Leo Strauss was one of the most insightful and consequential if not otherwise controversial, political philosophers and classicists of the last century. To his critics, Strauss is the bugaboo guy who is the dark mastermind of American imperialism and neoconservatism (notwithstanding, such conspiracies have been thoroughly debunked and dismissed in academic studies). To his students and his defenders, Strauss was a great exegete of the classics who brought Plato, Thucydides, Al-Farabi, and Machiavelli to life for a generation of political theorists who had been cut off from anything written prior to Thomas Hobbes. Strauss brought back into academic study and consideration the insights of the classical political tradition shunned by the modern political science of post-Hobbesianism.
Athens, Jerusalem, and all That
Part of Strauss’s fame was his elaboration on the Western dynamic caught up by two cities and the concepts they represented. For Strauss, the Western tradition cannot be lifted out of the indissoluble tension between rationalism and revelation, symbolized by Athens and Jerusalem. The Athenian rationalist tradition, for Strauss, was cut-throat, pragmatic, and suffered from a tension between hubris and realism. The Jerusalemite revelatory tradition, by contrast, was moralistic and zealous but also suffered the tension of hubris and realism, albeit for different reasons. One need only look at the long history of Jewish and Christian messianic movements for how faith could be as equally hubristic as an aspirational form of political apotheosis.
Strauss never believed that there was a peaceful coexistence between reason and revelation. Instead, reason and revelation were at war with each other. This violent dynamic between Athens and Jerusalem was mediated by the ascendant Catholic Church, but that mediation was eventually broken by Machiavelli and the Protestant Reformation—though that mediation was already facing problems with men like Marsilius of Padua and from within the Catholic tradition like with Augustine’s separation of the city of man (rationalism) and the city of God (revelation). Although Strauss does give attention to that Catholic mediation (namely in his short but important reflections on Saint Thomas Aquinas), this mediation is a betrayal of the real dynamic between the two: conflict not synthesis.
Central to Strauss’s thesis on the Western dynamic is the theologico-political problem. What comes first? God or the polis, God or the state, God or the lawgiver, etc. To where do our loyalties orient themselves: the realm of the white rose and the city of divine love or the city of man with its deified lawgiver like Lycurgus, Solon, or Numa – or in the American context where Straussianism thrives as an intellectual movement, the Founding Fathers and Abraham Lincoln? This is the tension between Athens (the city of man) and Jerusalem (the city of God). The highest good in life for the Greeks was political life. The highest good in life for Jews and Christians was the theological and contemplative life (focusing on metaphysics, ontology, aesthetics, and morality, leading to the numerous philosophies and theologies of love that we have inherited). Some Jews and Christians eventually found minority support from a handful of Greek philosophers who maintained intellectual contemplation and politics were compatible goods (namely Plato and Aristotle), but this revision of Plato and Aristotle was exactly that—a revision, and Strauss wanted to reclaim Plato and Aristotle from that revisionism to highlight how the intellectual impetus of Plato and Aristotle was subservient to political ends rather than intellectual ends in of themselves. This division is significant, and in the world of political struggle, it can have serious consequences when contemplating the fall of civilization in an isolated monastery, which takes precedence over the defense of the political order and allows for contemplative mysticism in the first place.
Despite this irreconcilable difference, Strauss maintained that the dynamism and greatness of the West was the dialectic between these two antagonistic traditions. When Athens veered into hubris, Jerusalem was there to reel it back in. When Jerusalem veered into hubris, Athens was there to reel it back in. The medieval conflict between the popes and Holy Roman emperors, the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict, embodied this dynamic of conflict. The outcome of this tension between reason and revelation is compromise, and the population at large benefits from such compromise between the forces of political fanaticism and religious zeal.
