From Legitimacy to Dictatorship—and Back Again: Leo Strauss's Critique of the Anti-Liberalism of Carl Schmitt
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Description
The encounter between Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss remains a source of fascination and polemics for the friends and enemies of both thinkers. According to Stephen Holmes, both Schmitt and Strauss belong to a single tradition of anti-liberalism, whose ultimate practical implication is suggested by Schmitt's fate as a Nazi apologist. Indeed, Holmes places much emphasis on Strauss's criticism of Schmitt for failing to develop a critique of liberalism that goes beyond the horizon of liberalism itself and interprets this criticism of Schmitt as a call for a form of anti-liberalism more extreme and virulent than that propounded by Schmitt on the very eve of his membership in the Nazi party. Friends of Schmitt, or those who wish to revive his thought on the Right, have used his exchange with Strauss to a quite different effect. Drawing on the prestige of Strauss in America, and his international reputation as a Jewish thinker, it is possible to display Strauss's clear sympathy with elements of Schmitt's thought as an indication that the “last word” or deepest teaching of the latter cannot be fascism. Thus, Heinrich Meier, one of the leading apologists for Schmitt in Germany today, focuses on a quite different dimension of Strauss's critique of the Concept of the Political—in particular, on Strauss's supposition that Schmitt's ultimate concern in facing off with liberalism is to vindicate or restore the seriousness of life as against liberalism's reduction of the human drama to mere economics and entertainment. Meier argues that the ultimate disagreement between Strauss and Schmitt is as to whether the seriousness of life finds its vindication in theology (Schmitt) or Socratic philosophy (Strauss). Understood in this way, the deepest intent of neither thinker is to justify fascism or virulent political anti-liberalism. Meier's efforts on behalf of Schmitt appear to dovetail in some measure with recent attempts by friends of Strauss' to save him from Holmes's charge of anti-liberalism. Thus, Peter Berkowitz—in a penetrating review of Holmes's book in the Yale Law Journal—questions Holmes's reading of many of the passages in Strauss's work that he uses to justify placing Strauss squarely in the anti-liberal tradition. Berkowitz shows persuasively that Holmes ignores the context of many of these passages, as well as many other statements of Strauss where he indicates his sympathy for liberal democracy, and his clear preference for the liberal regime over the alternatives available in our times. Likewise, in an essay entitled “Leo Strauss's Liberal Politics,” Nasser Behnegar seeks to respond to Holmes, among others, by attempting to show that, even if he rejected liberal theoretical principles in favor of classic natural right, Strauss was able to see important affinities between the demands of classic natural right and modern liberal democracy. These affinities are visible in liberalism's openness to individual excellence, its protection of the freedom to philosophize and its opposition to and constraints on arbitrary and immoderate, i.e., tyrannical, power. A debate about Strauss's relationship to liberalism also exists among French post-Marxist thinkers of a progressive or liberal persuasion. Claude Lefort sees Strauss's thought as of great importance in the recovery of a solid normative ground from which to diagnose the excesses of twentieth-century totalitarianism Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, by contrast, argue that Strauss's rejection of modern subjective freedom in the name of a fixed hierarchical conception of the human good places his thought in implacable opposition to the very idea of human rights, which for Ferry and Renaut must be at the core of any plausible contemporary liberal democratic, or liberal republican, theory. Although they have made a prima facie case that there are ways of reading Strauss compatible with some dimensions of liberalism, those who would establish Strauss's credentials as a friend of liberalism have as yet failed to provide an adequate explanation for his sympathetic engagement with the thought of Schmitt and especially an explanation of what Strauss meant by his call for a “horizon beyond liberalism.” Moreover, on the basis of Strauss's own observation that even Schmitt's anti-liberalism shares important premises or assumptions with liberalism, one might attribute statements of Strauss that have affinities with liberal thought to a shortfall in Strauss's aspiration to work pure, as it were, his own anti-liberalism, and to a self-consciousness of his inability to find a self-standing anti-liberal viewpoint.
Source Publication
Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism
Source Editors/Authors
David Dyzenhaus
Publication Date
1998
Recommended Citation
Howse, Robert L., "From Legitimacy to Dictatorship—and Back Again: Leo Strauss's Critique of the Anti-Liberalism of Carl Schmitt" (1998). Faculty Chapters. 865.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/865
