columbia, later at Chicago and St. John's College, Annapolis, among others, efforts were made to establish a great books curriculum and courses in the history of Western civilization. Some large universities have created small, alternative liberal arts programs within the larger university structure in which a few students may elect to enroll. We are informed, nevertheless, that only about 20 percent of the institutions of higher learning in the United States require their students to take Western civilization courses. Insofar as this countermovement has succeeded, what it has achieved is the insertion of survey courses into curriculums, alongside the more specialized courses and research programs, available to students but not necessarily required of them and often not urged upon them. This amounts to a two-track educational program: Students can divide their time between something called “general education” and specialized studies.

Academics are acutely aware of public skepticism about the character of higher education; they feel the loss of a commonsense bond between themselves and the larger world of which they are a part; they are simultaneously defensive and haughty about both the separation and the criticism. They have a great deal invested in the current concept of the university. They have gotten used until recently to being left free to evolve their intellectual interests in an uncontested way, as they have for the last generation been used to a regularly expanding financial investment in higher education. Now they can no longer be confident that the public will be content either to refrain from questioning them or to continue to invest larger and larger sums of money in their undertakings. It has become fashionable to expose scandals and absurdities in the conduct of professors and academic administrations, most recently in the uncovering of the misuse of large government grants in our most prominent research universities. The defining of the university is less and less formulated out of a commonly held academic tradition in which teachers and scholars engage in continuous reflection and conversation, and more and more influenced by those extrinsic sources who wish to mine the “mental resources” of the academy. Academic institutions are, it is widely asserted, disintegrated communities of scholars; to be in their midst no longer necessarily means we will encounter a self-understanding and commitment that bespeaks a distinctive activity. The idea of a university is contested and unclear.

The basic uncertainty was quickly apprehended by Strauss. He connected it to the peculiar difficulties of scholarship and teaching in a democratic age, while also insisting that the full dimensions of the problems involved could not be appreciated unless and until a comprehensive reexamination of the central issues of Western philosophical and political thought were undertaken.

The motto on Harvard's seal is “Veritas,” or Truth. The motto on the building in which I myself work at Colorado College is, from the Gospel of John, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” But in both of these places of learning, and in many others, there is a great debate over whether there is any truth. The debate calls into question not alone the commitment made by Gilman of Hopkins and others a century ago, but also the ancient commitment to searching for wisdom of which the modern scientific quest may be understood to be a particular interpretation.

A century ago there was little hesitancy to believe that the techniques of modern scientific research would be deployed with growing success to enlighten civilization through the dissemination of truth. A century before Gilman, in a remarkable essay called “What Is Enlightenment?” (1784), Immanuel Kant had urged that we “dare to know,” that we make use of our intelligence in order to pass from the interim stage of becoming enlightened, or civilizing, into a condition of full enlightenment, that we pass on from the childhood to the maturity of the race. The modern research university has seemed to be the institution through which the Kantian affirmation of the project to enlighten ourselves would be brought to concrete fulfillment. For Kant had also argued for the role of the thinker as a critical analyst of society's assumptions as a means to social progress. The pattern of criticism in the service of reconstruction and presumed advancement seemed to fit well with the growing confidence in the advancement of knowledge through scientific inquiry.

In his Logic of the Moral Sciences (1843), John Stuart Mill projected the symbiotic relation between a science of society and the art of political decision making through which many of the predicaments of social life would be transformed into problems for which well-designed solutions could be devised. While admitting that the contingencies of life could not be completely eliminated, Mill did assert that the aim of practical politics would be

to surround the society which is under our superintendence with the greatest possible number of circumstances of which the tendencies are beneficial and to remove or counteract, as far as practicable, those of which the tendencies are injurious.⁴

And, in his celebrated essay On Liberty (1859), Mill argued that promoting absolute freedom of thought and discussion would in time bring about a convergence of what is true and best for humanity in what he imagined as the spontaneously improving society. But what has come to the fore is an argument over whether the term “truth” is of use to us. Is it not the case, we are asked or told, that truth is relative to the discourse of particular groups and that while there can be views treated as true within a group, beyond the group's boundaries their truth can sustain no special status in the midst of competing alternatives. This is not by any means a novel argument. It is as old as philosophy itself, but it seems currently to have compelling force in the universities, and its emergence was foreseen by Strauss in his discourses on education.

Mill's faith in the ultimate convergence of ideas is in doubt today. The academic institutions that were to foster enlightenment appear to many now to generate more heat than light, often disdaining the very bases upon which they previously solicited the support of the larger public, which they claimed to serve and to enlighten.

