1
Saving Anglo-Americans from Themselves
“In defending modern civilisation against German nihilism, the English are defending the eternal principles of civilisation.”1 Leo Strauss delivered these stirring words in a lecture at the New School for Social Research in February 1941, when it was far from obvious that Britain, standing alone against Hitler, would win (or even survive) this deadly struggle. Yet the historic significance of Strauss’s words goes far beyond the context of World War II, since his clear support for the cause of England ultimately redefined what conservatives in the Anglo-American tradition would stand for well into the Cold War and post–Cold War periods: the defense of eternal principles that stand above the current of history.
Strauss, who had fled from a Germany veering toward Nazi takeover in 1932, had good reason to resent the numerous appeasers of Hitler who claimed the Führer was a great leader who represented the next wave of unstoppable historical change. Perhaps for this reason, Strauss scorned those who were tempted to portray Hitler as anything more than a “tool of ‘History’” who did not even understand the “new epoch” he was ushering into existence. Instead, the rise and success of Hitler demonstrated, at least to Strauss, the absurdity of reading into “History” any ultimate meaning that could provide a foundation for prudent political judgment. Appeals to “History” were so ambiguous that they could justify the bad as well as the good. Without a “standard which is stable and not changeable,” a standard that is above History, any judgment based on the currents of historical change would have to lead to nihilism, the ultimate denial of the “rulership of reason” in favor of defending the most monstrous regime in history.2
This attack on the authority of History is not simply a rejection of the nineteenth-century idea of Progress, which had already been forcefully challenged by the carnage of World War I. Nor is Strauss, who was an avid reader of history, rejecting the study of historical fact. The study of history is not the same as appealing to the authority of History. In his American exile, Strauss is calling for nothing less than the abandonment of any standard of politics or morality that is merely relative to its historic period. For this reason, he privileges the “eternal principles” over the merely historical ones. Without these timeless standards, the West will sink into nihilism and, ultimately, death.
The obvious question that arises here is “What are these eternal principles?” The purpose of my study is twofold: to understand what Strauss meant by these trans-historical principles that he attributed to the best traits of Anglo-American civilization, and to evaluate the implications of his teaching on the Anglo-American tradition of democracy that he cherished. It was his fondest hope that his American students would continue to take up the defense of these ideals in the perilous days of the Cold War. Strauss’s attempt to identify the cause of the Anglo-American West with credos that stand above and against History is not only his most lasting contribution to postwar political philosophy. It is his most enduring contribution to the cause of Anglo-American democracy in our time.
It is a major premise of this study that Strauss’s support for Anglo-American democracy is sincere. Unlike his numerous leftist critics who accuse him of secretly hiding a right-wing contempt for liberal democracy, I believe that Strauss should be taken at his word. In fact, I agree with his equally numerous defenders that his most important teaching is to find “new resources” for the liberal tradition he attributes to English and American civilization.3 However, I shall contend that Strauss’s reasons for defending Anglo-American democracy may actually do the cause more harm than good. Strauss’s radical rejection of History in favor of Nature is ultimately a rejection of the conservative tradition that is at the heart of the civilization he is determined to protect.
Before I embark on a full critique of Strauss’s concept of History, it is essential to explain why he and his students have been so successful in redefining what the West should uphold as principle. Much has been made of the connection between Strauss and “neoconservatism,” an ideology that first emerged in the early 1970s and has now become associated with the utopian project of democratizing the Moslem world through the use of American firepower. The purpose of this study is not to be another book on the relation between Straussianism and neoconservatism. Although the rise of neoconservatism is hard to imagine without the influence of Strauss, it is misleading to argue—as many critics do—that he and his movement bear sole responsibility for providing the intellectual rationale behind this foreign policy. Strauss would never have enjoyed the success he did in the Anglo-American world had there not already been a fertile ideological soil in which to plant his teachings. Although Strauss himself had more doubts than his American students about the wisdom of equating love of God with love of country and may well have opposed the post–Cold War policy of exporting American ideals by force, there is no question that he believed in the superiority of Anglo-American ideals.4 Even if it is simplistic to blame the Iraq War on the application of Straussian ideas, his belief in “eternal” principles uncannily coheres with an Anglo-American ideal that long predates neoconservatism: the will to see the peoples of the world and the Anglo-American West in fundamental agreement over what is universally right.5 Long before the beginning of Strauss’s American exile, the Anglo-American tradition of political philosophy was already turning away from historical standards of judgment to trans-historical ideals that paved the way for the triumph of neoconservatism. For this reason, this book is as much a study of Strauss as it is a study of the principles that underlie Anglo-American democracy.
