Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1069803

The Weimar Intellectual Baggage in Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History

Asim Jusic1

1 SJD candidate, Central European University (Budapest). Comments welcome, email: jusic_asim@phd.ceu.hu ; asimjusic@yahoo.com . This paper in its edited version is meant to be a part of the larger comparative study on the philosophy of law of Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt and Jurgen Habermas and its theoretical relevance for the current debate on European constitution.

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Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1069803

Abstract

Leo Strauss remains one of the most interesting and controversial political theorists of the 20th century. In this paper, I analyze several chapters of his most famous work Natural Right and History in order to discern their Weimar intellectual roots. Using textual interpretation, I compare his work with works of Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt. I conclude that, by and large, his closest intellectual affiliation is with Carl Schmitt. However, I argue that Strauss attempts to supersede the boundaries of Schmitt's thought by means of emerging himself into the re-interpretation of the fundamental problems of political theology and the perennial problem of the proper grounds of every polity from a perspective which lies outside the anthropological boundaries of Schmitt's thought. Nevertheless, in spite of this attempt, Strauss' criticism of Schmitt turns out to be a rejection of the consequences of Schmitt's reckless intellectual and political engagement rather than altogether persuasive building of an entirely new theoretical foundation of a 'new polity.'

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Table of Contents 1. Introduction................................................................................................................. 4 2. Strauss, the historicist thesis, and Heidegger’s existentialism....................................... 9

2.1 The greatest philosopher and his politics...................................................... 11 2.2 Historical attack on natural right................................................................... 13 2.3 Existentialism goes legal or Carl Schmitt ..................................................... 28

3. Max Weber and the fact-value distinction ................................................................ 38 3.1 Critic of Max Weber’s fact-value distinction ............................................... 39 3.2 Heidegger, Schmitt and Weber as brothers in arms...................................... 47 3.3 Applying the Weimar lessons in America .................................................... 52

4. Thomas Hobbes, or on the foundation of liberalism................................................. 56 4.1 Consequences of Hobbes’ Liberalism .......................................................... 61 4.2 Objections to Hobbes and liberalism ............................................................ 64 4.3 United again .................................................................................................. 67

5. Reinventing Locke .................................................................................................... 73 5.1 Locke, the pursuit of happiness and the property ......................................... 74 5.2 Natural law non-believer............................................................................... 77 5.3 Natural constitutional law............................................................................. 79

6. Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 84 7. Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 88

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1. Introduction Leo Strauss is a friend of the liberal democracy, but not the believer in the ultimate

goodness of liberal democracy. The best way to express his stance towards the liberal

democracy would be to paraphrase famous Churchill’s phrase that the democracy is the

worst possible political system, the problem is that we have no better.

Strauss was born on 20 September, 1899 in Kirchhain, Hessen, Germany, in a

Jewish family, and died on 18 October, 1973, in Annapolis, Maryland, USA.2 His own

life to a certain degree reflects cataclysms of the 20th century. Educated during the crisis

of the Weimar Republic, he shared the feeling of the “crisis of modernity” with his

contemporaries, most notably Martin Heidegger, Max Weber, and Carl Schmitt. For all of

them, the crisis of the Weimar Republic had cosmic proportions; it was no less than the

crisis of whole humanity and the final evidence that whole history has somehow gone

wrong. Strauss eventually migrated to the United States and managed to escape all the

horror of the Second World War in Europe. During his life in America, he was a part of

the group of “great three,” together with Hans Morgenthau and Friedrich Hayek, which

was teaching at the approximately same time at the University of Chicago. As John P.

McCormick argues, each of them, in his own way, contributed to the American

conservatism. Moreover, all three had a common friend, famous and infamous German

legal and political theorist, Carl Schmitt. 3 Although Strauss spent the rest of his life and

wrote his most important works in the United States, without exaggerating one can say

that Strauss spiritually always remained under the intellectual influences of his Weimar

days. To this claim, we can add one important qualification. Strauss made his life task to

make sure that cataclysm that followed the fall of the Weimar Republic does not repeat

2 Shadia B. Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (MacMillan Press, 1988), p. 1. 3 John P. McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 302-304. Hereafter Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism. McCormick identifies three lines of American conservatism that is traceable back to Carl Schmitt: cultural conservatism via Leo Strauss; technoeconomic conservatism via Hayek; and foreign-policy conservatism via Morgenthau. McCormick also argues that concepts of all of the above named, following the end of the Cold War, may transform from what previously perceived as a “friendly conservative” critic of liberal democracy to more malignant forms, see ibid. For other sources on Morgenthau’s and Hayek’s relationships with Carl Schmitt, see, Alfons Söllner, “German Conservatism in America: Morgenthau’s Political Realism,” Telos 72 (summer 1987), and Bill Scheuerman, “The Unholy Alliance of Carl Schmitt and Friedrich A. Hayek,” Constellations 4:2 (October 1997).

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itself in the United States. Viewed this way, his political philosophy stops being the

purely academic exercise in probity and becomes an epic saga.

In the introduction to one of his most important works, Natural Right and History,

this is precisely what Strauss tells us.4 He begins the book by quoting the renowned

phrase from the American Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-

evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with

certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of

happiness.”5 Strauss then proceeds by warning his audience of the disappearance, or the

lack of belief, in that teaching that made the United States of America one of the greatest

countries in the world. He claims that this disappearance and the lack of belief in the self-

evident rights of man are now characteristic of the American social science, if not of the

Western thought in general. The reason for this, according to Strauss, is that the

American social science has fallen prey to dangers of German thought, namely the

historicist thesis and the value-free social science. In his words, “It would not be the first

time that a [German] nation, defeated on the battlefield, and, as it were, annihilated as a

political being, has deprived its conquerors of the most sublime fruit of victory by

imposing on them the joke of its own thought.”6 We are then led to believe that Strauss

was an unqualified believer in the teachings of natural law and natural right and the

fervent critic of the “joke” of German thought, the tradition in which he was (together

with his Jewish origins) raised and educated. But is that really so?

In this paper I argue, contrary to Strauss, that his views are deeply embedded in

the German philosophical tradition, more precisely, the German philosophy as Strauss

experienced it during his education in the turbulent days of the Weimar Republic.

Through description, interpretation, and comparison, I will demonstrate that the ideas

Strauss advocates, supposedly in the name of natural right, share much in common with

works of his teachers and friends from the days of his education. Views of Martin

Heidegger qualified by retreat to Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt’s critic of his teacher

Max Weber and his opinions on Hobbes; negative views of the liberalism, technology

4 Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), hereafter NRH. All unnamed references are works by Leo Strauss. 5 Ibid, p. 1. 6 Ibid, p. 2.

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and modernity in general, shared by all the above named gentleman; all that is very much

present in Strauss’s Natural Right and History. But it is all somewhat concealed in

Natural Right and History, and except Weber and Nietzsche, both Heidegger and

especially Schmitt were not addressed by name.

As I said, my intention is to show, through the description, interpretation and

comparison, influence of Heidegger (and through his proxy Nietzsche) and Carl Schmitt

on Strauss’s work Natural Right and History. With this in mind, I felt that it was

sufficient to focus the most of my work on three chapters in Natural Right and History:

natural right and the historical approach; natural right and the distinction between facts

and values; and the modern natural right of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. It is

superfluous to say that this was not at the expense of the rest of the book or other works

by Leo Strauss, but only for the reasons of more focused analysis and the restrictions of

space. Complete analysis would require work much more voluminous than this one.

In part one of this work, I analyze Strauss’s critic of the historicist thesis.

Although he is unnamed in it, Heidegger’s historicism and existentialism is its primary

target. In spite of Strauss’s critic, due mostly to Heidegger’s controversial political

engagement, I emphasize Strauss’s debt to Heidegger and his qualification of

Heidegger’s existentialism with Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of nature, authenticity,

“noble delusion” and the belief in the necessity of the “philosopher-king.” In addition, I

analyze “legal existentialism” of Carl Schmitt, similarity between Schmitt’s and

Heidegger’s thought and Strauss’s fundamental agreement and radicalization of Schmitt’s

critique of liberalism.

In part two, I examine Strauss’s critic of Max Weber’s value free of social science

and argue that it is fundamentally the same as Carl Schmitt’s critic of Max Weber.

Moreover, using examples of Strauss’s post-WWII writings, I try to show how Strauss

retained negative attitude towards the value-free and quantitatively oriented social

science during his life in the United States. Strauss’s critic of Thomas Hobbes, whom

Strauss regards as the founder of liberalism, is addressed in the part three. Again, I argue

that his critic of Hobbes and liberalism is similar to Carl Schmitt’s critic of liberalism.

Also, I analyze roots and depth of Strauss’s critic of Carl Schmitt and try to show that

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Strauss criticizes him more on account of the consequences of Schmitt’s

Machiavellianism than on the basis of the fundamental disagreement with him.

Strauss’s interpretation of the political philosophy of John Locke is analyzed in

part four. There, my argument is that Strauss invents his own Locke according to his

model of atheist philosopher-legislator that publicly preaches natural law and religion in

which himself does not believe, the model that he became aware of during his Weimar

days under the influence of Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche. Moreover, I describe how

Strauss interprets Locke as the continuation of the liberal experiment started by Hobbes

and argue that Locke’s philosophy, in Strauss’s interpretation, contains elements that are

sufficient for the launch of “Strauss’s project”, the education of elite in the liberal mass-

democracy.

As for the works of Leo Strauss cited in this thesis, naturally the one most

frequently used is Natural Right and History. But Strauss’s ideas are spread throughout

his works and he does not reveal his ideas and their sources in a straightforward manner.

Even when he does so, as he did, i.e., in the chapter on Max Weber’s fact/value

distinction in the Natural Right and History, there is still a concealed part or reference to

unnamed authors whom Strauss engages in the intellectual debate or from whose ideas he

borrows. It is, then, not surprising that those readers who read just one of his works, find

his philosophy difficult to understand. To avoid this, I have made frequent references to

Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism and Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy,

especially in the chapter on Heidegger. Rebirth and Studies in Platonic Political

Philosophy contains two essays in which Strauss addresses Heidegger and his ideas

directly, in contrast to the chapter on historicism in Natural Right and History, where he

does not mention Heidegger even once. As for Carl Schmitt, Strauss wrote only one essay

on him, dated 1932, “Comments on Carl Schmitt’s Der Begriff Des Politischen.” After

that essay, for the rest of his life, to my knowledge, Strauss never directly mentioned

Schmitt in his other works. One is then bound, as I did, to engage in the comparative

study of Strauss’s and Schmitt’s works, especially Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political,

in order to find similarities or differences.7

7 For a list of Strauss’s works used, see Bibliography, p. 83.

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Regarding the secondary sources used, several authors are the most important and

most frequently cited. David Dyzenhaus’s Legality and Legitimacy: Carl Schmitt, Hans

Kelsen and Herman Heller in Weimar and John P. McCormick’s Carl Schmitt’s Critique

of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology provide indispensable insights into the

political ideas of Carl Schmitt. McCormick’s work is very detailed and provides an in-

depth discussion of Schmitt, especially his debt to Max Weber and the comparison with

Leo Strauss. Of course, Shadia B. Drury is the most vocal and publicized critic of Leo

Strauss, and no one working on this topic can afford to ignore her two seminal works,

Leo Strauss and the American Right and The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss. Regarding

Heidegger, his political speeches, and activities and their impact on his students, Richard

Wollin’s The Heidegger Controversy and Heidegger’s Children is a very useful as both

primary and secondary source. Strauss’s critic of Max Weber was thoroughly analyzed

by Nasser Behnegar in Leo Strauss, Max Weber, and the Scientific Study of Politics. In

chapters on Hobbes and Locke, I have relied mostly on Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the

Social Contract Tradition, and Steven M. Dworetz, The Unvarnished Doctrine: Locke,

Liberalism and the American Revolution.8

8 Complete list of secondary sources used in Bibliography, p. 84.

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2. Strauss, the historicist thesis, and Heidegger’s existentialism

Martin Heidegger was one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. Several

of the contemporary philosophical schools of thought are indebted to his work at least to

a certain degree, whether they admit it or not. The influence he exerted upon his students

was even greater. Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Leo Strauss, Herbert Marcuse, Hans-

Georg Gadamer, to mention only the most renowned ones, remained indebted to his

thought. They were all, as Richard Wolin says, “Heidegger’s Children.”9 In the United

States, perhaps Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss are the most publicly known. Both

Arendt and Strauss, each in its own different ways, have contributed to the revival of

interest in the political theory and the political philosophy in USA.10 For two reasons Heidegger has left such a long-lasting impact on his students.

Firstly, for all his students he was the greatest philosopher after Hegel, one who supplied

all of them with completely new stance towards life and ethics. One cannot stress enough

the influence that Heidegger’s existentialism and the ethics of authenticity and

“resoluteness” had on his students. For them, he was a hero who brought a new light into

the dark and shady world of the Weimar Republic; the man who virtually rewrites all

Western history and intellectual heritage and starts anew. However, one could make a

strong case, without negating the depth of his philosophy, that Heidegger exercised such

an influence partially because of the social crisis of Weimar. For both Heidegger and his

students, crisis of Weimar was not only a localized crisis, but also the crisis of cosmic

proportions, the apex of the general crisis of life and the Western civilization. To his

students, Heidegger appeared to have provided an answer to all questions.

9 Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children ( Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002). Wolin’s book addresses the relationship between Heidegger and his Jewish students, Arendt, Löwith, Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (but not Strauss), prior and after his engagement with National Socialism. 10 On comparison between Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, see generally Peter Graf Kielmansegg, Horst Mewes and Elisabeth Glaser Schmidt, ed., Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Emigres and American Political Thought after World War II (German Historical Institute, Washington D.C. and Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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Secondly, Heidegger’s way of teaching and lecturing virtually had a mesmerizing

effect on his audience. There are numerous testimonies that support this claim.11 As

Richard Wolin says, “Few scholars who experienced his [Heidegger’s] mesmerizing

lectures and seminars remained untransformed.12” As I will show below, Strauss includes

himself in to this group. As Shadia Drury suggests, Strauss was particularly impressed

with Heidegger’s analysis of the text and Strauss, to a certain degree, modeled his own

style of the textual analysis under Heidegger’s influence.13

After Heidegger’s short involvement in politics and the NSDAP, all of his

students and devotees were compelled to answer one question. How was it possible that

somebody who they regarded as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century could

have borrowed his authority to such a movement? The heated discussion that followed

focused on, more or less, following issue. Was Heidegger’s political engagement an

honest mistake or was there an inclination towards extremism within his philosophy? It

is, of course, beyond the scope of this study to address that question fully.14 As I shall

argue bellow, Strauss stands on a side that finds reasons for Heidegger’s political

engagement within his philosophy.

However this may be and no matter how Heidegger’s students developed their

own individual philosophies after they departed from him, Heidegger always remained in

their shadow. Indeed, it seems that this shadow influenced them considerably. As Richard

Wolin argues, “all [Heidegger’s students] accepted, wily nilly, a series of deep-seated

prejudices concerning the nature of political modernity-democracy, liberalism, individual

rights, and so forth- that made it very difficult to articulate a meaningful theoretical

standpoint in the postwar world.”15 [italics in original]

11 See, i.e., Karl Jaspers, “Letter to the Freiburg University Denazification Commission” from December 22, 1945, in Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy, p. 144-151 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Jaspers describes Heidegger’s way of teaching as magical, profoundly unfree and prone to seducement of young people who are not strong enough to resist Heidegger’s charms. 12 Wolin, Heidegger’s Children, p. 7. 13 Shadia B. Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right (New York: St. Martins Press, 1999), p. 77. 14 For a collection of essays regarding the subject of Heidegger’s political activities and Heidegger’s political speeches, see generally Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy. 15 Wolin, Heidegger’s Children, p. 8.

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2.1 The greatest philosopher and his politics Strauss spoke of Martin Heidegger with utmost respect and considered him to be

undoubtedly a greatest philosopher of the 20th century. His respect for Heidegger dated

back to 1922, at a time when Strauss himself was still a PhD student. In Strauss’s own

words, before meeting Heidegger “I had been particularly impressed, as many of my

contemporaries in Germany were, by Max Weber: by his intransigent devotion to

intellectual honesty, by his passionate devotion to the idea of science – a devotion that

was combined with a profound uneasiness regarding the meaning of science16.”

After the first time Strauss heard Heidegger teaching in Freiburg, he confessed to

his friend Franz Rosenzwig that, compared to Heidegger, “…Weber appeared to me as an

‘orphan child’ in regard to precision, probing and competence17.” Heidegger’s teacher

was Edmund Husserl, founder of the phenomenology, whom Strauss considered to be the

only German philosopher prior to Heidegger. Husserl, according to Heidegger, conceived

an objective reality appearing as a phenomena distinct from the “reality” which appears

to one when one reflects on a reality as a subjective interpretation or as pragmata,

scientific reasoning as understood by a Greek philosophy.18 In consequence, according

to Husserl, to achieve knowledge of the objective reality, one that is prior to the

conscious constructs, one needs to analyze pure consciousness. Pure consciousness is a

consciousness that is prior to the question of usefulness, “what do I need this for?”, or the

question of opinion or interpretation, “what do I think about this or that?” Hence, the

philosophy is the knowledge of the “pure consciousness as the absolute being.”19

Heidegger’ based his objection to Husserl on a fact that a human consciousness is

determined and restricted by the human mortality and finiteness. Finiteness makes

impossible for the human being to merely contemplate on an absolute being, for this does

not provide for any solution to problems of here and now. In other words, one needs

Weltanschauung or Weltanschauungsphilosophie to satisfy the need for solution of the

problem of here and now, and what remains to be find is the proper foundation for such a 16 The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism : An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss, selected and introduced by Thomas L. Pangle, (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1989), p. 27. Hereafter RCPR. All unnamed references are works of Leo Strauss. 17 Ibid, p. 28. 18 Ibid, p. 29. 19 Ibid.

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solution.20 This is, of course, a beginning of Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, of full

meeting with Being, full existence in here and now, existence truthful to oneself.

Before analyzing Strauss’s critic of Heidegger’s radical historicism and the

existentialism and the corresponding devastating consequences, one needs to bear in

mind that Strauss never considered himself to be a philosopher equivalent to Heidegger.

To the contrary, Strauss considered himself merely a scholar unequal to Heidegger, who

is a great thinker. Moreover, Strauss admitted that he probably never completely

understood Heidegger.21 This fact was however insufficient for completely abandoning

the attempt to understand and criticize whole greatness of the Heidegger’s thought,

especially the question which is, similar to the other Heidegger’s students, the most

important for Strauss. That question is a following one: how was it possible that a great

philosopher such as Heidegger rendered his intellectual authority to a fanaticism of the

1933?

In a manner unusual for him, Strauss is very explicit regarding the Heidegger’s

relation to National Socialism. According to Strauss, Heidegger identified himself with

the National Socialism in his inaugural speech, Rektorätsrede, at the University of

Freiburg in 1933.22 Moreover, Strauss explicitly denies that this was just an honorable

error of judgment of a philosopher inexperienced in the matters of politics. For, as Strauss

says, “Everyone who had read his first great book [Being and Time] and did not overlook

the wood for the trees could see the kinship in temper and direction between Heidegger’s

thought and the Nazis.”23 However, qualification to this statement immediately follows.

It is politically insufficient to say nothing about the philosophical quest for the truth to

assert that a certain philosophical view contributed to a rise of extremism. For that says

nothing about the correctness or incorrectness of the philosophical view in question. It

merely says that the extreme solutions proposed for the problem tackled with were

incorrect, but by no means implies that the description or the insight into the nature of

20 Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, ed. by Thomas L. Pangle, (Chicago and London. Chicago University Press, 1983), p. 36. Hereafter SPPP. 21 RCPR, p. 29-30. 22 Ibid, p. 30. See full text of Heidegger’s speech given on an occasion of assuming the position of the Rector of the University of Freiburg under title “The Self Assertion of the German University” in Wolin, ed.,The Heidegger Controversy, p. 28-39. 23 RCPR, p. 30.

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problem was incorrect. Furthermore, Strauss recognizes Heidegger as the one who

grasped the problem in its fullness.24

2.2 Historical attack on natural right In the chapter titled “Natural Right and the Historical Approach” in Natural Right and

History, Strauss does not mention Heidegger even once.25 Albeit when one compares

this chapter to the essays in which Strauss speaks directly about Heidegger, there can be

no doubt that Heidegger’s radical historicism is his primary target.26 That becomes

somewhat more understandable when one takes into account that a vast majority of

Strauss’s works, except maybe ones devoted solely to antique philosophy, start by

addressing Heidegger directly or at least by explaining problem posed to modernity by

the radical historicism and existentialism together with positivism.27 Furthermore,

similarity between titles “Natural Right and History” and “Being and Time [Sein und

Zeit]” is not to be underestimated.

In the “Natural Right and the Historical Approach”, Strauss starts by stating that

the attack against a natural right in the name of history can be said to have a following

form. “… Natural right claims to be a right that is discernible by human reason and is

universally acknowledged; but history (including anthropology) teaches is that no such

right exists; instead of the supposed uniformity, we find an indefinite variety of notions

of right or justice.”28 However, the attack on natural right in the name of history does not

rest solely on the basis of historical evidence, but on “a philosophical critique of the

possibility of, or of the knowability, of natural right – a critique somehow connected with

‘history’.”29 Infinite number of the notions of right present in the world was always

known to political philosophy and gave impetus to a view that Strauss calls

24 Ibid, p. 30-32. 25 Natural Right and History, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 9-34. Hereafter NRH. 26 Compare, i.e., “Natural Right and the Historical Approach” in NRH with “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism” in RCPR and “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy” in SPPP. 27 See, i.e., SPPP, RCPR, and What is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1959). 28 NRH, p. 9. 29 Ibid, p. 10.