What Athens gave to the West was political and military zeal and ingenuity, “daring, progress, and the arts.” What Jerusalem gave to the West was contemplative and spiritual discipline, a yearning for heavenly things, and a deep anthropology that contributed to the study of nature human nature, and created an important place for intellectual contemplation as a serious and noble pursuit in itself instead of the pragmatic, political-oriented, intellectualism of the Greek philosophers. These two forces produced a schizophrenic civilization and human person, but we have all benefited from this dynamic tension between pure politics and contemplative theological anthropology. For instance, the great treasures of Western art are the byproduct of this tension wrestling with each other; take the great art and literature of the West, so much of it influenced by Christian philosophies of love yet commissioned by political leaders to serve the purpose of political propaganda.
Classics and Moderns
The other famous distinction, or dialectic, Strauss drew was between the classics and moderns which is found in his magnum opus, Natural Right and History. Here the classical and Christian traditions were allied but allied only because they shared the same basic anthropology that humanity was social in its nature and had a telos undergirding it. While the Greco-Romans and Christians differed, Strauss noted that it was primarily the Catholic tradition of science and philosophy that kept the disparate visions of Athens and Jerusalem united under the principle of the common good and common understanding of human nature (though never a common or universal culture).
Contrary to popular misinformation, the modern project of philosophy was a complete break from Greek philosophy and not its resurrection. Any undergraduate in philosophy would know this. Yet, paradoxically, in breaking from the Greek philosophical tradition, modernity was also a return to the Greek philosophical tradition—namely, the pre-Socratic tradition of materialist sophistry. While Strauss saw Machiavelli as a forerunner, the culmination of this return to empty materialism and self-preservation as the highest end (read: lowest end) of life was in Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza. While the moderns turned to the pre-Socratics for inspiration, namely in the assumption that metaphysics begins with nature or matter and not God or the Platonic Ideas/Forms, that’s where the similarity ends. For modern materialism, born out of the Renaissance and early Enlightenment, was guided by Francis Bacon’s New Science of scientific conquest and the transformation and mastery of nature – concepts alien to the pre-Socratic materialists.
In a dazzling exegesis of the so-called “classical liberals,” Strauss highlights how their philosophical outlook is premised on relativism, hedonism, and solitary and atomistic individualism. In rejecting a summum bonum, the classical liberals decisively destroyed the possibility of unity in a society. In promoting hedonism, or lack of bodily harm, as the highest good in life, the classical liberals turned everyone into a robotic copy of each other, destroying all distinctive particularity to life. In considering humans a-social and solitary creatures, the classical liberals denied the possibility of political virtue in its Greco-Roman form centered around patriotism and phronesis, or in its Christian conceptualization through the politics of the common good in service to each other as an expression of loving God (love God and love your neighbor).
Life in the state of nature was terrible. Even in Locke, who was nothing more than “the wolf Hobbes in sheep’s clothing,” as Strauss described him, the classical liberal solution to the problem of a brutish and short life in the state of nature was the imposition of the leviathan overall who came under the tentacles of the social contract. Locke goes as far as to state that part of the responsibility of government is to “decide the rights of the subject, by promulgated standing laws, and known authorized judges.”
Locke, as Strauss showed, is hardly the benign libertarian that he is made out to be on the internet by people who have never understood him (and perhaps haven’t even read him). After all, his rosy state of nature necessarily descends into the state of war, which compels us out of the primal state of existence. Conflict defines an atomized society in a war over the scarcity of resources. Thus, Strauss shows, after many close and intense readings of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and others, that the logical conclusion of the modern liberal vision moves to “the outlawry of war or the establishment of a world state.” How prescient, all things considered. Even Locke’s political logic is the slow growth of statism—the more “rights” one has, the more power the state must have to enforce those rights “by promulgated standing laws, and known authorized judges,” as Locke himself states, whose legislature must be “sacred and unalterable.” What of Locke’s call for revolution, might one ask? If you read Locke carefully, he never advocates that in the way we moderns think of revolution; Locke’s revolution is a return to government because it has nullified itself, dissolved itself, through its own abuses and living under no government (now that it nullified itself) is the antithesis of our call into the social contract.