Why Did Strauss Succeed in the Anglo-American Sphere?
In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel praises modern eighteenth-century England for creating a “rational politics” that encourages her countrymen to reflect upon “their inward political and economic relationships.” In particular, Hegel admires English political institutions for encouraging the freedom of conscience that makes possible this philosophical reflection. Despite his keen eye for historic and cultural diversity, Hegel is also confident that this “philosophy of reasoning thought” has become “universal.” He even holds out the implicit hope that all peoples can adopt ideals that are historically specific to the English.6
Although Hegel represents the philosophy of “History” that Strauss pejoratively associates with historicism and nihilism, there is substantial agreement between the two thinkers on the virtues of the English. The fact that England offers to the world universal principles, which can be understood by all rational human beings, clearly appealed to both of these distinguished German thinkers. In “German Nihilism,” Strauss praises the English for upholding “the old and eternal ideal of decency, of rule of law, and of that liberty which is not license.”7 Unlike the German nihilists, who prejudicially separate human beings based on race and culture, the English defend eternal principles of the good precisely because these are universal principles. In this context, Strauss and his students typically praise liberal democracy as the best regime for all human beings. Although Strauss never quite offers a rigorous definition of what he means by “liberal democracy,” it is not hard to glean from his writings its historic origins. In his 1962 “Preface” to his early work on Spinoza, Strauss explains that liberal democracy was first conceived in opposition to the medieval “kingdom of darkness” that denied human freedom. In this new democratic regime, however, “universal human morality” and religious freedom are the cardinal political foundations.8 (For this reason, Strauss goes on to say, it is the first regime that extended full political rights to Jews.) Although Strauss portrays the Dutch Jew Spinoza as the first defender of liberal democracy, it is Anglo-American civilization that actualizes this regime. Strauss’s praise of liberal democracy is akin to Churchill’s famous defense of “Civilisation” in a 1938 speech that employed this term as its title. “There is freedom, there is law; there is love of country; there is a great measure of goodwill between classes; there is a widening prosperity. There are unmeasured opportunities of correcting abuses and making further progress.” It is not surprising that prominent Straussian scholars have looked to this speech as a classic defense of the best regime. This speech, as Thomas Pangle observes, inspires Western liberal democracies to “revivify” their understanding of “their highest purposes” and form an alliance as a bulwark against their enemies from the Left and the Right.9
In this defense of liberal democracy, there are a number of assumptions that cry out for scrutiny. For one thing, it is not obvious that liberalism and democracy fit as well as Strauss and his students seem to suggest. Spinoza, that great philosopher of liberal democracy, certainly treasured intellectual freedom, but he did not believe that women or slaves deserved the rights of democratic citizenship. Moreover, he lamented the democratic violence that the Puritans unleashed on the Stuart monarchy during the English Civil War, only to replace this institution with the dictatorship of Cromwell.10 As Paul Gottfried has persuasively argued, the earliest liberals were generally hostile to the very idea of a mass democracy that would give the vote to all human beings, lest this extension of the franchise lead to the destruction of liberty.11 Even Churchill, that hero of the Straussian pantheon, was generally opposed to the rise of democracy if this meant the end of Victorian virtues and liberties. Although Strauss cannot be accused of being a naïve defender of modern democracy, in light of his awareness that liberal freedom has led to discrimination against his own people,12 he never gives the impression that liberalism and democracy are a fatal mix that may undermine one in favor of the other.