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“conventionalism.”30 Conventionalism denies the existence of the natural right on a basis

of a claim that all right is made within the limits of the certain time and place, hence right

is the result of the social convention and certainly not natural. However, out of the notion

of the variety of rights conventionalism, according to Strauss, did not conclude that there

is no eternal order, quite opposite, fundamental ability to grasp eternal principles was

preserved by the conventionalism for philosophy. On the other hand, the contemporary

view, which Strauss calls “historicism,” proclaimed that “all philosophizing essentially

belongs to ‘historical world,’ ‘culture,’ ‘civilization,’ ‘Weltanschauung’, that is to what

Plato called the cave.”31

Naïve historicism

There are two kinds of historicism, according to Strauss: naïve historicism and radical,

Heidegger’s historicism or existentialism. Naive historicism did not grow out of purely

theoretical atmosphere, but as a reaction to a catastrophe of natural right doctrine that

paved the way for the French Revolution32. For the purpose of this study, we can divide

the development of the naïve historicism, as understood by Strauss, in to stages. In the

first stage, naïve historicism rejects universal norms in order not to render human beings

strangers in this world, for if one accepts existence of the universal norms that never

comes true, social existence becomes unbearable because of perpetual distance of the

norms of the present society and the universal norms.33 The second stage is the rebellion

against the unnatural or conventional and otherworldliness or transcendence (not only

religious but also every metaphysical transcendence), all in the name of the specific

understanding of the natural pursuit of happiness that is specific for each individual.34 In

the third stage, naïve historicism finds the grounds for a new society in historical rights

and hence presumes the existence of the folk minds and certain unique national

characters. In Strauss’s words, “The only kinds of rights that were neither incompatible

with social life nor uniform were ‘historical’ rights: rights of Englishman, for example, in

30 Ibid. 31 Ibid, p. 12. 32 Ibid, p. 13. 33 Ibid, p. 13-14. 34 Ibid, p. 14-16.

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contradistinction to the rights of man. Local and temporal variety seemed to supply a safe

and solid middle ground between antisocial individualism and unnatural universality.”35

Once the naïve historicism establishes the existence of historical rights, according

to Strauss, naïve historicism transforms itself to historical empirical positivism,

distinguished in principle from the positivistic natural science.36 At this point, the great

difficulty arises for naïve historicism that attempts to establish itself as the highest

authority. For history has proven itself to be meaningless because naïve historicist thesis,

after it invalidated all universal norms, could not come out with any norm that would

explain the chain of historical events. As Strauss describes, “…’the historical process’

revealed itself as the meaningless web spun by what men did, produced, and thought, no

more than by unmitigated chance – a tale told by an idiot.”37

Writing against naïve historicism, Strauss does not base his criticism purely on

the naïve historicism’s rejection of the possibility of the existence of the natural right.

Naïve historicism itself rests on a presumption of the possibility of the trans-historical

knowledge, the very same presumption on which the natural right doctrine is based on38.

What Strauss objects to naïve historicism is that, while passing a judgment on all of the

human thought by explaining it in historical terms, naïve historicism exempts itself from

the very same judgment. Here Strauss sees that the historicist thesis is self-contradictory

or absurd. He writes, “We can not see the historical character of ‘all’ thought – that is all

thought with the exception of the historicist insight and it implications – without

transcending history, without grasping something trans–historical39.”

Radical historicism or Heidegger’s existentialism

As I mentioned above, for Strauss, the radical historicism is an equivalent of the

existentialism. The word existentialism (mentioned only once in the brackets in the

Natural Right and History) is regarded by Strauss as a “movement” centered on

Heidegger’s thoughts.”40 At the core of existentialism, according to Strauss, stands the

35 Ibid, p. 14. 36 Ibid, p. 16. 37 Ibid, p. 18. 38 Ibid, p. 24. 39 Ibid, p. 25. 40 SPPP, p. 30.

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claim that fundamental human experience is anguish or angst41. While this experience is

present at all times, it is nevertheless the main characteristic of the modern man. Hence, it

must follow that rise of the anguish in modern time was somehow made possible by an

important change which happened along the way of history, the change which is peculiar

to a modernity. Such a change is embodied in the modern belief in technology and

progress, the belief in science.42 It seems that this is why Heidegger was devoted critic of

the Descartes scientific method and Kant’s formalistic ethic. According to Ian Ward,

Heidegger objected to both Descartes and Kant for using a scientific, reason-based

method to build a wall between subject and object, the wall that Heidegger wants to tear

down with the Dasein, being here and now.43

Ultimately, science, with its unqualified belief in reason, proved to be utterly

incapable of providing the answer to an important question of what constitutes a true,

human existence. Moreover, science provides no answers to questions such as a meaning

of life, justice, good and so on. Science managed to provide human beings with means to

achieve their goals, but not with a standard of reference which could help them to discern

and decide on the desirability of the particular goal. While managing to equip humanity

with the technological power unprecedented in history, science did not provide any

knowledge of how to use that power since, in eyes of a science, all goals are of equal

worth. This objection to science, in short, defines the core of Strauss’s critic of Max

Weber’s fact-value distinction that I will present in some detail in the next chapter. Even

worse, science made the possibility of the extinction of humanity very much real and

dehumanized life to a point when human beings are homeless in the world, “lonely

crowds.” Through the deprivation of the seriousness of life, technology turns a life in to a

never-ending pleasure hunt under the aegis of the mechanical concept of the state that

endorses a liberal and rational individualistic pleasure-driven concept of life.44 For

41 RCPR, p. 32. 42 Ibid. 43 Ian Ward, Law, Philosophy and National Socialism: Heidegger, Schmitt and Radbruch in Context (Bern; Frankfurt a. M.; New York; Paris; Wien: Lang, 1992), p.78-80. 44 Heidegger identified “machine technology” with “the domination of nature which . . . rages around ‘the world’ today like an unchained beast. Heidegger, quoted in John P. McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 85. Hereafter Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism.

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Heidegger, two metaphysically equal ideologies, Americanism and Bolshevism, are

embodiment of this new technological, soulless civilization, the empire of average man.45

Contrary to the scientific optimism, Strauss adds, scientific hope that in the end

science would be able to provide some kind of a rational morality is now extinct, for

science itself proves that that it is based on premise which can not prove. In other words,

the assumption that people should act rationally is a not a scientific assumption, since it s

based on a value judgment which is ipso facto unscientific and therefore out of the scope

of the scientific interest. Since the concept of progress is also a value judgment directed

towards the perfection of human mind, we can scientifically speak only about change.

There is no evident reason why human beings should live according to scientific

rationality. As Strauss says it, “it [science] admits that it is based on fundamental

hypotheses which always remains hypotheses.”46

If this is accepted as correct, Strauss continues, then choice for a science as a way

of resolving the final question of how to live a life is nothing but a choice, groundless

choice, no better or and no worse then living a life of pleasure or life of faith. The ground

for making the choice between the life of science, faith or pleasure is therefore not some

standard of reference but the fundamental freedom, which is the only certainty.

Necessity of making this choice is the source of the modern anguish or angst, further

complicated by what we can call “the historicist difficulty.”

That difficulty is the following one. Individuals live in human society and need to

live well, just as society itself needs it. In order to do so, individuals and societies have to

choose a certain solid categorical system, principles that will guide them without being

considered mere artificial net erected around the individual and the society in order to

organize their world. These principles have to be considered definite, ultimate ones, not

just free constructs of the human will specific to our time and our society. If the society

does not consider these principles as ultimate, it can easily endanger its own existence

and fall as an easy prey of enemies from the outside or within. Why would anybody fight

for his own country if he would believe that principles of the society he belongs to are

45 “From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same; the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average man.” See Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (1953), trans. Ralph Mannheim (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday Anchor, 1961), p. 37. 46 RCPR, p. 32.

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nothing but products of somebody’s imagination? The erection of the artificial net that

protects the society from the corrosive influence of the nihilistic truth is, according to

Strauss, Nietzsche’s solution. As Strauss says it:

According to Nietzsche, the theoretical analysis of human life that realizes the relativity of all comprehensive views and thus depreciates them would make human life itself impossible, for it would destroy the protecting atmosphere within which life or culture or action is alone possible. Moreover, since the theoretical analysis has its basis outside of life, it will never be able to understand life. The theoretical analysis of life is noncommittal and fatal to commitment, but life means commitment. To avert the danger to life, Nietzsche choose one of two ways: he could insist on the strictly esoteric character of the theoretical analysis of life – that is, restore the Platonic notion of the noble delusion – or else he could deny the possibility of theory proper and so conceive of thought as essentially subservient to, or dependant on, life or fate. If not Nietzsche himself, at any rate his successors [Heidegger] adopted the second alternative.47

However, Heidegger’s existentialism defies this solution on grounds that the human

society is too far down the road to simply accept the old cure of faith or any other kind of

metaphysical system such as the ones found in Plato’s or Aristotle’s work. For the basic

evidence of history shows that there are numerous ways to organize a life of an individual

and a society, and the historicist thesis already admits that these numerous ways are

essentially equivalent to each other. Consequently, the source of the modern anguish

Strauss expresses in one word: relativism. However, Strauss immediately qualifies this,

saying “Existentialism admits the truth of relativism, but it realizes that relativism, so far

from being a solution or even a relief, is deadly.48” Here, also, Strauss implies that his

own preferential answer to relativism is a return to the Nietzsche’s metaphysics or nature,

or, in Strauss’s terms natural right. As he says, “Existentialism is the attempt to free

Nietzsche’s alleged overcoming of relativism from the consequences of his relapse into

metaphysics or of his recourse to nature49.”

The historicist thesis exempts itself from the historical judgment which it applied

to all other periods of human history. Similar to the historicist thesis, existentialism

belongs to a period of the decay and crisis of liberal democracy, according to Strauss.

Against a dehumanizing technological progress made possible by science, obsolete

47 NRH, p. 26. 48 RCPR, p. 36. 49 Ibid, p. 26.

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religious and metaphysical systems and the nihilistic devotion to pleasure, existentialism

looked for the solution in a creation out of nothingness. While it claimed that it looked

deep in to a abyss of nothingness revealed by Nietzsche, Heidegger’s existentialism in

it’s analytics of Existenz tried to overcome its own angst not by referring to a will for

power, but by referring to a will to know [Wissen vollen] which seems to be more of a

will to create, construct. Implication is following: in order to truly meet Being, to be truly

oneself, one need to re-create it’s own world by being truthful to oneself. In this act, this

decision, Entscheidung, fundamental freedom of choice is re-constructed together with

the seriousness of life.

It seems that from this one practical consequence follows. While one is being

truthful to “inner self”, one does not need to justify its actions in the court of either

religious “good” and “evil” nor by the reference to the Kantian and Neo-Kantian

universalism, and especially not in the court of science. The final criterion is the

truthfulness to one self, grounded in the freedom of choice from which nobody can

runaway from. There is no choice but to make a choice imposed on us by the fate of

historical circumstances, with qualification that the existentialism proclaimed the return

to all obsolete metaphysical or religious systems to be a betrayal of the inner freedom,

subjugation. In a God-like manner, human beings construct their own world without

reference to anything but itself and the abyss in to which it purportedly looked deep in

too. That is what Existence precedes Essence seems to mean. There is no categorical

system prior to existence of human beings, but other way around, human beings construct

the reality after they have been thrown (to use Heidegger’s term) in the world. These

concepts of Heidegger’s philosophy faithfully reflect Heidegger’s own life, for he started

as a theologian and gradually moved toward the rejection of religious and metaphysical

concepts. For Strauss, although Heidegger demanded liberation from religious, especially

Christian, concepts, his understanding of the existence nevertheless remained one of

Christian origin (guilt, conscience, anguish, being unto death).50

When this concept of existential freedom is taken to its logical conclusion, Strauss

says, there seems to exist a possibility of the existentialist ethic, since one’s freedom to

re-create himself would also oblige him to respect the others’ freedom to do the same.

50 Ibid, p. 38.

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However, Strauss concludes, “Heidegger never believed in the possibility of an ethics.”51

Existentialism, therefore, denies the existence of the objective truth, demands freedom of

action unconstrained by the ethical scruples, and nevertheless preserves for itself status of

the ultimate truth. It would follow, for somewhat unclear reasons, that Heidegger’s

existentialism denies possibility of the existence of infinite numbers of subjective truths

and implicitly leans towards aggressive stance regarding the other subjective truths.

Understood in these terms and hidden somewhere in the core, Heidegger’s existentialism

preserved Nietzsche’s notion of life-giving truth and the will to power, which fights to

assert itself. Even if that is so, Heidegger rejected Nietzsche’s return to metaphysics and

nature.

The Heidegger’s pitfall, as Shadia Drury argues, starts with the socialization of

his ethics, which is meant to be the individual ethics, that is, liberation of the individual

from the chains of religious and metaphysical tradition. But socialization necessarily

implies this tradition, and hence it is a virtual betrayal of its individual, humanistic

message.52 According to Strauss, Heidegger himself asserted that being truthful to

oneself, truly existing as a human, implies also being in a community, being with

others.53 Dasein of community must be, then, similar to the individual Dasein, truthful to

oneself. Truthfulness of the community to itself implies rootedness in the soil and

accompanying tradition and language, which together with other factors creates the Geist

of the community. Rootedness in the soil is the opposite of the homelessness, which is

the result of the nihilistic, metaphysical and technological alienation of humanity from

Dasein. According to Gillespie, all of that this still does not explain why Heidegger

required a leadership of to assert the historical truths and the Dasein of the German

community. Furthermore, Gillespie suggests that the National Socialist rejection of the

theory in the favor of leadership was the decisive aspect that attracted Heidegger, who

was already an enemy of the mechanical, technological reasoning and the metaphysical

51 Ibid, p. 36. 52 Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, p. 67. 53 RCPR, p. 36. That the human existence is always “being-with-others” is the conclusion of Being and Time, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquerrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).

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systems that prevent the Dasein.54 Ian Ward suggests that Heidegger needed a leader

because he came to believe that the connection between the Geist and the Volk was the

need for the geistige Führung, the need for a commanding necessity, which would finally

bring the aletheia, primordial, authentic truth55. Jürgen Habermas also argues that

Heidegger needed somebody to complete the transformation of the German Dasein,

overcome the nihilism and put truth to work56.

In Natural Right and History, Strauss asserts that for the naïve historicism that

served as a partial base for the Heidegger’s historicist thesis, local and national

particularities are already proven a safe, middle ground on which one can erect the

truthful existence of the community.57 In other places, in a tone that seems to exculpate

Heidegger, Strauss says that in Europe, shook to its foundations by the First World War,

Heidegger welcomed the 1933 after the “faith in progress decayed” and “the only people

who kept that faith in its original vigor were the communist” and “Spengler’s Decline of

the West seemed to be credible.”58 Leaving it on this would amount to submitting to

hopelessness and desperation, according to Strauss. By saying this, Strauss implies that

Heidegger believed he was saving and regenerating the whole Western, European Dasein

through the proxy of spiritualization of the National Socialism in 1933. In the end,

however, Heidegger became disillusioned, for National Socialists were not the saviors

from the nihilism and technology, but the embodiment of the technological conquer and

nihilistic rule over Being. Furthermore, Strauss continues, Heidegger was taught by the

failure of the National Socialism that “Nietzsche’s hope of a united Europe ruling the

planet, of a Europe not only united but revitalized by this new, transcendent

responsibility of planetary rule, had proved to be a delusion.”59 To Heidegger, it seemed

that after the failure of that dream “the night of the world” has begun. “The night of the

54 Michael Allan Gillespie, “Martin Heidegger’s National Socialism,” in Political Theory, Vol.28, No. 2 (April 2002): p. 140 -166. 55 Ward, p. 77 and p. 75. 56 Jürgen Habermas, “Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective” in Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historian’s Debate, ed. and trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). 57 NRH, p. 14. 58 RCPR, p. 41. 59 Ibid. This refers to Nietzsche’s statement that “Europe wants to become one”, see Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886) in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 386.

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world” for Heidegger was the coming of world society controlled by either Washington

or Moscow which are metaphysically the same, and from whom only “God can save

us.”60 For Heidegger, as Strauss says, “it means… the victory of an even more

completely urbanized, even more completely technological West over the whole planet –

complete leveling and uniformity regardless of whether it is brought about by iron

compulsion or by soapy advertisement of the output of the mass production. It means

unity of the human race on the lowest level, complete emptiness of life…; nothing but

work and recreation; no individuals and no peoples, but instead ‘lonely crowds’.”61 The

mantra on the horror of the world society is repeating in works of Heidegger, Schmitt and

Strauss, and I will explain that further in the discussion on Hobbes.

For Strauss, whatever Heidegger’s mistakes were, he was the greatest philosopher

of the twentieth century. Heidegger saw clearly all the problems of the modernity and

was determined to face the void and abyss with resolution. Heidegger fully understood

the disease of modernity. Strauss himself admits that because of Heidegger’s critic of

liberalism he could never again be a full-fledged liberal, “[Because of Heidegger’s critic]

All rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance. One may deplore

this, but I for one cannot bring myself to clinging to philosophic positions which have

been shown to be inadequate.”62 As Shadia Drury argues, Strauss agrees with

Heidegger’s description of modernity as a disease, but not with a cure Heidegger

suggested63. What Strauss says about the relationship between Hobbes and Locke, may

as well be said for his relationship with Heidegger. It is because of his fundamental

agreement with Heidegger that Strauss rejects Heidegger’s conclusion.

Return to Nietzsche or the philosopher-king

In the Natural Rights and History, Strauss criticizes existentialism for two reasons.

Firstly, because radical historicism (existentialism) focuses on being here and now, on

history as ever changing and non-repeatable process, and not, as Strauss suggests, on

being always and eternally, the perspective of classical political philosophy. The political 60 See interview Heidegger gave to Der Spiegel in 1966 under title “Only a God Can Save Us” in Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy, p. 91-116. 61 RCPR, p.42. 62 Ibid, p. 29. 63 Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, p. 69-78.

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philosophy is not “a historical discipline”, becasuse it is driven by the desire to know, if

not to solve, the fundamental problems of living in society, problems that are perpetual

and changeable only in form, but not in substance.64 Radical historicism denies the

existence of the fundamental problems or the existence of the “natural horizon” because

it claims that all the existence is existence in time, here and now. Here and now existence

is unique and unrepeatable, hence there exists no unchangeable fundamental problems

and, consequently, radical historicism denies the need for the political philosophy as

such.

Secondly, more importantly, Strauss does not fully reject Heidegger’s premises,

but he completely rejects Heidegger’s solution on a basis of his return to Nietzsche. As I

stated above, in his critique of historicism in the Natural Rights and History, Strauss

implies that Nietzsche accepted the notion of Platonic noble delusion as a way of

preserving the artificial net that guards the society from the destructive influence of the

nihilistic historical truth, namely the groundlessness of all values, values of the given

society included. Strauss’s objection to Heidegger is that he did not truly understand what

the consequences of the public dissemination of philosophical truth were. It is not that

Heidegger was wrong in his basic conceptions, his mistake was that he expected too

much from the masses. On the one hand, Heidegger mythologized, together with Carl

Schmitt, the Volk, and, on the other hand, he publicly expressed what was supposed to

remain hidden: the individual choice for nationalistic or any other kind of living has no

support in the nature or the eternity. The choice is nothing but blind choice dictated by

the fate of historical circumstances. Of course, Heidegger, despite of his debt to

Nietzsche, rejected Nietzsche’s praise of nature as a final judge of the authenticity.

Heidegger refused to return to the notion of the Platonic noble delusion as a recovery of

metaphysics. For Heidegger, as Catherine Zuckert argues, the concealment of Being

begins when Plato separated ideas from things and Heidegger regarded that moment as

the beginning of the man’s alienation from the world that finally led to widespread

feeling that man is the stranger in this world, that he is “thrown in to the world.”65

64 What is political philosophy? and Other Studies, p. 56. 65 Catherine Zuckert, Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 4. Also see generally Zuckert’s discussion on Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato in ibid, p. 33-69.

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There are important similarities between Strauss’s and Nietzsche’s philosophy.

For Strauss, Nietzsche, probably more the any other philosophers, attached such an

importance to a philosophy as a discipline and the philosophers as rulers. Nietzsche’s

philosophers are no less than Superman’s, ones that are meant to rule over the vulgar

masses. They are the free and brave among humans, ones that will not despair in the face

of the emptiness of the world and the ultimate pointlessness of life. According to Strauss,

Nietzsche saw the twentieth century as an age of world wars, leading to a planetary rule

unprecedented in history, rule that would require a new kind of aristocracy. As Strauss

says, “The invisible rulers of that possible future would be the philosophers of the

future.” Certainly, this resembles Plato’s notion of the philosopher-king, ruling secretly

as the power behind the throne. But there is a major difference between Plato’s and

Nietzsche’s philosophers of the future, according to Strauss. Nietzsche’s philosopher,

unlike his classical predecessor, is an heir to Bible. In the heart he is an atheist. His public

philosophizing and exoteric teaching are religious, for he waits for a God to come back to

the world.66 Although Heidegger would reject much of this as a return to metaphysics, he

nevertheless, according to Habermas, expected to be the secret ruler behind the throne,

the philosopher-king with an arrogant and not well-hidden contempt for the masses67.

