What was Leo Strauss up to?

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

According to Strauss, the "crisis of modern natural right" arose from a reaction to the modern natural-right doctrine of Hobbes and Locke. Rousseau initiated that crisis by "thinking through Hobbes's critique of the traditional view" of man's natural sociality. According to Rousseau, Hobbes was right in seeking to discover the roots of justice in man's natural presocial condition, but he did not go far enough back. For natural man is not only presocial but prerational as well; he is subhuman. Rousseau thus had to provide an account of the historical evolution of man's humanity. And this, in turn, gave critical impetus to the rise of historicism--a development complemented by elements of Burke's thought.

Yet at the same time as he offers this portrait of the unfolding of modern thought, Strauss furnishes indications that it was not fated or inevitable. In his chapter on Rousseau and Burke, Strauss draws attention to the manner in which each contributed "one of the two most important elements in the 'discovery' of History." If less emphatically, Strauss also notes that "the impression grows that Rousseau sought to restore the classical idea of philosophy," and that "Burke may be said to have restored the older view according to which theory cannot be the sole, or the sufficient, guide of practice." Between these two restorations, or near-restorations, one has the elements of both classical theory and practice, or a complete classical teaching. Strauss almost suggests, or plays with the possibility, that if only the restorative rather than the radicalizing elements of Burke and Rousseau had been put together, historicism could have been averted and classic natural right restored. A century and a half later, after we had experienced historicism in theory and practice, Natural Right and History brought home to its readers the seriousness of the need for a recovery of natural right without in any way minimizing the problematic character of such a recovery.

The art of writing

Though Natural Right and History and Persecution and the Art of Writing were published within a year of each other, they seem to have little in common. Natural Right and History does not contain much explicit discussion of the philosophic art of writing, and has almost nothing to say about the medieval Islamic and Jewish thinkers discussed in Persecution. Natural Right and History emphasizes the contrast between classical and modern natural right; in Persecution, the emphasis falls not on the fundamental divide in the philosophic tradition, but rather on its continuity.

Persecution and the Art of Writing is Strauss's only book explicitly devoted to his rediscovery of the forgotten art of writing, of writing "between the lines," or, more precisely, exotericism. According to Strauss, awareness of exotericism disappeared with the emergence of historicism toward the end of the eighteenth century. In Thoughts on Machiavelli, Strauss identifies the post-Werther Goethe as "the last great man who rediscovered or remembered" the connection between persecution and the art of writing. After Goethe, this insight was lost, and with it "the last vestiges of the recollection of what philosophy originally meant" were destroyed.