Timothy W. Burns

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

Until a short time ago liberal education’s mind-broadening attempt to grasp what is universally true was thought to stand at odds with partisanship and narrowness of interests. But as the proliferation of area studies programs attests, parochialism, partisanship, and narrowness have now become acceptable and even fashionable for many scholars in the humanities. The demand for curricular inclusion of various “perspectives” has displaced what had been adherence to academic principles of disciplined inquiry and free thought in search of the truth—principles that now seem as quaint to those in the postmodern academy as does authorial intent. Grant Havers, proclaiming that he writes as a “conservative Christian” (x), carries this parochializing and politicizing trend to the academic Right. He deems it important to tell his readers that his parents raised him “to revere the defenders of traditional English constitutionalism as well as the statesmanship of Lincoln and Churchill,” that for a while he thought of Leo Strauss as a “reliably conservative” opponent of “modern relativism and nihilism,” and that when his own political views “shifted sharply to the Right,” he came to see Strauss as “a formidable adversary of everything that remotely stood for conservatism in the modern age.” Havers became “obsessed with Strauss” (xi), he tells us, as Strauss’s “conservative critic” (4). He became interested, that is, not in discovering the truth but in defending a political doctrine, conservatism, in which he had been raised and to which he himself had returned. The predictable result is a polemic that distorts the thought of Leo Strauss beyond recognition. Each of Havers’s first five chapters is devoted to a critique of an aspect of Strauss’s thought; a concluding sixth chapter looks at what Havers considers the one positive (if somewhat unintentional) effect on conservatism of Strauss’s thought. I will go through each chapter, explaining its critique of Strauss and the difficulties with it.

Reading Leo Strauss: Reply to Grant Havers

There are serious differences between what I wrote and what Havers claims I wrote, and between what he wrote in his book and what he now says he wrote. I argued in my review that “insofar as the ancients knew the principles of modern liberal democracy, Strauss makes clear, they rejected them.” Havers faults me for not explaining “how the ancients rejected something that didn’t even exist in antiquity.” My sentence refers not to modern liberal democracy, but to the principles of modern liberal democracy (and manifestly limits what the ancients knew of those principles with “insofar as”). There is no great difficulty to seeing that the ancients knew some of those principles. They clearly knew the principles of democracy. As for the principles of liberalism, it suffices to recall Aristotle’s presentation of the social contract arguments of Lycophron in the third book of his Politics (1280b–e), or Plato’s description of the toleration of all ways of life that characterizes one of the regimes described in the Republic (557b–558c) to realize that knowledge of some of liberalism’s key principles were available to the ancients. And contrary to Havers, there is no contradiction between claiming, as Strauss does, that the ancients rejected those principles and that “liberal or constitutional democracy comes closer to what the classics demanded than any alternative that is viable in our age.” Strauss held, after all, that “at present democracy is the only practical alternative to various forms of tyranny.”1 Liberal democracy is closer to what the classics demanded than is tyranny, yet remains far from what the classics demanded. Havers asserts that he “did not conflate historicism with the mere awareness of historical context (see p. 18).” But he did conflate them, as readers can see on page 5 of his work; that he says something quite different on page 18 I did not fail to note. Similarly, Havers now says he didn’t deny that Strauss “took seriously the arguments of famous historicists such as Heidegger.” But my argument was not merely that Strauss took Heidegger’s arguments seriously. It was that Strauss agreed with Heidegger on the threat of massification, and praised Heidegger for facing up to the impossibility of an ethics. My argument refutes Havers’s claim that Strauss “worried” about Heidegger’s argument because it “contributes to the relativistic and nihilistic portrayal of democracy.” Havers claims that I accuse him “of misreading Hegel as a historicist.” My argument actually concerns Havers’s misreading of Strauss. Havers had claimed that Strauss read Hegel as a representative of “historicism and nihilism.” Havers now repeats half of that original claim— that Strauss understood Hegel to be an “historicist.” Strauss, however, understood Hegel to be an historical philosopher, not an historicist. According to Strauss’s understanding, Hegel

The future of liberal education

Introduction Timothy W. Burns and Peter Augustine Lawler 1. Liberal Education: Its Conditions and Ends David D. Corey 2. Why Do We Wear These Gowns and These Hoods? Timothy W. Burns 3. The Conservative Defence of Liberal Education Peter Augustine Lawler 4. Liberal Education and Liberal Democracy Fred Baumann 5. Reclaiming the Core of Liberal Education in the 21st Century Lorraine Smith Pangle 6. The Liberal Arts and the Arts of Liberty Susan McWilliams 7. The Fading Promise of a More Meritocratic Society Ross J. Corbett 8. Education For Freedom Fr. Barry Bercier, A.A. 9. Liberal Education versus Great-Books Education Patrick Deneen 10. Liberal Education and Civic Education Daniel Cullen

Brill's Companion to Leo Strauss' Writings on Classical Political Thought

Brills Companion to Leo Strauss’ Writings on Classical Political Thought offers clear, accessible essays to assist a new generation of readers in their introduction to Strauss’ writings on the ancients, and to deepen the understanding of those familiar with his work.

Philosophy and Poetry: A New Look At An Old Quarrel

The subordination of poetry to rational guidance has been denounced as a symptom of a specifically Western sickness, with its origin in Platos Republic. But Platos disposition to the poets is more complex than is often supposed. Although Book Threes education in civic virtue includes a call for an austere, civic poetry, in Book Ten Socrates finds the wisdom of this provision to need a serious reconsideration, one made necessary because philosophy has emerged as the true answer to the search for a genuinely fulfilling, happy life. Book Tens reconsideration quietly shows that great poets like Homer are wiser than the earlier examination had suggested, especially about death, and are even indistinguishable from Socratic philosophers in their understanding of and disposition toward death and so in the related matter of the best human life.

Fall of Communism and End of History

The end of history is a concept developed by G. W. F. Hegel, according to whom the unplanned struggles of history have produced a progress of human consciousness that culminates in the final, rational state of humanity. The notion of such a historical progression of consciousness was adopted by Karl Marx, who however attributed progress to the economic history of humans. With the fall of the (Marxist) Soviet Union, the Hegelian notion was revived by Francis Fukuyama. Keywords: Bolshevism; bourgeois/bourgeoisie; communism; fall of communism and end of history

Hobbes and Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Thucydides, Rhetoric and Political Life

Thomas Hobbes’ dispute with Dionysius of Halicarnassus over the study of Thucydides’ history allows us to understand both the ancient case for an ennobled public rhetoric and Hobbes’ case against it. Dionysius, concerned with cultivating healthy civic oratory, faced a situation in which Roman rhetoricians were emulating shocking attacks on divine justice such as that found in Thucydides’ Melian dialogue; he attempted to steer orators away from such arguments even as he acknowledged their truth. Hobbes, however, recommends the study of Thucydides’ work for a new kind of political education, one that will benefit from Thucydides’ private, even ‘secret’, instruction, which permits the reader to admit to himself what vanity would otherwise hide from him.

Roman Virtue in a Christian Commercial Republic1

Abstract This article focuses on the drama between Antonio and Portia. Sometimes understood to embody the Christian willingness to lay down his life for his friend, Antonio is actually practicing the pagan virtue of munificence more than Christian charity. Likewise, Portia displays virtues that on the surface appear to be Christian but underneath are more appropriate to her Roman namesake. In her cunning, deft exploitation of Antonios plight, Portia is able to subordinate Antonio, and his affection for her husband, to her own marital bliss. In this drama between her and Antonio, we see Shakespeare transposing Roman virtues to a Christian context where private happiness can be secured against threats from the outside world.

Strauss on the Religious and Intellectual Situation of the Present

This chapter focuses on two talks of startling freshness given by Leo Strauss in 1930 and 1932, translated into English for the first time by Anna Schmitt and Martin D. Yaffe.1 Addressed to a Jewish audience, the talks were given in the most politically unsettled years for Germany, and the richest, intellectually, for German Jews. Among the topics they address is “[t]he Jewish problem, whose urgency in the age of National Socialism perhaps does not need to be proved [any]more to anyone.” Since the talks address other problems of both “modernity and ultramodernity,” or what today goes by the name postmodernism, their questions are still with us, in sometimes sharpened, sometimes degraded, forms. The talks offer guidance for those who wish to liberate themselves from the crippling presuppositions through which Strauss himself had—as we see here for the first time—fought his way to clarity.

The Key Texts of Political Philosophy: Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and his junior partner, Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), laid the theoretical foundation of modern communism, which aims to bring about a new world order born out of the overthrow of “bourgeois capitalism.” The latter is the phrase Marx and Engels applied to the historically mature form of the system of competitive, acquisitive, commercial individualism that is articulated and defended in the thought of Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and their revisers – including Hume and Adam Smith. The term “bourgeois” derives from Rousseau, who was the first to create and to make stick that pejorative label for the society and way of life designed and successfully promoted by the Enlightenment. In the century and a half after Rousseau, European thought was dominated by attempts to find a solution to the problematic that Rousseau had laid out. History vs. Nature as Norm The most important turn taken in post-Rousseauean theorizing was to “the philosophy of history”: A new way of thinking, rooted in the contention that what Rousseau had discovered, without his fully realizing it, was that we must take our orientation in life, our positive normative standards, not from the idea of a permanent human nature but instead from a conception of humanity as coming into full maturation through history. If or since modern, civilized existence – and thus what we understand as human – is not a product of our original nature (which was that of a being close to an animal) but instead arises out of a historical development over a long time, then we should seek for standards for our human existence in that historical process and its outcome. Through history, humanity has gradually and painfully brought itself out of its original “natural” condition toward a fully completed “nature” or condition of being: “The entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the begetting of man through human labor, nothing but the coming-to-be of nature for man.”