Reading Leo Strauss: A Conservative’s Distortion of His Thought

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. Strauss, “Liberalism of Classical Political Philosophy,” originally published in March 1959 in The Review of Metaphysics and republished in 1968 in Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 26–64. Havers refers to it on page 28, claiming that Strauss attacks Havelock “for insisting that only religious experience or fidelity to a particular religious tradition (e.g., Christianity) can illuminate human understanding about faith and politics.” Strauss does no such thing, and actually argues that Havelock is stupidly anti-religious, that he condemns the intolerance of “even the most humane” religions. Havers takes away from a text the very opposite of what it is arguing.

2. He claims in the same place that Strauss “spies in Schmitt’s thought” a “preoccupation with particular traditions,” but what Strauss actually argues (ad loc) is that Carl Schmitt, hoping to offer a radical critique of those living in the “culture” that has come to be over and against “nature,” returns to the Hobbesian notion of the state of nature, the better to see what has been overlaid and forgotten; the Hobbesian state of nature is for Schmitt the ground of the critique of the liberalism that has elevated “culture.”

3. See Strauss, “Liberalism of Classical Political Philosophy” (1959), 390–91; and Strauss, “Existentialism” (1956), 308–11.

4. Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?” 36.

5. Strauss, “Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero,” 208–11. Havers examines the debate on 71–73.

6. Strauss, “Existentialism,” 307. Havers is aware of this talk (20). See also Strauss, “The Problem of Socrates,” and “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” 29–37.

7. Strauss to Löwith, August 15, 1946, published in translation in The Independent Journal of Philosophy 2 (1978): 5.

8. Strauss, “Perspectives on the Good Society,” 272; cf. 268.

9. Strauss: “Cassirer had transformed Cohen’s system into a new system of philosophy in which ethics had completely disappeared: it had been silently dropped. He had not faced the problem. Heidegger did face the problem. He declared that ethics is impossible and his whole being was permeated by the awareness that this fact opens up an abyss” (“Existentialism,” 304).

10. I say “wishes to cite” because two of the three pages that Havers does cite, at 178 n. 26, contain no references to “ancient egalitarian natural right.” He seems to wish to refer to Natural Right and History page 118 (not 28) and page 144. The third reference, to page 7 of Liberalism Ancient and Modern, contains no statement about ancient egalitarian natural right.

11. See Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern, vii–viii and 28–29; Havers, 46 and 180 n. 53; see also 68. In the latter instance, Havers claims that Strauss “privileges an ‘ancient’ liberalism based on natural right over a ‘modern’ liberalism based on historicism and relativism.” But the ancient liberalism Strauss describes does not reference natural right; it is based on an awareness, however dim, that there are non-instrumental goods.

12. Strauss, “Interpretation of Genesis,” 373. The only city Strauss mentions in this context, incidentally, is Babylon.

13. For example, according to Havers, “Strauss and his followers have typically condemned [Hannah] Arendt as a radical historicist” (65, emphasis added), yet the supporting endnote (184 n. 2) has no reference to any work of Strauss.

14. See Strauss, Philosophy and Law, 11–14 (Havers cites this work at 187 n. 1); Strauss, Natural Right and History, 169, 175, 198, 201; and Strauss, Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 106–7, 124.

15. Strauss, The City and Man, 41–42; Strauss to Löwith, June 23, 1935, published, with English translation, in The Independent Journal of Philosophy 5/6 (1988): 177–92, especially 182–85; and see Havers, 180 n. 51; and Strauss, “The Intellectual Situation,” 237–54.

16. Strauss, “What Can We Learn from Political Theory?” 527; and see Havers, 98.

17. Löwith, “Can There Be a Christian Gentleman?” 58–67.

18. Churchill: “The Sermon on the Mount is the last word in Christian ethics. Everyone respects the Quakers. Still, it is not on these terms that Ministers assume their responsibilities of guiding States. …There is however one helpful guide, namely, for a nation to keep its word and to act in accordance with its treaty obligations to allies. This guide is called honour. … It is baffling to reflect that what men call honour does not correspond always to Christian ethics.” The Gathering Storm, 320–21.

19. Ibid, 667. “But I cannot conceal from the reader,” etc.

20. See Strauss, “Farabi’s Plato,” 364; see also 365–66, 389; “On Classical Political Philosophy,” 93; Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 153; and “How to Begin to Study,” 216–17.

21. Preface to the English translation of Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 25 top; cf. 27 bottom, on Cohen. See also “Cohen und Maimuni,” 401.

22. Strauss, “Cohen und Maimuni,” 424–26; and Strauss, Plato’s Laws, 1.

23. On Heidegger’s atheistic, Dasein-interpretation of the call of conscience, see Strauss’s letter to Gerhard Krüger, January 7, 1930; On Machiavelli, see Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli 188, 193–94. On the ancients, see e.g., Strauss, Socrates and Aristophanes, 117–25 with Aristophanes, Wasps 999–102, 1112, and Strauss, “Preliminary Observations on the Gods,” 89–104.

24. Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica, 13.2.19–27.