Strauss himself never abandoned this view. In the chapter “Classic Natural Right” in the

Natural Right and History, the virtual Strauss’s political manifesto, the problem of the

rule of philosophers-kings in the vulgar society is one of the major themes.68

66 RCPR, p. 40-41. Cf. Nietzsche’s emphatic statement , “Toward new philosophers; there is no choice; towards spirits strong and original enough to provide the stimuli for opposite valuations and to revalue and invert ‘eternal values’; toward forerunners, toward man of the future who in the present tie knot and constraint that forces the will of millennia upon new tracks,” [italics in original] in Beyond Good and Evil, above n. 51, p. 307. 67 Habermas, “Martin Heidegger: On the Publication of the Lectures of 1935” in Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy, p. 186-197. According to Habermas, “He [Heidegger] had the nutty idea that he, as a spiritual leader, could set himself at the head of the whole movement,” ibid. p. 189. As for Heidegger’s contempt for masses, Habermas claims that Heidegger believed that “It is ‘strength’ that elevates the aristocratic individual above the ordinary Many. The noble individual, who chooses fame, will be ennobled by the rank and mastery that belong to Being itself, while the Many – who, according to Heraclitus, whom Heidegger approvingly cites, are like a well-fed cattle - the Many are the dogs and the asses, ” see ibid, p. 193. 68 See chapter “Classic Natural Right” in NRH, p. 120-164.

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Exotericism and esotericism

In the context of the Platonic noble delusion and Heidegger’s mistake, the way Strauss

interprets it, can we understand Strauss’s famous and infamous thesis on the exoteric and

esoteric teaching and the “writing between the lines”, of which, as I will show below, he

will make ample use in his discussion about Locke in the Natural Rights and History.

Core of the thesis can be, somewhat briefly, stated in a following manner. The great

philosophers of the past did not state truths in a plain and straightforward manner for two

reasons. In the first place, they were afraid of the social persecution, for philosophy

always questions basic premises and values on which the given society is based on.

Secondly, even more important in my opinion, Strauss claims that philosophers never

stated their opinions explicitly because they accepted their social responsibility. They

knew that the truth plainly said would cause disturbance among the “vulgar”, among

masses that are majority in every society. Tacit presumption of this thesis is that the truth

is dark and hard to bear. Hence, it must be kept secret and known only to those few

“wise”, which are of course philosophers, who are able to bear the truth without

devastating consequences, namely destroying the society and their fellow citizens69.

Strauss’s philosopher is, then, the holder of truth (or more likely, the guardian of

the truth that there is no truth) and, at the same time, the countercultural and sub cultural

fellow. He is countercultural insofar that he claims to know that all truths of society are

but “opinions” and “noble delusions”. But he is also sub-cultural since he does not

attempt to make any revolutionary changes in the society. Strauss’s philosopher,

resonating Plato’s philosopher king, is assured that philosophical way of life is the best

way of life, and that he himself and company of his philosophical brothers are elevated

well above “vulgar” masses. Nevertheless, since the philosophical life presupposes peace

and order in the society, philosophers should secretly counsel the rulers and make gradual

changes in society, when and if they deem necessary. 69 See generally Persecution and the Art of Writing, (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1952). Also see “How Farabi Read Plato Laws” in What is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies, and “Exoteric Teaching” and “How to Begin to Study Medieval Philosophy” in RCPR. For example, Strauss argues that Farabi used Plato as a mouthpiece to present his own atheistic views, and by taking the stance of the historian of ideas, protected himself from the theological persecution. Major controversy, of course, is whether Strauss himself applies the same method, or, in other words, when Strauss describes, for example, Machiavelli’s ideas how can you be shore who is speaking, Strauss or Machiavelli?

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As Catherine Zuckert shows, all “postmodern Platos”, Nietzsche, Heidegger,

Gadamer, Strauss and Derrida, felt at some point the need to return to Plato as the

beginning of the philosophy. Their motivation was the postmodernist contention

according to which there is no objective truth, or, at least, the knowledge of it is not

accessible to man, hence everything is an interpretation. And if the only certain

knowledge is the knowledge that we do not know, then all the philosophy from Socrates

onwards was running in circles, since Socrates knew this at the very beginning. Plato, as

Socrates most famous student and the one who transmits Socrates teaching in his

writings, must be the key of understanding. Zuckert further argues that Strauss differs

from his postmodern companions in so far that they received their knowledge on Plato

true the proxy of Neo-Platonism, or, in other words, already Christianized Plato.70

It is safe to say that since both Heidegger’s students, Gadamer and Strauss, each

in their own different ways, developed distinct hermeneutical methods for treating the

texts, one could trace the origins of their methods back to Heidegger and possibly even to

Nietzsche. But the difference that makes Strauss unique among the other, to use

Catherine Zuckert’s term, “postmodern Platos”, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gamader and

Derrida, is that Strauss, after he parted from Heidegger, developed distinct hermeneutical

method by drawing from different sources than the rest of his “postmodern” companions,

namely from the Jewish and Islamic medieval philosophies and mysticism. Strauss tried

to understand the philosophical text precisely in a way that its writers understood it,

contrary to Heidegger who claimed that all previous philosophies were unaware that they

are being determined by the social and historical circumstances and hence that Heidegger

understands the texts and philosophers better than they understood themselves.

This difference in the origin of source is the core of Strauss’s critic of what we

may call Christianizing philosophy and, in the long run, social science. For Strauss,

Christianity or at least its influential thinkers did what should not be attempted, namely

they tried to show that reason (philosophy) and fate could be reconciled. The example in

the Natural Right and History is the attempt of Thomas Aquinas to reconcile Aristotelian

teaching on an infinitely mutable natural right with the truths of faith.71 Aquinas

70 Zuckert, p. 4-6. 71 NRH, p. 163-164.

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succeeded in this, but at cost of making the natural law teaching rigid and conservative,

and the consequence was Hobbes’s rebellion. For Strauss, Aquinas’s attempt is futile,

since Strauss believes that the secret of the vitality of the Western civilization lies in the

tension between reason and fate. Reason should stay on the playfield of the philosophers

and the fate is meant to be the relief for masses. Heidegger (who started out as a Christian

theologian) and, as I shall argue below, Weber and Hobbes were mistaken in thinking

otherwise, and for that reason their philosophies had such a bad aftermath. Moreover,

they over-publicized their teaching, without considering if their audience, the “vulgar”

and the “heard”, is ready to exchange the sweet delusion of religion for sore truth.

Similarities and differences

To sum up, we can say that, despite the differences, Strauss shares much with his teacher

Heidegger. Firstly, Heidegger left on Strauss his imprint in so far that Strauss thinks of

modernity as a state of crisis and interprets the truth as nihilistic and hard to bear.

Moreover, he agrees with Heidegger that the Enlightenment’s faith in science and the

power of reason and is futile. Strauss parts with Heidegger regarding the solution of the

crisis. Relying on Nietzsche and Plato, he seeks to reestablish the position of the

metaphysics and religion in the public space, but only so far that these teachings are

meant for the masses as the noble delusion in order to ease the pains of the existence. The

truth (or the truth that there is no truth) is preserved for the philosophers or the “wise”

elite.

Secondly, through the influence of Heidegger, Strauss relies heavily on Nietzsche

and preserves the elevated position for the philosophers in contrast to the “vulgar

masses.” Moreover, for all three of them, philosophers are not only ones who try to

explain and reflect on the Being or existence, the philosophers are legislators, rulers

(secret or not), and the makers of public universe.

Thirdly, although different in content, Strauss’s way of interpreting the text,

writing and teaching resembles Heidegger’s style, and, as Shadia Drury says, it is not by

chance that Strauss gathered so many followers around him, just as ones he followed

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Heidegger72. In this respect, the main difference between Strauss and Heidegger is that

the former is oriented toward the Dasein understanding of the here and now and claims

that he understands his philosophical predecessors better than they understood themselves

because they were oblivious of the historical groundings on which they were erecting

their respective philosophies. Strauss claims to follow the “pre-historical”, “common

sense” understanding and attempts to understand the text as his creator understood it,

irregardless of social and historical circumstances. Chiefly because of this belief did

Strauss manage to sketch the very unusual picture of the classical natural right in the

Natural Right and History, and in the latter part of his life, to dedicate himself fully to the

study of classical Greek philosophy.

2.3 Existentialism goes legal or Carl Schmitt

Although the above subtitle may be a somewhat confusing, given that in a chapter on

Strauss’s critic of Max Weber I emphasize Schmitt’s debt to Weber, the explanation is

following. Part of Weber’s though, ethics of conviction or intention, as I will argue

below, is very similar in its temper and direction to Heidegger’s existentialism and to, as

I choose to call it, “legal existentialism” of Carl Schmitt.

Carl Schmitt probably belongs among greatest and most controversial legal and

political theorists of the twentieth century. Moreover, both his life and his works bear

almost ironical resemblances to that of Heidegger, as it was suggested by, i.e, Karl

Löwith, Christian Graf von Krockow and Reinhard Mehring.73 From 1933-1936 Schmitt

was, according to Ian Ward, Kronjurist for the National Socialist, at about the same time

when Heidegger was politically engaged.74 Moreover, in his letter to Schmitt, Heidegger

urged him to become legal spiritual leader, while Heidegger would be philosophical

72 Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, p. 75-78. 73 Karl Löwith, “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism” in Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy, p. 167-185. Christian Graf von Krockow, Die Entscheidung: Eine Untersuchung über Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 1990). Reinhard Mehring, “Der philosophische Führer und der Kronjurist: Praktisches Denken und geschichtliche Tat von Martin Heidegger und Carl Schmitt” in Deutsches Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 68 (1994). 74 Ward, p. 156-168.

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leader of the National Socialist movement.75 What makes Schmitt even more

controversial than Heidegger is that not even a year before he became a Kronjurist,

according to Müller, he publicly advocated and strongly advised President Hindenburg to

ban the Communist Party and the National Socialist Party in order to preserve peace and

stability.76 Both Heidegger and Schmitt, although coming from strong Christian

backgrounds, turned their backs on religion and attempted to overcome the chains of

tradition through the Being (Heidegger) or decision (Schmitt). Their political careers with

the NSDAP were short, and National Socialists rejected them both. In addition, they both

suffered the prohibition on university teaching after the end of the WWI.

Schmitt’s works are abundant with language and concepts that sound as

Heidegger’s existentialism applied in law. Throughout all Schmitt‘s works, the major

enemy, similarly to Heidegger, is liberalism as an embodiment of the technological rule

over humanity. Liberalism for Schmitt subsumes living to pure functioning within the

aegis of the mechanized machine of the soulless state. In legal terms, Schmitt recognizes

this liberal over-rationalization of life in the legal positivism of Hans Kelsen. Against the

legal over-rationalization that attempts to predict and control all circumstances of life,

Schmitt launches critic based on “decisionism” which is the distinctive mark of the

sovereign. In Political Theology, Schmitt lays one of his famous statements, “Souverän

ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet.”77 In legal terms, it is a brilliantly

constructed phrase. For it does not mean that sovereign decide in the state of exception or

emergency, but sovereign also decides when the state of emergency is, hence the rule of

sovereign is next to infinite. The ultimate purpose of the existence of state is to decide

unconstrained by any a priori existing laws. State exists fully in the moment of decision

“a pure decision, which, because it can not be rationalized or discussed, nor in itself

justified, is an absolute decision out of normative nothingness.”78 It is not hard to

recognize in the above sentence the resonance of existentialism, and it is unimportant if

Schmitt developed it by himself or under Heidegger’s influence. Important is that Schmitt

elevates the state above the individual, and, just as Heidegger rejected ethics as an 75 Ibid, p. 118. 76 Jan-Werner Müller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 35. 77 Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität (Berlin, 1990), p. 11. 78 Ibid., p. 83.

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obstacle on the way towards true Being, Schmitt rejects all a priori legal rules

(constitution) as an obstacle on the way toward the full existence of the state.

In his most famous work, The Concept of the Political, Schmitt reaches the peak

of his intellectual engagement contra liberalism.79 But before interpreting its most

important parts, one remark is necessary. Schmitt’s book always has to be read against

the background of the social and political crisis of the Weimar Republic. The Weimar

Republic was toured both from inside, as result of political parties competition and deep

economic crisis, and from outside, as a consequence of the unjust Versailles Peace Treaty

and the obnoxiously high war reparations that were imposed upon Germany. Given

imposed circumstances, the rise of extremism was but to be expected.80

In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt makes two famous claims. First, Schmitt

claims, “The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political.”81 The political

itself has a polemic, if not a dialectical, nature. As morality is consisted of good and evil,

esthetics of beautiful and ugly, so does the political has its own dialectic. But what

differentiates the political from moral, religion, esthetics and so on, is that the political is

the most intense human activity. Moreover, it is an independent activity, if not the one

that encompasses in itself all other domains of life (religious, moral, and economical

although Schmitt is somewhat vague regarding the relationship of the political and other

domains of life).

What is, then, the distinction specific for the political, according to Schmitt? “The

specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that

between friend and enemy.”82 The enemy needs not be an economic competitor, morally

evil or something alike, it suffices that he is “the other, the stranger.”83 Echoing

Heidegger, Schmitt writes, “The friend and enemy concepts are to be understood in their

concrete and existential sense.”84 Important is that the enemy is not a private, but public

79 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. and intro. George Schwab, with comments on Schmitt’s essay by Leo Strauss (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers, 1976). 80 On the crisis of the Weimar Republic and Schmitt’s role in it see, i.e., David Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen and Herman Heller in Weimar (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 2-37, and Müller, p. 15-48. 81 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 19. 82 Ibid, p. 26. 83 Ibid, p. 27. 84 Ibid.

30

enemy, since the political is above the individual. The political as concept reaches its

greatest intensity within the organized political entity, state, which alone decides on the

friend enemy distinction.85 States, organized political entities of individuals, exist

because of the problematic, if not evil, character of human beings (again Schmitt is

somewhat unspecific at this point). Evil in man must be restrained through obedience and

fear, as Hobbes testifies, if man is not to return to the state of nature. At this point,

Schmitt changes Hobbes’s argument. For Hobbes, state of nature (or civil war that

Hobbes witnessed in England) is primarily war among individuals (although secondarily

also the war of states), but for Schmitt, in the state of nature “states exist among

themselves in a condition of continual danger.”86 As McCormick suggest, Schmitt found

a source of inspiration in Hobbes because Hobbes’s Leviathan was written in the times of

civil war and unrest, times that reminded Schmitt of the situation of the Weimar

Republic.87 Moreover, Schmitt praises Hobbes for revealing the truth and constructing

his absolute sovereign, Leviathan, to “instill in man once again ‘the mutual relation

between Protection and Obedience’.” For Schmitt, “The protego ergo obligo is the cogito

ergo sum of the state.”88 Schmitt also adds another important qualification to Hobbes.

Hobbes always insisted that the natural right to self-preservation, the right of individual

not to sacrifice its life as a result of the sovereign command, is preserved in every

situation, hence sovereign can demand obedience, but only so far that the obedience

protects lives of individuals. It is not so for Schmitt. “The state as the decisive political

entity posses an enormous power: the possibility of waging war and thereby publicly

disposing of the lives of man. It implies a double possibility: the right to demand from its

own members the readiness to die and unhesitatingly to kill enemies.”89

To the state alone, according to Schmitt, belongs the “honor” of deciding in the

extreme case, in the state of emergency or war. And the possibility of the war is ever

present and when that possibility realizes itself, the core of the concept of the political,

the friend-enemy distinction, shows itself in its purest form. For Schmitt, “War is the

85 Ibid, p. 30. 86 Ibid, p. 58-59. 87 John P. McCormick, “Fear, Technology and the State: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss and the revival of Hobbes in Weimar and National Socialist Germany,” Political Theory, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Nov., 1994): 619-652. 88 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 52. 89 Ibid, p. 46.

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existential negation of enemy. It is the most extreme consequence of enmity. It does not

have to be common, normal, something ideal, or desirable. But it must nevertheless

remain a real possibility for as long as the concept of the enemy remains valid.”90

Besides his somewhat disturbing and mystified concept of friend-enemy

distinction and the warmongering vocabulary, Schmitt is more concrete and coherent

regarding his enemy. And his enemy is, similar to Heidegger, liberalism and technology.

We need not repeat here Schmitt’s laments on the rationalization and mechanization of

life. For our purposes here, it is more important to see how Schmitt describes the

consequences of the world liberalization.

For Schmitt, liberalism is canny and vicious. It hides its true intentions behind the

many veils and humanitarian motives. In other words, the power structures of the

presumably apolitical liberalism are precisely that –political. Liberalism attempts to

destroy the friend-enemy distinction as the purest core of the political and turn in to

meaningless economic competition or intellectual debate.91 The existence then becomes a

never-ending pleasure and profit hunt, with occasional unimportant conversations during

short breaks. Liberalism destroys the political by granting the autonomy to the cultural,

economic, religious, labor party and other kinds of pluralistic values, political party

values included (since for Schmitt the state equals party politics concept is a liberal

delusion and trick).92 It motivates individuals to associate themselves with different kind

of groups, all attempting to use the state for their own purposes, while at the same time

remaining faithful to their groups, but not to the state. Hence, liberalism undermines the

power of state by depriving her of the obedience of her members.

What happens, according to Schmitt, in the world where liberalism prevails,

world where the possibility of war is outlawed or made impossible? “A world in which

the possibility of war is utterly eliminated, a completely pacified globe, would be a world

without the distinction of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics.”93 There

would be no state or politics in such a world “but culture, civilization, economics,

90 Ibid, p. 33. 91 Ibid, p. 28. 92 Ibid, p. 32. 93 Ibid, p. 35.

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morality, law, entertainment, etc.”94 Schmitt implies that such a world would be

dehumanized world. In addition, throughout The Concept of the Political, Schmitt

forcefully criticizes forces that, for him, are attempting to outlaw war, pacify and

liberalize world. The League of Nations, the Treaty of Versailles, and the Kellogg-Briand

Pact are but different faces of this movement. Implicitly, at several places Schmitt also

targets Woodrow Wilson. Schmitt asserts that “It is a manifest fraud to condemn war as

homicide and then demand of men that they wage war, kill and be killed, so that there

never again be war.”95 Behind this false pacifist-humanitarian ideology, Schmitt traces

new imperialistic, economical and ideological interests that are more intense than any

other in history, because, by their nature, they do not tend only to defy their enemies

militarily. They intend to globalize, spread across national borders and perpetrate every

level of the enemies’ society, in the name of, ultimate lie for Schmitt, universal humanity.

Comments or Schmitt and Strauss united against liberalism

In 1932, Leo Strauss published his “Comments on Carl Schmitt’s Der Begriff des

Politischen.”96 By that time he was already Schmitt’s protégé. As Strauss himself admits

in a letter to Schmitt, dated March 13, 1932, Schmitt’s references were vital for securing

him the grant of the Rockefeller Foundation for studies in Paris and subsequently in

Oxford.97 As Heinrich Meier shows, it seems that the respect between Schmitt and

Strauss was mutual. Schmitt himself several times talked about Strauss as important

philosopher and he was also one who recommended Strauss’s comments for

publication.98

According to both McCormick and Drury, in his commentary, Strauss radicalized

Schmitt’s already radical concept of the political.99 As McCormick argues, Strauss

immediately recognizes the importance of Hobbes’s concepts of fear and the state of

94 Ibid, p. 53. 95 Ibid, p. 48. 96 Leo Strauss, “Comments on Carl Schmitt’s Der Begriff des Politischen” in Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 81-105. 97 Leo Strauss, “Letter One” in Heinrich, Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 123. 98 Meier, p. 8. 99 McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, p. 258-266. Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, p. 91-95. For this interpretation I rely heavily on McCormick.

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nature for Schmitt’s concept of the political.100 He also recognizes the need for such a

reference to Hobbes in the light of the present Weimar situation. The whole Schmitt’s

thesis is determined, according to Strauss, “by his fight against liberalism.”101 Strauss

joins Schmitt in so far that he also admits the present decline of the state and its

“neutralization” and “depoliticizing” as result of the “prevailing conception of culture,

[according to which] the various provinces of culture are ‘autonomous’.”102 Term culture

that Strauss uses denotes various pluralistic, liberal values which Schmitt criticizes, as

argued above. In accordance with Schmitt, only more forcefully, Strauss asserts the state

of nature and a need not only for physical obedience of the ruled ones, but also a

psychological one:

This conception makes us forget that ‘culture’ always presupposes something which is cultivated: culture is always cultivation of nature. Originally that means culture develops the natural disposition; it is a careful cultivation of nature – whether of the soil or of the human mind; in this it obeys the indications that nature itself gives… Since we understand by ‘culture’ above all the culture of human nature, and since man is by nature an animal sociale, the human nature underlying culture is the natural living together of men, i.e., the mode in which man-prior to culture behaves towards other man. The term for the natural living together thus understood is status naturalis. One may therefore say, the foundation of culture is the status naturalis.103 [italics in original]

As McCormick argues, the cultivation of the state of nature, for both Schmitt and

Hobbes, is the state, which establishes order and makes society possible. Hence, Strauss

makes Schmitt’s critique of the liberal “autonomy” even more firm.104 In short, human

autonomy is evil just as human beings are and they are in need of being ruled, for the

status naturalis (Weimar) gives ample examples of man’s intrinsic evilness.

But Strauss pays attention to another, for him more important, contradiction in

Schmitt’s thesis. Hobbes qualifies (although narrow) states’ right to demand of citizens to

die in the name of the natural right of self-preservation. For Strauss, Schmitt remained

within the playfield of the objective valueless liberalism. Schmitt did assert that the state

has a right to demand from individuals to die in a fight, but he did not established

100 McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, p.259. 101 Leo Strauss, “Comments on Carl Schmitt’s Der Begriff des Politischen” in Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 82. 102 Ibid, p. 86. 103 Ibid, p. 86-87. 104 McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, p.260.

