Abstract
Robert Howse has written an important book reevaluating Leo Strauss’s thought in light of many unpublished seminar transcripts at the University of Chicago that have now been made available online. Howse’s goal is to retrieve Strauss’s legacy from the clutches of three kinds of misinterpretation. Foremost are neo-conservative appropriations of Strauss leading up to the U.S. War on Iraq. Cloaked as “spreading democracy in the world,” this group’s ideals instead sought to further American imperial ambitions. Nor are Strauss’s left critics, such as Anne Norton, who seek to establish tendentious links between Strauss’s teaching and the strategies of Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and others, acceptable (1 ff). Howse notes that Paul Wolfowitz, the then deputy secretary of defense, was taught not by Strauss at the University of Chicago but by Albert Wohlstetter, nicknamed “Dr. Strangelove” (153).
American interpreters of Strauss who spread cultic and obscurantist attitudes around the man and his teachings are the second group criticized for having lost touch with the great existential questions that motivated Strauss himself (4, 5, 176). A third group places Strauss in the company of Carl Schmitt in order to relegitimize Schmitt’s own tarnished reputation after his collaboration with the Third Reich. Howse disagrees with Heinrich Meier’s interpretation of this Strauss–Schmitt connection in particular (3n3).
“As the horrific drama of Nazism unfolded,” he writes, “Strauss became and never ceased to be profoundly troubled that he had been tempted by and even subscribed to an outlook that, at least indirectly in the case of Nietzsche himself and much more directly in the case of political nihilists who followed in his path, contributed to the political movement that led to the destruction of European Jewry. He sought, through writing as he did . . . to atone before God and the Jewish people, through providing a critique of the kind of thought represented by German nihilism” (13). Such a temptation of the thinker by the “will to power” is all the more dangerous because his transgression arises from certain noble—even if misguided—motives, from a kind of philosophical honesty which is termed Redlichkeit by Strauss, and translated by Howse as “probity” or “intransigence” (15n38). Strauss then enacts “a kind of t’suvah, a pulling back from the extreme through critique, often internal, of the extreme—a deeper, more radical level of philosophical reflection that, however, has the result of establishing the case for moral-political limits and for legality, hence moderation in Strauss’s sense” (16).
How did Strauss understand his own path to t’suvah, which means “return” or “return to the Covenant”? Strauss’s diagnosis of German nihilism is that this “protest against liberal modernity has, in itself, nothing to do with ‘bellicism (sic) with love of war’” (quoted by Howse, p. 29; emphases in the original). Rather, this protest “arises out of a love of morality, a sense of responsibility for endangered morality” (ibid.). In Strauss’s view, liberalism fails not only because it has no plausible answer to the crises of morals in modernity but because “liberals seek to take away this last possibility of nonmercenary morality through their plan for world government through perpetual peace” (30).
Volumes have been written on the sources of German nihilism as an ideology, the weakness of the Weimer Republic and the rise of Nazism. This account, which fails to mention German war debt, crushing inflation and unemployment tin the wake of WWI; the weaknesses of the Weimar constitution that were skillfully exploited by the likes of Carl Schmitt, or even the class warfare which raged in cities like Munich or Berlin, where Raeterepublike (workers-soldiers councils) emerged after WWI, is not convincing.
Furthermore, is liberalism simply a mercenary, utilitarian project of bourgeois society? Precisely because he shares Schmitt’s critique of liberalism as reducing politics either to the economic or the technological, Strauss is attracted to Schmitt’s concept of the political as the “ultimate,” most serious struggle between “friend and foe.” Howse admits that the “challenge of Carl Schmitt” never quite left Strauss. In his 1932 critique of Schmitt’s “The Concept of the Political,” Strauss was finally able to see that “empty of content, the ideal of fighting is just another preference, which has no greater or lesser moral status than the opposite equally sincere or honest preference for peace and lawfulness.” (45) But such an ethic of ultimate sacrifice, unless justified through an analysis of the ideals for which one sacrifices oneself, becomes an aesthetic choice alone. Max Weber’s question whether there is any good reason to choose between God or the devil that bedeviled Strauss in Natural Right and History remains unanswered.
While admitting the elusiveness of Strauss’s considerations, to demonstrate his commitment to constitutional democracies in the post-WWII period, Howse examines his exchange with Alexander Kojève, who had to leave Russia as a child and whose lectures on Hegel mesmerized France’s leading intellectuals of the period. After the war, Kojève labored in the French ministry of Foreign Affairs and became the architect of the European Community and the GATT system (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs). In their famous exchange “On Tyranny,” Kojève, the Hegelian, argues that a world-historical “struggle for recognition” is unfolding in which the philosopher must participate actively, even if the outcome of such struggle can only be available in retrospect to the owl of Minerva who flies at dusk (63). Strauss criticizes Kojève’s ideal of the Universal and Homogeneous state toward which he sees post-war democracies tending. As becomes clear from his 1967 seminar notes on Kant, despite his skepticism toward the Universal State, Strauss is not opposed to the transnationalizing project of European integration as long as it is understood in sense of De Gaulle as “l’Europe des patries”—a Europe of the Fatherlands.
