What was Leo Strauss up to?

Public Interest, Fall, 2003 by Steven Lenzner, William Kristol

The only way to begin to understand Leo Strauss's political thought is by studying his writings. This may seem a simple rule of common sense. Yet a glance at the current controversy over Strauss's supposed influence on contemporary American politics and foreign policy suggests that this rule is easily ignored.

The controversy turns on a legitimate question: "What was Strauss up to?"--or, more precisely, "What was Strauss's intention?" But it would be misleading to attempt to understand Strauss by ascribing to him an influence, whether beneficial or nefarious, on current policy debates, and then inferring from the alleged influence what his aims really were. It makes far more sense to turn first to Strauss himself--that is, to his writings--in order to understand his political teaching. Then one might evaluate his intentional as well as inadvertent influence on today's policy debates.

Strauss was born in Germany in 1899 and settled in the United States in the late 1930s. He taught at several schools, most notably the University of Chicago. By the time of his death in 1973, he had written 15 books, most of which comment on the great texts of political philosophy, including the writings of Plato, Xenophon, Machiavelli, and Locke. But Strauss did not restrict himself to the narrow road of a single discipline: His works include interpretations of Thucydides' history, Aristophanes' comedies, and Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed. Successful as Strauss was as a teacher, it is above all his books--works such as Natural Right and History (1953), Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), and Socrates and Aristophanes (1966)--that constitute his legacy. His extraordinary body of work makes Strauss more than just one learned voice among many in scholarly debates, worthy of respect perhaps, but not serious engagement. Indeed, it is no doubt some vague sense of Strauss's status as a thinker that has aroused so much passion both in and out of the academy. His thought is of such a character that it defies indifference.

The rediscovery

Strauss set himself a remarkable task: the revival of Western reading, and therefore, of philosophizing. Strauss claimed that he had rediscovered "a forgotten kind of writing," and that for almost two centuries the proper manner of reading the greatest works of the past had apparently disappeared. If Strauss in fact rediscovered the art of writing, then he made possible the revival of Western letters. If Strauss's work is sound, he made it possible for us today to appreciate great books in the spirit and manner in which they were written. And the almost universal vehemence with which his rediscovery was initially denounced and ridiculed by the scholarly world demonstrated just how completely this art had been lost.

No passage of Strauss's more vividly captures what was entailed by this rediscovery than his account of Machiavelli's art of writing:

Time and again we have become bewildered by the fact that the man who is more responsible than any other man for the break with the Great Tradition should in the very act of breaking prove to be the heir, the by no means unworthy heir, to that supreme art of writing which that tradition manifested at its peaks. The highest art has its roots, as he well knew, in the highest necessity. The perfect book or speech obeys in every respect the pure and merciless laws of what has been called logographic necessity. The perfect speech contains nothing slipshod; in it there are no loose threads; it contains no word that has been picked up at random; it is not marred by errors due to faulty memory or to any other kind of carelessness; strong passions and a powerful and fertile imagination are guided with ease by a reason which knows how to use the unexpected gift, which knows how to persuade and which knows how to forbid; it allows of no adornment which is not imposed by the gravity and the aloofness of the subject matter; the perfect writer rejects with disdain and some impatience the demand of vulgar rhetoric that expressions must be varied since change is pleasant.

By recreating with at least equal care the teaching of his ostensible antagonist, Machiavelli, as that of his ostensible guide, Plato, Strauss offers an invitation to open-minded reconsideration, one that consists "in listening to the conversation between the great philosophers, or more generally and more cautiously, between the greatest minds, and therefore in studying the great books."

Strauss became aware of this unorthodox literary practice, above all, while studying two authors: the medieval rationalist Maimonides and the supposedly naive student of Socrates, Xenophon. Toward the end of his life, Strauss pointed to the late 1930s as the period in which he fully grasped the character of the forgotten art of writing--what it entailed and what its essential implications were. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, the magnitude of what he had then detected, Strauss waited a decade before publishing his next book. That book was On Tyranny: An Interpretation of Xenophon's Hiero (1948). Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952) and Natural Right and History (1953) followed soon thereafter. It was primarily by way of these three books that Strauss introduced himself to his contemporary readers.