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individual moral duty to do so, hence he granted too much individual freedom. Schmitt

sustained from passing a moral judgment upon his enemy. As Strauss understands it,

“’Morality’ is for Schmitt always – at least in the context here under discussion-

‘humanitarian morality’. This means however that Schmitt accepts his opponents’ view

of what constitutes morality instead of questioning the claim of humanitarian-pacifist

morality to be the true morality; he remains under the spell of the opinion he combats.”105

Schmitt then, according to Strauss, affirms the political, but in the same way as

liberalism tries to nullify the political. He remains constrained within the liberal concepts.

His concept of political is but a negative liberalism. What is required for Strauss is a

completely new morality that would deploy humanitarian liberal tricks. In Strauss’s

words, “The critique of liberalism that Schmitt has initiated can therefore be completed

only when we succeed in gaining a horizon beyond liberalism…A radical critique of

liberalism is therefore possible only on the basis of an adequate understanding of

Hobbes106.” All of this was, to remind once again, written in 1932. As I will argue below,

even in 1953, when Strauss wrote Natural Right and History, his opinion on liberalism

and Hobbes has not changed substantially.

According to Herman Meier, after Schmitt read Strauss’s Commentary, he said to

one of his doctoral students (Günther Krauss): “You’ve got to read this. He saw through

me and X-rayed me as nobody else has107.” Indeed, it may well be that Strauss already

recognized the general direction in which Schmitt’s thought was going. Nonetheless, it

would be a mere speculation to say how much Strauss was aware of this, or if he could

predict Schmitt’s later political engagement, to which his The Concept of the Political

contributed.

To summarize this chapter, we may say that, at least in 1932, Strauss

fundamentally agreed to Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberalism. Strauss concurs with

Schmitt that liberalism puts emphasis on the protection of individual rights and autonomy

of society versus the rights of the state, by so weakening her power; consequently,

105 Leo Strauss, “Comments on Carl Schmitt’s Der Begriff des Politischen” in Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 102. 106 Ibid, p. 105. 107 Meier, p. xvii.

35

liberalism is the one to blame for the weakness of the Weimar Republic; and liberalism,

while purportedly apolitical, seeks imperialistic ways of spreading around the globe.

What differentiates Strauss from Schmitt is that he openly calls not only for the critic of

liberalism, but for the establishment of a new, counter-liberal morality.

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37

3. Max Weber and the fact-value distinction

Throughout the rest of his life in the United States, after the emigration in 1930s, Strauss

retained negative attitude towards the quantitatively oriented social science or, as he

usually calls it, positivistic social science. The roots of his distrust lay in the experience

of the Weimar Republic and the influence of Strauss’s great contemporary, Max Weber.

As stated above, while he was still a young student in the 1920s and 30s, and prior to

meeting Heidegger, Strauss was impressed by Max Weber, as many of his

contemporaries were. And despite all the criticism towards Weber’s thought, which he

shared with Carl Schmitt, Strauss nurtured great respect for Weber. In 1953, writing in

Natural Rights and History, Strauss still maintained “No one since Weber has devoted a

comparable amount of intelligence, assiduity, and almost fanatical devotion to the basic

problem of the social science. Whatever may have been his errors, he is the greatest

social scientist of our century.”108 [emphasis mine]

In this chapter, I elaborate on Strauss’s criticism of Weber’s fact/value distinction.

First and second parts of this chapter are devoted to the interpretation of chapter “Natural

Right and the Distinction Between Fact and Values” in Natural Right and History.

Throughout both parts, besides explaining Strauss’s critic, I emphasize similarity of his

critic with the critic Carl Schmitt directed towards Hans Kelsen’s legal positivism and,

implicitly, towards Max Weber. I argue that Strauss critic shares more in common with

Carl Schmitt than its meets the eye, that is, although implicitly critical towards Schmitt’s

practical solutions, on a basic theoretical level Strauss is very much in agreement with

him. Moreover, I emphasize Kelsen’s and Schmitt’s debt to Max Weber’s thought, by

arguing that they both represent one part of Weber’s thought, adopted to the exclusion of

other. Following that, I elaborate on Strauss’s suggestion on a similarity of political

conclusions in between Heidegger, Weber, and Schmitt. In the third part of this chapter,

on the example of “An Epilogue”, a critical essay directed towards the positivistic social

science, I try to present how Strauss retained the negative stance he adopted following

Weimar during his life in the United States.

108 Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 36. Hereafter NRH. All unnamed references are works by Leo Strauss.

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3.1 Critic of Max Weber’s fact-value distinction For Strauss, the radical historicist thesis denies the possibility of natural right and hence

of the philosophy itself because he claims “philosophy in the full sense of the term is

impossible.”109 The historicist thesis is based on the existence of the historically changing

horizons and the denial of the existence of the natural horizon.110 Social science criticized

by Strauss does not follow the historicist thesis fully. It recognizes that there exists

“fundamental problems” and “fundamental alternatives”; but it denies that these

fundamental problems are conclusively solvable. Hence, this kind of social science does

not deny the possibility of the philosophy, but it certainly denies the existence of the

natural right. As Strauss says it, “The possibility of philosophy does not require more

than that the fundamental problems always be the same; but there can not be natural right

if the fundamental of political philosophy cannot be solved in a final manner.”111

The assumption of this kind of social science, according to Strauss, runs contrary

to a major assumption held by political philosophers from Plato to Hegel, and that

assumption was “that the fundamental political problem is susceptible of a final

solution.” The assumption rests on “the Socratic answer to the question of how man

ought to live.” The Socratic answer to this question, starting from the fact of one’s

ignorance, changes the face of society in which one lives in since there are political

consequences for taking this answer seriously, as shown in the Plato’s Republic or

Aristotle’s Politics. Now, this quest for wisdom may well prove that the wisdom chased

was not the one thing needful. As Strauss says it, “the disavowal of reason must be

reasonable disavowal.”112 In other words, if we are to proclaim the political philosophy

or the natural right to be insufficient or superfluous, that should be from within the

political philosophy, on its own terms.

Rejection of the natural right in the name of value-free social science advocated

by Max Weber, according to Strauss, has the following shape. “Natural right is then

109 Ibid, p. 35. 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid, p. 36.

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rejected today not only because all human thought is held to be historical but likewise

because it is thought that there is a variety of unchangeable principles of right or of

goodness which conflict with one another, and none of which can be proved to be

superior to the others.”113

Max Weber has started, in Strauss’s view, as a follower of the historical school,

but in the name of science, Weber made serious objections to the historical school , albeit

halfheartedly.114 On the one hand, in the name of the individual, regarded by Weber as

the basis of real, Weber rejected the historicist claim on the existence of the folk minds.

On the other hand, Weber also rejected the historicist belief in the intelligibility of history

as metaphysical, for he believed only in the intentions of historical actors as a way of the

understanding of historical process.115 Strauss further claims that Weber understood very

well that the value ideas determine the interest of social science; but value ideas are

historically relative and so it follows that the science itself is to a certain point part of the

Weltanschauung. This precisely was what Weber wanted to negate. In his attempt to

prove that the science is independent of the Weltanschauung, Weber took the necessary

step and removed the point of interest of social science from values to facts and their

causes. This decisive point separates Weber and the historicist school, according to

Strauss. In his interest in facts and their causes, Weber found the idea of trans-historical,

timeless values, and on this base, according to Strauss, Weber rejected the idea of natural

right.116

In a game of words that follows, Strauss claims, the social science, always to a

certain degree part of the given historical Weltanschauung, now move from “the value

judgments”, which are purportedly unscientific, to “reference to values”. “Reference to

values” is the ethically neutral, value-free way of describing the social processes without

saying anything about their goodness or desirability. It is a practical tool required for

finding the focus of interest of the social science, for how else could the social science

discern its object of the inquiry from the myriad of facts? By refereeing to this concept,

Strauss claims, Weber was in the position to base his concept of the ethically neutral

113 Ibid. 114 Ibid, p. 37. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid, p. 38-39.

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social science in what he regarded as the most fundamental opposition of all “the

opposition of Is and Ought, or the opposition of reality and norm or value.”117

At this point, Strauss suggests, for a moment we may assume that we have the

knowledge of some undeniably true system of values, which we came to know because of

the scientific or any other, say philosophic for example, pursuit. If that is true, then social

science becomes a way of social engineering, truly means-oriented science, guided by the

values assumed. The mere possibility of the existence of this assumption, that is the

existence of the true value system, is exactly what Weber negated. For Weber, according

to Strauss, did not just believed in the opposition of the Is and Ought, he believed “that

there can not be any knowledge of the Ought.” Moreover, Strauss continues, for Weber

“…the true value system does not exist; there is a variety of values which are of the same

rank , whose demands conflict with one another, and whose conflict can not be solved by

human reason.”118

A large part of the rest of the chapter on Max Weber and the distinction between

facts and values Strauss devoted to explaining how Weber arrived at the position

described above. While reading it, one cannot escape the feeling that Strauss is trying to

present to a reader just what the uncontrolled love for truth can do to a man when it is not

qualified with the appreciation of good or the public interest which, for Strauss, is a

different concept. It is almost an epic story, written not without the sympathy and

understanding for Weber, albeit not in a manner that exculpates Weber. In front of the

reader Strauss lays the psychological profile of a man cursed with the love for truth and,

at the same time, in desperate search for the possibility of genuine ethics or, more

precisely, the knowledge of the grounds on which man, guided solely by reason and

faithful to himself, can make an ethical choice. Moreover, the way Strauss tells it, it is a

story about the man who, through the virtue of intellectual honesty and incapable of a

Life-asserting self-deception, committed himself to a scientific reason until the point of

self-destruction.

Coming from a both neo-Kantian and the historical school background, according

to Strauss, Weber, following these two schools of thought, rejected utilitarianism and the

117 Ibid, p. 40-41. 118 Ibid, p. 41-42.

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faith in the possibility of the right social order. Similar to neo-Kantianism, he preserved

the idea that the human dignity embeds itself in a human autonomy, the individual free

choice of values and ideas as exemplified in “Become what thou art.”119 Kant’s

categorical imperative, according to Strauss, at this point remains alive and “Thou shalt

have ideals” is still a formal, non-arbitrary and intelligible standard. Then the first twist

comes. In a manner of disenchanted theoretician unconnected to the real world, Weber,

instead of moving down the Kant’s road of universality, treats God and Demon as

equivalents. As Strauss says, “Weber’s own formulation of his categorical imperative

was ‘Follow thy demon’ or ‘Follow thy god or demon.’” However, since the choice for

either God or Demons is insoluble by human reason and either choice is praiseful for its

own sake the conclusion, as Strauss says it, is following. “The categorical imperative has

then to be formulated as follows: ‘Follow God or the Devil as you will, but, whichever

choice you make, make it with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your

power.”120

Now it seems that while Weber was following the stars, he was slowly falling in

to the mud, which he embraced as equally shine. That is what Strauss refers to when he

says that Weber’s position is a resolute strive for baseness, baseness meaning “the

indifference toward all causes.” Weber acts as a disenchanted intellectual, uncommitted

to any cause whatsoever and without the regard for common good. For only the total

alienation from practical reality, non-commitment to anything, can afford to draw a sign

of equivalence in between the “vitalistic” values, resolute strive for ones own goal

irregardless of the consequences for others or the violation of categorical imperative, and

the cultural values of Weber’s own time, bourgeois commitment to comfort and prestige.

After this only complete chaos remains, chaos in which, it seems for now, Weber stands

as a spectator, not as an actor. Hence, Strauss concludes, “The final formulation of

Weber’s ethical principle would thus be ‘Thou shalt have preferences’- an Ought whose

fulfillment is fully guaranteed by the Is.”121

119 Ibid, p. 44. 120 Ibid, p. 44-45. 121 Ibid, p. 46-47. Nasser Behnegar describes this part of Strauss’s critic of Weber’s ethical wonderings as a path from moral duties to relativistic idealism, from idealism to fanatical resoluteness, from there on to philistinism, and, finally, from philistinism to insanity. Behnegar also points out that the “cultural” part of Weber’s notion of values is as nihilistic as a “vitalistic” part, albeit differently. The evidence for this

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If Strauss’s interpretation of Weber’s social science is for a moment accepted as a

correct one, what are the consequences, how would Weberian-style social scientists look

alike? Obviously, the first consequence would be that he acts as the United Nations in

certain parts of Balkans. Since he restrained from any value judgment, with a stoic

peacefulness and cold mind, he may factually report on the inconveniences of genocide

or concentration camps or may well proclaim Gretchen equal to a prostitute. He might

also explain a causal chain of events that led to a mass murder and he might describe

motivations of both perpetrator and victim, albeit treating them both as morally equal in

all decisive respects. The second consequence would be that, if he is a political adviser,

he could peacefully and with equivalent seriousness render his services to a government

that is planning to commit a mass murder, and to the one that is planning to eradicate the

poverty from society. Whatever comes, be that tyranny or liberal democracy or

cannibalism, may pass as far as he is concerned, for he does not approve nor reject any

kind of the social order. At least on a human intuitive level, as Strauss comments in a

number of places, this is unacceptable, nor did Weber, in his search of objectivity,

avoided naming things their true names, namely greed, avarice, devotion, sense of

proportion, etc., and he indeed knew the difference between Gretchen and a prostitute.122

In short, according to Strauss, it is impossible to restrain fully from the value judgments

and the attempt to do so ends up in a disaster.

The second conclusion drawn above is the very objection that Strauss directs

towards generous liberals, namely that they are able “to give an advice with equal

competence and alacrity to tyrants as well free peoples.”123 Although general, in this case

his objection is targets Hans Kelsen’s legal positivism. Of course, we need not prove here

the known fact that Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law is an application of Weber’s

Behnegar finds in the conformism or philistinism. Bourgeois conformism is oriented towards the passion and the pleasures of instinct promulgated as the culture of society. But it is nihilistic insofar that it does not believe in the values beyond the simplest pleasures of instinct, or the instinctive pleasures that require fighting, as pure “vitalistic” values do. See Nasser Behnegar, Leo Strauss, Max Weber, and the Scientific Study of Politics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 77-86, esp. p. 86. In the historical context, the implication would be that the rise of National Socialism, representative of the “vitalistic” values, was made easier by the bourgeois conformism, the representative of the “cultural” values.” Since in it self was nihilistic, conformism, by definition, had no reason to oppose the rise of “vitalistic” values. All that conformism could do is hope, or ask for a promise, that their only value, passion and pleasures of instinct, will not be abrogated because of the rise of “vitalistic” values. 122 NRH, p. 52-53. 123 Ibid, p. 4.

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methodological principles, and the Is and Ought distinction within the realm of legal

theory.124 By quoting Kelsen, Strauss gives one example of what he has in mind.

Vollends sinnlos ist die Behauptung, das in der Despotie keine Rechtsordnung bestehe, sondern Willkür das Despoten herrsche . . . stellt doch auch der despotisch regierte Staat irgendeine Ordnung menschlichen Verhaltens dar . . . . Diese Ordnung ist eben die Rechtsordnung. Ihr den Charakter das Rechts abzusprechen, ist nur eine naturrechtliche Naivität oder Überhebung . . . . Was als Willkür gedeutet wird, ist nur die rechtliche Möglichkeit des Autokraten, jede Entscheidung an sich zu ziehen, die Tätigkeit der untergeordneten Organe bedingungslos zu bestimmen und einmal gesetzte Normen jederzeit mit allgemeiner oder nur besonderer Geltung aufzuheben oder abzuändern. Ein solcher Zustand ist ein Rechtszustand, auch wenn er als nachteilig empfunden wird. Doch hat er auch seine guten Seiten. Der im modernen Rechtsstaat gar nicht seltene ruf nach Diktatur zeigt dies ganz deutlich125.

What Strauss objected to Weber’s social science through the backdoor of

Kelsen’s legal positivism is somewhat similar to objection made to Kelsen by Carl

Schmitt. Schmitt claimed that Kelsen’s positivism, by restraining the power of state and

not being able to make a distinction in between the friend and enemy, makes the state an

easy prey for its enemies.126 Of course, we may wonder if Strauss and Schmitt had the

same concept in mind when speaking about the tyrants and enemies.

As Strauss suggests at different places, Weber was deeply rooted in his own

culture and in the Protestant type of Christian ethics. He was also a child of his time,

although an unsatisfied child. It suffices, according to Strauss, to look at Weber’s three

124 For explanation of Kelsen’s legal positivism and his debt to Weber, see David Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen and Herman Heller in Weimar, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 102 – 157, hereafter Legality and Legitimacy. For Kelsen’s opinion on the natural law, see Kelsen, “Natural-Law Doctrine Before the Tribunal of Science“in Shadia B. Drury, ed., Law and Politics: Readings in Legal and Political Thought, p. 251 – 257 (Calgary, Alberta: Detselig Enterprises Ltd, 1980). In essence, Kelsen argues that the natural law presupposes the presence of value in the reality. Hence, according to Kelsen, the natural law is always, more or less, religious in character. The main fallacy of the natural law is it’s attempt to obliterate the difference in between law, which is a realm of science concerned with the Is, and the realm of morality, ethics and politics , which is concerned with the Ought. In Kelsen’s words “Since the metaphysical assumption of the immanence of value in natural reality is not acceptable from the point of view of science, the natural-law doctrine is based on the logical fallacy of an inference from the ‘is’ to the “ought’”, see ibid, p. 255. 125 NRH, p. 4, n. 2. Kelsen’s quote which Strauss uses here is in Kelsen, Algemeine Staatslehre (Berlin 1925), p.335-36. In the same footnote, Strauss notes that since “Kelsen has not changed his attitude toward natural right, I cannot imagine why he has omitted this instructive passage from the English translation (General Theory of Law and State [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949], p. 300),” see ibid. 126 For Carl Schmitt’s critic of Kelsen’s legal positivism see Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy, p. 104 – 123. Also see John P. McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 206 – 248. Hereafter Carl Schmitt’s Critic of Liberalism.

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ideal types of legitimacy (traditional, rational, and charismatic) and to see that “not a

comprehensive reflection on the nature of political society but the experience of two or

three generations hap supplied the basic orientation.”127 More importantly, says Strauss,

Weber’s own methodology affected adversely the content of his thought.128 No matter

how much Weber was concerned with the difference between the natural science and the

historical or cultural sciences, he still based his methodology, according to Strauss, on the

modern natural science, “the new physics.”129 According to McCormick, Carl Schmitt

made the exact same objection to Weber’s method and generally to quantitatively

oriented social science.130 Schmitt complained that “In almost every discussion one can

observe the extent to which the methodology of the natural-technical sciences dominates

contemporary [social science] thinking.”131

Weber, according to Strauss, was aware of the influence of natural sciences on his

own methodology. Weber also suspected that the disenchanted situation of a modern,

man was made possible by the rise of natural science, which promised to render man free

from all the delusions of past. The promised freedom of delusion proved itself just

another delusion, although one that is hard to bear. Nevertheless, Weber concluded that

the irreligion or science (his own faith) has an equivalent legitimacy to religion. He came

to see that the choice for religious or scientific view of the world rests on nothing but a

blind choice. How in practice the choice would look like is to a certain point dictated by

fate, or the mere accident of being born in a time that prefers science to religion or vice

versa.

At this point there is, again, a similarity between Strauss and Carl Schmitt.

According to Howse, what Strauss objected to Weber’s science, Schmitt objected to Hans

Kelsen’s concept of the Grundnorm. In Kelsen’s scientific theory of law the Grundnorm

is the basic norm from which all other legal norms within one legal system derive their

127 NRH, p. 57. Strauss refers to the experience of continental Europe in the post-French revolution era, which is, according to Müller, one of the perennial subjects of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt believed that the liberal neutralization and the demise of the European states and Europe in general started after the French revolution. Schmitt transferred this belief to his two pupil-historians, Reinhart Koselleck and Hanno Kesting. See Jan-Werner Müller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 104-111. 128 NRH, p. 59. 129 Ibid, p. 78. 130 McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, p. 59. 131 Schmitt, quoted in ibid.

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validity. The problem with the Grundnorm is that it cannot be, by definition, derived

from the state system, yet the coherence of all legal and political system rests on it. And

if morality or politics is the realm of value judgments and, therefore, beyond the scientific

interest, then the Grundnorm has no basis in itself. It is the command or decision of

someone’s will, or, we may add, the result of the blind choice or fate, unable to give an

account of itself.132

The religious (or any metaphysically guided) way of life is then decisively equal

to scientific way of life in a sense that both choices, ways of life, cannot give an account

of themselves. This, according to Strauss, is “what Weber had in mind when he said that

science seemed to be unable to give a clear or certain account of itself” and “All

arguments in favor of revelation seem to be valid only if belief in revelation is

presupposed; and all arguments against revelation seem to be valid only if unbelief is

presupposed.”133 Nevertheless, even though choice is blind or dictated by faith, the

choice has to be made if for no other reason than the practical one, for, as Strauss says it,

“man cannot live without light, guidance, knowledge.”134 For this reason, inability of

Weber to adhere to normative system which would not grant legitimacy to every

preference, Strauss labels Weber’s thesis as one that necessarily leads to nihilism.135

However, Strauss also labels it as “noble” and not ordinary nihilism, since it steams out

of “the alleged or real insight into the baseless character of everything thought to be

noble.”136 To break out of this vicious circle would require, according to Strauss, a return

to the world of pre-scientific understanding, the world of common sense. That step which

Weber was obviously not willing to take is the step that Strauss takes by resurrecting the

notion of classical natural right.