Yet consider the following passage from Natural Right and History, one of Strauss’s most influential works: An open or all-comprehensive society will exist on a lower level of humanity than a closed society, which through generations, has made a supreme effort toward human perfection. . . . If the society in which man can reach the perfection of his nature is necessarily a closed society, the distinction of the human race into a number of independent groups is according to nature. (Natural Right and History, pp. 131–32, quoted by Howse, on p. 70)
Who are these “lower level of humans” as opposed to the philosophers who need the “freedom of mind” which supposedly they can only attain in the nation-state? (71, 77). Even among the Ancient Greeks did not the philosopher escape a “closed society” to find the true form of justice? Did not Plato himself run away from Athens after conspiring to overthrow the regime and sought inspiration in Egypt instead? Recall the Stoics, who, disgusted by slavery which they could justify neither according to reason (Logos) nor nature (Fusis) nor convention (Nomos), abandoned their politeia and chose to live outside its walls! Already for the Greeks philosophical wisdom led to a form of cosmopolitanism and to a critical distancing of oneself from the follies of the city into which one was born.
In one of the longest chapters of the book dealing with the contrast between Thucydides and Machiavelli, Howse reconstructs Strauss’s views of the laws of war and peace, international and transnational alliances. For Strauss, “Athenian democracy was a special kind of democracy exercising quasi-tyrannical rule over her so-called allies” (145). Yet, “Can internal principles of democracy—freedom and equality—be made compatible with imperial (i.e., undemocratic rule) rule over others—rule that denies equality and freedom as principles of interstate relations?” (145). Precisely because Strauss sees something noble in an imperialism “that is a projection of individual striving toward greatness or excellence of universal meaning” (146), it is unclear that he really condemns it. Howse struggles through a morass of textual ambiguities to conclude that “where modern international law stands for justice or is a hedge against the worst forms of barbarity, Strauss stands with it. He affirms the post–World War II revival of the notion of just war and the corresponding re-elevation of justice over Westphalian notions of sovereignty. He is favorable to Nuremberg, strongly supporting war crimes trials as a method of transitional justice with respect to Germany—indeed in Strauss’s view, the principal method” (150).
Nonetheless, Strauss does not come around to admit his old friend Kojève’s faith in international institutions. He cautions that legal progress does not imply moral progress since “the permanence of human evil upsets the hope for permanent or perpetual peace” (153). Political philosophy then remains political theology since the thesis of the persistence of human evil can be proven neither by empirical science nor by history, and is at bottom an item of faith. Strauss, like Thomas Hobbes, shies away from condemning human nature and in his seminars on Grotius recognizes the necessity to “find a middle way between strict morality and sheer Machiavellian(ism)” (quoted by Howse, 161). Jus gentium is acknowledged as a “kind of minimum positive legal normativity recognized by all peoples, or at least all civilized peoples” (159).
Howse’s book ends on a melancholy note: after a misleading interpretation of Arendt’s famous essay on “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” as an apologia for Heidegger’s political mistakes, he remarks churlishly that Arendt, unlike Strauss, “got off relatively easily with the progressive academy” (176). And if “Strauss through his mature years wrote and spoke in a language that seemed more and more obscure, atavistic, esoteric, and cultish to the mainstream academy, this may have been either a proud or exasperated reaction to what he perceived as ostracism and marginalization” (176).
Howse has given us ample reason to question this marginalization by explicating the origins of Strauss’s often ill-understood method of transhistorical reading. Nonetheless, despite his “t’suvah”, doesn’t Strauss remain a Heideggerian? Isn’t his transhistorical method indebted to Heidegger’s doctrine of philosophy as the disclosure of Being as revealed (alethea) and concealed throughout human history? Nihilism and the will to power were for Heidegger one such epoch of momentous forgetfulness in the History of Being.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, another student of Heidgger who held Strauss in high esteem, also believes that we “are always already immersed in a conversation across the ages,” and that it is the prejudice of the Enlightenment to think that we can deny our own situatedness in this “effective history” (Wirkungsgeschichte) and begin, in Thomas Hobbes’s words, by wiping away the past “as if we were but mushrooms sprouted from the earth” (De Cive). In a genuine hermeneutic encounter, we will realize that the Ancients guide us only insofar as we become aware of our own historicity and that there is no naïve return to texts which may fall silent in the face of our own questions and preoccupations. This kind of reflexive hermeneutics is missing in Leo Strauss’s work.
It is a mark of Howse’s own Redlichkeit in this penetrating book that he acknowledges the difficulties of Strauss’s method of transhistorical reading without solving them: “[to] sustain transhistorical standards of moral and political judgment, there must somehow be an enduring, normatively meaningful nature of man. But because the perspective is immanent not transcendent, this so-called permanent nature can only be known through experience, which necessarily means experience hitherto” (154). Such a fallibilistic understanding of human nature is incompatible with some of the more dogmatic pronunciations by Strauss on human nature and history. Howse’s insight implies that political philosophy need not be political theology after all.