Strauss and the social scientist

Public Interest, Spring, 2003 by Werner J. Dannhauser

AS Leo Strauss becomes more famous and books about him proliferate, it is important to remember, though easy to forget, that he was not the sinister godfather of the Right, nor the pied piper of so-called conservative values. During his most productive years, he taught in the Division of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago as a professor of political science. There he wrote some of his most path-breaking books and attracted a number of students who became so devoted to him that they called themselves Straussians (I myself am one of them).

Controversy surrounded Strauss even then, to be sure. He seemed to specialize in unsettling settled convictions, and usually did so in quiet prose buttressed by formidable scholarship. But once in a while his prose yielded to polemical zest, as in a memorable passage quoted in the book under review:

Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic: it has no attributes peculiar to fallen angels. It is not even Machiavellian, for Machiavelli's teaching was graceful, subtle, and colorful. Nor is it Neronian. Nevertheless, one may say that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.

Since Strauss drew blood both as a scholar and polemicist, he inevitably drew criticism unto himself. But his critics almost never read him the way he wanted or deserved to be read--the way he read others. Strauss was indeed a great reader of texts, producing a series of matchless commentaries on political philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche. Today, it is easy to come upon sweeping denunciations of Strauss, but difficult to find any serious engagement with what he actually wrote.

This dearth of textual criticism has now been partially remedied by Boston College political scientist Nasser Behnegar in his book Leo Strauss, Max Weber, and the Scientific Study of Politics. Behnegar concentrates on Strauss's most accessible and influential book, Natural Right and History, especially on the chapter devoted to Max Weber. He also considers the "Epilogue" Strauss wrote for a book of essays by his students, Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics. This relatively narrow focus should not obscure the fact that Behnegar proves himself completely familiar with Strauss's entire corpus, from his early studies of Spinoza, Maimonides, and Hobbes to his later essays, some published only posthumously. What is more, Behnegar has mastered the whole field of the so-called scientific study of politics. He discusses the works of Arthur Bentley, Charles Merriam, Robert Dahl, and Harold Lasswell--the kind of social science Strauss subjected to criticism. Above all, Behnegar has studied the dense work of Ma x Weber in order to evaluate Strauss's painstaking analysis of the German sociologist in Natural Right and History.

Throughout his book, Behnegar manifests great doggedness and genuine openness of mind. These traits, also evident in Strauss himself, enable Behnegar to get inside the latter's universe of discourse, and to prove that Strauss was not an enemy but "a friend, perhaps an indispensable friend," of political science.

IT is of course true that Strauss had some harsh words for con temporary political science, which he faulted for its methodological obsessiveness and its "neglect of man's moral concerns." But his criticism came from within, from one who wanted his profession to be genuinely scientific. If he criticized the new political science, it was in part because of his appreciation for the old political science, with its roots in Socrates' turn to the human things. And yet he was not antiquarian in his orientation--the new political science compared unfavorably in his view with Montesquieu and Tocqueville as well as Plato and Aristotle.

One cannot ignore moral concerns with impunity. Considerations of better and worse, of good and bad, and ultimately of justice and natural right enter constantly into our actions and attempts at understanding. But Behnegar shows that Strauss was anything but a dogmatist who propounded the eternally true principles of justice. Having grasped that Plato's Republic is ultimately not so much about justice as about the problem of justice, Strauss also understood that the need for natural right does not guarantee the existence of natural right. With this in mind, Strauss began an ambitious investigation into what stands in the way of subscribing to natural right. The result of that investigation was Natural Right and History.

Strauss showed that natural right had been rejected on two grounds. One of those was historicism, which asserts that reason is decisively influenced and determined by its historical matrix; the other is the fact-value distinction, which asserts that reason is unable to establish the superiority of any one principle of right or goodness in a world in which such principles conflict. Behnegar devotes almost all of his analysis to Strauss's chapter on the fact-value distinction, presumably because it is more relevant than historicism to "the scientific study of politics."