The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss. - book reviews

National Review, August 18, 1989 by Charles R. Kesler

SIXTEEN YEARS after his death, Leo Strauss's influence on the American mind and on American politics continues to grow. His books are more widely read than ever. His students and followers, whose ranks multiply, form not only the most distinguished and combative group of conservatives in the contemporary academy, but also a revolutionary force within American conservatism.

The reasons for Strauss's growing reputation are abundantly clear in this new collection of his essays and lectures. The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism brings together five of Strauss's previously published articles and five "slightly edited versions" of unpublished lectures. All display the imcomparable insight and remarkable range of knowledge that set Strauss's works apart from any other twentieth-century political philosopher's. And the lectures, which capture something of the wit and informality of Strauss the teacher, are especially welcome.

We ought to be grateful to have so many excellent studies conveniently gathered together. The pity is that room could not have been found for one more: Strauss's essay "On the Interpretation of Genesis," his most radical statement on the reasonableness of divine Revelation. In any case, it would have been helpful if Professor Pangle had indicated at what points he edited Strauss's lectures, especially in the light of Strauss's own fidelity to close textual analysis. But such points hardly detract from the merits of a volume that is fresh, profound, challenging, and readable.

Neither Strauss nor his students have escaped the dislike and sometimes hatred of their faculty colleagues. Partly this is because the Straussians challenge the smug relativism of today's academy and endeavor to reconnect specialized inquiries with the permanent, unifying questions of human life. By reviving the serious study of political philosophy, the Straussians have begun, gradually but inevitably, to have an effect on American political practice. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the most interesting intellectual disputes within American conservatism now involve, directly or indirectly, the Straussian school.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the principal fault line within the conservative movement ran between traditionalists and libertarians. As an intellectual matter, this split is now largely inconsequential. It lives on, in changed form, only as a stumbling block for the Republican Party, which often finds itself torn between its populist-religious and economic-libertarian wings.

This seeming loss of interest has at least two causes. In the first place, the focus of the traditionalist and libertarian parts of conservatism has changed. The traditionalists' ranks have been swollen by millions of new conservatives outraged by Supreme Court decisions on racial integration, abortion, prayer in schools, pornography, and the like-most of whom are good democrats who have no special love for Anglicanism, agrarianism, or aristocracy. The libertarians have been transformed by the addition of supplysiders and public-choice theorists. A related development, not to be overlooked, is that the wings of the conservative movement have learned from each other. Traditionalists have come to doubt the Federal Government's ability to foster virtue, even as libertarians are waking up to the connection between individual freedom, on the one hand, and personal, family, and community integrity on the other.

The libertarian-traditionalist debate is flagging for another reason as well. To reduce the question of the best political system to the polarity of freedom versus order, as both sides have tended to do, is awfully simplistic. With freedom and order, or even freedom and virtue, ranged against each other, defined against each other, the solution to the problem of the most desirable polity seems almost mechanical. One needs only a Laffer-style curve of freedom versus order to select the optimal arrangement. This solution, of course, begs the decisive question. What kind of order, what kind of freedom is under consideration? Is fascism a form of order, or of disorder? Is Communism (which after all preaches the withering away of the state) the perfection or the negation of freedom? Is American republicanism a happy mixture of tyranny and anarchy, or is it something distinctive and desirable in itself?

In short, the debate requires a more profound consideration of the purposes of human, and humane, freedom and order or morality-to make any sense. But raising the question "What is morality?" or "What is virtue?" transcends the distinction between freedom and order.

Gradually, then, the libertarian-traditionalist dispute has been eclipsed by two new disputes in which the Straussians have more or less taken center stage. At the risk of some cuteness, we may call these the East-West and North-South disputes.

For the past ten years, the liveliest and most interesting debate within conservatism has raged between two camps of Straussians-the so-called "Western Straussians," clustering around Harry V. Jaffa and the scholars associated with the Claremont Institute, and the "Eastern Straussians," among whose leading figures are Walter Berns, Allan Bloom, and Thomas Pangle (although the distinction is more a state of mind than of geography-there are "Western Straussians" in the East and vice versa). In books, scholarly essays, letters columns, and not least in the pages of NATIONAL REVIEW, the two sides have clashed-occasionally with angry words and personal vituperation-over the nature of political philosophy, thc character of America, and the status of revealed religion. The majority of Straussians, to be sure, have remained either in the middle or on the sidelines of the disputes, watching them with a mixture of fascination and regret. But however sharp the personal exchanges may have been, the issues involved are of supreme importance for the future of American conservatism.