The issue is stated dramatically by Alasdair MacIntyre in his book, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry,⁵ wherein he distinguishes the “encyclopedic” from the “genealogical” definitions of knowledge, showing that “enlightenment” has come to have both a negating and an affirming connotation. The former definition, the encyclopedic, describes the older, positivistic confidence in the method of accumulating information and expanding the power of human self-regulation through the systematic gathering and organizing of the data, symbolized by the great dictionaries and encyclopedias of the Enlightenment. The latter definition, the genealogical, describes the revolutionary undertaking, inspired by Nietzsche's demolition of values through revealing their dirty origins, to expose the concealed subjectivity and struggle behind what presents itself as scientific knowledge, and thus to deconstruct the encyclopedic enlightenment. MacIntyre asserts that these rivals are locked in a battle of mutual destruction that might permit a different and, as MacIntyre sees it, superior form of the university to emerge, addressing itself specifically to the conflict of traditions in a way reminiscent of the method of Scholastic disputation.

Hovering over these concerns is the much-used term “modernity” and the question whether modernity is good or bad for us. As the argument has developed, one discerns some of the salient features that inevitably enter into any discussion of the modern situation:

Modern life is characterized by “abstraction,” in the sense that large-scale technical, economic, and bureaucratic institutions have taken precedence over smaller, relatively cohesive communities who share a way of life in concrete form. We encounter this in the complicated structures of the modern university, or “multiversity.” It reveals to us the degree to which the university today has come to reflect the world it inhabits, the world of the mass to which the managerial revolution is a response. The university's distinctiveness as an institution among other institutions has diminished. Periodic calls for renewal of community issue from academics. It is not obvious, however, that many of them would accept the alterations in academic life that would be necessary to bring such renewal to fruition, even if they retain some residual memory of what that was like. To do so would be also to question the democratization that has affected all modern institutions. The democratizing of the universities has ensured a dizzyingly swift expansion that has produced a chaotic proliferation of motives and aims, and disputes over “standards.”

Discussions of the “technological society” or of the rationalism of modern life, document how lives are redefined as careers, and societies reinterpreted by would-be social engineers as raw materials for designs and plans for the future. The capacity to enjoy and to make use of the present has been demoted. By contrast, the felt need to move on, to be productive, to justify oneself as a contributor to some suppositious program to lead society to an alleged promised land, and the incapacity to achieve repose, dominate. This is reflected in the university's loss of confidence in the idea of learning for its own sake, the pursuit of wisdom as an intrinsic reward, not to mention its growing dependency on and desire for the largesse of governments and foundations.

This, in turn, encourages both greater preoccupation with and uncertainty about what it means to be a self and how that self is to relate itself to others. Traditional understandings of conduct are called into question and rejected; the art of moderating conduct in relation to others becomes more difficult. Civility comes to be seen as a repression of the self rather than as an essential feature of the collegiality and conversationality through which the self might develop without suffering isolation.

The inability to sustain collegiality and conversationality is related to the cult of liberation, the desire to experience everything as a matter of choice, to multiply options, thus rendering the resources of traditional inquiry invisible and perhaps finally inaccessible. But this also calls forth the experience of choice without a destiny, and the question, choice for what end? Education in the service of what? As Strauss put it:

There is a tension between the respect for diversity or individuality and the recognition of natural right. When liberals became impatient of the absolute limits to diversity or individuality that are posed even by the most liberal version of natural right, they had to make a choice between natural right and the uninhibited cultivation of individuality. They chose the latter.⁶

In Strauss's terms, the choice of diversity as good in itself is a distortion and restrictive even while proclaiming the expansion of freedom. For

liberal education is concerned with the souls of men and therefore has little or no use for machines. If it becomes a machine or an industry, it becomes indistinguishable from the entertainment industry unless in respect to income and publicity, tinsel and glamour.⁷

The preceding prepares the way to consider Leo Strauss's position in American education or, more broadly, in the education of a democratic age. It is essential to remember that Strauss entered an American academic culture that had a history parallel within its own idiom to the history of modern higher education in Europe; that the transformation of the universities had American and British versions as well as a continental European one. The transformation is Western, not merely European—and Strauss understood it so. We can see this in the following remarks of Strauss on the difficulty of defining liberal education today:

“Liberal education is education in culture.” In what culture? Our answer is: culture in the sense of the Western tradition. Yet Western culture is only one among many cultures. By limiting ourselves to Western culture, do we not condemn liberal education to a kind of parochialism, and is not parochialism incompatible with the liberalism, the generosity, the openmindedness, of liberal education? Our notion of liberal education does not seem to fit an age which is aware of the fact that there is not the culture of the human mind, but a variety of cultures.

And, he remarks, paraphrasing Heidegger, that today it is insisted “that every comprehensive view is relative to a specific perspective, or that all comprehensive views are mutually exclusive and none can be simply true.⁸ Strauss wrote this in 1961, but a generation later American academics cannot be unaware of or untouched by the point.

Because the academic surroundings in America were, though not identical, also not unfamiliar, Strauss succeeded both in offering a distinctive but recognizable voice on education and in creating a major impact in particular on the American political science profession. He had the advantage of being an ally to those who sought to recover a lost understanding of education and, at the same time, one who had experienced directly the intensity of the crisis of civilization in Europe, the crisis Strauss referred to as the “crisis of the West.”