132 Robert Howse, “From Legitimacy to Dictatorship – and Back Again: Leo Strauss’s Critique of the Anti-Liberalism of Carl Schmitt” in David Dyzenhaus, ed., Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, p. 57-91 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998). 133 NRH, p. 74-75. 134 Ibid, p. 74. 135 Ibid, p. 42. 136 Ibid, p. 48.

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3.2 Heidegger, Schmitt and Weber as brothers in arms When one compares the above Strauss’s claim regarding Weber’s position to Strauss’s

exegesis of Heidegger’s thought, it is implied that Weber and Heidegger arrived at the

same conclusion, namely the groundlessness of all choices and the imposition of fate

(historical circumstances) upon it, just coming from the different directions. A thought

that Strauss subscribes to Weber (although he adds that Weber did not consistently

adhere to it), “all meaning, all articulation, originates in the activity of knowing or

evaluating subject”137 certainly sounds as Heidegger’s thought. This is way in What is

Political Philosophy and Other Studies Strauss explicitly claims that positivism (term he

often uses for what he understands as a Weberian style value-free and facts oriented

social science) “necessarily transforms itself to historicism.”138

In light of that claim, we can reconsider the possible kinship in the temperament

and direction among Heidegger’s, Schmitt’s, and Weber’s thought. As I argued above,

both Heidegger and Carl Schmitt despaired over what for them were the consequences of

liberalism and technologization of society, namely the disappearance of the seriousness

of life and its conversion to mere entertainment and economics. Both Heidegger and

Schmitt made a turn towards the creation out of nothingness in order to find the way out

of the mechanized, soulless world. In a similar manner, Weber despaired over the

situation of a modern man that finds himself alone in a “disenchanted” world, after all the

past safe guidelines of tradition and religion have lost their meaning. Such a modern man

is consequently compelled to re-construct his own world, albeit he has no guiding light

for doing so, and ultimately everyone is bound to make a blind choice at some point.

Moreover, Weber described the modern economic order in a way that is clearly similar to

Heidegger and Schmitt. For Weber, modern economic order has no internal meaning; it is

a pure instrumental order that turns those to which it was suppose to serve in to servants;

it is an “iron cage.”139

137 Ibid, p. 77. 138 What is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1959), p. 25. 139 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of the Capitalism, trans. Talcot Parsons, intro. Anthony Giddens (London: Unwin Hyman 1989; first pub. 1904-1905), p. 181 – 183.

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Strauss repeats no less than three times that Weber saw two ways out of the

situation which he experienced as a highly problematic, if not a desperate one. “Either a

spiritual renewal (‘wholly new prophets or a powerful renaissance of old thoughts and

ideals’) or else a ‘mechanized petrifaction, varnished by a kind of convulsive sense of

self-importance,’ i.e., the extinction of every human possibility but that of ‘specialists

without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart’.”140 Two ethical systems

correspond to these alternatives, the ethics of intention and the ethics of responsibility.

As Strauss says it, “According to former [ethics of responsibility], mans responsibility

extends to the foreseeable consequences of his actions, whereas, according to the latter

[ethics of intention], man’s responsibility is limited to the intrinsic rightness of his

actions.”141 Strauss continues to explain that Weber believed that these ethics supplement

each other and “both united constitute the genuine human being.”142 However, Strauss

stresses that what Weber really had in mind when speaking of the ethics of the intention

is, in fact, wholly alien to the ethics of this-worldly social and political movements and

actually constitutes a certain interpretation of Christian ethics, strictly otherworldly ethics

of “I stand here, I can do no other” type. It follows, in Strauss’s opinion, that conflict

between the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of intention represents a conflict in

between this-worldly and otherworldly ethic, conflict insoluble by human reason.143

According to David Dyzenhaus, legal and political theories of Hans Kelsen and

Carl Schmitt represent these two different types of Weber’s ethics, albeit constructed in a

mutually exclusive manner. Kelsen adopts the ethics of responsibility by constructing his

system of legal positivism with a goal of constraining the political power of state.

Nevertheless, his ethics of responsibility, following Weber’s Is and Ought distinction,

remains deprived of the political and moral content, for the politics and morals fall into

the categories of value judgments and, hence, remain removed from the interest of

Kelsen’s scientific understanding of legal science. Contrary to this, Schmitt’s legal and

political theory (at least in its fully developed stage) follows ethic of intention

140 NRH, p. 42, p. 49 and p. 74. 141 Ibid, p. 69. Weber presented a speech on two ethics in 1918 under the title “Politics as a Vocation.” See “Politics as a Vocation” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, p. 77-128 (London: Kegan Paul, 1947). 142 NRH, p. 70. 143 Ibid.

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(conviction), arguing for a Volk as a homogenized political unit and a strong and

unconstrained executive power willing to decide and assert its own existence. Schmitt

finds that unrestrained, executive will embodied in a charismatic person.144

Here we may rightly ask if Weber leave the issue solely on that, presenting the

above-sketched ethical alternatives without his own preference. In other words, did the

alleged inability of reason to resolve the conflict of value systems completely paralyzed

Weber? As Strauss comments, for Weber conflict is an unambiguous thing, while the

peace is not. Weber himself always put the word “peace” in quotation marks because for

him universal peace is an illegitimate and fantastic goal, equivalent with the moral

depravity of the “last man.” There is an equally high duty to join “the eternal struggle”

for the “elbow room” for our nation; and while considering our national interest we

should be guided by the warrior ethics for “the most naked Machiavellianism [would

have to be] regarded as a matter of course in every respect, and as wholly unobjectionable

from an ethical point of view.”145 From within Weber’s thesis itself, as Strauss suggests,

extreme political positions are preferable to middle ones for the reason of their

consistency and passion in pursuance of their goal.146 Hence, conflict has assumed the

position of sacredness.

When one takes into account Weber’s ideal type of the charismatic person and, as

Dyzenhaus suggests, his appeal for the leader, charismatic person that would change the

disastrous state of the Weimar Germany we can already see to whom this helped. 147 Put

in to a historical context, it has cleared the way for Hitler. It took the genius, but

troublesome work of Weber’s student Carl Schmitt, the second of his two “legitimate

144 Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy, p. 14. 145 NRH, p. 65. 146 Ibid, p. 67. Very similar opinion regarding Weber’s own political, especially foreign policy, preferences, and his appeal for the charismatic leadership can be found in Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics: 1890 -1920, trans. Michael S. Steinberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). As Mommsen argues in The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber: Collected Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 191-193, when he first published Max Weber and German Politics: 1890-1920 in 1959, the reactions were more than unwelcoming and critical. However, things changed after the 15th German Sociological Congress in Heidelberg in 1964, organized to commemorate the centenary of Max Weber’s birth. At that Congress, Habermas claimed that there is a connection in between Carl Schmitt’s decisionism and Weber’s view of democracy. On views Habermas presented at the Congress, see Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy, p. 236. 147 Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy, p. 12. For Weber’s own thoughts on the relationship between the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of conviction and an appeal for a new leader, see Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” above n. 34.

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sons” (the first being Hans Kelsen), to take one part of Weber’s thoughts to their radical

conclusion. According to Dyzenhaus, Hans Kelsen’s legal positivism, the other part of

Weber’s thought, did not exactly pave the way for National Socialism, but it offered no

resource for legal resistance to it, since Kelsen insisted on the difference between law and

morality.148 We may only wonder what Weber himself would do if he had lived to see

that.149

Of course, Strauss is aware of the shadow of Hitler from the beginning of the

chapter on distinction between facts and values in the Natural Right and History and he

warns not to be turned away by that. What Strauss says about Weber and his (as

understood by Strauss) relationship to National Socialism might as well apply to

Strauss’s relationship with Heidegger and Schmitt. “It does not go without saying that in

our examination we must avoid the fallacy that in the last decades has frequently been

used as a substitute for the reductio ad absurdum; the reductio ad Hitlerum. A view is

not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler.”150 [italics in

original]

This is not a pleasant claim on Weber’s account but, as suggested by Strauss’s

comment above, not particularly troublesome for Strauss himself. Jürgen Habermas,

David Dyzenhaus, and John P. McCormick also claim that the certain parts of Weber’s

thought contributed to the rise of National Socialism through the works of his student

Carl Schmitt. Jürgen Habermas asserts that “Weber’s sociology stripped ‘state authority

148 Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy, p. 5. 149 The discussion of a new leader, charismatic authority, ethics of responsibility, and ethics of conviction was, in the historical context, the discussion on the legal position of a president and his relationship to the parliament in the new, post-Versailles German parliamentary democracy. According to Wolfgang Mommsen, Weber advocated that in a parliamentary democracy (future Weimar Republic) that was to replace the German monarchy, the president should be a counterbalance and should also retain an upper hand in his relationship to it. The president would claim his charismatic authority from his ability to win a popular plebiscitary election, Mommsen, quoted in Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy, p. 13. For an in depth study of Weber’s role, see Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics: 1890 -1920. For different opinions on Weber’s political role, see Dyzenahus, Legality and Legitimacy, p. 13, n. 33. In one of many Weimar Republic constitutional crises, Schmitt and Kelsen engaged in a heated debate regarding the relationship among the president, parliament and constitutional court. Schmitt interpreted the Article 48 of the constitution of the Weimar Republic as authorization to the President to decide in the state of emergency, while Kelsen thought that the Constitutional Court needs to inspect the presuppositions for such a decision and, effectively, almost make that decision itself, see Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy, p. 70-85 and 123-133. As I will argue in the chapter on Strauss’s critic of Locke, Strauss retained Weber’s and Schmitt’s faith in the need for a strong, executive power. 150 NRH, p. 42.

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of its kinship with reason and religion” and that Carl Schmitt is a “legitimate pupil” of

Max Weber.151 As noted above, for David Dyzenhaus, Kelsen and Schmitt represent the

two ethical paths inscribed in Weber’s thought and both Kelsen and Schmitt embrace

either ethics of responsibility or the ethics of intention (conviction) to the exclusion of the

other alternative.152 John P. McCormick also claims that Schmitt has taken parts of

Weber’s thought to their radical conclusion and draws a fascinating parallel with another

famous Weber’s student, Georg Lukacs. It is indeed troublesome to see that both Weber’s

students, Schmitt and Lukacs, have invested their intellectual geniality into the

totalitarian political ideologies, National Socialism and Communism.153 As McCormick

persuasively shows, by the time when both Schmitt and Lukacs understood that they got

involved with irrational political movements, they both tried to point to Weber as an

intellectual source of their mistake.154 The question of Weber’s responsibility,

nevertheless, remains open.

As I have tried to show above, Strauss follows two divergent lines within Weber’s

thought and within Weber’s concept of the fact/value distinction. As for the first line,

Strauss claims that the “ethics of responsibility” together with the “cultural values” leads

to an inability to take a stance against the extreme political movements; moreover, it

makes their victory more probable. Contrary to Weber, Strauss argues that it is

impossible to take a fully neutral stance while judging the facts of the social life and

implicitly advocates social activism and partisanship. Furthermore, Strauss identifies the

“responsible” and “purely scientific” part of Weber’s thought in Hans Kelsen’s legal

positivism. As Dyzenhaus shows, Kelsen’s positivism did not exactly supported National

Socialism, but it made its rise easier by undermining all the legal resources of

resistance.155 But that still has not reached the core of the argument. The main issue is

that although Strauss tries to persuade us that he argues from the perspective of the

natural right and contra tyranny, his critique shares many common points with Carl

151 Habermas, quoted in Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy, p. 236. For the full account of Habermas’ opinion on Carl Schmitt, including Schmitt’s relation to Weber’s thought, see “The Horrors of Autonomy: Carl Schmitt in English” in Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historian’s Debate, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), p. 128-139. 152 Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy, p. 14. 153 McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, p. 31 – 82. 154 Ibid, p. 78. 155 Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy, p. 5.

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Schmitt’s critique of Kelsen’s positivism. Strauss and Schmitt both criticize the

dominance of the natural sciences method and its application to the social science in

Weber’s theory. And while Strauss criticizes Weber’s value-agnosticism for not being

able to take a stance, Schmitt criticizes Kelsen (and implicitly his teacher Weber) for not

being able to make a “decision.” Of course, one could make a counter-argument that the

difference between Strauss and Schmitt lies in a content of stance or “decision”, but

given that Strauss is not quite clear how that stance would look from the perspective of

natural right, the similarity remains, to say at least, suspicious. In spite of this, Strauss

indeed implicitly criticizes Schmitt, by directing his critic against Schmitt’s “legitimate

father” Weber and the second line in his thought, ethics of intention (conviction).

As suggested, the second line of Weber’s theory, his concepts of the “ethics of

conviction”, “charismatic leader”, “vitalistic values” and so on, lead directly to,

according to Strauss, the most radical extremism. This kind of extremism was for Strauss,

moreover, Weber’s own preference. For Strauss, the trouble with this kind of extremism

is not that it is extreme, but it is extreme in a most sinister manner. It is irrational and, so

to say, base and situation-minded and completely oblivious of any restraints when

choosing its goals. The greatest trouble is, that while oblivious and irrational when

choosing goals, it is completely rational in the process of their accomplishment, that is, in

choosing means for achieving goals. It is a sort of “scientific lunacy.”

3.3 Applying the Weimar lessons in America

One could make a case that Weber’s value-free social science did perhaps contribute to

the rise of National Socialism only because of the social and political deficiencies of the

Weimar Republic and not because such a science is inherently inclined to do so.

Nevertheless, Strauss remained deeply convinced in the basic deficiency and inability of

the quantitatively oriented social science to resolve social problems. Moreover, as Nasser

Behnegar persuasively shows, until the end of his life in the United States, Strauss

remained committed to criticizing, in his days prevailing, quantitative political science.156

156 Behnegar, p. 141 – 147.

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In 1962, in “An Epilogue”, part of the collection of essays written by Strauss and

his students, Strauss very critically addressed “the new political science” (behavioral and

positivistic political science).157 He accused “the new political science” for applying the

value free analysis and not being able to affirm the existence of the hierarchy of values,

and, consequently, the fundamental superiority of the liberal democracy over other

political systems.158 Value free analysis, for Strauss, undermines the resistance and

makes the victory of enemies (Communism at the time) more probable. He believed that

the inability of such a “new political science” to defend liberal democracy against its

enemies is an evidence of its failure and a sign of the crisis of liberal democracy. Of

course, this is a continuation of Strauss’s negative opinion about the value-free social

science, along the lines presented in the above discussion. It is a reminiscent of his deep

conviction that liberal democracy, if not properly guarded, ends up in fascism, as Strauss

believes it was the case in the Weimar Republic. In Strauss’s words:

Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic: it has no attributes peculiar to fallen angels. It is not even Machiavellian, for Machiavelli’s teaching was graceful, subtle, and colorful. Nor is it Neronian. Nevertheless, one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.159

As stated in the chapter on Heidegger, Strauss, following Nietzsche, considered

religion to be the cure for masses and the ultimate glue for the societal cohesion. The

Cold War political climate, with is insistence on opposition to the atheistic Communism,

has made it easier for him to object to “the new political science” that it “rests on a

dogmatic atheism which presents itself as merely methodological or hypothetical.”160 In

other words, Strauss objected that the role of religion in a public sphere is disregarded by

the social science, since the religion is treated as a mere private hypothesis. Moreover,

according to Strauss, “the new political science” insists on liberal relativism and denies

the concept of the common good, since it treats all opinions as equal without the regard

157 I am referring to reprint of “An Epilogue” in Political Philosophy: Six Essays by Leo Strauss, edited with an introduction by Hilail Gildin, (Indianapolis, New York: Pegasus, 1975), p. 99-130. 158 Ibid,p. 128 – 129. 159 Ibid, p. 129. 160 Ibid, p. 122.

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for the public interest.161 Strauss’s essay implies that the social science should serve in a

public or national interest. He stops just one step short of recommending to social science

to think in advance of all the consequences of its conclusions, that is, before making it

public. This also serves as evidence that Strauss regarded the truth as a matter that should

not be carelessly spread among masses, who would then supposedly loose their minds

and start the destruction games, as Strauss’s interpretation of Weimar goes. Religion,

then, comes as a handy and noble delusion.

Needless to say, above comments did not made Strauss particularly popular

among his colleagues. However, after Strauss’s death in 1973, he left behind him a

number of devoted students and adherents and thoroughly changed the position of

political philosophy as an academic discipline in North-American universities. Political

philosophy, before Strauss considered being the low-rated subfield of political science

and not so important historical discipline, after his death became exactly what he would

want it to be. It became the way of living. As Robert Devigne shows, Strauss’s writings

and his students’ academic and governmental work have reshaped the conservatism in the

United States.162 New conservatism, sometimes suspected as un-American, gained new

meaning, by orienting itself towards “values” and the critic of “unrestrained liberalism”,

especially during the Vietnam War.

Strauss’s adherents took up his attitude towards the social science and the role of

religion in the society. I have already showed Strauss’s opinion of the societal role of

religion. However, it is not altogether clear what, for Strauss, should take the place of the

ethically neutral social science research. It seems to me that Strauss succeeds more in

criticizing the practical consequences of such a science than in proving persuasively that

such a science is altogether wrong. What should be the substitute? Should the

government control the social science, so it directs itself purely towards the strengthening

of the “values” or convictions of a given society? If so, what remains of the academic

freedom? In short, is the social science supposed to be the servant of national interest?

Naturally, I cannot give an answer to these questions here. I can only say that an allusion

to such a position of the social science in a society does not speak highly of the one who

161 Ibid, p. 123-124. 162 Robert Devigne, Recasting Conservatism: Oakeshott, Strauss and the Response to Postmodernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 36 – 77.

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alludes, no matter how noble his intentions are. Nor it would speak highly of the society

that would accept the allusion. Both the society and the one that alludes do not, then, play

by the rules established by the democracy.

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4. Thomas Hobbes, or on the foundation of liberalism As I have already noted in the chapter on Heidegger’s existentialism, in “Commentary on

The Concept of the Political,” written in 1932, although he shared most of Schmitt’s

views on liberalism, Strauss radicalized Schmitt’s already radical notion of the concept of

the political that presupposes the concept of the state. Moreover, Strauss points out that

Schmitt, although trying to engage and challenge liberalism, nevertheless remains within

the playfield of the liberalism. It is constrained by its assumptions, which, according to

Strauss, Schmitt takes upon on their face value. Strauss also indicates the need for

reaching to the “horizon beyond liberalism” that is possible only on a basis of the proper

understanding of the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, which is the one who made the

radical turn from the classical to modern natural right and by so radically reoriented the

direction of history. In this chapter, I try to prove that in 1953, Strauss still did not find

the way to fully reject Schmitt’s influence on him, even after the immigration and the end

of the WWII, when all the consequences of the political engagement of his Weimar

friend and teacher Carl Schmitt were made public.

* * * In Natural Right and History, Strauss describes Hobbes as the one who stands in

between Locke and the Anglican divine Richard Hooker. Hobbes is the one who draws

all the consequences from the rise of modern natural science. According to Strauss, to

understand Locke and the turn from the classical to modern natural right one has to turn

to Hobbes, “that imprudent, impish, and iconoclastic extremist, that first plebeian

philosopher, who is so enjoyable writer because of his almost boyish straightforwardness,

his never failing humanity, and his marvelous clarity and force.”163

In Strauss’s view, Hobbes, self-regarded as the founder of the political

philosophy or political science, knew from the beginning the basics of the classical

tradition against which he was rebelling, albeit he tacitly took some of the premises of

that very tradition and transformed them. The classics (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero,

163 Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 166, hereafter NRH. All unnamed references are works by Leo Strauss. On the natural law teaching of Richard Hooker, see Ross Harrison, Hobbes, Locke, and Confusions Masterpiece (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 33-38

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Seneca, Tacitus, and Plutarch) distinguished and preferred nobility and justice, the good,

to pleasure; and asserted the existence of the natural right and the naturally best order as

distinguished and independent of human conviction.164 But for Hobbes himself, all this

was too idealistic. However, he did not, for that reason, rejected the classical view

altogether, but he tried to succeed where the Socratic tradition has failed. Hobbes did this,

according to Strauss, in two ways, by means of the political hedonism and the political

atheism.165 Firstly, Hobbes’s political hedonism consists in the following: he denied the

traditional assumption of the classics that held that, by nature, human being is a political

or social animal, that is to say, Hobbes denied to human beings their natural sociality.

Contrary to the classics, Hobbes regarded human beings as apolitical or asocial animals.

Following this, Hobbes could also deny that a good is distinguishable from the pleasure,

or, in other words, Hobbes claimed that the good and the pleasant are identical.166

Secondly, Hobbes rebelled against the notion that the universe is intelligible and parted

with the already present tradition of the extreme skepticism. Using the method of the then

new natural science, Hobbes withdrew the intelligibility from the universe and gave it to

human beings. From then on, a man is a stranger in the cosmos and could understand

only what he makes and is, therefore, free to construct. Hence, Hobbes political atheism

consists in a claim that the nature is unintelligible and there are no knowable limits to the

conquest of nature.167 Strauss comments that, despite all of the above, “what is certain is

that man’s natural state is misery; the vision of the City of Man to be erected on the ruins

of the City of God is an unsupported hope.”168 This suggestion implies that Hobbes was

also rebelling against the conservatism of Christianity of his days. According to Strauss,

the classical tradition of natural right lived under the aegis of the Christianized natural

law teaching.169 Nevertheless, it seems that Strauss also suggests that Hobbes merely

secularized the very teaching against which he was rebelling.

164 NRH, p. 167. 165 Ibid, p. 169. 166 Ibid, p. 168-169. 167 Ibid, p. 170-175. For another interpretation of Strauss’s claims on Hobbes’s political hedonism and political atheism and generally on Strauss’s description of Hobbes, see Shadia B. Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (MacMillan Press, 1988), p. 133-150. 168 NRH, p. 175. 169 Ibid, p. 163-164.