If Strauss and his students have any consistent worries, they involve the recurrent possibility that even the most democratic of peoples may lose faith in this regime and, worst of all, be unwilling to fight for its survival. We shall see Strauss emphasize that only a few Englishmen, and not necessarily the nation’s greatest philosophers, uphold these ideals. As he observed in a letter to Karl Löwith one year after the end of World War II, one is more likely to find within “Anglosaxony” (sic) the presence of philosophical minds at work in the “historical faculties” than in “pure philosophy.”13 Strauss apparently never abandoned the hope that there are always a handful of Anglo-American minds who understand the big picture. For this reason, he credits the famed English liberal Lord Acton for teaching that an overemphasis on the historical origins of ideas may subvert otherwise decent regimes.14
The Historicist Threat to Liberal Democracy
What Strauss fears most, especially in the Cold War period of his American exile, is that the old German nihilism which caused World War II is enjoying victory in the nation struggling to maintain the “eternal principles” he once associated with the England that defied Hitler. In Natural Right and History, which Strauss published at the University of Chicago twelve years after his lecture on German nihilism, he warns Americans that the nation their country defeated in war may impose on them “the yoke of its own thought.”15 That yoke is Historicism, the ideology of appealing to History as the source of all political judgment. Only the United States represents the last, best hope to protect what is eternally true from the threat posed by those ideologues who believe in the historically relative. Lest any critic thinks that Strauss is an historicist for siding with the Anglo-American tradition while he blames the Germans for all that is wrong with modernity, his student Harry Jaffa cautions that this reading is dead wrong. Although no one “appreciated better than he—nor was anyone more grateful than he—for the strength no less than the decency of Anglo-American democracy,” the nihilism and historicism that plagued the age was radically modern, not unique to the German mind.16 It took a civilization dedicated to eternal principles to defeat this plague.
What, then, is eternal about the United States, a nation known for its brazen love of technological progress? It is well known to readers of Strauss that America’s tradition of “natural right,” particularly its adherence to the “self-evident” truths of universal liberty and equality, is, in his judgment, the most effective modern bulwark against historicism. Despite his misgivings toward the philosophy of Locke, Strauss admires America for retaining an awareness of what is naturally good for humanity. Since Locke and the American Founders clearly have an appreciation for an unchanging human nature that seeks what is universally good for all human beings, the republic still represents the most powerful obstacle against Historicism in its most lethal (that is, German) form.17
What exactly is wrong with Historicism? Why does Strauss emphatically assert that this ideology is destructive to all that is true and (eternally) good in the world? Historicism is not to be confused with the historical study of ideas, that is, an awareness of the historical context in which great thinkers and statesmen have labored. Strauss never opposes “history” per se, particularly when he refers to himself at times as an historian.18 Historicism is more radical than this. The most serious criticism that he consistently offers throughout his oeuvre is that Historicism is self-contradictory: if it is true, then it is false (or at least trivial). Historicism suffers from the paradox of the liar. Since it teaches “that all human thoughts or beliefs are historical,” historicism itself “can be of only temporary validity.” Because historicism denies the existence of transcendent or universal standards, there is no way of judging what is absolutely good or bad for human beings.19 The political upshot of this teaching is a dire one since, from an historicist perspective, there is no way of judging the goodness or badness of a regime: democracy is reduced to the same level as tyranny. Taken to an extreme, Strauss believes that even the greatest modern historicists cannot distinguish between civilization and cannibalism if they apply historicism with consistency: the goodness or badness of both modes of being is relative to their historic periods.20 To be sure, this last claim smacks of a polemical, straw man argument on Strauss’s part: there is no evidence of an historicist who ever conflated civilization with cannibalism. It is also far from obvious that a reader can understand a great thinker’s original intent (a cardinal tenet of Straussian hermeneutics) without understanding the kind of world this thinker inhabited.21
Nevertheless, Strauss is legitimately targeting a serious defect in some historicist thought (e.g., Marxism): its inability to account for its own quasi-absolute moral judgment, which then sacrifices people to some tyrannical end in the name of “History.”22 Strauss’s keen sense of self-referentiality is motivated by his genuine determination to defend the most decent regime that humanity has ever known, Anglo-American liberal democracy. Still, as I argue throughout this book, Strauss’s anti-historicist inattention to historical...