Leo Strauss and Contemporary Thought

Reading Strauss Outside the Lines

Jeffrey A. Bernstein, Jade Larissa Schiff, Jeffrey A. Bernstein, Jade Larissa Schiff

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781438483948, 9781438483955
• eBook ISBN: 9781438483962
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Broadens the horizons of Strauss's thought by initiating dialogues between him and figures with whom little or no dialogue has yet occurred.

Leo Strauss's readings of historical figures in the philosophical tradition have been justly well explored; however, his relation to contemporary thinkers has not enjoyed the same coverage. In Leo Strauss and Contemporary Thought, an international group of scholars examines the possible conversations between Strauss and figures such as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Charles Taylor, and Hans Blumenberg. The contributors examine topics including religious liberty, the political function of comedy, law, and the relation between the Ancients and the Moderns, and bring Strauss into many new and original discussions that will be of use to those interested in the thought of Strauss, the history of philosophy and political theory, and contemporary continental thought.

II. HISTORY AND POLITICS

5

A Civil Encounter

Leo Strauss and Charles Taylor on Religious Pluralism

Jessica L. Radin

To be sure that something of a certain general kind will happen is quite compatible with being unsure, and indeed with its being uncertain, exactly what will happen.

—Neil MacCormick, Rhetoric and the Rule of Law

Like all the contributions to this volume (whether they concern thinkers or topics), this chapter puts Leo Strauss in new company—in this case, Charles Taylor. Other than the novelty value of introducing an imagined conversation between two objectively interesting thinkers, what can we learn from such a pairing? I want to argue that from an imagined conversation between Taylor and Strauss a new way of considering the relationship between religion, politics, and society emerges. Yet these two thinkers, who wrote about politics in the same language and on the same continent at the same time, have no record of responding to one another’s thought. There is one intellectual degree of separation between them—that of Isaiah Berlin—but our topic here is the back and forth between Strauss and Taylor, who received his PhD under Berlin’s supervision in 1961 in the midst of a flurry of writing.¹ As Strauss published What Is Political Philosophy? (1959), Taylor was publishing articles as a graduate student and then newly minted PhD on the arms race, Cold War neutrality, and the relationship between the state and secularism—articles that even then demonstrated his awareness of the importance of a shared moral center, and his doubts that human beings could, in the absence of a transcendent principle, create such a moral center for themselves. Similarly, Strauss recognizes the particular challenges that religion poses to a modern and pluralistic democracy—Strauss sees both the positive resistance that religious belief offers from social and communal homogeneity (the descent into mass culture) and the fact that religious traditions in power inevitably end up rendering all other groups outliers or outsiders.

In some ways the intent of this chapter, and the desire to write it, come from the whisper I hear when I read Taylor or Strauss: perhaps, maybe, a better and more civil/civilian community comes from having more and not less religion. Is it possible that having more religion and religions in a community simultaneously results in citizens who have both stable principles (Strauss) and greater sensitivity toward people who are different from themselves (Taylor)?

The methodology of this chapter takes its cue from the particular melody of Strauss and Taylor’s work: that political philosophy, and particularly political philosophy concerned with the role and impact of religion on the world, cannot be divorced from the real, material, and human world in which religious practice(s) and conflict(s) arise. For that reason the chapter takes into account more than the place of Strauss and Taylor in the history of philosophy and seeks to show how their awareness of their own thought as a part of the philosophical continuum is coupled with an awareness of the particular context—both time and place—in which each of them wrote. Both Strauss and Taylor identified themselves with what could accurately be called a philosophy of investment, often contrasted with the thought of Nietzsche and certainly in contrast to any form of philosophical and political contemplation that does not address the past, and the traditions of its texts and praxis, respectfully and with seriousness.

Material Histories

Strauss, raised in the aftermath of World War I and educated in Germany, eventually fled the rising Nazi tide in Germany and eventually found a home at the University of Chicago, where he was a teacher for many years. He never took a government post or in any way participated in the formulation of government policies—although there are those who say that he did so behind the scenes or through his students.² Some of the undergraduates who heard Strauss lecture have followed his own career path, becoming professors in universities and colleges across North America, Canada, and Europe, while some opted for more public and occasionally notorious careers in (primarily the United States) government. Strauss is widely read, and his readers can be found in academic departments ranging from political science to the study of religion, from history to education, and from Jewish to Islamic Studies. Whether simply reading Strauss and thinking that his thought is eloquent and important is enough to make one a “Straussian,” or whether that descriptor requires an ideological affinity, is a different question.³