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At this point Strauss makes a claim that is perhaps the most important addition to

his “Commentary on The Concept of the Political.” Strauss claims Machiavelli is the one

which laid the foundations on which Hobbes is building his concept of the natural law.

Hobbes, according to Strauss, accepted Machiavelli’s premises, but not his conclusions.

The major difference in between Machiavelli and Hobbes is that the latter oriented

himself towards the exceptional cases and on that ground based the concepts of the civic

virtue and the statesmanship, while the former one oriented towards normalcy and the

self-preservation of individual.

The fact that Strauss claims that Machiavelli oriented himself towards the

exception reminds us that Carl Schmitt did the same. As Robert Howse suggests, Strauss

only later understood Machiavelli’s importance for both Hobbes and Schmitt, and that

was due to Strauss’s newly adopted orientation toward the classical natural right. Howse

also suggests that the reason why Strauss did not name Schmitt explicitly was the

prevalent political climate of McCarthyism that prevented prejudice-free academic

discussion at the time when Strauss wrote Natural Right and History.170

According to Strauss, Machiavelli limited the vision of the classical political

philosophy in order to achieve practical goals. In opposition to classics, Machiavelli

started not from how man ought to live (as classics did), but from how man actually lives.

Furthermore, Machiavelli claimed that human beings are evil and that there is no

superhuman or natural support for the existence of justice. Because men are evil, the

beginning of the civil society is a crime, fratricide, as the founding of Rome shows.

Therefore, the exception, the state of emergency, is the representative of the true nature

of the civil society and the basic order of things. However, Strauss explicitly criticizes

Machiavelli’s opinion and therefore also implicitly Carl Schmitt’s inclination toward the

exception because it led “to the substitution of patriotism or merely political virtue for

human excellence, or, more particularly, for moral virtue and the contemplative life.”171

Strauss also says that in case of Machiavelli and Schmitt “the root of the efficient cause

170 Robert Howse, “From Legitimacy to Dictatorship – and Back Again: Leo Strauss’s Critique of the Anti-Liberalism of Carl Schmitt” in David Dyzenhaus, ed., Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, p. 57-91 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998). 171 NRH, p. 178.

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takes place of the end or of the purpose.”172 In other words, from the perspective of the

classical natural right, we are then oriented not toward the perfection, but towards

imperfection. Strauss implies the further connection in between Machiavelli’s love for

exception and the praise of political virtue as the virtue and Schmitt’s politics. According

to Strauss, the German historical thought of the nineteenth century (with which Schmitt

shares some important common beliefs) has recovered Machiavelli’s notion of

statesmanship. The consequence of this, however, was that during the process historical

thought destroyed “all moral principles of politics.”173 That this claim of Strauss is

directed toward Carl Schmitt can be proven, according to Robert Howse. Howse refers to

Schmitt’s own appraisal of Fichte and Hegel, which rehabilitated Machiavelli in the

nineteenth century in order to defend German people against an enemy Napoleon, which

was, similarly to Wilsonian liberalism against which Schmitt is rebelling, armed with a

humanitarian ideology.174 For Strauss, this revival was a moral backlash exemplified in

the school of thought known as “the reason of state”. Moral backlash consists in the

reason of state school insistence on the efficiency and realism rather then on the classical

ideals of human perfection made possible in the best regime. In Strauss words, “‘reason

of state’ school replaced ‘the best regime’ by ‘efficient government’.”175

Now that we have sketched Strauss’s description and critic of Machiavelli and

Schmitt, we may return to Hobbes. As stated above, Hobbes, according to Strauss,

accepted Machiavelli’s premises but rejected his conclusion. Hobbes’s different

conclusion, however, makes Strauss no less critical toward him. The presumption which

Machiavelli and Hobbes agreed on is man’s evilness or a sociality. Machiavelli’s

conclusion or, rather, call for the unrestrained political virtue with all its brutalities,

sufferings and sacrifices in the name of the state, “Machiavelli’s admiration for the lupine

policies of republican Rome”, motivated Hobbes to restore moral principles or the

concept of natural law, albeit in a new, scientific manner.176 In contrast to the classical

natural right, Hobbes started not from the man’s ends, but from its beginnings and found

the basis for his modern concept of the natural right in the natural right of self- 172 Ibid, p. 178 – 179. 173 Ibid, p. 192. 174 Howse, above n. 8, p. 68. 175 NRH, p. 191. 176 Ibid, p. 179.

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preservation. The guiding light for Hobbes, according to Strauss, was not merely reason,

but reason working in cooperation with passions, or, specifically, the strongest of all

passions, “the fear of violent death at the hands of others.”177 Classical natural right

inclination towards mans perfection, moreover natural duty to achieve perfection, was

changed in to an inclination towards natural right to self-preservation.

The concept of the state, according to Strauss, was profoundly transformed by this

change in orientation. The function of the state is no longer a promotion or production of

virtues or virtuous life. Instead, the safeguarding of the natural right of self-preservation

is called for. This safeguarding is the only absolute limit to the power of state. This

change in the concept of the state led to a birth of liberalism. In Strauss’s words, “If we

may call liberalism that political doctrine which regards as the fundamental political fact

the rights, as distinguished from the duties of man, and which identifies the function of

the state with the protection or the safeguarding of those rights, we must say that the

founder of liberalism was Hobbes.”178 Hence, in the way that Strauss portrays Hobbes’s

development, Hobbes started from the extreme skepticism, combined it with the scientific

method and the prejudice against the teleological concept of the universe and founded

liberalism. It is indicative that for Strauss extreme skepticism (read liberalism) “was then

guided by the anticipation of a new type of dogmatism.”179 The idea that everybody, no

matter how foolish, should be a judge of what is required for his or her self-preservation

or what is just, Strauss calls “the natural right of folly.”180

All Hobbes’s efforts were, according to Strauss, motivated by realism, a need to

replace the classical natural right conception of the order (state) based on man’s duties,

whose actualization is highly improbable and utopian, with the modern natural right

concept of order which is based in man’s rights and whose actualization is, then, almost

certain. For the appeal to rights common to all is bound to have a warm and welcoming

177 Ibid, p. 180. 178 Ibid, p. 181-182. 179 Ibid, p. 171. 180 Ibid, p. 186. Richard Tuck argues against Strauss’s depiction of Hobbes as „the demon of modernity“. Tuck recognizes that Strauss has made important insights in to Hobbes’s moral and political philosophy and his relationship with natural science. The reason why, according to Tuck, Strauss depicts Hobbes as „the demon of modernity“ is Strauss’s fanciful reading of the ancient writers rather than Strauss’s reading of Hobbes. See Richard Tuck, “Hobbes as the demon of modernity“ in Great Political Thinkers, p. 214-217 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

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reception among many, since it promises incentives for its embracement, while the case

is quite contrary with an appeal to duties without incentives. The appeal to many, no

matter how vulgar, and the promise of incentives explains, according to Strauss, that

“during the modern period natural law became much more of a revolutionary force that it

had been in the past.” Moreover, the requirement for the effectiveness of the modern

natural right is “enlightenment or propaganda rather than moral appeal.”181

4.1 Consequences of Hobbes’ Liberalism Because of this Hobbes’s turn toward the individual and its right to self-preservation as a

new center of the natural law, several important consequences took place, according to

Strauss. For the purpose of this study, four are important: new concept of the “state of

nature” as the basis of the natural law; doctrine of sovereignty and the notion of the

“commodious living”; legal positivism and the new concept of justice; and the

institutionalization as the basis of the good governance. To a certain degree, all these

consequences are interconnected and I will explain each of them in turn.

It is only after Hobbes, according to Strauss, that the doctrine of natural law has in

essence became the doctrine of the “state of nature.” It was necessary for Hobbes to claim

that the state of nature antedating civil society is the brutish condition of the fight for

survival, where everyone is a law on to himself. It is a state of perpetual war for survival

where everybody is everybody else’s enemy, or the state of the “homo homini lupus.”

The human reason leads the man to conclude that the orderly state of things is preferable

to the disorderly and brutish state of nature, since it is easier to save one’s own life if

everybody subjects themselves to one sovereign that will have a duty to preserve a peace

among the individuals. Strauss notices that if Hobbes’s state of nature is present

everywhere and people are, by virtue of reason, led to replace it by the state of peace, one

could ask why the state of peace is not present everywhere, since it is supposed to emerge

naturally. Hobbes explains this as an interference of human stupidity in a natural order.

Contrary to Hobbes, for Strauss it is obvious that “The right social order does not

normally come about by natural necessity on account of man’s ignorance of that order.

181 NRH, p. 183.

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The ‘invisible hand’ remains ineffectual if it is not supported by the Leviathan or, if you

wish, by the Wealth of Nations.”182 Another reason that Strauss gives for Hobbes’s state

of nature concept not being overcome everywhere is because, according to Strauss,

Hobbes’s concept of the state of nature is but a secularized Christian concept of the state

of grace, hence concept not evident to a pure human reason that does not accept fate.

Essentially, Hobbes replaced the divine grace with the good government.183

Based on the supposed brutish state of nature Hobbes was able to build his

doctrine of sovereignty. The sovereign then becomes the one that preserves peace in the

society and elevates it from the brutish state of nature. Sovereign bases its claim to

governance and preservation of social peace in a social contract to which every individual

adheres to ones that it has become a member of the society. In other words, individuals

surrender to the sovereign their own right to self-preservation. However, Hobbes,

according to Strauss, did not stop at this. Opposing the classical, Epicurean tradition of

the “ascetic hedonism”, according to which nature has given to a man only needful

things, driven by the hedonism and the belief in the power of science to conquest and

change nature, Hobbes claimed that there are no purely natural wants. Hobbes claimed

that all wants are legitimate as long as they are pleasant, with exception of one, namely

the want to disturb the peace. From there on, the function of state is not only to preserve

the peace and the self-preservation of individuals, but also to make their pleasurable

living possible, to secure “commodious living.” And since sovereign is the result of the

contract among individuals, the machine that is supposed to guard pleasurable existence

of individuals, the sovereign may do only that to which individuals have consented to. In

opposition to the classical natural right, in Hobbes’s modern natural right, consent takes

precedence over wisdom. The doctrine of sovereignty then becomes a legal doctrine and

the natural law transforms itself in to a natural public law. As Machiavelli insisted to

replace the “best regime” with the “efficient government”, Hobbes’s natural public law

substituted “‘best regime’ with the ‘legitimate government’.”184

A logical consequence of Hobbes’s doctrine of the state of nature and the doctrine

of sovereignty is the legal positivism, according to Strauss. Since everybody’s natural

182 Ibid, p. 200-201. 183 Ibid, p. 184. 184 Ibid, p. 191.

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right to self – preservation is transferred to a sovereign which, in turn, creates laws that

are suppose to guard that very right, there is no reason anymore to oppose the legal norms

enacted by the sovereign, since these norms are based in the supposed consent of

individuals. The positivist legal position, according to Jean Hampton, understands law as

dependable on sovereign’s will.185 This is the reason why, according to Jean Hampton,

Hobbes is frequently regarded as absolutist, since when this Hobbes’s legal theory is

taken to its logical conclusion, individuals cannot oppose any decision made by

sovereign, since the sovereign’s will is presumably the will of everybody.186

We may then conclude that Hobbes opposed the traditional position of natural law

as defined by Thomas Aquinas, according to which for a law to be proper law, it needs to

be just and known by human reason. The mere fact that the sovereign commands the law

does not suffice.187 Again, according to Strauss, Hobbes motivation for this was his

realism and scientific approach and, as Strauss implies, the rebellion against the

traditional, conservative Christian natural law teaching. Hobbes wanted the legal system

to endow all the individuals for their entrance in to the social contract and the creation of

sovereign, and not just to appeal to the idealistic moral virtue, in a way that classics of

natural right, Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas did. To strengthen his endowment of the

individuals, and in consistence with his claim that the good and pleasant are equal and

that the function of the state is to preserve the “commodious living”, Hobbes also had to

transform the classical notion of justice. According to Strauss, while for Aristotle the

justice was a virtue of serving others, for Hobbes justice is “equivalent to fulfilling ones

contracts.”188

185 Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 107. Hobbes’s definition of law is following “I define Civill Law in this manner. CIVILL LAW, Is to every subject, those Rules, which the Common-wealth hath Commanded him, by Word, Writing, or other sufficient Sign of the Will, to make use of, for the Distinction of Right, and Wrong; that is to say, of what is contrary, and what is not contrary to the Rule.” [italics and capital letters in original] Hobbes quoted in ibid. For M.M. Goldsmith, there is a difference between Hobbes’s and Kelsen’s legal positivism. In case of Hobbes, final authority is the sovereign, beyond which there is no appeal In the case of Kelsen, the final authority is the Grundnorm which validity is presupposed. See M.M. Goldsmith, “Hobbes on law” in Tom, Sorrel, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes, p. 274-304 (Cambridge University Press, 1996). 186 On the absolute sovereignty in Hobbes’s work see Hampton, 98 – 104. On the legal positivism as a result of Hobbes’s concept of the absolute sovereignty, see ibid, p. 107 – 110. 187 Thomas Aquinas quoted in Hampton, p. 107. 188 NRH, p. 187.

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If human beings are regarded as asocial or evil and are led by reason to install the

sovereign, Leviathan, which is to preserve peace and “commodious living”, the task of

sovereign is to enforce laws in order to achieve these goals. The primary task of the

government so constructed ceases to be the education of character or the creation of

virtuous citizens. Since self-interest and the need to satisfy there infinite wants is the

individuals primary motive, private vices will become public benefits only trough the

institutionalization of government. For classics (Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, etc),

institutionalization was only secondary in “comparison with ‘education’, i.e. formation of

character.”189 Strauss identifies this orientation towards the institutionalization also in

Kant’s philosophy. “As Kant put it in rejecting the view that the establishment of the

right social order requires a nation of angles: ‘Hard as it may sound, the problem of

establishing the state [i.e. the right social order] is soluble even for a nation of devils

provided they have sense,’ i.e. provided that they are guided by enlightened

selfishness.”190

4.2 Objections to Hobbes and liberalism Apart from more abstract objections for deviating from the classical natural right, Strauss

files two other concrete objections to Hobbes. Hobbes himself noted one of Strauss’s

objections and made serious attempt to overcome it. Both objections are very similar to

the ones Carl Schmitt directed towards liberalism, and as we have seen, Strauss identifies

Hobbes (with the addition of Machiavelli) as the founder of liberalism.

The first objection, the one that according to Strauss Hobbes made every effort to

overcome, we may call “competing fear.” Strauss describes this by quoting two passages

from the Leviathan. ”In the first passage Hobbes says that the fear of the power of man

(i.e., the fear of violent death) is ‘commonly’ greater than the fear of the power of ‘spirits

invisible,’ i.e., than religion. In the second passage he says that ‘the fear of darkness and

ghosts is greater than other fears.’”191 Hobbes then came to see that the only way to

salvage his project against the competing fear of invisible powers which endanger the 189 Ibid, p. 193. 190 Ibid. 191 Ibid, p. 198.

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purpose of his project, peaceful and commodious living, was to weaken or eliminate that

fear, or, more precisely speaking, to establish a “a-religious or atheistic society as the

solution of the social or political problem.”192 Hence, according to Strauss, enlightenment

then becomes propaganda against the religious beliefs or the tyranny of reason over other,

traditionally held beliefs.

The second objection that Strauss makes to Hobbes was already made in the 17th

century, according to Jean Hampton, when Hobbes’s Leviathan was identified as a

“rebels catechism.”193 For although it seems that the sovereign as constructed in

Hobbes’s Leviathan is an absolute ruler, the reservation against sovereign, virtually knife

in the back, is already present in the very bases of social contract that made sovereign’s

rule possible. Sovereign can demand obedience from ones that he protects as long as

sovereign’s demands do not endanger the natural right of self-preservation, the basis of

the social contract. Hence, sovereign cannot demand from the ruled ones to surrender

their lives in the war or subject themselves to the capital punishment. Strauss notes this

and says, “by granting this, he [Hobbes] destroyed the moral basis of national defense.

The only solution which preserves the spirit of Hobbes’s political philosophy is the

outlawry of war or the establishment of a world state.”194 Moreover, Strauss suggests that

Hobbes rejected the ambition and avarice as vices. Hobbes supported this asserting that

the virtuous, peaceful, and “commodious living” will come true because of scientific

ethics and the exercise of it in the conquest of nature. By doing this, Hobbes undermined

the basis of the greatness of state and effectively proclaimed the statesmanship

undesirable.195

I have above described how Strauss objected to Machiavelli and implicitly to

Schmitt that their notion of statesmanship and “effective government” is deprived of any

moral substance. However, as shown, Strauss does not fully reject Machiavelli’s and

Schmitt’s concept of statesmanship, as he leads us to believe earlier, but he is supposedly

192 Ibid. 193 Hampton, p. 197 – 207. 194 NRH, p. 197-198. 195 Ibid, p. 192 and 199. Hampton agrees with Strauss in this respect. It is interesting to note, and Strauss must have been aware of this, that Hobbes, according to Hampton, depicted the desire for honor as a cause of the continual warfare by using examples from German history, see Hampton, p. 66.

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trying to qualify it with his concept of the classical natural right.196 While interpreting

Aristotle’s teaching on infinitely mutable natural right, Strauss gives following

explanation. “When speaking of natural right, Aristotle does not primarily think of any

general propositions but rather of concrete decisions [sic].”197 As situations in practical

life are infinitely mutable, so are decisions, and no a priori rules that would be valid in all

situations can be given. This, according to Strauss, is especially visible in the case of

emergency and war. We can say that Schmitt’s fascination with exception, emergency,

and war retained magical influence on Strauss. In those cases, Strauss says, “the public

safety is the highest law,” and it is justified to suspend certain rules of natural right (this

is an obvious contradiction, since Strauss already claimed that that are no a priori

assignable rules).198 Suspension may apply to both foreign and domestic enemies. In

Strauss’s words, “Considerations which apply to foreign enemies may well apply to

subversive elements within society.”199 Furthermore, Strauss again tries to prove that

there is a difference between his Aristotelian natural right and Machiavellianism (or

Schmittianism), by saying that the Aristotelian statesman is oriented towards normalcy,

while Machiavellian (Schmittian) one is oriented towards exception and war and even

derives pleasure from that. But Strauss himself admits that he cannot fully explain the

difference and we may rightly ask if there is any essential difference. As he says, “No

legal expression of this difference can be found. Its political importance is obvious. The

two opposite extremes, which at present are called ‘cynicism’ and ‘idealism,’ combine in

order to blur this difference. And, as everyone can see, they have not been

unsuccessful.”200 Schmitt’s political engagement, then, is to blame for the bad reputation

of the theoretically correct view.

196 NRH, p. 120-164. In his work devoted solely to Machiavelli, Strauss calls him “the teacher of evil,”see Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 9. As Steven Dworetz argues, for Strauss, Machiavelli and Locke (and I would add Hobbes) are partners in crime, the contributors to the same pathology in Strauss’s history of political philosophy, in contrast to J. G. A. Pocock, for whom Machiavelli is a hero, an embodiment of civic humanistic ideals and the republican virtue. See Steven M. Dworetz, The Unvarnished Doctrine: Locke, Liberalism and the American Revolution (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1990), p. 102. For Pocock’s views on Machiavelli, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton University Press, 1975). For the interpretation of Strauss’s view of Machiavelli, see Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, p. 114-132. 197 NRH, p. 159. 198 Ibid, p. 161. 199 Ibid, p. 160. 200 Ibid, p. 162.

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4.3 United again The objections that Strauss makes to Hobbes, which he regards as the founder of the

liberalism, are, in essence, the objections Carl Schmitt makes to liberalism. In Roman

Catholicism and Political Form, early Schmitt, clearly resonating Nietzsche’s language

and opinion, identifies, according to McCormick, technology as un-Christian or at least

anti-Catholic, an attempt to undermine the value of fate.201 Since Schmitt considers

technology and liberalism as interconnected, if they are not the two sides of the same

coin, we can safely say that indeed for Schmitt it is liberalism that is trying to expel the

religious out from the public and in to the private sphere. However, Schmitt’s critic of the

liberalism would become even more virulent after his break with the Catholic Church in

the mid-twenties.202 In Schmitt’s early writings, then, the effective force able to resist the

poisonous influence of the liberalism and technology was the faith. For late Schmitt

writing in the Concept of the Political (it seems to me that the Political Theology stands

in the mid-ground between these two positions), that force is the romanticized politics.

Romanticized politics is at the same time secularized theological concept and a highest

form of existence that takes the place of faith. Recall that Strauss noted that Hobbes

exchanged the state of grace for the government that will provide the salvation.

Understood like this, Schmitt shares with Hobbes more than it appears at the first sight.

As I argued above, Strauss complains that Hobbes undermined the basis of the

national defense by granting to the individuals the natural right to self-preservation.

Moreover, Strauss asserts that the peace for Hobbes is the only virtue; the ambition and

statesmanship are superfluous and damaging. Schmitt claims essentially the same thing in

somewhat different terms, as argued previously. Schmitt accepts Hobbes’s claims about

man’s evilness; he also admits that the basis of the state is fear, the ever present fear of

the return in to the brutish state of nature; and he accepts the correspondent need for the

201 John P. McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 87, hereafter Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism. See Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Westport: Greenwood, 1996). 202 According to Müller, Schmitt was excommunicated from the Catholic Church after his divorce and remarriage, see Jan-Werner Müller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 19.