The crisis of modernity is, therefore, one of permissive nihilism and encroaching statism. With nothing to call citizens up toward besides comfortable living, the gains won by liberal democracy would be threatened. It was threatened by fascism but managed to survive, something that Strauss focused on in his lecture/essay “On German Nihilism” (1941). In Strauss’s time, liberal democracy was in a struggle with communism. From Strauss’s perspective, communism offered humanity something to be zealous for and strive to achieve. Liberalism, not so much. This would, in turn, Strauss feared, lead to non-communist young adults embracing communism because the apotheotic aspiration of communism was far more alluring than the empty hedonism of liberalism. Strauss wanted to avert this possibility.
Strauss was not an anti-liberal in the manner that Strauss’s critics ignorantly and erroneously charge (and one is often left to wonder if the critics ever bothered to read him). On the contrary, he was a friend to liberal democracy. He believed that the liberal democratic states, for all their metaphysical and philosophical problems, still retained the spirit of classical Athens and acceptance of spiritual matters and religion (even if in a much more depreciated form) in the promise of freedom of religion. Despite the problems of liberalism, Strauss believed that rejuvenating liberal polities with classical virtue ethics would safeguard it from slipping into nihilistic tyranny and from losing the contest with communism. In a world where tyranny was everywhere, liberalism—while in danger of falling into its own tyranny—had the most freedom to confront decadence and despotism from within. Strauss’s hope, then, was that the recovery of classical ideals and virtue would bolster the implicit nihilism and hedonism of liberal thought; this was only possible in liberal polities precisely because of their relative openness. Plato and Aristotle may have been forgotten, but they were not banned. As such, they could be recovered. Strauss was, in fact, a great friend and supporter of American Democracy and was deeply concerned about what would happen to the world if American Democracy decayed, degenerated, and failed to remain steadfast in its opposition to its more authoritarian opponents who followed the single path of creating salvation on earth.
Three Waves of Modernity
In his essay “The Three Waves of Modernity,” Strauss charted the tripartite struggle for modernity as an ideological one. Conservatism need not apply because conservatism was premodern and anti-ideological. The contenders in modernity were liberalism (including many who go by the label “conservative” in today’s world), socialism, and fascism.
Liberalism was marked by the discovery of humanity’s mastery over nature through technology (or what we call “science”). The essence of liberalism was to create safe, pleasant, and harmless lives through the instruments of the new science, “The purpose of science is reinterpreted: propter potentiam, for the relief of man’s estate, for the conquest of nature, for the maximum control, the systematic control of the natural conditions of human life. The conquest of nature implies that nature is the enemy, chaos to be reduced to order; everything good is due to man’s labor rather than to nature’s gift: nature supplies only the almost worthless materials. Accordingly, the political society is in no way natural.” Furthermore, Strauss writes in reflecting over the movement of modern political ideology, “I can here only assert that the increased emphasis on economics is a consequence of this. Eventually we arrive at the view that universal affluence and peace is the necessary and sufficient condition of perfect justice.”
The materialization of life and the triumph of scientistic-economism was the outcome of the first wave of modernity. It was reacted against by the second wave, or socialism. The head of the second wave was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as much a modernist as any Enlightenment philosopher before him.
Rousseau protested on behalf of nature, but he protested on behalf of human nature more than he did the green trees and flowery pastures interrogated on the rack of post-Baconian science, “[Rousseau] protested in the name of virtue, of the genuine, nonutilitarian virtue.” If liberalism was about remaking the world to make humanity’s consumeristic life pleasurable and peaceful, socialism also concurred with liberalism in this regard. Hence, the two movements are bitter enemies. They agree on the same end that “universal affluence and peace is the necessary and sufficient condition of perfect justice.” The difference is that socialism disagreed with the means to the end.