Biographically, Charles Taylor is unlike Leo Strauss in almost every possible way (though they are both white men who held tenured positions at world-class universities). Taylor is both a lawyer and an academic; a public intellectual, his writing can be found in Canadian and, on occasion, international newspapers: and he has worked directly for the Canadian government, most famously as one of the two eponymous co-chairs of the Bouchard-Taylor Report (2008).⁴ Canada, and specifically Quebec, is one of Michael Walzer’s “mixed regimes” of toleration. It has a significant immigrant and first-generation community, combined with the descendants of those who arrived in the region as colonists, and Indigenous Peoples whose residence pre-dates all other groups.⁵ The Bouchard-Taylor Report was commissioned by the government after a spate of incidents (and an absolute explosion of press) regarding situations in which “religious accommodation” had taken place. The goal of the Report was to clarify and make recommendations about the state of multiculturalism in Quebec and how legal and social issues could be more clearly and productively addressed. The fact that the stumbling block to multiculturalism in Quebec was around questions of religious canons and state civility is no coincidence; as Strauss noted, religious faith and even more so religious practice make it difficult to homogenize people, or to unify them, if one is concerned about “nationhood.” In the Report, Bouchard and Taylor describe the specifics of known incidents, legal precedents and possibilities, and concrete attempts to define—for both legal and rhetorical purposes—a vocabulary of toleration. And most fascinatingly for an examination of secularization and toleration, it was a report delivered to a government that already had a legal framework for dealing with potentially borderline issues of state duty/individual rights: reasonable accommodation. In other words, Canada has already been operating under the presumption that the state has a duty to accommodate, within specific limits, the disturbance and potential pressure on resources generated by Canadians who believe that their faith requires them to do a certain thing, perform a certain prayer, or wear certain clothes.⁶

Taylor’s works, from the early leftist essays of the late 1950s and ’60s through the substantial and deep tomes of 1989 (Sources of the Self) and 2007 (A Secular Age), presuppose that secularism—as both a government position and a social concept—involves figuring out how actual political and social institutions can balance a commitment to freedom of religion with the need for adherents of all religions to interact nonviolently and on equal footing before the state. Strauss, further removed from politics explicitly, was more worried about the ability of states to find that real balance, and took very seriously the possibility that in fact genuine political equality among religions might be impossible, and that some degree of “otherness” would have to be accepted by minorities in the nation-state.⁷

Political Scientist, Philosophers of Politics, Historians of Political Philosophy

Despite the fact that Strauss never participated in politics directly, one of the reasons for his fame and infamy is the pertinence of his work to the challenges of democracy. However timely his insights into the issues of democracy might be, Strauss himself maintained that there was a fundamental distinction between the philosopher and the politician, or to phrase it differently, between the virtue of the philosopher and the virtue of the politician. The virtue of the philosopher is a never-ending, critical, careful search for the truth. The virtue of the politician is his ability to direct the community of people that make up a polity toward peace and prosperity, and therefore stability.⁸ Obviously, these goals of the philosopher and the politician are not always the same, and in fact are often opposed to one another. The politician promotes ideas and practices, and in fact promulgates laws, that ensure the survival of the community. That (relatively) peaceful stability is the virtue for which he strives. The philosopher, on the other hand, promotes debate about the truth, about the morality of a given law, about the foundations of an uncritical belief. In short, the philosopher provokes discord not for its own sake, but makhloket l’shem shamayim—for the sake of a higher power that demands the truth, regardless of whether that truth may have negative consequences for an individual, a group, or the legitimacy of a political regime itself.⁹ Philosophy therefore appears in much of Strauss’s work as fundamentally in conflict with politics and different games whose players keep tripping over one another because they are on the same field.¹⁰

Political philosophy is a particular problem because for Strauss the attempt to conduct political philosophy in the modern world can only be a third- or fourth-stage imitation of Classical political philosophy that, as we will see below, was anchored in its time and place to physical, material, even “natural” occurrences in a way that no succeeding generation of political philosophers (doomed to speculate about and view everything through their understanding of the classics) ever was. What is notable about the political philosophy that developed at the time of Nietzsche was that it ceased to even make such an attempt, casting off the requirement that one understand the past or search for any kernels of truth within it. This is disastrous, according to Strauss, on a number of levels: while a critique of our predecessors may be both the prerogative of and a necessity for the new generation, Nietzschean political thought would have us throw the baby out with the political bathwater. Acknowledging the need for our predecessors—as teachers, as resources, as examples of what is good and what can go wrong—is one of the things that Strauss and Taylor share.¹¹ For Taylor, the attempt to create a better and more virtuous society cannot involve a radical break from the prior systems that we now regard as oppressive or patriarchal, unless that break somehow involves the deep understanding of oppression and patriarchy that makes us at least somewhat less likely to repeat the same exclusions and aggressions in a different form. For Strauss, it is only by understanding the thinkers of the past as they understood themselves that we can begin to seriously critique and analyze our own world. Strauss’s command that we “understand the thinker of the past as he understood himself” has been the subject of a great deal of controversy. At the most basic (or exoteric, if you like) level, Strauss acknowledges the potential impossibility of such a venture (though this does not undermine the importance of the attempt).¹² On a deeper level, Strauss’s insistence points us to his own work on the thinkers of the past; and, in the case of the Classical and to a certain extent Medieval political philosophers, to the fact that their political philosophy, unlike our own, owed its legitimacy to its direct confrontation with the circumstances in which they developed it rather than to its knowledge of prior thinkers.¹³

For Taylor, the relationship between political science and philosophy is more evenly divided, between the science that analyzes political movements and provides information about them, via public news sources or government policy recommendations; and the investigation of concepts and ideas deployed (often uncritically) in those contexts. The easiest way to identify this distinction in Taylor is by looking at the Bouchard-Taylor Report of 2008, which gave more than thirty-five explicit recommendations to the Quebec government about its limits and responsibilities of the government to reasonably accom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. Arts of Reading and Seeing
• II. History and Politics
• III. Culture and Critique
• About the Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover