Leo Strauss: the sphinx's secret? Or how we learnt to stop worrying and believe through the 'Hoi Poloi'.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 22 September 2006
• Author: Sharpe, Matthew

Just who was Leo Strauss anyway? Is there any chance that he will be born posthumously as himself? A different self than he seemed?

Lawrence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche. (1)

When Zarathrustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home and went into the mountains. Here he had the enjoyment of his spirit and his solitude and he did not weary of it for ten years. But at last his heart turned--and one morning he rose with the dawn, stepped before the sun, and spoke to it thus: Great star! What would your happiness be, if you had not those for whom you shine ... Thus began Zarathrustra's down-going.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Prologue, Thus Spake Zarathrustra. (2)

Since Oedipus Rex, it might have been suspected that the mysteries of many sphinxes are much less mysterious than they first appear to be. This does not mean that there are no sphinxes. It means that, like the purloined letter of Edgar Allen Poe's imagining, what we suppose they are hiding is often not what, or where, we thought it was.

It is no surprise that American political philosopher Leo Strauss has been accused of being a sphinx by critics, and even a sphinx 'without a secret'. (3) After all, what Strauss called his 'great discovery' was that all great philosophers until Machiavelli wrote 'esoteric' texts. (4) Leo Strauss the man, moreover, remains an enigma. Strauss arrived in the United States in the 1930s, a Jewish emigre fleeing Nazi persecution. Yet, as broadcasts, Strauss' teaching has bred generations of 'Straussian' academics, whom critics have repeatedly accused of cultish traits. (5) Perhaps most remarkable of all--and this is certainly what is now being most remarked upon--students of Strauss or of their students (in particular, Alan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind), have become increasingly important in US political circles since Strauss' death in 1973. Strauss' deep appreciation of the Greeks' 'classical political rationalism', together with his strident critique of the 'historicism' of later modern thought (including that of Heidegger, who became a vocal philosophical defender of Nazism) and qualified defence of Western liberalism against the 'Eastern despotism' of the USSR, (6) is widely contended to have had a formative influence on current neo-conservative thinking. Virtually all sources regard Straussian thought as pivotal to such powerful neo-conservatives within the Bush Administration as (formerly) Paul Wolfowitz, Leon Kass and Abram Shulsky, as well as hawkish commentators Richard Perle, Robert Kagan and William Kristol. (7) Few commentators, however, have traced the logic in Strauss' opus that might provide an insight into this confusion over his political philosophical contribution.

Given the bellicose change in American foreign policy since September 11 2001 and the changed political rhetoric used to justify it, it is easy to respond in an alarmist way to commentators' disclosures of a 'powerful and long-standing Straussian presence' in Washington. (8) As Saul Bellow's Ravelstein in part dramatizes, the rise of Straussians to power has almost all of the ingredients of a racy airport novel: secrecy, power and the intersection of seemingly disparate cultural worlds, if not the inveterate opposition of desire (eros) and the law (nomos). (9) The Internet abounds with conspiracy theories locating Strauss as the eminence grise 'behind the throne', seated in nocturnal counsel alongside Vice President Dick Cheney, 'kingmaker' Karl Rove and others.

It is certainly true that, as Anne Norton comments, today there are few if any left-wing Straussians, if there ever were such a bird or such a cage. There are certainly none amongst the 'cadet line' of Straussians influential in Washington. (10) And defenders of Strauss against the idea that he is 'behind the throne' of the Bush II regime tend not to unambiguously repudiate the claims of Strauss' influence on the thinking of the US Administration. Nor do they seem to think the idea such a bad thing. (11) Both this confusion over the Straussian influence, and that apparent influence in the context of world politics today, justify a critical examination of Strauss' theoretical work that takes seriously his whispered 'posthumous birth' as the intellectual godfather of the neo-conservative hawks, vulcans or wasps. As Strauss himself suggests concerning the charges laid by the Athenians against Socrates, where there is smoke there is almost certainly fire. (12)

I will argue, here as elsewhere, that alarmism is not the best way of coming to terms with the apparently contradictory political phenomenon of 'Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire'. (13) In this article I propose a critical-philosophical response to this political phenomenon. Whatever we finally decide (see Part 2 below), I contend that there is no simple one-to-one correspondence between Strauss' academic writings on Plato, Aristotle or the mediaevals and the policies of the 'Bush II' Administration. Not the least challenging aspect of Strauss' work, as I will highlight, is how many of its key notions both anticipate and, at the same time, diverge markedly from positions widely accepted in the liberal Western academy--notably, a root-and-branch critique of modernity and a profound scepticism that modern rationalism or liberalism could peaceably and desirably 'assimilate' cultural, political and ethnic differences. As in any case where a theoretical position has been put to work ideologically, political Straussianism is an articulation of Strauss' theoretical philosophy in political practice, where the pressing demands of politics have unquestionably influenced how and which aspects of the theory have been put to political work.

In what follows, my guiding question is: what is it about Strauss' theoretical position that can have led to it being raised, repeatedly, in connection with the most controversial and secretive American 'regime' since Nixon's? In Part 1, I present a brief, working exposition of Strauss' political philosophy, culminating in Strauss' maverick reading of Plato's Republic that Irving Kristol, amongst others, cites as decisive in his political education. (14) In Part 2, I pose a critical theoretical analysis of Strauss' philosophy, read in the 'unnatural' retrospective light of today's neo-conservative ascendancy. (15) Here I will argue that what is arguably most persuasive in Strauss' thought--his sense of the difference between philosophy and politics, the latter having always to 'vulgarize' the elevated purity of the former--also means that he could hardly be surprised at the significant, openly illiberal 'closing of the Straussian mind' evidenced in the domestic policies and political practice of George W. Bush.

To return to my opening gambit: what I will finally suggest in conclusion is that, just as the uncanny creature invoked by the Theban sphinx's riddle in Oedipus Rex was Oedipus himself, so the solution to the riddle of the current political Straussianism does not lie deep 'between the lines' of Strauss' works. To cite Strauss' Thoughts on Machiavelli: 'the problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things'. (16)

Part 1: Strauss' Rough (Double) Ascent

i. Strauss' criticism of modern liberalism and/or nihilism

Academic Straussians typically present Strauss as an ally of modern liberalism, and this was certainly one level of his teaching after he arrived in the United States. In prefaces and introductions to his books, Strauss expresses patriotic support for the United States, a 'bulwark of freedom' in the face of the 'contemporary tyranny' of the USSR. (17) Strauss' Natural Right and History bears the image of the Declaration of Independence on its cover. On the basis of such evidence, Straussian Stephen Smith, for example, goes as far as to suggest that 'it is an oddity of academic mythology that Strauss is viewed as a bete noir of liberalism'. (18) Yet Strauss' relation to modern (as against ancient) liberalism is ambivalent, at the least, as Gunnell comments. (19) Strauss' strongest theoretical statements in its defence take the form of pointing out how it 'comes closer to what the classics demanded than any alternative that is visible in our age'. (20) Strauss elaborates this 'unhesitating support' without 'unqualified approval' (21) in 'Liberal Education and Responsibility':

we are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy because we are friends and allies of democracy. While we are not permitted to remain silent on the dangers to which democracy exposes itself as well as human excellence, we cannot forget the obvious fact that by giving freedom to all, democracy also gives freedom to those who care for human excellence. (22) Like other great thinkers of the last century, Strauss' thought is overwhelmingly characterized by the diagnosis that secular liberalism, and the modern West, is in 'crisis'. (23) Irving Kristol is, accordingly, being characteristically frank when he says that, however Strauss qualified his position, his 'extraordinary influence' upon US public debate comes from:

Strauss' critique of the destructive elements within modern liberalism, an analysis that was popularised by his students ... [which] has altered the very tone of public discourse in the United States ... To bring contemporary liberalism into disrepute ... is no small achievement. (24) Strauss' criticism of modern liberalism centres on the charge that it tends inevitably towards 'nihilism'. (25) Nietzsche famously claimed that nihilism is the 'uncanny' condition that results when a culture's highest values devalue themselves. Strauss consistently argued that the highest achievements of the West came from its subjects' adherence to two ancient inheritances, whose 'fruitful tension' modern liberalism has turned its back upon: namely, classical rationalism (which Strauss referred to by the cipher...