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absolute sovereign203. Nevertheless, Schmitt tries to disqualify Hobbes’s major claim that

says the individuals in order to secure their right to self-preservation can disobey the

sovereign’s command. For Schmitt, admittance of this right would make the return of the

state of nature or the civil war even more probable. Hence, Schmitt, according to

McCormick, demands from the citizens of the Weimar Republic the absolute obedience

to the sovereign, which he thoroughly romanticized along the lines of Weber’s ideal type

of “charismatic person”, forgetting at the same time that that for Hobbes sovereign is an

artificial person. For Schmitt, virtually the sacrifice of the individual on the altar of state

is the one thing needed. Just as Strauss argues that the idea that everybody is the judge of

what is required for ones own self-preservation, or what is just, is “the natural right of

folly”, Schmitt demands from individuals to, as McCormick says it, transfer their

“illegitimately exercised subjectivity regarding friend and enemy to the sovereign

state.”204 To be sure, for Schmitt the friend-enemy distinction is the existential decision

equivalent to the decision on self-preservation. “Protego ergo obligo” is for Schmitt the

“cogito ergo sum of the state” and all the qualifications to this are weakening the strength

of state.205 McCormick argues that Schmitt intended to end a competition among group

and individual interests that, according to Schmitt, rendered Weimar Republic weak and

he felt compelled to claim that the state solely decides on external and internal enemy,

and not the individuals or groups and their split loyalties.206 For Schmitt, no individual

interest or group identity should come before the loyalty to the state. Resemblance to

Strauss’s Aristotelian natural right of state to suspend the “rules” in order to deal with the

external and internal enemies is obvious.

Since Hobbes undermined the power of sovereign by his insistence on the

individual natural right of self-preservation, for Strauss, as I have stated above, there are

only two solutions if Hobbes’s concept of the state and the corresponding individual

liberalism is to survive. “The only solution which preserves the spirit of Hobbes’s

political philosophy is the outlawry of war or the establishment of a world state”207 and,

203 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. and intro. George Schwab, with comments on Schmitt’s essay by Leo Strauss (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers, 1976), p. 52. 204 McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, p. 257. 205 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 52 206 McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, p. 257. 207 NRH, p. 197-198.

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in context, Strauss regards both solutions as negative. It is implied in Strauss’s statement

that this solution is necessary because the arena of international relations remains the

“state of nature.” Hence, Strauss tacitly accepts Schmitt’s elevation of Hobbes’s war of

individuals to a level of the war of nations. The expression “outlawry of war” implies

supranational order, and this implication bears uncanny resemblances to both

Heidegger’s glorification of Germany’s 1933 withdrawal from the League of Nations,

towards which Schmitt already had a hostile stance. For Heidegger, the withdrawal was

the assertion of German Dasein and uniqueness, while Schmitt throughout his book The

Concept of the Political laments that the liberal forces and the League of Nations want to

undermine the sovereignty, under the disguise of international pacifism.208 The second

expression, the world state, implies that the only just war is then the Wilsonian war to end

all wars. The making of the world state based on liberal principles is for Heidegger,

Schmitt and Strauss ultimate horror. As I stated above, Strauss explains what that means

for Heidegger, and now we may safely say for Strauss himself. “It means… the victory of

an even more completely urbanized, even more completely technological West over the

whole planet – complete leveling and uniformity regardless of whether it is brought about

by iron compulsion or by soapy advertisement of the output of the mass production. It

means unity of the human race on the lowest level, complete emptiness of life…; nothing

but work and recreation; no individuals and no peoples, but instead ‘lonely crowds’.”209

Schmitt also objects that the liberalism undermines his beloved concept of the political by

depriving a life of its seriousness and subsuming it to mere economics and

entertainment.210

In sum, for Heidegger, Schmitt, and Strauss, the world state represents the

inglorious Hegelian end of the Western history, the kingdom of Nietzsche’s “last man”

entertaining himself while living in Weber’s “iron cage” of the modern economic order.

Francis Fukuyama, distant disciple of Leo Strauss, in his book The End of the History

208 Heidegger’s speech welcoming Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations in Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy, p. 49-51 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). For Schmitt’s view of the League of Nations, see The Concept of the Political, p. 55-56. 209 The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss, selected and introduced by Thomas L. Pangle, (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1989), p.42. Hereafter RCPR. 210 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 53.

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and the Last Man eloquently describes the state of the world after the fall of Communism

clearly along the lines drawn above.211

Heidegger seeks refuge from this purportedly terrible state of things in the myth

of Volk and unique national character to which individuals should succumb in order to

assert their own existence, existence that would otherwise be, according to him,

meaningless. While Schmitt concurs in this part with Heidegger, he takes a step further

and mystifies the state, a representative of the homogenous unit of people, which has a

right to ask the individuals to sacrifice their lives on its altar. According to Müller, in his

post-WWII writings, Schmitt continued, probably following Nietzsche’s appeal for the

united Europe ruled by the new aristocratic elite, to work on jus publicum Europeaum

and the theories of international relations212.

Neither Schmitt nor Strauss ever claims that the coming of world state is

impossible.213 To the contrary, they both concur insofar that such a world state could

come true because it is based on an appeal to self-interest, an appeal that is

understandable to all irregardless of class, religion, nation or culture. They nevertheless

agree on the undesirability of such a state. Schmitt seeks a way to change the coming of

such a future along the lines I just suggested above. Somewhat similarly, Strauss finds

reasons for hope and the point of resistance to a liberal, world state in two pillars, culture

and religion, both understood by Strauss as interconnected. In his own words:

How can there be hope? Fundamentally, because there is something in man which cannot be satisfied by the world society: the desire for the genuine, for the noble, for the great. … We may also say: a world society can be human only if there is a world culture, a culture genuinely uniting all man. But there has never has been a high culture without a religious basis: the world society can be human only if all men are genuinely united

211 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, (New York: Free Press, 1992). Fukuyama, once an intellectual flag of the neoconservatives, was a PhD student of the one of the most famous Strauss’s students, Allan Bloom, author of Closing of an American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). Theoretically, the way I see it, Fukuyama draws heavily on the ideas developed in Leo Strauss’s On Tyranny, especially on the dialogue in between Leo Strauss and Alexander Kojeve, see On Tyranny, Revised and expanded edition, including the Strauss-Kojeve Correspondence, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (New York: Free Press, 1991). Kojeve was a famous Hegelian and one of the ideological founding fathers of the today’s European Union. Fukuyama makes every effort to present himself as a Kojeve style Hegelian, but his ideas are closer to Strauss then to Kojeve. Curiously enough, Kojeve was a good friend of Carl Schmitt. On the subject of Kojeve-Schmitt relation and their intellectual debate, that looks very similar to Kojeve–Strauss debate, see Müller, p. 90-98. 212 Müller, p. 87-90 213 NRH, p. 201, and Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 54.

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by a world religion. But all existing religions are steadily undermined, so far as their effective power is concerned, by the progress towards a technological world society. There forms itself an open or concealed alliance of the existing religions which are united only by their common enemy (atheistic communism). Their union requires that they conceal from themselves and from the world that they are incompatible with each other – that each regards the other as indeed noble, but untrue.214

What is true for the macrocosm of the world society is also true in the microcosm of the

particular, national society. This Strauss’s statement clearly reveals his cultural and

religious conservatism. For Strauss, culture is but the superstructure based in religious

values and, as I will argue in the part on Strauss’s interpretation of Locke, it is not by

chance that Strauss praises Locke for restoring the place of religion in the public sphere.

Moreover, it would follow that for Strauss task of the society and state is to preserve

cultural and religious basis against the corrosive influences of liberalism. Cultural and

religious conservatism, then, is not the guaranty of the existence of the society (society

will not cease to exist even if its values are thoroughly changed), but the guaranty of the

nobleness and humanity of the society. Implication is that the culture, religion, and state

need to be intertwined, contrary to liberalism’s intention of preserving the autonomy of

cultural and religious values as private matters, and prescribing to the state task of

economic development and the preservation of peace among the competing beliefs and

values. The trouble with this kind of thinking is that it says nothing about the possibility

of the pluralistic values, that is, the possibility of the existence of multicultural and

multireligious values in one society: it even considers them a treat to the wellbeing of the

society and state. Furthermore, in the world consisted of societies that adhere to above

Strauss’s opinions, the relations among states would of necessity be hostile playground,

but not necessary war of all against all. The grouping or coalitions among the states

would occur along the lines of the cultural and religious similarities. It would prove even

more difficult to reach common agreement among such coalitions, since cultural and

religious differences are, by nature, more difficult to overcome. As McCormick suggests,

it is then not by chance that Samuel Huntington speaks about the clash of civilizations

214 RCPR, p. 42.

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and it is not accident that Strauss’s and Schmitt’s ideas were bound to arise fresh

following the fall of Communism and the rapid economic globalization.215

As a conclusion to this chapter, we can say that since 1932 and the publication of

Schmitt’s Concept of the Political and his Commentary, until 1953 and the chapter on

Hobbes in Natural Right and History, Strauss has not dramatically changed his opinion

about the liberalism. He shares with Schmitt all the major assumptions regarding

liberalism. For both of them, the liberalism is a deprivation of humanity since it puts

emphasis on the individual rights and subsumes life to economics and entertainment; it

constrains the strength of the state both in internal matters and especially in external

matters; and it is imperialistic insofar that it attempts to transform all of the world into his

own kingdom of pleasure and game. The critic that Strauss, through the proxy of

Machiavelli, directs towards Schmitt is not a full rejection of Schmitt’s assumptions. At

best, one could say that Strauss objects to Schmitt for allowing the state to exercise

unlimited power for the sake of power itself, without spiritualizing state goals. For

Strauss, Schmitt’s unrestrained state power did not reach for the “horizon beyond

liberalism.”

215 McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, p. 302-314.

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5. Reinventing Locke

Importance of the political philosophy of John Locke and especially his influence on the

Founding Fathers is a well-known and debated matter. A wide span of opinions of

Locke’s influence on the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers ranges from

attaching the decisive importance to Locke to claims that his influence is but a myth.216

The fact that Strauss chose to include Locke in the chapter on modern natural right in

Natural Right and History indicates his intention of speaking to the American public. As

stated before, in the introduction to Natural Right and History, Strauss warns about the

disappearance of the natural law teaching as a result of succumbing to the “joke” of

German thoughts. And without the danger of exaggeration, one could say that Locke is

certainly most famous of his natural law teaching, the one whose statements about

natural, self-evident and God given truths of right to life, liberty and property inspired

many revolutionaries, including the American ones.

In what follows, through interpretating and drawing on the above chapters on

Heidegger and Hobbes, I will present how Strauss paints Locke in two different ways.

Strauss’s Locke, on the one hand, is a continuation of Hobbes and his liberal conquest.

On the other hand, he is, so to say, Weimar-style Locke, modeled according to Nietzsche

– Strauss’s model of atheist philosopher-legislator which, for political purposes, professes

religious beliefs in which he himself does not believe.

* * * Locke, according to Strauss, preserved the basics of Hobbes’s teaching, that is,

Locke agrees with Hobbes in following aspects. The right of self-preservation is the most

fundamental of all; reason leads men to will the peace in civil society in order to

supersede the miserable state of nature marked by penury and the war of everybody

against everybody; notions of the good or bad are equivalent to pleasure or pain .217

216 For the discussion of different opinions on Locke and his influence on the American Revolution, see Steven M. Dworetz, The Unvarnished Doctrine: Locke, Liberalism and the American Revolution (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1990), esp. p. 3-38 and p. 97-134. 217 Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 227-229, and p. 249. Hereafter NRH. All unnamed references are works by Leo Strauss.

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Strauss further argues that Locke differs from Hobbes’s conclusions at different points.

For our purposes, three differences are important. Firstly, pursuit of happiness and

property rights are continuations of the natural right to self-preservation. Secondly,

Locke’s exoteric restoration of Christianity is, in conjunction with reason, a source of

natural law in existence of which, according to Strauss, Locke himself did not believe.

Thirdly, Locke believed that the limited government is an assurance of natural right to

self-preservation. I will discuss each of them in turn.

5.1 Locke, the pursuit of happiness and the property

According to Strauss, Locke denied the traditional teaching of natural law (rejecting

Hooker’s views) that the law of nature is imprinted in men’s minds and more forcefully

than Hobbes insisted on the existence of the state of nature.218 His main reason for doing

so was to affirm the natural right to a pursuit of happiness and property rights as ones

existing prior to civil society and hence having the character of absolute right. As Strauss

says it, for Locke “The desire for happiness and the pursuit of happiness have the

character of an absolute right, of a natural right.” The desire of happiness and an aversion

to misery are the same. Furthermore, this desire is absolute since it is intrinsic in human

beings and hence absolute, while natural laws are not.219 However, Strauss does not

emphasize the pursuit of happiness as he does on Locke’s doctrine of property.

Locke’s doctrine of property, for Strauss, is “directly intelligible today if it is

taken as the classic doctrine of the ‘spirit of capitalism’ or as a doctrine regarding the

chief objective of public policy.”220 The chief reason why Locke, stronger than Hobbes,

affirmed the existence of the state of nature is that he wanted to prove that property is “a

corollary of the fundamental right of self preservation.” In order to secure self-

preservation, man needs to own property (food, land and so on). Moreover, since

property is necessary for self-preservation, humans enter in to the social contract to

preserve it. Property, therefore, exists in the state of nature and antedates the creation of

218 Ibid, p. 221 and 225. 219 Ibid, p. 226-227. 220 Ibid, p. 246.

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civil society. Hence, society exists to preserve property.221 Nevertheless, there is still a

major difference between what the property means in the state of nature and what it

means in the civil society.

As Strauss argues, for Locke, labor is the creator and the source of property even

within the state of nature. Though unpleasant activity, work is necessary in order to take

away from nature things required for the survival, even more so since the state of nature

is poverty. But there are natural laws to be obeyed in the state of nature regarding what

can and what cannot be appropriated, in other words, there are limits to man’s appetites

and appropriation. Man has to make a distinction in appropriation of perishable and

useful things and durable and useful things, and may appropriate very little of latter, but

very much of the former (including gold and silver, since, in themselves, they are not

useful things). Moreover, he has to take care of nature in terms of not disposing its own

waste, since he receives all the needful from nature. Furthermore, he is to be concerned

with the preservation of others, as long as that does not endanger his own existence. In

Strauss words, “It is the poverty of the first ages of the world which explains why the

original law of nature (1) commanded appropriation by labor alone, (2) commanded the

prevention of waste, and (3) permitted unconcern for the need of other human beings.”222

With the coming of the civil society and, in accordance and in continuation of

Hobbes’s claim that there are no unnatural wants and desires, apart from the peace-

breaking ones, the status of the labor and property, for Strauss’s Locke, changes. The

creation of money as a sign of property allows man to appropriate as much as money as

possible as long as he does so in accordance with the positive laws. Even labor, although

it remains the origin of value, seizes to be a property title, since the ownership of the

means of production and not the labor itself constitutes a title to property (at this point,

Strauss certainly starts to sound like a Marxist critic of capitalism). The original law of

nature, even one regarding the disposal of waste, is abandoned.223 Hence, men enter the

society in order to enlarge his property and not merely to save it. But if men are to

enlarge it, they must be motivated by their wants, so the motivation requires the

enlargement of wants. Not much labor is required for mere survival, and there is always

221 Ibid, p. 234-35. 222 Ibid, p. 239. 223 Ibid, p. 239-241.

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present danger of falling back into laziness. In order to be motivated for the unpleasant

activity of work, men must always be in the state of want, desire, not merely desire to

survive, but the desire for pleasure. The labor and property, then, serve to satisfy infinite

pleasurable appetites in a mutually supportive manner. As Strauss says, quoting Locke,

“[But] this is peculiar hedonism: ‘The greatest happiness consists’ not in enjoying the

greatest pleasures but ‘in having those things which produce the greatest pleasures224.’”

The accumulation, then, of the potentially pleasurable things is more pleasant than

actually enjoying the very same things; moreover, as it will be argued below, it is the

foundation of a prosperous society. Karl Marx would gladly sign this claim.

Locke, according to Strauss, “did not commit the absurdity of justifying the

emancipation of acquisitiveness by appealing to a nonexistent absolute right of property.

He justifies the emancipation of acquisitiveness in the only way which can be defended:

he shows that it is conducive to the common good, to public happiness or to the temporal

prosperity of society.”225 In continuation of the project started by Hobbes, Locke more

forcefully asserts that the private vices, moreover governmental support of the private

vices, become public benefit. The true grounds for building the prosperous society is not,

as classics thought, the moral appeal to virtue for the sake of virtue itself, but the appeal

to an enlightened self-interest, appropriately endowed and preserved by the government.

For Strauss, this is absurdity. According to him, this means that death and pain

have assumed the place of the guiding light, the telos of life and, I would add, only one

step is required from that to Heidegger’s existentialist orientation toward finiteness,

mortality. If Locke’s teaching is accepted as true, then human beings live in the

perpetual state of escape from pain, and cling to life not because the life is sweet but

because of the fear of death. If the primary fact is want and desire then “The goal of

desire is defined by nature only negatively – the denial of pain.”226 In order to escape and

remove the uneasiness and satisfy their desires, human beings engage in work, an

unpleasant and painful activity. As Hobbes identified the rational life as the escape from

fear, “Moved by the same spirit, Locke identifies the rational life with the life dominated

224 Ibid, p. 249. 225 Ibid, p. 242. 226 Ibid, p. 250.

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by the pain which relives pain.”227 Work, pain that relieves pain, seizes only in death.

The government is there only to ensure the conditions for peace and individual hedonism.

Hence, according to Strauss, “hedonism becomes utilitarianism or political hedonism.

The painful relief of pain culminates not so much in the greatest pleasure as ‘in the

having those things which produce the greatest pleasure.’ Life is joyless quest for joy.”228

5.2 Natural law non-believer Contrary to Strauss, not too many contemporary political scientists or economists would

have a lot to object to Strauss’s Locke. At least they would agree that the consumption

supports production and produces jobs. But Strauss emphasizes that our contemporary

understanding was not the understanding of all ages, and certainly not Locke’s age, hence

he attempts to understand Locke in a way Locke understood himself, in contradiction to

the above criticized historicist thesis. For Strauss, that explains why Locke wrote in such

a contradictory way, why he was “full of illogical flaws and inconsistencies” and felt

necessary to strengthen his concept of natural law by an appeal to God and religion .229

At this point Strauss makes his original claim, one that divides him from many other

Locke’s commentators. Strauss claims that Locke himself did not believe in the natural

law or that the natural law has any support in God’s providence or nature itself. Hence,

Strauss implies that Locke was an atheist, or at least a deist, somewhat similar to Hobbes,

nevertheless socially responsible atheist or deist. Locke’s teaching on natural law which

has a source in the Christian God and nature was merely his public and exoteric teaching,

meant for the political purposes and not his true opinion.

Strauss himself calls this conclusion “shocking.”230 And indeed this Strauss’s

conclusion stands in contrast to what is usually understood by Locke’s teaching and it

was criticized by many and persuasively refuted by, i.e., Steven Dworetz and Ruth Green.

Both of them, with the aid of textual evidence, show that Strauss disregarded and

wrongly interpreted many of Locke’s statements in order to prove that Locke did not

227 Ibid. 228 Ibid, p. 251. 229 Ibid, p. 220. 230 Ibid.

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believe in the existence of natural law backed by divine sanctions.231 But in the light of

the arguments I presented above, especially in the chapter on Heidegger, that is only to be

expected, since Strauss models Locke according to his own Heidegger-Nietzsche view of

the philosopher-atheist-legislator. Strauss’s Locke matches the Heidegger-Nietzsche

model of philosopher all too well, and this similarity is nothing but suspicious.

Chasing the textual contradictions in Locke’s texts, in accordance with his

persecution and the “writing between the lines” thesis, Strauss eagerly tries to prove that

Locke was a philosopher who could not possibly accept the teaching of faith. As

evidence to his argument, Strauss points that Locke accepted the weakest of all proofs of

God’s existence, miracles of Jesus, as the corner stone of his proof that God indeed exists

and that he is the source of natural law and morality.232 In addition, it suffices, for

Strauss, to see that Locke left different contradictory statements spread around in his

works to conclude that Locke had different opinion than the one he publicly professed.

Nevertheless, Strauss praises Locke for being a cautious writer who did not publicly state

his doubts and his true opinion.

But why did Locke hide his true opinion? Strauss argues that Locke was aware

that the masses cannot be persuaded in certain moral truths, if those moral truths are not

backed by the fear of divine sanctions. As Strauss says it, quoting Locke, “’The greatest

part cannot know, and therefore they must believe,’ so much so, that even if philosophy

had ‘given us ethics in a science like mathematics, in every part demonstrable, … the

instruction of the people were best still to be left to the precepts and principles of

gospel´.”233 Hence, if the masses are to be motivated for political actions, they have to be

persuaded to do so by the threat of divine sanctions. But Locke went further. For Strauss,

not only that Locke hides his true opinion regarding his own religious (non)belief, but he

also hides that he draws heavily from Hobbes, whose name Locke publicly calls “justly

decried” one.234 Even though Hobbes’s name appeared to be not particularly popular at

the time, Strauss’s Locke borrows heavily from Hobbes, for he knows that even the threat

of divine sanctions is not enough if there are no rewards and sanctions in this life, too. 231 Dworetz, p. 125-126, and Ruth Green, John Locke’s Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 8-9. 232 NRH, p. 209-211. 233 Ibid, p. 221. 234 Ibid, p. 211.

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Reward is life, accumulation of property, and the pleasure that one takes in it, pursuit of

happiness and so on. Sanction is penury, civil unrest and the threat of the return to the

brutish state of nature. Locke, then, overcomes Hobbes in so far that he understands that

two treats, the treat of divine and of this-worldly sanctions, have to work in conjunction,

if the social control is to be both internal and external. Failure is inevitable if one puts

emphasis on just one or the other.

Again, Strauss’s Locke is a perfect model of the Heidegger-Nietzsche-Strauss-

style philosopher, although he does not share Strauss’s opinions, for we have seen that

Strauss is highly critical of Locke’s liberalism. Strauss’s Locke is an atheist philosopher,

legislator that knows how to motivate “vulgar” masses through religious beliefs and the

promises of pleasure. His exoteric and public profession of religion is a mere political

propaganda. It is a Weimar-style Locke.

5.3 Natural constitutional law In Locke’s work, according to Strauss, a view of the natural law as the natural public law,

initiated by Hobbes, becomes the natural constitutional law. As Strauss says it, “It is on

the basis on Hobbes’s view of the law of nature that Locke opposes Hobbes’s

conclusions. He tries to show that Hobbes’s principles-the right of self preservation- far

from favoring absolute government, requires limited government.”235 Hobbes needed the

absolute sovereign in order to keep peace, and nevertheless preserved for the individuals

right to self-preservation and consequently a right not to sacrifice their lives when

sovereign asks them to. Locke agrees with Hobbes in part regarding the sacredness of the

individual right to self-preservation, and precisely because of that demands that the

sovereign, the government, be not the absolute but limited, constitutional government.

Hobbes’s sovereign is absolute in so far that it demands of individuals’ absolute

obedience, minus the self-preservation qualification. This is because Hobbes is convinced

that reason itself in combination with a fear of disorder and the return to brutish state of 235 Ibid, p. 231. Steven M. Dworetz questions this contention of Strauss that Locke is but a continuation of Hobbes on two levels: on the level of Hobbes’s “materialistic” and Locke’s “Christian” hedonism and on the level of Strauss’s claim that Locke’s constitutional government is but Hobbes diluted. Dworetz rightfully asks, if Hobbes and Locke are fundamentally the same, why did Locke even bother to insist on the limited government? See Dworetz, p. 119.

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nature will lead everyone to conclude that the obedience is best for both the individuals

and society. What separates Locke from Hobbes is that Locke insists even more on the

power of majority and ultimately grants to the majority something which Hobbes was not

keen to do, namely the right to replace the sovereign with another one. In Strauss’s words

“Locke opposes Hobbes by teaching that whatever ‘the people’ or ‘the community,’ i.e.,

the majority, have placed the supreme power, they still retain ‘a supreme power to

remove or alter’ the established government, i.e., they still retain a right of revolution.”236

Locke’s sovereign, “supreme power”, is the result of the consent of majority and the will

of individuals. Individuals participate in the decision-making process through their

representatives and form the majority that is to be a check on a bad government and, at

the same time, a way to dismantle the government in a case if it is not receptive to the

will of people. In order to achieve this, according to Strauss, Locke believed that “the

best institutional safeguards for the rights of individuals are supplied by a constitution

that, in practically all domestic matters, strictly subordinates the executive power (which

must be strong) to law, and ultimately to a well-defined legislative assembly.”237

[emphasis mine]

We can safely say, in light of the above Strauss’s critic of Hobbes’s emphasis on

individual rights and the consent over wisdom, that Strauss is not particularly happy

about a further dilution of the right of the “wise” elite to rule and the accent on the

consent of many. However, Strauss emphasizes that Locke, although he accepted that the

individuals are created equal in so far that anybody can kill anybody, did not for that

reason deemed that the natural inequalities should be altogether abandoned. To the

contrary, according to Strauss:

Locke regarded the power of the majority as a check on bad government and a last resort against tyrannical government: he did not regarded it as a substitute for government or as identical with government. Equality, he thought, is incompatible with civil society. The equality of all men in regard to the right of self-preservation does not obliterate completely the special right of the more reasonable people. On the contrary, the exercise of that special right is conducive to the self-preservation and happiness of all. Above all, since self-preservation and happiness require property, so mush so that the end of civil society can be said to be the preservation of property, the protection of the propertied members of society

236 NRH, p. 232. 237 Ibid, p. 233.

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against the demands of the indigents – or the protection of the industrious and the rational against the lazy and quarrelsome- is essential to public happiness or the common good.238 [emphasis mine]

Hence, even though Locke continued liberal conquest started by Hobbes, there is still

hope for the success of Strauss’s philosophical project. There is hope because there is an

opportunity for the founding of the governing elite in the midst of the liberal project. It

does not matter, in my opinion, that such an elite is based on the wealth and not on the

philosophical or republican virtue. What matters is that the doors are open. Although the

constitution restricted the ruling power of elite, it retained two opportunities, however

weak, for the exercise of influence, namely the opportunity of the executive power that

does not have to rely totally on the consent, and the opportunity to govern the foreign

affairs. Some similarity with Schmitt’s insistence on the power of president over

parliament, I believe, exists. And the true playground of such an elite becomes foreign

policy, the realm of, as Strauss and Schmitt believe, the state of nature. And all of that for

the good of many.

My argument is more understandable when one takes in to account how Strauss

describes and distinguishes in between the theoretically and practically best regime. The

theoretically best regime is the “rule of the wise”, wise being of course philosophers.

Moreover, that rulers, by virtue of being wise, are not to be held accountable by the

unwise, “vulgar”, subjects, or, in Strauss words, “the rule of the wise must be absolute

rule.”239 But the wise are few, and they cannot rule many “unwise” by force (Strauss

even implies that tyranny begins when the rule of many, “consent”, takes precedence

over the rule of “wise”). There must be an aristocratic class of gentlemen that serves as

the intermediary between the “wise” and the “vulgar.” This class of gentlemen is

nevertheless prone to take instructions from the “wise” ones. Hence, the practically best

regime “will then be a republic in which the landed gentry, which is at the same time

urban patriciate, well-bred and public spirited, obeying the laws and completing them,

238 Ibid, p. 234. Cf. following Locke’s statement. “Though I have said… that all Men by nature are equal, I cannot be supposed too understand all sorts of equality: Age or Virtue may give men a just precedency: Excellence of Parts and merit may place others above the Common Level.” [italics in original]. Locke, quoted in Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 25. 239 NRH, p. 140.

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ruling and being ruled in turn, predominates and gives society its character.”240 The fact

that the constitution (rule under law) is a check on an unlimited rule of aristocracy

instructed by the “wise” need not be an obstacle to the creation of the elite within the

mass society. The elite is distinguished from the many not by their obedience to laws, but

by their way of life. This is what Strauss implies when proposing the concept of politeia,

rather than the constitution (rule of law), as a guiding principle of elite life. In his own

words:

The American Constitution is not the same thing as the American way of life. Politeia means the way of life rather than its constitution. Yet it is no accident that the unsatisfactory translation “constitution” is generally preferred to the translation “way of life of a society.”… The character, or tone, of a society, depends on what the society regards as most respectable or most worthy of admiration. But by regarding certain habits or attitudes as most respectable, a society admits the superiority, the superior dignity, of those human beings who most perfectly embody the habits or attitudes in question.241

We may then say that Locke’s philosophy, no matter how critical Strauss is towards it,

retains “loopholes” for the launch of the “Strauss’s project.” On the one hand, Locke’s

philosophy is the continuation of Hobbes’s liberal conquista of the overemphasis on

individual rights against government and the chase for property for the sake of pleasure.

On the other hand, possibility for the rule of elite (gentleman instructed by the secret

kingship of “wise” philosophers) is real. Moreover, Locke returned the religion in to the

public space and with it antidote against the relapse of Lockean liberalism into the

historicism and value-free social science. As I have argued in the chapters on Heidegger

and Weber, for Strauss, liberalism suffers catastrophe when social science and

historicism undermine the belief in the life-giving truths. When they prove that the way

of the life of society is nothing but a blind choice, no better and no worse than any other

choices, the artificial net protecting the society is destroyed and the Weimar type political

nihilism steps in, with disastrous consequences. But the germ of liberalism’s failure is

already embedded even within the Locke’s project.

What is required, then, is the defense and protection of society. There is no better

cure against historicism than faith, religion, civil religion or the belief in the ultimate

240 Ibid, p. 142. 241 Ibid, p. 137.

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goodness of values of the one’s own society, that is, belief that our values have ultimate

support in the divine sanctions, or, even better, that they are universal values. Such faith

inserts in individuals feeling of self-confidence and, by the way, provides the handy tool

for governing. One would lay his life (in defensive or aggressive war or in any other way)

voluntarily if he believes that it is done not because it is the right of government to ask

him to do so, but because that is the right and good thing to do. Hence, historicism must

be contained or, at least, kept secret.

Recall that Strauss argues that Hobbes’s liberalism was made possible by the rise

of natural science and that Weber employed the natural science methodology in his social

science, and made the rise of political extremism easier. For Strauss, Locke is the

continuation of Hobbes’s liberal project. Both Locke and Hobbes attach great importance

to science in terms of its being the tool for the conquest of nature and the way to satisfy

infinite desires. The problems arise when science becomes value free and grants the same

validity to all preferences. First, that supports extreme individualism and weakens the

coherence of the society, and we already know that Strauss, together with Schmitt,

depicted such a liberal individualism as a folly. Second, such a science makes the state

easy prey for its enemies, because it does not distinct, if you wish, between the friend and

enemy, or, it does not support the validity of social beliefs in an unqualified manner.

Again, containment of such a value-free social science, as I argued in the chapter on

Weber, is necessary.

Understood in this way, Strauss is a strange friend of American liberal

democracy. This is not to say that he is a liberal democrat; for he is certainly not. He does

not believe in the self-evident truths or any Lockean natural law. Nevertheless, he urges

the wider public to remain faithful to truths that he considers mere public teachings,

useful propaganda. Reason for his adherence to American liberal democracy is an

unsupported hope that his project, ideas he brought from across the ocean, may find

fertile soil in America.

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6. Conclusion As Volker Reinecke and Jonathan Uhlaner say, “Leaving Europe behind, Strauss begin to

rearrange his attitude towards philosophy. He abandoned none of the positions with

which he had worked for over a decade, but transformed their coordination.”242 I concur

in this. Strauss’s most influential book, Natural Right and History, contains many

elements and concepts that he came to accept as true during his education in the Weimar

days. His work is abundant with influence of Heidegger and through him Nietzsche, and

especially Carl Schmitt.

To an attentive reader it may appear that certain places were repetitions of what

was already said. Fault for this lies not in the author of this work, but in the general

intention behind my examination and the topic dealt with. Main issues in Heidegger’s,

Schmitt’s, Weber’s, and Strauss’s work discussed here remained more or less the same

and self-repeating. The disappearance of nobleness of humanity was a result of the

Enlightenment and the liberal and scientific modernity; liberal individualism was nothing

but a demise of the human being to a well-fed and enlightened, but self-interest and

lonely beast. All of the above discussed authors longed for the greatness, fulfillment and

reconnection with the fullness of life, which was lost along the way of history.

Furthermore, as we have seen, the final victory of the liberalism over the whole world,

coming of the world state and the last man, was their common fear.

Through description and comparison of works of Leo Strauss and his Weimar

contemporaries such as Heidegger, Weber, and Schmitt, I have tried to show that in spite

of Strauss’s professed turn away from the German thought towards natural right teaching,

he remained deeply embedded in the tradition in which he was educated. Natural right

was but a cover for ideas Strauss already accepted, although he tried, unsuccessfully, to

242 Volker Reinecke and Jonathan Uhlaner, quoted in John P. McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 287, n. 78.

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distinguish himself at certain points from it, or more precisely, to distinguish between the

theory, which he accepted as true, and a bad reputation that that theory gained due to the

political engagement of his Weimar friends. As I have argued in Chapter I, even after his

immigration to the United States, Strauss remained under the spell of Martin Heidegger,

his hermeneutics, his way of teaching, and his diagnosis of modernity as crisis. But

Strauss also learned something from Heidegger’s inglorious flirt with politics. He

understood that the public prophesizing of philosophical truths and the attempt of

philosophy to govern and spiritualize the world end in a disaster, and he retreated towards

Nietzsche, noble delusion, and his exoteric-esoteric thesis. But the retreat was more

tactical, than strategic, for he never lost faith that the philosophers are the “wise” and

elite of elites in the society, who are destined to rule, or otherwise the world will go to

hell. Moreover, with the example of Carl Schmitt, I have showed how Heidegger’s

existentialism looks like when it turns into radical legal concepts, to whom Strauss lend

his intellectual strength in order to arm it with the new morality and make it a more

consistent enemy of liberalism. In Chapter II, I have argued that Strauss’s critic of Max

Weber’s fact-value distinction shares many similarities with the critic that Carl Schmitt

directed towards his teacher Weber. Both Schmitt and Strauss concur insofar that they

blame Weber for his value agnosticism and its political implications. Strauss differs from

Schmitt and criticizes both him and Max Weber for their rational jump into the ethics-

free irrationality, either with Schmitt’s concept of the decisionism out of nothingness or

with Weber’s vitalistic values. In addition, I have showed how Strauss retained negative

attitude towards the positivistic social science during his life in the United States, and

what was for him the proper position and function of the social science in the society.

In Chapter III, in connection with Chapter I, I have showed Strauss’s Weimar and

post-WWII obsession with Thomas Hobbes as the founder of liberalism, which he shared

with his teacher and friend Carl Schmitt. Strauss and Schmitt identify the sins of

liberalism in Hobbes’s work: emphasis on the rights of individuals against the state; grant

of license to individuals to enjoy the pleasures of the “commodious living”, while the

state’s role is nothing but a peacekeeper; institutionalization versus Strauss’s preferred

education of character; political atheism and the expulsion of religion out of public space;

and, the inclination of liberalism to transform itself into the world state. Moreover, I have

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showed how Strauss’s critic of Schmitt’s Machiavellianism is inconsistent and does not

amount to the full rejection of Schmitt’s position. Even Strauss’s concept of the

Aristotelian classical natural right looks almost identical to Schmitt’s decisionism,

although Strauss tries to prove otherwise.

In Chapter IV, I have showed how Strauss applies all of the above in American

context. Continuing the criticism of Hobbes’s liberalism, Strauss, on the one hand,

accuses Locke for even affirming natural right of self-preservation through his teaching

on the pursuit of happiness, theory of property, and the further dilution of the right of

“wise” to rule through the concept of limited, constitutional government. On the other

hand, Strauss reinvents Locke according to the Heidegger-Nietzsche model of atheist-

philosopher legislator, which for political purposes of ruling masses and motivating them

for political action, preaches religious natural law teaching in which he does not believe.

Locke is praised, because he knew what Heidegger, Schmitt, and Weber did not want to

know, namely that the religion in public space is indispensable for well being of the

society and that the state, trough secularized political-theological concepts, can never

take its place.

Taught by Heidegger’s failed attempt to govern openly, Strauss advocates

breeding of intermediary elite, which serves as a mediator between the “wise” and

“vulgar”, masses. The elite is distinguished from the masses throw its way of life or, if

you wish, education. And although constrained trough the constitutional system,

Strauss’s elite retains opportunity to influence the society on two levels. On the first

level, it exercises its influence throw the legal means of executive will and the foreign

policy, something that Strauss learned from his teacher Carl Schmitt and his insistence on

the supremacy of president over the parliament and the constitutional court, and

description of relations among states as the brutish state of nature. On the second level,

such an elite exercises influence on the society trough the propaganda (Strauss learned

that from the success of Enlightenment) of religious and cultural values as opposed to the

values of “others”, who are purportedly trying to infiltrate among “us” (far cry of

Schmitt’s friend – enemy distinction and the assertion that the enemy simply needs to be

“other”). And while that was not the primary goal of this study, I hope that throw the

explanation of Strauss’s reinvention of Locke, I have managed to at least partially explain

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which parts of Strauss’s political philosophy can be recognized in the contemporary

American conservatism. Both supporters and opponents of Strauss agree that his

philosophy influenced the American right, and the only disagreement is on the extent.243

Before finally concluding this work, I will say a few words on all the authors

discussed in this thesis. None of the above was meant as a passing of judgment on

Heidegger, Schmitt, Weber, or Strauss. My work was neither concealed as an accusation

against or an apology for them. As for me personally, whatever their mistakes were, I

would rather be on their side than against them. As a proof that all of them were onto

something important, one just has to observe, since the end of the Cold War, how much

interest in all of them (especially Schmitt and Strauss) has grown on both sides of the

Atlantic. Their critic of liberalism and globalization as a process of alienation and

leveling of life to the lowest level is today even more interesting than it was at the time

when it was written, which shows how far beyond their times they all were. Criticism of

their political engagement or inclinations that is meant to disregard their work as a whole

should be dropped, for it seems that passing of time proves that their predictions of the

future were correct. Perhaps they just did not find the right answers, or, rather, the time

they lived in did not offer right options.

243 On the relationship between Strauss and American conservatism see, i.e., Shadia B. Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right (New York: St. Martins Press, 1999),79 and Robert Devigne, Recasting Conservatism: Oakeshot, Strauss, and the Response to Postmodernism, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994).

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7. Bibliography Works by Leo Strauss. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953. On Tyranny. Revised and expanded edition, including the Strauss-Kojeve correspondence, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth. New York: Free Press, 1991. Political Philosophy: Six Essays by Leo Strauss, edited with an introduction by Hilail Gildin. Indianapolis, New York: Pegasus, 1975. Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss, selected and introduced by Thomas L. Pangle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1989. Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, ed. Thomas L. Pangle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Thoughts on Machiavelli. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. What is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1959. Secondary sources: Behnegar, Nasser. Leo Strauss, Max Weber, and the Scientific Study of Politics. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Bloom Allan. Closing of an American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Devigne, Robert. Recasting Conservatism: Oakeshot, Strauss, and the Response to Postmodernism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994. Drury, B. Shadia. The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss. MacMillan Press, 1988. ---Leo Strauss and the American Right. New York : St. Martins Press, 1999. Dworetz, M. Steven. The Unvarnished Doctrine: Locke, Liberalism and the American Revolution. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1990. Dyzenhaus, David. Legality and Legitimacy: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen, and Herman Heller in Weimar. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992.

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Gillespie Michael Allan. “Heidegger’s Aristotelian National Socialism.” Political Theory, Vol. 28 No. 2 (April 2000): 140-166 Goldsmith, M. M. “Hobbes on law.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes, ed. Tom Sorrel, p. 274-304. Cambridge University Press, 1996. Green, Ruth. John Locke’s Liberalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Habermas, Jürgen. The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historian’s Debate, ed. and trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989. Hampton, Jean. Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 1986. Harrison, Ross. Hobbes, Locke, and Confusions Masterpiece. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Heidegger, Martin. An Introduction to Metaphysics (1953), trans. Ralph Mannheim. Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday Anchor, 1961. ---Being and Time, trans. J. Macquerrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Howse, Robert. “From Legitimacy to Dictatorship – and Back Again: Leo Strauss’s Critique of the Anti-Liberalism of Carl Schmitt.” In Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, ed. David Dyzenhaus, p. 57-91. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998. Kelsen, Hans. “Natural-Law Doctrine Before the Tribunal of Science.” In Law and Politics: Readings in Legal and Political Thought, ed. Shadia B. Drury, p. 251 – 257. Calgary, Alberta: Detselig Enterprises Ltd, 1980. ---Algemeine Staatslehre. Berlin, 1925. ---General Theory of Law and State. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949. Kielmansegg, Peter Graf, Horst Mewes and Elisabeth Glaser Schmidt, eds. Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Emigres and American Political Thought after World War II. German Historical Institute, Washington D.C., and Cambridge University Press, 1995. Krockow ,Christian Graf von. Die Entscheidung: Eine Untersuchung über Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 1990. Löwith, Karl. “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism.” In The Heidegger Controversy. ed. Richard Wolin, p. 167-185. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. McCormick, P. John. “Fear, Technology and the State: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss and the revival of Hobbes in Weimar and National Socialist Germany.” Political Theory, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Nov. 1994): 619-652. ---Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology. Cambridge University Press, 1997. Mehring, Reinhard. “Der philosophische Führer und der Kronjurist: Praktisches Denken und geschichtliche Tat von Martin Heidegger und Carl Schmitt.” In Deutsches Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschihte 68 (1994). Meier, Heinrich. Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Mommsen, J. Wolfgang. Max Weber and German Politics: 1890 -1920, trans. Michael S. Steinberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

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---The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber: Collected Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Müller, Jan-Werner. A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1968. Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment. Princeton University Press, 1975. Scheuerman, Bill. “The Unholy Alliance of Carl Schmitt and Friedrich A. Hayek,” Constellations 4:2 (October 1997) Schmitt, Carl. Politische Theologie Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität. Berlin, 1990. ---Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Westport: Greenwood, 1996). ---The Concept of the Political, trans. and intro. George Schwab, with comments on Schmitt’s essay by Leo Strauss. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers, 1976. Söllner, Alfons. “German Conservatism in America: Morgenthau’s Political Realism.” Telos 72 (summer 1987). Tuck, Richard. “Hobbes as the demon of modernity.“ In Great Political Thinkers, p. 214-217. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Ward, Ian. Law, Philosophy and National Socialism: Heidegger, Schmitt and Radbruch in Context. Bern; Frankfurt a. M.; New York; Paris; Wien: Lang, 1992. Weber, Max. “Politics as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and eds. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, p. 77-128. London: Kegan Paul, 1947. ---The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of the Capitalism, trans. Talcot Parsons, introduction Anthony Giddens. London: Unwin Hyman 1989, first pub. 1904-1905. Wolin, Richard, ed. The Heidegger Controversy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. ---Heidegger’s Children. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001. Zuckert, H. Catherine H Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996.