Bruno Quélennec: Retour dans la caverne: Philosophie, politique et religion chez le jeune Leo Strauss. Paris: Hermann Éditeurs, 2018.
Admired and decried in his adopted American home, Leo Strauss has enjoyed a more favorable reception in France, thanks in large measure to the kind and perspicacious Pierre Manent, who shares Strauss’ intention of defending natural right against its enemies, ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern.’ Bruno Quélennec enters the fray as a critic of Strauss from the ‘Left,’ but does so much more intelligently than North American Leftists have done, attempting to understand Strauss’s though in its own terms before condemning it in the name of egalitarianism and democracy.
As Quélennec explains, in the past several decades Strauss has been (mis)understood as the progenitor of ‘neo-conservativism,’ despite his near-total avoidance of American political debates; illiberal, authoritarian-to-fascistic, and (most wildly) ‘La Rouchite,’ the Strauss depicted by the American Left was a very bad sort, indeed, somehow responsible for enormities ranging from Goldwaterism to the Second Gulf War. Central to this argument is a 1933 letter Strauss wrote to a friend in which he called for a sort of Unpopular Front consisting of the several right-wing Continental European regimes, including Mussolini’s Italy, to array itself against Nazi Germany. Having despaired of liberal democracy—already ruined in Germany, tottering in France—and shrinking from the Leninist-Stalinist regime in Russia, which he had rightly identified as malevolent the moment it appeared, Strauss shared with Winston Churchill the soon-to-be-disappointed hope that the ‘old’ Right might stand up and contain its radical challenger. From the Stalinists of the 1930s to the resolutely egalitarian ‘postmodernists’ of today, the Left is not amused.
Quélennec examines Strauss’s writings before and after the Nazi revolution, focusing particularly on his critique of the political philosophy of the Enlightenment, “modern liberalism.” In the decade before 1933, Strauss saw the liberalism of Germany’s Weimar Republic in crisis, challenged both philosophically by critics of the Enlightenment thought upon which it was based and practically by the ideological Jew-hatred which set itself against the “liberal model of German-Jewish emancipation.” to do this, Quélennec begins with an incisive account of that model and of the Enlightenment thought behind it, as understood by prominent Jewish intellectuals of the time criticized by Strauss, particularly Julius Guttmann, Herman Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig. Quélennec rightly understands Strauss not as an ideologist bending philosophy to political ends but rather as a thinker engaged first of all in the thought of his times in order to study its philosophic underpinnings, and only then to “return to the Cave” (Plato’s familiar image of life in the political community”) in order to defend the possibility of the philosophic way of life in that constrained, dimly-lit circumstance. Quélennec provides “a sort of map” of the German-Jewish regions within that cave, first of all in the pre-republican German regimes between 1780 and 1918. In the early decades of that period, German Jews were excluded or ‘ghettoized’ economically, socially, and politically; emancipation was intended to make “morally corrupt” (allegedly usurious and religiously prejudiced) Jews better, that is, more like German Christians. Jews were expected to ‘assimilate’ with Germans, free themselves from Jewishness.
Many Germans were having none of this. Modern anti-Semitism arose, often led by ‘Left’ Hegelians (eventually including Karl Marx, no Aryan), who associated Jews with capitalism, but more usually by nationalists, who especially detested Jews from eastern Europe who had fled pogroms in Russia and Ukraine. Whereas the old Jew-hatred bespoke religious bigotry, the new Jew-hatred registered racial prejudice (animated by ‘race science’) and a sort of democracy (resentment of Jewish ‘elites’ in finance and commerce). The more assimilation progressed, the more virulent anti-Semitism became, leading to controversy among German Jewish intellectuals in the years prior to the First World War. One response, political Zionism, judged European anti-Semitism “incurable”; in his 1882 book, Autoemancipation, Leon Pinsker maintained that “liberalism could not fulfill its promises of liberty and equality,” that Jewish must establish their own national state on some other continent. Political Zionism’s leading thinkers, Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau, argued respectively for a “statist Zionism” (secular, nationalist, anti-socialist) and a “muscular Zionism” (anti-liberal, anti-progressive, anti-bourgeois). Another response, cultural Zionism, founded by Ahad Hasam and propound famously by Martin Buber, regarded political Zionism as unrealistic and rejected nationalism in favor of “a universalist and pacifist ethic.”