According to Strauss, the discovery of the second wave of modernity was the dissolution of any form of realism in nature. While the assault upon nature commenced in the Renaissance, in the writings of Machiavelli, and especially Francis Bacon, it wasn’t until the aftereffects of the Scientific and Industrial Revolution that the true war on nature was unleashed with the belief that nature was entirely changeable, reducible, destructible. The goal of life wasn’t harmony with nature, wasn’t to be taught by nature, wasn’t to dwell in the beauty of nature; the goal of life was the transformation of nature for the self-pleasure and contentment of man. Technology made this possible. If you refuse to be part of this project, you will be made to journey to a better world whether you want to or not. As Rousseau said in The Social Contract, “whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free.” The world of freedom through the mastery and transformation of nature is the only world that we must create. This was a communal endeavor, not an individualistic one.
While the second wave of modernity came to these conclusions from the spirit of the first wave, the real difference between socialism and classical liberalism was socialism’s moral fire vis-à-vis liberalism’s moral relativism. Here, one can see Strauss laughing like Democritus. While there were some religious socialists, most socialists have been, and remain today, anti-clerical, atheistic, and opponents of religion. Yet they were filled with the moral spirit of Jerusalem, lending credence to the dismissive jeering of socialism as a “religion” or new “theology,” a religious faith for those who have lost their religious belief in a Transcendent Deity like the Christian God. Liberals, in their Athenian and Thrasymachean materialism, were the unintentional heirs of Athens, just like socialists became the unintentional heirs of Jerusalem with their moralism and zeal for reform. The new dialectic of Athens and Jerusalem was between the cut-throat materialism of Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke against the sentimental materialism of Rousseau and his heirs, especially the Romantics. Socialism preached the gospel of techno-sentimentalism, or “scientific socialism,” a transformation of the world for moral ends using the same means and methods as classical liberalism’s transformation of the world purely for the self.
Then Strauss reached his elaboration on fascism, which was the cruelest of all the modern ideologies. Fascism was defined as “the experience of terror and anguish rather than of harmony and peace, and it is the sentiment of historical existence as necessarily tragic.” The perpetual struggle was what would bring humanity happiness. Herd life, the life of the “last men,” was simply to have a full stomach and a warm bed to retire to at night. To the fascist, the emptiness of modernity was where humans lived “without any ideals and aspirations” and simply wanted to be “well fed, well clothed, well housed, well medicated by ordinary physicians and by psychiatrists.”
The seductive danger of fascism was achieved through its synthetic combination of discoveries of the first two waves of modernity. From liberalism, fascism took the cult of technology and science to new levels of repression, interrogation, and control. From socialism, fascism took over criticism of liberalism as morally weak, relativistic, and too self-centered. With the power of technology now in the hands of the Übermensch, the new brave new world of could be made real. The purpose of life was the struggle to make that world a reality since nature and technology called for a world of control to be established. If liberalism was the thesis of modernity and socialism the antithesis to liberalism, then fascism was the synthesis that drew on the discoveries of liberalism and socialism while also rebelling against liberalism and socialism. Far from a “reactionary” movement like the medieval romanticism of the nineteenth century opining for a return to the throne and altar, fascism was an intensely modern and forward-looking movement. Fascism represented the synthesis of liberalism and socialism, the totalizing embodiment of modernist philosophy and science gone awry.
In this contest of ideologies, fascism had fallen with its defeat in 1945. At the time of Strauss’s death, liberalism and socialism remained. From Strauss’ point of view, socialism could have still emerged as the victor when he died in 1973. The ever-present threat of a socialist victory in the ideological wars of modernity and the slow-growing nihilism and relativism that lay at the heart of liberalism was something with which Strauss was extensively and intensely concerned.
