Gregory Bruce Smith

Leo Strauss and the Straussians: An Anti-democratic Cult?

In both scholarly and popular venues, the political philosopher Leo Strauss has emerged as the alleged father of an anti-democratic cult at odds with the principles of American democracy. The relative suddenness and uniformity of this recently evolving sentiment is intriguing. Certainly, Strausss name and those of his self-avowed “followers” have surfaced in public before recent years. That Strauss was a controversial and iconoclastic scholar during his lifetime is certainly true, but primarily on issues such as how to read Machiavelli or the appropriate way to approach the study of the social sciences. His recent public impact, especially since his death, was therefore hardly predictable. Strauss simply was not a public man. He seldom declaimed in public, and despite a sense of professional obligation to his university and his students, clearly preferred the withdrawn, quiet, contemplative life. He showed no desire to have a public persona. It is difficult to explain, therefore, how Strauss could occasion such intemperate remarks as those printed in the New York Times , under the heading “Undemocratic Vistas: The Sinister Vogue of Leo Strauss.” Author Brent Staples stated that “Leo Strauss contended that the Philosopher-kings (himself included) were born to rule, servants were born to serve and that only disaster came of letting the rabble get above its station. Strauss, then, was unapologetically elitist and anti-democratic. His ideas have survived him and crept into vogue in American politics.”

What Is Political Philosophy? A Phenomenological View

Political philosophy must be pursued phenomenologically. When pursued phenomenologically, political philosophy is in fact proto or first philosophy itself rather than a subsection of philosophy. As first philosophy, political philosophy must be seen as architectonic, the queen of the sciences.

The post-modern Leo Strauss?

Few authors rival Leo Strauss in the variety of conflicting interpretations they have provoked. One might be reminded of Hegel and the proliferation of ‘right’ and ‘left’ Hegelians. But no one doubted that Hegel was a modern author. There is no similar agreement about the work of Strauss. Strauss has been accused of (or praised for) everything from the naive attempt to plot a return to Athens, to being an ideological defender of a ‘conservative’ vision of liberal capitalism, to being a Nietzschean nihilist and historicist hiding under an esoteric natural right teaching, to be a mediaeval rabbi in disguise, and so on. I want to suggest that this confusion is due to the fact that many competing elements exist in Strauss’s thought. In short, Strauss’s life work-his ‘project’-is based on a novel synthesis. It is a synthesis that is constructed in a post-Hegelian, post-Nietzschean, post-Heideggerian environment. But it is equally true that Strauss consciously responds to and tries to transcend the problems inherent in late modern thought. It is in this sense that Strauss’s synthesis could legitimately be termed post-modern, and take its place in the growing debates about postmodernity. I will explicitly oppose my view of Strauss’s indebtedness to several latemodem authors to the interpretation that the esoteric Straussian position is a furtive Nietzscheanism, which uses Machiavelli as its spokesperson, does not believe in God or the immortality of the soul, etc.’ Strauss clearly differentiates himself from the late-moderns-his ‘third wave’-while nonetheless drawing some elements from them. I have in mind specifically Martin Heidegger far more than Nietzsche. In a way that is not sufficiently appreciated, Heidegger was the pivotal thinker for Strauss-if not the most important in his final synthesis-but unlike Heidegger, Strauss did believe that there is a natural basis for man’s existence. It does not, however, actualise itself through efficient causality; hence it is not always available or operative. I will argue that the post-Hegelian elements in Strauss’s thought prove quite clearly that he was not plotting some simple-minded return to the ancients. Strauss openly admitted that nothing so massively affected him ‘in the years in which [my] mind took [its] lasting direction as the thought of Heidegger’.2 He says of Heidegger that he is the only ‘great thinker’ of the twentieth century.’ According to Strauss, Heidegger understood, like no one else, the nature of the technological world society that is now destined. Strauss agrees with Heidegger that that society runs the grave risk of eventuating in the complete degradation of man: ‘no leisure, no elevation, no withdrawal; nothing but work and recreation; no individuals and no peoples, but instead “lonely crowds”‘.4

Joseph Cropsey on the Ancients and Moderns

Abstract Cropseys corpus inspects the philosophical tradition with an eye to “rearranging the patrimony.” In that regard, Cropsey sees proto-Modernity as primarily a “re-inspiriting” and “re-naturalizing” return to the Ancients against the Scholastic Christians. There exists instead a far greater break between the proto-Modern and later Modern authors. This essay reflects on the ramifications of Cropseys rearranged patrimony.