Neither political nor cultural Zionism could stop Jew-hatred, which increased during the war and found an early, murderous expression in the 1922 assassination of Walter Rathenau, the German-Jewish Foreign Affairs minister of the Weimar Republic. At the same time, Weimar saw a “Jewish Renaissance,” a “return to the Jewish religion” led by Cohen and Rosenzweig. Both men attempted to resolve the ‘Jewish problem’ with grand philosophic syntheses. The neo-Kantian Cohen combined the “prophetic ethic” of the Bible with Enlightenment themes, all to be safeguarded by democratic socialism within the Jewish community (he was a firm anti-statist). Rosenzweig, also a neo-Kantian, came down on the “liberal-imperialist” side of modern politics, although his ‘imperialism’ was entirely pacifistic and anti-statist, consisting of a belief in the evolution of all European nations toward peace and equality, an evolution to be spurred by the unification of Germans throughout Europe, who would thereby establish a benign hegemony over the Continent. He saw the Great War rather a Woodrow Wilson did: the harbinger of the Kantian version of the end of History, resulting in a League of Nations (to be dominated by Germans, not Anglo-Americans) whose members would make war against one another no more. With the German defeat, the undaunted Rosenzweig formulated a “new synthesis,” this one combining the high-enlightenment rationalism of Kantian and Hegelian ‘idealism’ with a ‘subjectivist’ or ‘perspectivist’ theology: “They complement one another, Rosenzweig averred. This time, not Germany but the Jewish nation would serve as the catalyst for change, as its longtime statelessness provided a model for the world’s peaceful future. In sum, both Cohen and Rosenzweig affirmed Jewish “self-emancipation, but [in] a religious, not Zionist form.
At these new forms of messianic utopianism the young Strauss raised a skeptical eyebrow above a cold, clear eye. In what would become characteristic of his thought throughout his life, Straus spurned attempts at combining opposites in grand syntheses; he ‘divided the house’ between national/secular Jews and universalist/religious Jews, between “radical atheism” and “religious orthodoxy.” He sided with Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism, a political realist with no patience for utopianism who advocated Jewish national unity, corporatism, military discipline, the rapid colonization of Palestine, and a sharp rejection of Orthodox Judaism as quietist, subservient to the despots of eastern Europe. Resolutely tough-minded when thinking of practical politics, Strauss praised Theodor Herzl for his clear-eyed geopolitical realism and did not hesitate to propose an alliance of Zionism with neither Orthodox Jewry nor Italian fascism but with German liberals, who equally rejected submission to the divine Law while advancing religious freedom.
This notwithstanding, Strauss interested himself much less in the practical side of Zionism as in Zionism as an instance of the “theologico-political problem”—that is, in Zionism’s theoretical implications. He expressed this problem in a paradox: there could be no Jewish nationalism without the (atheist) Enlightenment which—in its non-universalist form—valorized nationalism over the universalism of the revealed religions; however, without religion, there can be no Jewish people, ‘Semitism’ (and therefore anti-Semitism) being an excrescence of pseudo-science. Therefore, one must choose, and Strauss chose political Zionism, calling for “a strictly atheist and Zionist appropriation of the biblical text.” The liberalism, humanitarianism, and assimilationism of Enlightenment emancipation—that is, the universalist form of Enlightenment—had proved a weak reed, as had the German state which was supposed to guarantee it. Jews must face facts, abandon their utopian-socialist illusions whether purely secularist or ‘synthetic,’ understanding that they are not now and never will be Germans; in this, the anti-Semites are right, even if their malevolence i wrong; political societies are by nature exclusive, limited to the like-minded. Jews and Germans are not like-minded; absent thorough assimilation, they must separate. Quélennec objects, arguing that given the pogroms of 1922-24, any call upon German Jews to abandon their historical rights to German citizenship was “absurd.” But of course Strauss wasn’t calling upon Jews to abandon their rights; he called upon them to go someplace where they could secure them.
