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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
In the “metaphysical squabbles” that Bertrand de Jouvenel has said characterize much of American political science, none has been more bitter and perplexing than the controversy surrounding the work of Leo Strauss. To the extent that one can speak of a revival of classical political philosophy in this country, the credit for it assuredly belongs to the influence of Strauss's profound scholarship. Nonetheless there is common agreement among fairminded reviewers of Strauss's writings that a “calculated obscurity” hides his message. “He does not wish to tell us, in bold propositional terms, what is on his mind,” says Robert McShea. Granted that “Strauss indulges in the … game of esoteric silences,” that his real views are often “camouflaged,” we must see these devices for what Lee McDonald suggests they are: devices to persuade the reader to “a special way of reading the ‘classics’”; they are not primarily concerned with “specific details of interpretation.”
1 McShea, Robert, “Leo Strauss on Machiavelli,” The Western Political Quarterly, XVI (12, 1963), 782.Google Scholar
2 McDonald, Lee, Western Political Theory From its Origins to the Present (New York, 1968), p. 213, n. 72.Google Scholar
3 Strauss, Leo, What Is Political Philosophy? (Glencoe, 1959), p. 29.Google Scholar
4 Ibid., p. 31.
5 Ibid., p. 32.
6 Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago, 1953), p. 156.Google Scholar
7 Strauss, , What Is Political Philosophy? p. 32.Google Scholar
8 Strauss, Leo, The City and Man (Chicago, 1964), p. 21.Google Scholar
9 Ibid.
10 Strauss, , Natural Right and History, p. 156.Google Scholar
11 Ibid., p. 144.
12 Ibid., p. 156.
13 Ibid., p. 144.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., p. 156.
16 Ibid., p. 157.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., p. 144.
19 Ibid., p. 145.
20 Metaphysics 10. 1053a 33.Google Scholar
21 Strauss, , Natural Right and History, p. 87; p. 92.Google Scholar
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25 Ibid., pp. 148–49.
26 Politics 2. 1261b 23–33.Google Scholar
27 Metaphysics 10. 1053a 24.Google Scholar
28 Ethics 5. 1137b 12–19.Google Scholar
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32 Ibid., p. 92.
33 Ibid., p. 93.
34 Ibid., pp. 93–94. As an example of “camouflage” in Strauss's teaching, to which McShea calls attention, we have the following curious remarks of Strauss on the “world-state”: “… what is divined in speaking of the ‘worldstate’ as an all-comprehensive human society subject to one human government is in truth the cosmos ruled by God, which is then the only true city, or the city that is simply according to nature because it is the only city which is simply just. Men are citizens of this city, or freemen in it, only if they are wise; their obedience to the law which orders the natural city, to the natural law, is the same thing as prudence” (ibid., pp. 149–150). Since, as we have just seen, the justice that has superhuman support is what is right according to nature as standard, the meaning of these sentences can only be that if God were to rule the “world-state” his rule would ignore the principles of indigenousness and private ownership. “God” is “camouflage” for “wise rules.” Indeed, Strauss tells us that Plato's cosmology is not separable from the quest for the best political order (The City and Man, p. 21).Google Scholar
35 De Koninck, Charles, “The Nature of Man and His Historical Being,” Laval Théologique et Philosophique, V, 2 (1949), 274.Google Scholar
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40 Aristotle, Ethics. I. 1096b 8ff.Google Scholar
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 Aristotle, On the Soul. 2, 414b 20–25.Google Scholar
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45 One ought not to abandon the search for universal causes in the line of causality itself. Unlike the universal of predication which contains its subject parts indeterminately and confusedly (elephant and man are contained confusedly in “animal”; family and village are contained confusedly in “community”), the universal cause in the order of reality belongs to nature as “authority”: it has real existence as a universal and is a universal cause by reason of extending to many different kinds of effects. When Aristotle says that the state is prior by nature to the family, his meaning is that the state is a more universal final cause of good, diffusive of itself by reason of its communicability and reaching to the various parts of the whole state in their very diversity. But this diversity comes from the order of the parts in the whole; thus, the common good is the good of individuals as parts and members of society and is sought by them precisely as members of society and as being not all alike. Reaching thus to individuals in what is most determinate and actual in them, the common good is a universal cause in the order of causality: this common good of the community is, for each of the members, also the good of the others.
46 Aristotle, Politics. 2. 1261a 18–23.Google Scholar
47 Strauss, , Natural Right and History, pp. 163–164; p. 144.Google Scholar
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50 Ibid., pp. 92–93.
51 Ibid.
52 Cassirer, Ernst, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston, 1951), p. 18.Google Scholar
53 Ibid., pp. 144–145.
54 Strauss, , The City and Man, p. 21.Google Scholar
55 Cassirer, , pp. 144–145.Google Scholar
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62 “Manuscrit economico-philosophique, XXIV,” cited in De Marx au Marxisms, (ed.) Aron, Robert (Paris, 1948), p. 93.Google Scholar
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67 The Invisible Writing (Boston, 1954), pp. 41–42.Google Scholar This verification of the “substitute intelligence” of nature as standard that is found in Marx's “socialized humanity” may be seen also in that child of Lockean natural right, “corporate liberalism”: “The change from the overt authority of the nineteenth century to the anonymous authority of the twentieth was determined by the organizational needs of our modern industrial society. … Modern man is obliged to nourish the illusion that everything is done with his consent, even though such consent be extracted from him by subtle manipulation. His consent is obtained, as it were, behind his back, or behind his consciousness.” Erich Fromm, Introduction to Neill, A. S., Summirhill: A Radical Approach to Child-Rearing, 2nd ed. (New York, 1964), pp. x–xi.Google Scholar Italics added. See Lynd, Staughton, “The New Left” in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (03, 1969).Google Scholar
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70 Ibid., p. 119.
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