Man of Peace: Rehearing the Case against Leo Strauss
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Was there a coherent foreign policy doctrine or a philosophy of world politics behind the United States decision, along with its allies, to make war on Iraq and destroy the regime of Saddam Hussein? If so, is there a view about international law, either explicit or implicit, in this doctrine or philosophy? A range of media commentators and academics have suggested that the decision to go to war was prepared and decisively influenced by a perspective on world politics derived from ‘Straussianism’, a school of thought that developed around the teachings of Leo Strauss, a twentieth century German-Jewish philosopher who is well known as a critic of liberalism, and whose diagnosis of the spiritual and intellectual crisis of modernity led to an attempted recovery of pre-modern philosophical perspectives on thought and politics, as a way of understanding the crisis and perhaps also as an alternative to ‘nihilism’ and to the political implication of nihilism—fascism. Much has been made of Strauss’s hostility to liberalism, but to the extent he criticized liberalism this hostility is largely based on liberalism’s embrace of relativism and positivism, the separation of morals from law and politics, which Strauss saw had rendered Weimar liberalism impotent to counter the extremists with effective arguments and counter-strategies. One cannot underestimate the impact on Strauss of the collapse of the moderate centre in German politics, and the spectacle of the Weimar as ‘justice without a sword or of justice unable to use a sword’, incapable of standing up to fanaticism: Strauss witnessed these events with his own eyes in his formative years as a Jewish scholar in Berlin. Contrary to some critics of Strauss, however, the failure of Weimar democracy did not lead him to conclude that liberal democracy is necessarily weak or unable to maintain good public order. He noted that ‘there were other liberal democracies which were and remained strong’ through the economic crises and instability of the 1920s. While drawing some general lessons about the vulnerabilities of liberal democracy as a form of government, his explanation of the failure of liberal democracy in Weimar focuses on the specific political history and pathologies of German civilization. Strauss notoriously attracted students who were conservatives and even reactionaries. This was not only because of his critique of liberalism (which does not necessarily imply an endorsement of conservative thinking), but because of the potential for the recovery of ‘classical’ thought to legitimate all kinds of prejudices which had become disreputable as ‘elitism’, ‘sexism’, and so forth. Did the ancients not believe in slavery? Did they not regard giving citizenship to women as unthinkable? Just as the Nazis had invoked Nietzsche as a ‘great mind’ to give philosophical weight to their prejudices, Strauss might have opened up the possibility for American conservatives and reactionaries to invoke Plato and Aristotle for purposes of giving intellectual respectability to positions generally viewed as crudely ‘redneck’, as dark superstitions of the bad old days. But Strauss did not present Plato and Aristotle as apologists or ideologists for conventional Greek politics; instead, according to Strauss, the distinctiveness of ancient political philosophy emerges through its critique—indeed a radical critique—of the adequacy of the Greek city as against the standards of perfect, or rational, justice. According to Strauss, the unqualified rule of wisdom as presented in Plato is merely a theoretical construct for understanding the nature and limits of justice; its practical lesson is that the desirable form of political ordering is, as Strauss puts it, a mixture of wisdom and consent, a mixed regime that gives a proper place both to popular will and to the role of educated political, legal, and military elites: ‘The political problem consists in reconciling the requirement for wisdom with the requirement for consent… According to the classics, the best way of meeting these entirely different requirements—that for wisdom and that for consent or for freedom—would be that a wise legislator frame a code, which the citizen body, duly persuaded, freely adopts… [T]he administration of the law must be entrusted to a type of man who is most likely to administer it equitably, i.e. in the spirit of the wise legislator, or to “complete” the law according to requirements that the wise legislator could not have foreseen.’ What differentiates this from the modern liberal idea of separation of powers and checks and balances is that Strauss, following the classical political philosophers, does not believe the mixed regime can work as a balance of self-interested powers checking each other; it depends also on the character of those who exercise power, the kind of education they receive, and especially their capacity to believe in a common good and their respect for the rule of law. Be that as it may, a number of students or followers of Strauss have become prominent figures in American conservatism, especially neo-conservatism, Irving and William Kristol being the most famous examples.
Source Publication
The Legacy of Leo Strauss
Source Editors/Authors
Tony Burns, James Connelly
Publication Date
2010
Recommended Citation
Howse, Robert L., "Man of Peace: Rehearing the Case against Leo Strauss" (2010). Faculty Chapters. 859.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/859