Be this as it may, one cannot read Straus’s writings of the 1920s without recognizing how Zionism spurs his mind to thought much more than to action. “The central opposition which haunts the texts of the young Strauss is that between ‘belief’ and ‘unbelief.'” Indeed, Strauss concurred with Goethe’s judgment, that the “struggle between unbelief and belief” constitutes “the eternal and sole theme of the entire history of the world and man.” Against “unconditional submission to Jewish law,” affirmation of certain “fundamental dogmas” creation, miracles, providence) Strauss opposed what looks to Quélennec very much like the Nietzschean claim (itself borrowed from the Protestant Bible scholar Julius Wellhausen) of Judaism as originally a form of nature-worship, and thus potentially a pathway to the rational study of nature, to philosophy. On this basis Strauss could claim that Zionism, aiming at the founding of a state based on natural principles, could be reconciled with Judaism in its original form, a nature-religion opposed and buried by priests. This would overcome the impasse of Jewish nationalism. It would require the formation o a Zionist elite who would hold up Judaism as a civic religion for the Jewish ‘masses,’ obviating the need for “a democratic politics,” which was proving itself impotent against proponents of tyranny ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ in 1920s Germany.
By the 1920s Strauss thus had established himself as an astringent critic of the ethics and politics of sentimentalism. It would be too much to call him a philosopher, yet, but his no-nonsense refusal to tolerate slovenly thought, sentimental moralism, and the wishful thinking resulting from them impelled him to an ascent from the ‘cave’ of the Weimar regime generally, and from its Jewish (and, as he saw it, insufficiently Judaic) milieu in particular. In the second half of the decade he began to turn away from “the political struggles of his time,” beyond the nationalist-Enlightenment critique of Orthodoxy as revised and radicalized by Nietzsche and toward a critique of the Enlightenment itself. For that, he turned to the study of Spinoza. Cohen had criticized Spinoza for his “aristocratic” concept of philosophy, for his naturalistic ethics founded not on divine law but on “the right of the stronger,” for his irreligious denial of prophetic inspiration, and for his use of revealed religion for merely civic purposes. “For Cohen, Spinoza totally lacked the universalistic dimension of Judaism, which was illustrated by the rabbinical doctrine of the Noachide [commandments], the source of modern natural right,” as Cohen thought. Strauss defended Spinoza for attempting “to deliver philosophy from the tutelage of the Church and for reinforcing the republic” in Holland, which was under attack by Calvinists who justified absolute monarchy by citing the Old Testament. Cohen failed to look at Spinoza in his political context, that is, as a ‘politic’ as well as political philosopher. Further, Cohen ignored the contradiction between Judaism and his own neo-Kantianism, itself an Enlightenment-based philosophy decisively inflected by Spinozist thought.
As he concentrated more carefully on Spinoza’s philosophy itself, however, Strauss began to think of “the modern critique of religion” not so much in historical terms but as a “philosophic problem.” Spinoza took aim at three adversaries: Orthodox Jews, who suspected philosophy as such of heresy; Maimonides, whose defense of philosophy before the bar of Orthodoxy remained mired in ancient Greek thought; and Calvinists, as hostile to philosophy as the Orthodox but anti-republican as well. Strauss rejects Spinoza’s critique of Orthodoxy because his critique of miracles presupposes that we have comprehensive knowledge of natural law; further, and in step with the Enlightenment generally, Spinoza sought to disprove Scripture by ‘crowding out’ divine providence with what Strauss would later recognize as the Machiavellian notion of progress—the use of reason to master fortune. This obviously leads to an infinite regress (how does one know that the scientific discoverer wasn’t aided by God’s grace?). Moreover, as Strauss puts it in a 1925 essay, science “knows nothing, and can now nothing, of all these things since it does not permit itself to believe.” This goes especially for modern “Bible science” which, like all modern science, is atheistic in principle. These weaknesses in Enlightenment arguments induced Enlighteners to supplement their critique with ridicule, replacing piety and prayer with irreverent jeering. Strauss found such antics unimpressive, writing, in his 1928 essay on Sigmund Freud, “If God’s thoughts are not the thoughts of men, and men’s ways are not the ways of God, then God’s thoughts and ways are not experimentally controllable; moreover, every attempt to justify directly by scientific means the denial of the existence of God is fundamentally deficient.” That goes for satire as well as science.
By contrast, in Spinoza’s estimation Maimonides is a fellow philosopher. But Maimonides concedes too much to biblical revelation, and his science consists of a now-discredited Aristotelianism. He has the wrong theological-political doctrine and the wrong philosophic doctrine. As Strauss observes, Spinoza sees that the new Cartesian science pays no respect to tradition, looking instead to the present and the future, regarding human thought alone to suffice for “the perfection of theory.” Contra Maimonides, no harmonization or even coordination of Scripture and philosophic theory need be attempted.
Much more firmly anti-rationalist than Orthodoxy (let alone Maimonides), Calvinism regards the Holy Spirit as the sole “necessary guide for the conduct of life,” as reason merely evinces human pride. Enlightenment science simply cannot address such a claim, much less refute it.”
Strauss finds Enlightenment philosophy as Spinoza and other neo-epicurean philosophers conceive it too ‘soft’ on religion, which is too ‘hard,’ stern and demanding, for epicureans of any stripe to withstand. “Biblical morality, as Strauss represents it, hardens the individual who has faith,” as seen in the example of Father Abraham, ready to sacrifice his own sons to his stern God. If atheism is to match faith, and overcome it, it must make itself equally stern. This is the dimension of Judaism Nietzsche praises. The young Strauss therefore joins Nietzsche in “valoriz[ing] all that which, in theism or atheism, favors the ‘hardening’ of man” against the mushy humanitarianism of Cohen and his predecessors. Strauss praises Hobbes as Nietzsche’s tough-minded forebear, deviser of “an authentically rationalist, atheist morality founded on fear” of death—that is to say, acknowledgement of grim reality far removed from ‘idealist’ illusions. But even Hobbes’s Leviathan, king of the proud, and Nietzsche’s new dawn of the Superman will not suffice: “the deification of mankind is no genuine atheism,” Strauss would eventually observe.
Quélennec tips his hand at this point, finding all of this “meager and superficial” compared to the thought of the young Marx, who bases his critique of philosophic idealism on the claim that class struggle underlies human ideas and the thought that produces them. But even the young Strauss had a refutation of Marxism well in hand, having shown that scientific materialism at the service of the human mastery of nature and fortune—the promise of all ‘modern’ philosophic doctrines including Marxism—can only ‘speak past’ claims of divine revelation, and never refute it on rational grounds. To his credit, despite his own neo-Marxism, Quélennec usually engages Strauss’s thought on its own terms, even while occasionally assuring his readers of his Leftist bona fides. In this he follows the young Strauss after all, who wrote, “Every author is measured first of all by the standard that he expressly acknowledges in his own work. The best way to dispose of an author is therefore to prove that he fails to achieve what he strives for.”
Having raised serious questions about the various contemporary attempts to ‘synthesize’ Judaism and Enlightenment philosophy and finding much of the latter inclined to soften human souls in a world that treats softness unkindly, Strauss turned away from Nietzsche and toward the philosopher many regard as the arch-idealist, Plato. What accounts for this turn?
Against such Straussian thinkers as Heinrich Meier and Michael and Catherine Zuckert, and indeed against Strauss’s own testimony, Quélennec regards the “turn” as “less a rupture with his engagement of the 1920s than a transformation of his mode of political intervention” [italics added]. Strauss, he argues, was forced into ‘Platonism’ by the final political crisis of the Weimar regime and the philosophic crisis it embodied. The Weimar Republic’s weakness stemmed not simply from liberalism’s softness, but more specifically from the incapacity of liberalism founded upon historicist philosophy to defend itself. The historicist claim—that all ‘epochs’ exhibit the ‘values’ of the persons who rule at a given time and place—results in a combination of moral relativism and sociopolitical anarchy incapable of defending itself. Historicist-relativist versions of liberalism cannot justify their own continued existence in the face of challenges mounted by would-be rulers who despise the liberal ‘values’ of egalitarianism and toleration—not incidentally the moral claims enabling the liberation of Jewry. Whereas initially, in the nineteenth century, historicism had resulted in nationalism (to each nation its own values), which led to German unification and strength, in the twentieth century a radical, Nietzsche-inspired historicism led to moral crisis and indeed to German defeat in the Great War, a view Strauss unknowingly shared with a then-obscure French army officer, Charles de Gaulle. [1]
To understand this radical historicism, Strauss examined the thought of Carl Schmitt, the proponent of a “political existentialism” pointing (very hard-headedly indeed) to the distinction between friends and enemies and the ensuing struggles to the death of friends with their enemies as the essence of politics and the revelation of the truth about human life. There isn’t a trace of epicureanism, or even eudaimonism, in Schmitt; he is no fuzzy-headed liberal. But, as Strauss sees, the confrontation of friends and enemies reprises Hegel’s struggle for recognition, a standard feature of historicist liberalism with its attendant desires for peace with liberty—the happy ending of mutual respect among the combatants. In asserting a ‘pessimistic’ account of the Hegelian dialectic, Schmitt offers only a ‘photographic negative’ of such liberalism. Whether pacifist or bellecist, historicist thought incorporates the Biblical and especially Christian themes it claims to overcome or at least to ‘synthesize’ within a grander ‘system.’ Recalling the imagery of Plato’s Republic and the aspiration of the philosopher to escape the ‘cave’ of political opinion and to ascend to rationally-discoverable truth, Strauss began to describe revealed religion as another nook in the cave, harder for philosopher to escape than the outer rooms, and then to see that historicism was a second cave beneath that enlarged cave. Instead of ascending to the light of the sun, philosophers were becoming more and more profound. But only in the sense of digging themselves a deeper hole.
This meant that to philosophize under conditions of radical historicism Strauss could not just go ahead and ‘do philosophy,’ as professors like to say, but engaged in historical scholarship with respect to philosophy, revisiting the “historical problem.” Intended as a “corrective” to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, which failed to overcome Biblical revelation or “theological absolutism” rationally, historicism, in incorporating or ‘synthesizing’ Biblical principles with those of Enlightenment rationalism, had produced “the illusion of a liberation from illusion,” not overcoming revelation but allowing itself to become parasitical on it. There remained “a fragile line of continuity” between Christianity, the Enlightenment, and historicism, “each position constituting itself in polemical negation of the preceding one,” each as dogmatic at its core as the other.
Seeking to indict Strauss of failing to overcome his Nietzscheism of the 1920s, Quélennec charges that “to Christian modernity, linked historically to a project of intellectual and socio-political emancipation, Strauss would oppose another model of secularization and emancipation,” namely, a philosophic emancipation found in Platonism, approached via Maimonides. As Strauss explains in his 1935 study, Philosophy and Law, Maimonides confronted Christianity without having recourse to modern rationalism in either its Enlightenment or its historicist forms, finding ‘classical’ or Platonic rationalism (and not the Aristotelianism he apparently relies on) adequate to the task of addressing the challenge of revealed religion. “The moderns, from the radical Enlightenment to radical historicism, have wrongly universalized a limited and historically situated combat,” systematically confounding ‘natural’ opinion and ‘religious’ prejudice.” To distinguish such prejudice from such opinion will enable philosophers to ascend not to the ‘sunlight’ of truth outside the cave but to the first cave, reestablishing (as Strauss puts it) “philosophy in its natural difficulty” as the first step toward reestablishing “natural philosophy” undistracted by prejudice. [2]
Recurring to his neo-Marxist framework, Quélennec begins his final chapter with a quote from the famed neo-Marxist Louis Althusser, who denounces Plato as “this aristocrat” who “despises Athenian democracy,” proposing “a revolt against the course of things”—against ‘history’ defined as the course of events. In Althusser’s judgment, the philosopher-king merely represents Plato’s own “interests”—the “pride of philosophy.” (In this he echoes the critique of the Apostle Paul.) Quélennec begins more cautiously with Strauss, saying that Strauss defends the liberty of the philosopher against “the politicization of philosophy” seen in “modern thought from Hobbes to Marxism to existentialism,” but also against “apolitical” philosophy, the failure of many academic philosophers to begin their philosophizing with consideration of the images on the walls of the ‘cave’ of social and political opinion. But he quickly applies the Althusserian critique of Plato to Strauss, charging that Strauss shared the intention, the illusion of German conservatives, who intended to use Nazism a a bludgeon to end the liberal-democratic Weimar regime and to replace it with a “fascist, authoritarian, imperial” regime (as Strauss put it in a1933 letter to Karl Löwith), a regime he supported in principle, not merely as a political stopgap against the Nazis. At stake, then, is whether Strauss’s defense of rightist authoritarianism was a matter of principle as well as (im)prudence, and exactly what those principles were.
Strauss began with what Quélennec calls “a radical critique of Hobbes,” the founder of liberalism and therefore (despite his monarchism) of the modern ‘Left’ in political philosophy. Quélennec rightly disagrees with critics of Strauss who describe him as a neo-Hobbesian, inasmuch as Strauss rejects “modern philosophy” in principle. Strauss’s Hobbes endorses monarchy only as a means to enforce such liberal principles as modern natural right and contractualism against ecclesiastical and aristocratic authority. To put it in Quélennec’s neo-Marxist terms, Hobbes would replace the vanity of the old-regime ‘few’ with a bourgeois morality valorizing economics over politics. Strauss disputes Hobbes because Hobbes makes the human fear of violent death the summum malum of human life, substituting the securing of peace over the securing of justice, effectively making political philosophy instrumental to the presentation of life and no longer a quest for life’s purpose. Add the doctrine of materialism to this, and reason becomes a technique of rule instead of a means of discovering the principles that justify rule. This means that the ‘right to life’ trumps duties which hitherto had imposed limits on the state because those duties derive from realities that transcend the all-too-human: God and nature.
Strauss does not, however, recur to the old aristocratic celebration of courage, recognizing that Plato subordinates courage to reason; indeed, contemporary German nihilists had forgotten reason altogether. Instead, Strauss argues that “political authority” can only be “assured if it has a foundation outside itself, in a transcendent and immutable order which is not in the free disposition of individuals.” Following the example of Plato’s Socrates, Strauss affirms the need for dialogue as the first step for philosophers, dialogue asking what justice is; the dialectical reasoning exhibited in such dialogues winnows out false arguments about justice, taking the abler participants closer to a glimpse of what justice is.
Fearful of the physical warfare that has arisen from just such dialectical struggle, Hobbes endorses a mortal and philosophic egalitarianism whereby no distinction between the philosophic ‘few’ and the unphilosophic ‘many’ remains. Because reason is impotent, the dominant passion of the ‘many,’ the fear of violent death, replaces the quest for justice as the foundation of politics. Sovereign power inheres no longer in the exercise of reason (including and especially its exercise in theological dispute) but in the exercise of will—the strong will of the sovereign. “Faced with the union of the ‘tyrant’ and the ‘masses’ in National Socialism, of which Jews living in Germany are the primary victims,” Strauss “responds not with a critical analysis of authoritarianism and of anti-semitism in its political and socio-political causes, but…with a radical negation of equality among men.” It is surpassingly odd that Quélennec ignores the way in which so many Marxists themselves treated their fellow men as if they were subhuman, murdering millions of them in the quest to eliminate the supposed political and socio-political causes of inequality. On the theoretical level, Quéennec joins his fellow neo-Marxists in praising Strauss’s critique of liberalism’s “pseudo-neutrality” and pseudo-objectivity,” but criticizes him for failing to to recognize the “socio-historical” conditions of all thought, ‘ancient’ and ‘modern.’ “The Straussian return to nature ‘forgotten’ by the moderns is itself constructing on a forgetting, the forgetting of society and history.”
Given the fact that Strauss concentrates his attention on the Platonic dialogues titled The Regime and The Laws, one must wonder how ‘forgetful’ of society Strauss really was. It rather looks as if the young Strauss consciously rejected historicist reduction of philosophy and politics to economic and social causes understood as the motors of ‘History.’ This may be seen even in Quélennec’s own account of Strauss’s approach to Platonism through the philosophy of Moses Maimonides. In studying Maimonides, Strauss concluded that the problem of Orthodoxy and Enlightenment must remain insoluble “as long as one clings to modern premises.” Strauss “puts Orthodoxy against modernity” in view of Orthodoxy’s firm endorsement of divine revelation as fundamental to Judaism. But Platonic rationalism as understood by Maimonides approaches revelation differently. But Orthodoxy and Plato center their understanding of political life on consideration of law, ultimately on the regime—the “concrete and obligatory order of life” in the political community, as Strauss puts it. Plato requires the philosopher first to make a dialectical scent from the ‘cave,’ the city, but then requires him to return and to submit to its laws even while continuing, cautiously, to philosophize. Maimonides stands with Plato on this, while adding the additional and crucial argument that the prophet, not the philosopher, is the true lawgiver, the one who has the imaginative capacity to communicate theoretical truths to ‘the many’ in a form they can comprehend. The prophet thereby serves as a link between philosophy and legislation, “a political function,” his laws aiming at the perfection of the individual, body and soul, and of the city as a whole. Judaic prophecy realizes what Platonic philosophy leaves in the realm of the (practically unattainable) ideas.