Strauss Today
The importance of Strauss for many in the present is in his exceptional classical scholarship and his recognition that in liberalism lay a deep relativism that would exhaust into permissive nihilism. The collapse of moral norms would divide society which was unified by the force of the law under the social contract. With no more external enemy to threaten liberalism, liberalism’s internal contradictions would prove to be its own worst threat. Without the great external foe, liberal polities would grow politically impotent as society relativized itself and liberal states became impotent to act.
Contemporary Straussians, then, tend to be virtue ethicists. They believe in the importance of the classical conception of virtue, either in its Greco-Roman or Catholic flavor, as the great buttress against relativized disintegration. (Strauss follows the classical theorists who, in assessing the decline of classical Greece, latched onto the idea of moral softness and materialism as the primary cause for their degeneration into tyranny, civil war, and eventual conquest—despite their wealth and large militaries—to comparatively poorer entities: Macedon and, eventually, Rome.) Strauss, who knew Oswald Spengler’s thesis in Decline of the West well—he even references Spengler directly in his seminal essay “The Three Waves of Modernity”—feared that without virtue in political life the eventual political impasse of an increasingly decadent, relativistic, and nihilistic West would leave itself open to the return of the politics of force, tyranny, in which the formerly relatively free and open polities of the West would slip into despotism.
Spengler argued that in the final descent of the West’s civilizational death, politics would become so untenable that force would be the only answer to political problems. Caesarism was the future because Caesarism coincides with political and cultural decadence. This is precisely what Strauss feared and was warning against.
Thus, Straussians tend to be conservative only insofar that they understand the enemy of liberalism is itself; more specifically, the hollow relativism embedded in Hobbes and functionally present in Locke, which threatens to destroy the very world that liberalism helped to create, is the enemy within liberalism that must be addressed. The conservative reputation of Strauss is because—unlike fanatical Whigs who do not think we have anything to learn from the past—he saw much wisdom from the ancients to help us with the questions of life, politics, and the destiny of humanity which moderns have shunned or lowered the standards of. Ancients concerned themselves with how humans should live. Moderns, according to Strauss, “start from how men do live.” However, in taking this approach, “one must lower one’s sights” to the lowest common denominator of human existence: self-preservation. Ironically, Strauss is more an idealist than a realist in that he wanted to return to what we could become rather than what we are. The low realism of hedonistic self-interest, which rests at the core of modernistic anthropology and philosophy, does not permit anything beyond this and, therefore, the striving for a superior life (intellectually, morally, aesthetically, spiritually, etc.) disintegrates into an atomistic relativism of everyone pursuing their self-interest which produces weakness within society.
The victory of modernity, the crowning achievement of Whig civilization, is that we simply live and then die alone in a warm bed with three meals a day provided by the state. There is no striving. There is no goal. There is no telos for humanity to consummate. If we live comfortable, peaceful, and pleasant lives, we have won the game of life according to the New Science ideology of modernism. This is why, in the 21st century, so many children of the victorious liberals of World War II and the Cold War are abandoning liberalism and turning to alternatives that offer them something to strive for.
Those who present Strauss as a closet fascist, a synthetic philosopher of rationalism and religion, a reactionary, or an opponent of liberalism have not read him or portray him in deceptive and misleading ways meant to advance their own grinding axes. In concentrating on classical natural right and the philosophers and historians of Athens, like Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides, we begin to see the kind of intellectualism that Strauss advocated: a return to the rationalist philosophy of Athens and not the moral revelation of Jerusalem. Why? There is a kernel of moral virtue deep within the atheistic rationalism of Athenian philosophy, and that is the only path amenable to moderns who need saving from their own apathetic nihilism and the totalitarian moralism of utopianism but who cannot accept the love of God and neighbor as the highest good in life because of hyper-individualism, leaving the cultivation of individual virtue in the city of man as the only possibility for moderns. This, however, would require a return to the classics—not to serve the New Jerusalem but to reinvigorate the New Athens. When all is said and done, Strauss endorses the only city he believes truly exists, the city we do, in fact, live in: the city of man.
