What was Leo Strauss up to?

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

In this essay, we allow Strauss, as it were, to reintroduce himself, free of the assumptions and accretions piled on him by 50 years of subsequent work by students, scholars, and critics. We begin with the most famous and most accessible of the three books that constitute his own self-introduction, Natural Right and History.

Historicism and relativism

Natural Right and History opens with a solemn invocation of the Declaration of Independence's assertion of self-evident truths and unalienable rights. And Strauss reminds his readers of the important role natural right played in making the United States "the most powerful and prosperous of the nations of the earth." Yet no sooner does he appeal to this heritage than he raises a frightening prospect--that the allies' military victory over Nazi tyranny is being undermined by German thought. At the least, "American social science has adopted the very attitude" that seemed to characterize prewar German thought. It has abandoned adherence to natural right for relativism and historicism. The latter doctrine holds that all human thought is nothing but the accidental or fortuitous product of its time; and the former that all principles of justice are equally arbitrary. There is no ground in nature by which one can reasonably prefer liberal democracy to tyranny. While our social science claims to be able to tell us how we can attain any ends we might desire, it insists that all ends themselves are wholly without foundation. Strauss diagnoses these twin contentions as "retail sanity and wholesale madness."

Strauss does not directly refute either the teaching of historicism or relativism. That is to say, Strauss does not counter the historicist or relativist denial of the existence of natural right by attempting straightforwardly to demonstrate that there are in nature universal and unchanging principles of justice discernible to human reason. Rather, he seeks to sow doubt by bringing to light the dogmatic assumptions that underlie historicism and relativism. Strauss's treatment is negative and preparatory. His intention is to induce us to reflect on the opinions we take for granted, to open us to the possibility that there is a true "philosophic ethics or natural right."

Strauss deploys historicism's own arguments against itself. Historicism maintains that every trans-historical teaching--every teaching that claims for itself universal validity--is in the decisive sense mistaken. All human thought, it holds, has been and will always be "historical," subject to crucial limitations imposed by its age and of which it is necessarily unaware. Yet, Strauss notes, this claim itself is trans-historical: "Historicism thrives on the fact that it inconsistently exempts itself from its own verdict about all human thought. The historicist thesis is self-contradictory or absurd."

Strauss also employs historicism's appeal to experience against its claims. According to historicism, the "experience of history" shows that all teachings of the past rest on a dogmatic foundation, that in their origin things were taken "for granted which must not be taken for granted." Historicism claims that thinkers of the past were characteristically under the spell of their historical situation: Plato could not see beyond the horizon of the Greek city, Hobbes could not look beyond that of the English civil war. Yet Strauss, without taking explicit notice of Martin Heidegger, observes that the most theoretically sophisticated form of historicism, "radical historicism," does not itself call the "experience of history" into question: That vague and indistinct "experience" is taken for granted. Strauss declares that he (or "we") cannot even attempt to discuss radical historicism's critique of classical metaphysics. Instead, he begins to prepare his case for the possible existence of natural right by appealing to his readers' own experiences--"the evidence of those simple experiences regarding right and wrong which are at the bottom of the philosophic contention that there is a natural right."