Where does this leave philosophers? While recognizing the divine law as the starting point of their inquiries, both Jewish and Muslim medieval philosophers reserved the right to interpret that law. In so doing, they also recognized the limits of reason, which cannot (for example) say whether the world is eternal or was created by God. they therefore contented themselves with indirect influence on the city—interrogating, interpreting, unifying, repairing the law in accordance with reason, establishing “a sort of State in and under the State, the ‘ideal’ State united in its disjunction with the ‘real’ State and the ideology which sustains it.” Philosophy is a ‘guide for the perplexed’ for the young and perplexed potential philosopher, who wonders about the divine law, its apparent paradoxes, and the difficulties of applying it in hard cases. Quélennec suggests that “many German philosophers” were similarly perplexed in the wake of the Nazi revolution; their “unconditional submission to the new regime often went together with a certain defense of the autonomy of the field [i.e., philosophy] in the face of direct interventions of the State in the functioning of the [academic] institution.” This was surely true of Heidegger, although not true enough; as for Strauss, it is only just to say that the moral and political content of Nazi law precluded any such submission, a refusal based precisely on the hyper-modern content of that law. Quélennec recognizes this much later, observing that Strauss criticizes the Nazi sympathizer Carl Schmitt for giving the ‘total’ law a folkish or democratic foundation and for endorsing the Führerprinzip. Strauss understands law as endorsed by the medieval philosophers as “a counter-model to Schmitt,” a “neo-aristocratic program which inscribes inequality of intelligences and capacities into Being.” This is partially correct, except for the “inscribed” part. Inequality of intelligences and capacities isn’t somehow imposed by philosophers upon nature; they recognize it in nature. This in no way precludes the more fundamental equality of human beings as members of the same species. Quélennec misconceives Strauss as attempting to found a “reactionary utopia.” Strauss had no truck with utopianism, ‘reactionary’ or ‘progressive,’ precisely because he was no historicist. He never assumed that ‘History,’ conceived as the course of events, is necessarily going anywhere.
In what Quélennec calls Strauss’s first “Platonic phase”—1932-36—Strauss “linked the liberty of the philosopher to the submission to and justification of the authoritarian political order.” Obviously, in theory Strauss justified only “authoritarian” political orders founded upon the divinely revealed law as interpreted by philosophers; no modern regime of ‘the few’ qualified. Strauss did in practice justify authoritarian political orders in order to contain the Nazis, but that hardly means he endorsed them on the highest level. No less a defender of republicanism than Winston Churchill continued to hope that Mussolini’s Italy, the archetype of fascism, would either join in alliance with the commercial republics against Hitler or at least remain neutral, as Franco would do in Spain. In his second “platonic turn”—1936-38—Quélennec’s Strauss abandoned his claim that Maimonides limited reason with a prophetic-revelatory framework while adhering to Maimonides’ assertion of the political need for a prophet to address ‘the many.’ With his well-known distinction between esoteric thought and exoteric dogma in hand, Strauss now argued that the ‘esoteric’ teaching of Maimonides proved him no pious Jew but “a radical critic of religion”; Strauss adopted the same stance for himself. In practice this meant that Strauss “now describ[ed] the relation of philosophy vis-à-vis the political and religious authorities as purely defensive,” while in practice advocating not the rule of ‘the few’ but Aristotle’s mixed regime, with its compromise between the wisdom of the philosophers and the consent of the people. he also took up his claim that Plato intended his regime in speech as an ironic construct, never to be implemented in practice.