Strauss was not unique in this. There is no doubt, however, that his impact in the post-World War II world of American political science is equal to any. The impact was concrete and remains visible in the numerous students and students of students who have been inspired by and carried on his work. The first part of his career in the United States, the period of the 1940s and 1950s, saw the triumph of the “behavioral revolution” in political science. But throughout this period there were the stirrings of the countermovement that was to issue in the revival and current flourishing of new interest and vitality in the study of political philosophy. Natural Right and History (1953) was an important harbinger of this restoration. In the 1950s it was common to debate the question whether political philosophy still existed. But there can be no doubt today that it both exists and even has some claim to dominating the consciousness of the political science profession.

In his stalwart defense of the great books, Strauss offered a philosophical justification for their centrality and related that defense to his understanding of the fundamental problem of our democratic age and hence also of the study of politics in that age.

There exists a whole science … political science—which has so to speak no other theme than the contrast between the original conception of democracy, or what one may call the ideal of democracy, and democracy as it is.⁹

However, political science, to the extent that it adopted the meaning of the word “science” associated with the modern natural and physical sciences, allowed the split between philosophy and science, or between the philosopher and the scientist, to continue. The philosopher might criticize democracy, but the scientist might be inclined either only to study its features or to increase its power to do what it will.¹⁰ Strauss, speaking as philosopher against the scientist, argues that modern democracy is principally not a regime but a mass culture managed by elites.

Thus we understand most easily what liberal education means here and now. Liberal education is the counterpoison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture, to its inherent tendency to produce nothing but “specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart.” Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant. Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.¹¹

The recollection of human greatness in an age that denies it and in which those who could have it conceal it, is to be accomplished through the reading of the great books. Strauss here quotes the indictment of modernity voiced by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as a sign, since Weber, in elaborating the postulates of modern social science, pointed insistently to the limits of what this social science could do as well as to what it could claim to achieve. Strauss thought that this implied the need of a philosophical critique of the methodology of the social sciences, and reconsideration of the aims of traditional political science, that is, political philosophy in the classical sense.

The philosophical questioning of the modern social sciences meant recovering the arguments of the great books. By great books Strauss meant works written by those who had surpassed the status of pupil.

The teachers themselves are pupils and must be pupils. But there cannot be an infinite regress: ultimately there must be teachers who are not in turn pupils … the greatest minds. Such men are extremely rare. We are not likely to meet any of them in the classroom. We are not likely to meet any of them anywhere. It is a piece of good luck if there is a single one alive in one's time. For all practical purposes, pupils, of whatever degree of proficiency, have access to the teachers who are not in turn pupils, to the greatest minds, only through the great books. Liberal education will then consist in studying with the proper care the great books which the greatest minds have left behind—a study in which the more experienced pupils assist the less experienced pupils, including the beginners.¹²

I confess to an inclination toward Strauss's argument, but there are questions we cannot avoid if we are to do the argument justice. First, can a human being cease to be a pupil? Is learning not an endless engagement, coterminous with human beings such that it has no specifiable starting-point or end? It may be that a few inquirers in reduced intellectual circumstances will cease to find others around them from whom they can learn much. Could such individuals transcend the dependence on dialogue that classically characterizes the philosophical pursuit? Would the quest for wisdom cease to be problematic? Can there be individuals who somehow go beyond being pursuers of wisdom and simply have wisdom? Does not even a human being who is not a pupil still have to be a learner, perhaps a self-moved seeker?

Strauss's statement also suggests that the writers of great books show their greatness through those books. Implied is a demand for a reader capable of appreciating the achievement manifested in such books, a great reader or, at any rate, a reader who senses the need of greatness without yet knowing exactly its features. Strauss attaches greatness to great philosophical achievement. But greatness is also necessarily associated with superiority in the sense of heroic action in the military field and in politics, and in enjoying a right to rule that is insulated in some degree, though not entirely, from the opinions of the many about one's qualifications to rule.

It is, for Strauss, the philosophical achievement that must constitute the saving grace today because the dominance of the democratic culture cannot be overthrown or significantly moderated in the foreseeable future, and the efforts to do so in our time have been corrupted by the misunderstandings of our time, which have called for an even more radical rejection of the past instead of a recovery of it.¹³

Nor need the real philosophers have any interest in political activism. They can be content so long as they are left free to philosophize in the midst of current events.

We are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely because we are friends and allies of democracy. While we are not permitted to remain silent on the dangers to which democracy exposes itself as well as human excellence, we cannot forget the obvious fact that by giving freedom to all, democracy also gives freedom to those who care for human excellence. No one prevents us from cultivating our garden or from setting up outposts which may come to be regarded by many citizens as salutary to the republic and as deserving of giving to it its tone. … We are indeed compelled to become specialists, but we can try to specialize in the most weighty matters or, to speak more simply and more nobly, in the one thing needful.¹⁴

The pursuit of greatness, then, demands the contemplation of the greatness of the past as recorded in those books that competently preserve an account of greatness. The question of doing more in light of the study of the greatness of the past is not clearly answered, except that one is to allow oneself to be a witness to the study of the great books. To do this is to unify the inner disposition to greatness with one's manifest conduct in a moderate, politically respectful, fashion.¹⁵

It was always Strauss's intention to portray the philosopher as a seeker who passes between dogmatism and radical skepticism. Such a person does not claim either to have overcome Socratic ignorance or to know that it is impossible to attain wisdom. In his argument with Alexander Kojève, for example, Strauss admitted that there can be no simple refutation of historicism. The claim of natural right or natural law presupposes the existence of natural right or natural law. Likewise, historicism presupposes its own historical assumptions defining natural right or natural law as refuted. The modern political philosopher is thus forced to live in the tension between “natural right” and “history.” To live in that tension is to acknowledge the obstacles to making up one's mind once and for all, not adopting either the opinion that natural right is simply true or the opinion that it has been superseded by historical fate, but struggling toward the knowledge that would come only by transcending these alternatives. At the highest level, then, there would still be a conversation of political philosophers—even intense disagreements—wherein each of them would reveal their inclinations toward one or the other of the alternatives in full awareness of what can be said against them. Natural Right and History constituted Strauss's “observations on the problem of natural right.”¹⁶

For Strauss the Socratic quest continues to be a real, present possibility. Holding the options open is the starting point for the possible refutation of historicism, and thus the basis for the critique of democracy presented as our historical fate. There is no decisive insight in the Hegelian sense, the alternatives are not decisively disposed of by the movements of history. Strauss can choose to think unhistorically, but in so choosing, he cannot choose innocently. It is a historical issue knowingly to live unhistorically. In this respect, we may remain within the Hegelian ambiance: We are in ourselves what we are for ourselves, or our essential character is what we understand it to be. Even if learning is natural to human beings, the argument of natural right must be learned. The choice of a way of life, as Max Weber said, is the choice of a way of knowing. By choosing within the tension specified, the political philosopher becomes exemplary for the critique of the positive social sciences. If to choose a way of life is to choose a method of knowing, then conversely to choose a method of knowing is to choose a way of life.

In Strauss's outlook, these choices are the catalysts for analyzing alternative interpretative frameworks, and the political philosopher must become the diagnostician of these alternatives, including the one that he self-consciously chooses for himself; he must create the dialogue. There emerges a characteristic range of alternatives in relation to each of which there may be associated conceptions of the best regime. As to these alternative possibilities, the political philosopher can neither simply be a positive social scientist nor a resolute activist.

The philosopher's dominating passion is the desire for truth, that is, for knowledge of the eternal order, or the eternal cause or causes of the whole. As he looks up in search of the eternal order, all human things and all human concerns reveal themselves to him in all clarity as paltry and ephemeral. … Chiefly concerned with eternal beings, or the “ideas,” and hence also with the “idea” of man, he is as unconcerned as possible with individual and perishable human beings and hence also with his own “individuality,” or his body, as well as with the sum total of all individual human beings and their “historical” procession.¹⁷

This liberal education moves us toward a dimension of reality obscured under current conditions because such education will proclaim that historical knowledge is not identical to wisdom. This is not because we do not understand our own age and conditions, but because we understand them very well. We are led by our very historical sophistication to perceive the limits of historical knowing. Thus liberal education requires us to live for ourselves, and living for ourselves in the deepest sense means pursuing the philosophical life. But the liberal education, insofar as it carries with it the duty to perpetuate the opportunity of liberal education for the future, means that we cannot abandon altogether the paltry and ephemeral conditions of earthly existence. “Education to perfect gentlemanship, to human excellence, liberal education consists in reminding oneself of human excellence, of human greatness.”¹⁸

There is, then, a tension between concern for human greatness and for the greatness of the whole that far surpasses human greatness. The heart of the philosophical aspirant lies above even as he remains below. The boldness of the aspiration curtails and transforms the initial enthusiasm for worldly successes. Such an individual becomes educated in the sense of becoming the intersection of the divine and the human things without being able to identify simply with either pole, without being certain to which pole one truly belongs.

The desire for eternal things weakens attachment to other human beings, but the detachment from typical material desires also dissolves the motives to antagonize and compete with others. Yet the natural sociality of human beings, together with the need of conversation to check the sanity of one's convictions, forces the philosopher to be attached to others. Beyond this, there is the urge to improve others by conversation as a check on the sanity of their convictions.¹⁹

Strauss thus fastens his attention on the question of what the “proper care” in reading great works means, for this means to take proper care in educating oneself. Proper care in educating oneself necessarily requires concern for the question of education in general, and thus concern for others. Taking proper care, however, will show that the “community of the greatest minds is rent by discord.”²⁰ Thus there can be no independence from the necessity of dialogue; the pursuit of wisdom cannot cease to be problematic. Since “wisdom is inaccessible to man, and hence virtue and happiness will always be imperfect,” liberal education must be an activity which is capable of becoming an end in itself for serious human beings.²¹ The serious cannot simply identify themselves with the regimes of the democratic culture—or with any regime on earth—which is not to say they cannot live lawfully within them. In Strauss's view, living lawfully—including paying respect to prevailing opinions—within a democratic regime is nearly all that such regimes require of one. But merely to live lawfully is not to explore, or to be required to take seriously, the matter of fulfilling one's humanity. One's humanity and one's citizenship are not identical.

To learn to be human, then, is not to center one's attention on current political and social issues as if they were a set of problems for which solutions are to be devised, and which thus define one's duty. Rather, to learn to be human is to acquaint oneself with the universal human predicament (in part no doubt illustrated by the current issues) by seeking greater conversancy with that predicament's dimensions and the classic alternative responses to them. In this sense, the philosophical pursuit of greatness necessarily detaches itself from the pursuit of greatness as that could be defined—inadequately—in the politics of our time. Greatness as defined today would too easily mean celebrity or vulgar recognition. Greatness then almost inevitably is associated with self-assertion or self-promotion.

Liberal learning engenders modesty about political things as it directs us to boldness in philosophical things. The pursuit of political boldness may well be only political rashness.

The responsible and clear distinction between ends which are decent and ends which are not is in a way presupposed by politics. It surely transcends politics. For everything which comes into being through human action and is therefore perishable or corruptible presupposes incorruptible and unchangeable things—for instance, the natural order of the human soul—with a view to which we can distinguish between right and wrong actions.²²

This opens up—indeed, demands—an active role for us as philosophical pupils since even we who are the less than greatest minds must assess the alternatives presented to us. Not all will be satisfied merely to take notes and develop a catalogue, or to become philosophical pedants. For this reason liberal education, properly speaking, cannot become indoctrination and the responsibility for working out one's self-understanding cannot be relinquished.

Strauss elaborates on the character of the task to achieve self-understanding in discussing the difference between “liberal education” and “responsibility.” Strauss observes that we regularly now speak of individuals as “responsible” where once we spoke of them as “just,” “conscientious,” or “virtuous.” To be held responsible, Strauss points out, is merely to be in the position of being either virtuous or vicious; murderers can be responsible for their criminal acts just as teachers can be responsible for imparting knowledge to their students. Responsibility is closely associated with accountability. In general, apart from the issue of criminality, responsibility is used to signify anyone who carries out an appointed task.

In this sense, the term “responsibility” equalizes us because there is a common denominator of responsibility that can be imputed to the widest range of jobs without distinguishing among them with respect to the effect they may have on the development of the lives of the jobholders, the goals, purposes, or talents they encourage. To be responsible in this sense is to acquire the praise most easily granted in a democratic culture. It becomes plausible to associate the responsible discharge of one's task with maturity or fulfillment. It permits open-ended broadening and thus, in Strauss's terms, a lowering of the idea of fulfillment. Numerous educational experts today encourage us to translate the engagements of teaching and learning into “behavioral objectives,” in order to rationalize responsibility in expressions of quantitative measurement. By such measurements, philosophical undertakings, because they are not amenable to behavioral specification, might easily seem less responsible than many if not most others. Behavioral standards of accountability replace the conversational with the apparently commensurable. Finally, the paradigmatic experiential meaning of liberal education is lost from sight. Philosophical conversation must resist this trend.

How is this resistance to be carried out? If “liberal education consists in listening to the conversation of the greatest minds,” we nevertheless “must bring about that conversation. The greatest minds utter monologues even when they write dialogues.”²³ We must re-create in ourselves a dialogue that is suppressed in the democratic ambiance. That it remains possible to do this shows that there is something here natural to the human condition which the ethos of the age cannot eradicate.

That there are great works is a position I willingly defend. Moreover, I think Strauss helps us to respond to contemporary critics of the great books or those who deny there can be such books.

Responsible teaching, according to the analysis of responsibility before us, cannot be a sufficient standard. According to it, responsible teaching need not, perhaps is not even encouraged to take account of differences of superior and inferior in the works studied or the subjects chosen for study. According to that same analysis, the task of the learner suffers the same fate. All efforts at liberal education in the original sense can then easily be made to look arbitrary, narrow, and elitist.²⁴

Strauss's endorsement of the intellectual power of great works does not deny our freedom to respond to them. Indeed, it promises that sort of freedom related to the original meaning of the word “liberal” against the contemporary meaning, which is satisfied with responsible conduct regardless of the aims or content of the undertaking. But if we must create the dialogue to which the “monologue” (argument) of a great book is the invitation, then the great books do not oppress but rather liberate us in this sense of the word. They expand the horizon of our imagination without dictating the conclusions to which we are obliged to submit.

Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty, not to say of humility. It is at the same time a training in boldness: it demands from us the complete break with the noise, the rush, the thoughtlessness, the cheapness of the Vanity Fair of the intellectuals as well as of their enemies. It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or least popular opinions. Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for “vulgarity”; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful.²⁵

Thus the great books, while inciting us to bold thought, will also make it less easy for us to want liberation in the sense of becoming current in the received “wisdom,” the intellectual fashions of the day. We will not be liberated from skeptical second thoughts, and thus we will not be fluent participants in the current scene.

The facile delusions which conceal from us our true situation all amount to this: that we are, or can be, wiser than the wisest men of the past. We are thus induced to play the part, not of attentive and docile listeners, but of impresarios or lion-tamers. Yet we must face our awesome situation, created by the necessity that we try to be more than attentive and docile listeners, namely, judges, and yet we are not competent to be judges. As it seems to me, the cause of this situation is that we have lost all simply authoritative traditions in which we could trust, the nomos which gave us authoritative guidance, because our immediate teachers and teachers' teachers believed in the possibility of a simply rational society. Each of us here is compelled to find his bearings by his own powers, however defective they may be.²⁶

To defend liberal education today is thus to engage in an exercise of retrieval or recollection in a world hostile to the undertaking. It is a peculiarity of our time to be estranged from our past even as we collect more and more detailed information about it.

In the academic debates this means to insist upon the distinction between the superior and the inferior. Strauss informs us that the current trends in education are, if the tradition of liberal learning is a guide, antithetical to liberal learning. The founding idea of liberal learning contradicts the prejudices of the modern democratic culture. Strauss thus unfolds an argument that distinguishes his own view from the historicist view he rejects. According to the historicist view, the idea of liberal education evolves in accordance with the changes that mark each historical epoch. Strauss's view, in contrast, is that there is a permanent insight into the character of liberal education. Moreover, Strauss held that his idea is philosophically discernible and accessible to inquiry even in the midst of changing historical circumstances. To learn what to look for in the midst of all that goes on historically, one must consult those works that articulate the experiential foundation and with the help of which one can attempt to distinguish liberal education from other activities. Without knowledge of those works, one will very likely lose confidence in the task.

Thinking about education is thus at the heart of thinking philosophically. And since education cannot but be at the heart of the way of life of a society, and a central factor in fashioning the coherence of a society's way of life, thinking philosophically about education is an act that takes the political life seriously. To take the political life seriously means to take to heart the differences between classical and modern philosophy.

According to classical philosophy the end of the philosophers is radically different from the end or ends actually pursued by the nonphilosophers. Modern philosophy comes into being when the end of philosophy is identified with the end which is capable of being actually pursued by all men. More precisely, philosophy is now asserted to be essentially subservient to the end which is capable of being actually pursued by all men … the modern conception of philosophy is fundamentally democratic. The end of philosophy is now no longer what one may call disinterested contemplation of the eternal, but the relief of man's estate.²⁷

On this basis, it is easy to see why today the discussion is largely about education for democracy instead of what Strauss is taking up: What is the educational task in facing democracy?

Education for democracy meant and means altering the attitudes of the many who initially distrusted science and technology to make them willing believers in its infinite power for improvement, and also persuading us that egalitarianism is a standard or vision of order from which all societies' departures are to be seen as unfortunate distortions of a “true” order of human relationships. Education in the face of democracy would mean questioning the vast achievements of the scientific-technological culture as though they were a “lowering” rather than a “raising” of standards, while insisting on the need to confront the diversity of human accomplishments. This would be the Socratic reversal necessary in our time. If everyone thinks we are raising ourselves, it becomes the task to ask in what sense we might be lowering ourselves. We would be showing in what way our enlightening is really a darkening. At the same time, as a recollection, it is not the nihilistic revolt against enlightenment. It is quite different.

Enlightenment came to mean a universal project to improve health, longevity, income while expanding “trade which unites all peoples,” in order to take precedence over religion “which divides the peoples.”²⁸ Responsibility, Strauss argues, we can now see is a term at first encouraging, of necessity, only enlightened self-interest, but not necessarily an idea of virtuous fulfillment. Later, however, with the hope of eliminating scarcity from the world, responsibility comes to include compassionate concern for maintaining minimum universal material standards for all. It cannot be ignored that the pursuit of liberal education in the classic sense will be taken as evidence that those who pursue it are incapable of the requisite compassion, and thus are inadequate contributors to the democratic project. The result is “hardly more than the interplay of mass taste with high-grade but strictly speaking unprincipled efficiency.”²⁹ But since mass taste precludes holding anyone in particular responsible in any meaningful way, the ultimate ground of self-understanding in a democratic culture is a kaleidoscopic, continuous transformation of day-to-day opinions and beliefs. Everyone and no one is responsible for our situation.

At the heart of modern inquiry we must confront the question of natural right and history. Our views will presuppose a stance on this question. This requires taking seriously antidemocratic arguments without seeking to form an antidemocratic party or a revolutionary movement.

