Reading Leo Strauss: A Straussian Distortion of My Book

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Notes

1. All page numbers in the text refer to Havers, Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy.

2. Strauss, On Tyranny, 194.

3. Burns makes some historicist assumptions of his own. He writes: “Havers has failed to grasp that Strauss understands classical political philosophy to be a pre-philosophic activity that seeks to ground the philosophic life” (original italics). Is Burns, then, suggesting that philosophy did not truly begin in history until the post-classical era?

4. See MacDonald and Craig, Recovering Hegel, 48–49.

5. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 135.

6. See Spinoza, Political Treatise, 3.7. See also Polka, Between Philosophy and Religion, vol. 2, 143–287.

7. Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 94.

8. Cf. Strauss, “On a New Interpretation of Plato’s Political Philosophy”: “Generally speaking, medieval philosophy has in common with modern philosophy the fact that both are influenced, if in different ways, by the teaching of the Bible” (328).

9. Churchill, “Something That Will Astonish You,” 312–13. In this context, Churchill declares: “Let there be justice, mercy, and freedom” (312).

10. See Havers, “The Philosophical Rhetoric of Tragedy and Hope,” 193–98. Towards the end of his review, Burns cites as evidence of ancient Greek “mercy” the speech by Nicolaus the Syracusan calling for merciful treatment of the defeated Athenians who had killed all of his sons (as reported by Diodorus Siculus). Yet Nicolaus falls short of condemning all enslavement and mass slaughter as categorically wrong. See Konstan, Pity Transformed, 91.

11. Spinoza, Ethics, Part 2, Prop. 49, Scholium, 100–101.