Quélennec rejects all that. In his reading of Strauss, the mixed regime was only an exoteric shell covering a call for American or “Anglo-Saxon” imperialism, or what Strauss calls (thinking of Churchill’s imperialism) a “decent hegemony.” Such an empire would be ensured by Straussian disciples practicing a “Gramscianism of the Right”—that is, a ‘long march through the institutions’ initiated in the graduate program at the University of Chicago, where Strauss spent most of the last two decades of his life. In pursuit of this alleged goal, Straussians eventually allied with ‘neo-conservatives,’ who (Quélennec rightly remarks) were not conservatives in the European sense at all but old-fashioned liberals. The proffered evidence of this is Strauss’s argument in Persecution and the Art of Writing: Some degree of persecution of politically heterodox views is natural in any political regime, including the relatively tolerant liberal regimes, because any regime must resist its most radical enemies. As far as Quélennec is concerned, this amounts to “philosophic endorsement” of McCarthyism and “Anglo-Saxon propaganda for the ‘free world.'” Although Strauss presents philosophers as persecuted, in his Rightist-Gramscian scheme they are really pulling the strings of the political figures who do the actual persecution of the regime’s enemies, discreetly defending Strauss’s “reactionary utopia.”
It should be unnecessary to observe that one need not be a ‘McCarthyite’ to support the identification and removal of foreign agents from the government of the United States. Further, Quélennec produces no evidence that the ‘neo-conservatives’ had anything to do with McCarthyism; since there is none, his silence is understandable. It should also be unnecessary to observe that the original, leftist, Gramscians propounded an equally ‘elitist’ vanguardism. So does the ‘postmodernist’ Left of today, which acts exactly as Strauss expected every regime to acting—lauding and hiring its friends, condemning and excluding its enemies. Regimes impose limits and elevate ‘elites,’ period; even democracy requires an elite, namely, the majority that rules. The charge that Strauss thereby endorses McCarthyism thus invites an obvious reply of tu quoque. As for those scare quotes around the Cold-War phrase, the ‘free world,’ it is noteworthy that Quélennec never so much as mentions Strauss’s exchange with the self-proclaimed Hegelian Soviet sympathizer Alexandre Kojève. In his one philosophic dialogue with a real ‘totalitarian’ thinker, Strauss stood on the side of liberty.
On the practical/moral level, Strauss also testified that the example of Churchill made him see that the republican regimes could still defend themselves; it was not only or event mostly as an imperialist that Churchill galvanized Strauss’s attention. That is where Strauss drew the line in practice, even as he drew it between himself and Kojève in theory, for the balance of his life. Every one of his students knew that. (As an aside, it might be added that Strauss regarded his students, or that they regarded themselves, as the core of a new, Nietzschean ‘planetary aristocracy’ can only be seriously entertained by someone who never knew those guys. Stanley Rosen, Harry Jaffa, and Allan Bloom lacked nothing in self-esteem, but there were limits to it.)
With this intelligent and stimulating essay, Quélennec climbs to the top of the substantial heap of scholars who charge Strauss and his students with elitism, authoritarianism, imperialism, and so on. With regard to “the young Strauss,” Quélennec most likely wishes that he had favored not an anti-Nazi coalition of ‘Rightist’ regimes or even an Anglo-American alliance based partly on assaults launched from territories within the British Empire, but the Popular Front strategy of the 1930s Left. Honorable men took this position, including George Orwell and André Malraux, but they also abandoned hope of ‘one big Left’ after the moral and geopolitical realities of the Cold War sank in. Quélennec hasn’t learned enough from them.
As for the more recent controversies, it is hard to resist the opinion that the ‘Strauss Wars’ have really amounted to not so much a critique of American foreign policy under the Reagan and Bush administrations as an attempt to discredit faculty colleagues in North America, Britain, and continental Europe. The struggle is unquestionably a political one, very much among academic ‘elites,’ over who will be permitted to teach students and thereby advance the political principles and policies of the regimes they favor. Plato was right about Socrates and Athens, philosophers and sophists, philosophers and demagogues, and from the universities of seventeenth-century Europe to the universities in the West today, such struggles continue.
Notes
- See Charles de Gaulle: The Enemy’s House Divided. Robert Eden translation. Durham: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
- In this passage, Strauss does not mean “natural philosophy” in the sense of the pre-Socratics; he means rather philosophizing that begins in the polis, ‘the city,’ and ascends from there to insight into nature.
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