For we cannot expect that liberal education will lead all who benefit from it to understand their civic responsibility in the same way or to agree politically. Karl Marx, the father of communism, and Friedrich Nietzsche, the stepgrandfather of fascism, were liberally educated on a level to which we cannot even hope to aspire. But perhaps one can say that their grandiose failures make it easier for us who have experienced those failures to understand again the old saying that wisdom cannot be separated from moderation and hence to understand that wisdom requires unhesitating loyalty to a decent constitution and even to the cause of constitutionalism. Moderation will protect us against the twin dangers of visionary expectations from politics and unmanly contempt for politics. Thus it may again become true that all liberally educated men will be politically moderate men. It is in this way that the liberally educated may again receive a hearing even in the market place.³⁰

Thereby we may fortify ourselves to elevate the sense of being responsible—in dramatic terms, the life of relative existential commitments—toward the forming of a vision of the life of virtue. Whatever the boldness of that vision, Strauss will not permit its beholder to separate it from political modesty or the virtue of moderation, the virtue that is virtuous in relation to all intellectual stances. But moderation need not be a sign that the best lack all conviction; it will be a sign, rather, that importance does not reside only in or even depend primarily on universal acclaim of it.

Notes

1. Daniel Coit Gilman, The Launching of a University (New York, 1906), as quoted in David M. Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science, Politics, Scholarship and Democracy (New Haven, Conn., 1984), 42.

2. John Henry Newman, The Uses of Knowledge. Selections from The Idea of a University, ed. Leo L. Ward (Arlington, Ill., 1948), 8-9.

3. Ibid., 1.

4. J. S. Mill, A System of Logic in Selected Writings of John Stuart Mill, ed. with an intro. by Maurice Cowling (New York, 1968), 345. Mill defended the primacy of intellectual progress while binding it tightly to material improvement: “The impelling force to most of the improvements effected in the arts of life is the desire of increased material comfort; but … the state of knowledge at any time is the impassable limit of the industrial improvements possible at that time; and the progress of industry must follow and depend upon, the progress of knowledge.” Ibid., 374. Here “knowledge” is not being used to refer to what Strauss refers to as liberal education, even though Mill was steeped in the elements of liberal education and wrote about them. Mill identifies the fundamental problem of social science to be “to find the laws according to which any state of society produces the state which succeeds it, and takes its place.” Ibid., 360.

5. South Bend, Ind., 1990.

6. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, 1953), 6th Impression, 1968, 5. One may well ask if Strauss's “they” is not far too broad a categorization. It is not the case that all “liberals” would choose diversity as an end in itself. Nor can we define liberals fairly as merely those who do prefer diversity as an end in itself. Indeed, academic debates over the limits to diversity indicate that the choice of unalloyed diversity is by no means uncontested among liberals. It is true that liberalism makes a strong commitment to diversity as a good in keeping with the diversity of goods for human beings to pursue. Thus, it is not easy for liberals to insist on limits to diversity without questioning their own motives. However, this is often as likely to reinforce their sense of legitimacy in drawing a limit, when they are convinced that they have drawn it correctly, as it is to do otherwise. This naturally exposes them to the charge of hypocrisy on both left and right, but especially among those “progressives” who think there is an obvious goal in life which is inhibited only by the inhibited. The academic version of this debate is unlikely to recede unless and until a consensus on the distinctive character of the university and its engagement is restored. This would require a depoliticization of education, but many today deny that any human undertaking can be detached from politics. This belief, if it persists, will prove in the long run to be a great misfortune for universities and for other activities as well. But it is a mark of the current difficulties that many are hard pressed to mount an argument in favor of the transpolitical character of some of the most important human engagements.

7. Leo Strauss, “Liberal Education and Responsibility,” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern, ed. with a foreword by Allan Bloom (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989 [1968]), 25. This essay first appeared in 1961. Here Strauss is saying that what is missing is the clear vision of the idea of liberal learning as a distinctive undertaking, shaped not by the prevailing culture but by the reflections on the experience of liberal learning accessible to its practitioners. The latter might very well have a deeper connection to their antique predecessors in regard to their experience of teaching and learning than they do to professional “educators,” or the sociologists of education.

8. “What Is Liberal Education?” 4, 8. Strauss here adapts the issue posed in modern philosophy to a question posed by every thoughtful undergraduate who is exposed for the first time to the world's variety. His intention is to show that certain skeptical questions will arise as an inherent part of the educational undertaking, if they are permitted to arise. They are, of course, permitted to arise in a democratic age where the consideration of all questions is, in principle at least, permitted. But the posing of the skeptical questions is the acknowledgment of knowing that we do not know which is the start of the quest for wisdom. Education does not end with the celebration of diversity; on the contrary, that is the stimulating beginning from which the hard and longer, arduous but not always stimulating, journey must begin. The recognition of the latter is a prerequisite experience and without it one can hardly be said to have begun serious thought on the issues.

9. “What Is Liberal Education?” 5. Here too we may ask whether this is an adequate characterization of the political science profession's aspirations. Alternatively, for example, we might say, following Hegel and today Michael Oakeshott, that the fundamental object of investigation has been to define the categorical distinctiveness of the “modern liberal state” in contrast to the “ancient city.” Looked at this way, it would not restrict modern political studies to issues of democratic culture.

10. “Liberal Education and Responsibility,” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 22. See also Leo Strauss, “An Epilogue,” in Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics, ed. Herbert J. Storing (New York, 1962). There Strauss showed what moderation of speech could include by saying: “Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic: it has no attributes peculiar to fallen angels. It is not even Machiavellian, for Machiavelli's teaching was graceful, subtle, and colorful. Nor is it Neronian. Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns,” 327.

11. “What Is Liberal Education?” 5.

12. Ibid., 3. It should be clear that this definition of what a great book is does not specify a list or canon, although it is not hard to construct the list of books important to Strauss. Rather, this is the hint of a connoisseur to initiates as to what to look for. The fact that we do not know ahead of time, and cannot predict, what those initiated will choose to honor is nonetheless compatible with the conviction—and, indeed, the demonstration by the true teacher—that such books do exist. There is, in short, a tradition of teaching and learning that goes with being truly educated but, sadly in our time, this is regularly caricatured as a doctrine and a program rather than as an adventurous quest for self-understanding in which the journey is no less relevant than the destination.

13. Horst Mewes has expressed this point very clearly in an unpublished paper, “Critics of Modern Rationalism: Strauss and Heidegger.” In it he writes: “Whereas Strauss's view of the crisis of Western civilization can be called a modified Platonic perspective which affords a genuine alternative to the modern crisis, Heidegger regards Plato in the most crucial respects as the very source of the beginnings of that crisis. For Strauss, Platonic philosophizing (or Socratic philosophizing) discovered certain basic problems and alternatives of human thought which provide permanent standards by which to judge the ‘obfuscations’ of modern enlightenment philosophy. For Heidegger, however, Platonic philosophy is already under the ‘coercive yoke’ of the type of human thought that hides the very source and prerequisites of all truth. Since Plato contains the seeds of all subsequent Western metaphysics up to and including Nietzsche, it is unable to provide any standards by which to judge or resist nihilism and ‘homelessness’ that due to modern variations of Platonism blossomed forth from those seeds.”

14. “Liberal Education and Responsibility,” 24.

15. To take diversity seriously in academic debates would be to take up the aristocratic critique of democratic culture as a legitimate voice emergent in democratic freedom. Such freedom is, ambiguously, both a condition urging voices to speak, and a cultural determination of what they may say. This aristocratic voice is not inherently in opposition to the “liberal tradition” even if it refuses to honor uncritically the democratic culture that has come to characterize the world of liberalism in our time. Among the safeguards against the dangers of such a critique would be the traditional criteria of philosophical and academic inquiry, the principles of Socratic ignorance and conversationality. The radicalization of the universities, in undermining these traditions, looks to be a self-destructive tendency in a democratic culture. When Strauss says he is critical of democracy because a friend to it, he means to say that democracy should be praised for its virtues and challenged on its vices. Unfortunately, there is a democratic tendency to want simply to be praised, or worse, flattered, and that, in effect, is likely to mean being praised for its faults or excesses. The diversity of human goods is real. Thus, the appearance of excellence or greatness in our midst should be responded to so as to appropriate its contribution opportunely, not vilified because it embarrasses a concealed desire for a diversity that is actually a uniformity.

16. Natural Right and History, vii.

17. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (Ithaca, N.Y., 1968), 211-12.

18. “What Is Liberal Education?” 6.

19. Strauss, On Tyranny, 214-16.

20. “What Is Liberal Education?” 4.

21. “What Is Liberal Education?” 7.

22. “Liberal Education and Responsibility,” 13.

23. Ibid. I take it by monologue Strauss means “argument” or the expression of the position one has found persuasive. The expression of an argument is, of course, the invitation also to a response from others.

24. To say responsibility cannot be a sufficient standard is not to say we are free to be irresponsible in discharging our daily duties and obligations. Nor does it mean that officeholders are not to be held accountable for how they discharge the duties of their offices. It is to say that after all this has been done there remains something more. Human beings are different from any other beings in the inexhaustibility of the undertaking to be human and the incompleteness of all formulas of completion.

25. “What Is Liberal Education?” 8.

26. Ibid.

27. “Liberal Education and Responsibility,” 19-20.

28. Ibid., 20.

29. Ibid., 23. The efficiency is unprincipled “strictly speaking” because its aim is to satisfy the widest range of demands through the multiplication and expansion of resources so that as few decisions about what to support as possible will need to be made. The criterion for refusing a demand will then not be based on an idea of virtuous human fulfillment, but only on what is available to satisfy desires because they are desires. We are born in possession of IOUs.

30. “Liberal Education and Responsibility,” 24.