Leo Strauss

Life

Leo Strauss was born on 20 September 1899 in Kirchhain, in the German state of Hesse, into a small-town Orthodox Jewish family. His father Hugo Strauss owned a small farm-supply business; the family observed Orthodox Jewish practice in a region where Jews had long been integrated into the local social and economic life. Strauss attended the Gymnasium at Marburg from 1912, completing his Abitur in 1917, and was briefly conscripted into the German army at the end of the First World War (he saw no front-line service).

He studied at the universities of Marburg, Frankfurt, Berlin, and Hamburg between 1917 and 1921, completing his doctorate at Hamburg in 1921 under Ernst Cassirer with a thesis on the philosophical problem of knowledge in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. The doctoral work brought him into contact with the major German philosophers and historians of the early Weimar period: Cassirer's neo-Kantianism, Edmund Husserl (under whom Strauss attended seminars at Freiburg in 1922), and the young Martin Heidegger, whose Marburg lectures Strauss attended in 1923–25 and whose impact Strauss would later describe as decisive even when Strauss disagreed.

The Weimar years involved Strauss in the political-cultural debates of German Jewry. He worked from 1925 to 1932 as a research scholar at the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, where he produced his first books — Spinoza's Critique of Religion (1930) and Philosophy and Law (1935, completed in Berlin before emigration) — and engaged closely with the political philosophy of his contemporary Carl Schmitt (whose Concept of the Political Strauss reviewed in 1932 in a substantive critical-engaged essay).

The Nazi seizure of power in January 1933 ended Strauss's German career. He left for France with a Rockefeller fellowship, spent 1934 in England working on Hobbes, and emigrated to the United States in 1937, where he joined the New School for Social Research's University in Exile in New York. He taught at the New School from 1938 to 1948, then moved to the University of Chicago as Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor of Political Philosophy. The Chicago years (1949–67) were Strauss's most productive period; the school of political philosophy that bears his name was formed around the students and conversations of these years. After retirement from Chicago Strauss taught at Claremont Men's College (1968–69) and at St John's College, Annapolis (1969 until his death). He died on 18 October 1973 in Annapolis, aged 74.

The family life included his marriage in 1933 to Marie Bernsohn, a recent widow with one young daughter; the couple later adopted Marie's nephew, whose parents had perished in the Holocaust.

The Esoteric Reading

The interpretive method for which Strauss is best known is the doctrine of esoteric writing: the claim that classical and medieval political philosophers regularly wrote with a public, exoteric meaning intended for the general reader and a private, esoteric meaning intended for the philosophical reader capable of penetrating the surface. The doctrine was developed most extensively in Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), which gathers essays on the esoteric writing of Maimonides, Halevi, Spinoza, Xenophon, and others.

The argument: in conditions of persecution — conditions Strauss saw as the normal historical situation of philosophy in pre-modern societies in which the philosophical critique of received religious and political opinion could be politically dangerous — philosophical writers developed techniques of esoteric communication. The careful reader can detect the esoteric teaching through textual features (contradictions between surface and depth, the placement of decisive passages, the use of speakers with whom the author does not identify, deliberate apparent confusion at crucial points) that signal the presence of a teaching distinct from the exoteric surface.

The doctrine was developed in Strauss's interpretive practice across the entire corpus: from his Plato (the dialogues read as carefully constructed dramatic-philosophical performances in which the surface argument is rarely Plato's own teaching), to his Maimonides (the Guide for the Perplexed read as concealing an Aristotelian rationalism behind the surface of Jewish orthodox piety), to his Machiavelli (the Prince read as concealing an even more radical critique of Christian morality behind a surface that itself shocked the conventional reader), to his Hobbes and others.

The doctrine has been continuously controversial. The mainstream history of philosophy and political theory has been broadly skeptical, treating the esoteric readings as elaborate constructions that frequently impose Straussian interpretive priorities on texts that bear them poorly. The Straussian school has continued to defend and develop the readings; the dispute has not been resolved and probably cannot be. The most significant assessment outside the school is George Anastaplo's, who was sympathetic but methodologically careful.

The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns

Strauss's substantive historical-philosophical thesis, developed across the works of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, is that the history of Western philosophy is best understood as the unfolding of the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns: the conflict between the classical political philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, and their successors and the modern political philosophy initiated by Machiavelli, developed by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, and consummated in the late modern political thought from Nietzsche through Heidegger to the present.

The classical position, on Strauss's reading, treats political philosophy as the systematic inquiry into the best regime, conducted with full awareness of the gap between what is best in principle and what is achievable in actual political conditions. The modern position, beginning with Machiavelli's Prince, lowers the philosophical aim from the best to the actually achievable, takes the actually existing human nature as the starting point rather than as something to be improved, and substitutes the conquest of nature and the manipulation of political affairs for the classical contemplation of the best regime.

The modern project, on Strauss's account, was the deliberate philosophical decision to abandon the classical tradition. The decision was made for understandable reasons — the failure of classical political philosophy to produce satisfactory political results, the demand for a politically effective philosophy that could shape conditions rather than merely contemplate them — but the consequences were catastrophic. The unfolding of modernity through its three waves (Machiavelli-Hobbes-Locke, Rousseau-Kant-Hegel, Nietzsche-Heidegger) produced the crisis of modernity in which Western civilization had lost both classical contemplation and modern effective rationality, leaving only the nihilism Strauss saw as the defining condition of the twentieth century.

The major works developing this thesis include Natural Right and History (1953, the 1949 Walgreen Lectures at Chicago), Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), What Is Political Philosophy? (1959), The City and Man (1964), Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (1983, posthumous), and many essays.

The Theological-Political Problem

The other major Straussian theme is the theological-political problem: the unresolved tension between the philosophical life (the life of contemplative inquiry into the truth, conducted without commitment to received religious doctrine) and the religious life (the life of obedience to divine command). Strauss treated this tension as the central problem of the medieval Jewish and Islamic political-philosophical tradition, particularly in Maimonides and al-Farabi, and as a problem that modern philosophy had attempted to dissolve but had not actually solved.

The Straussian engagement with medieval Jewish and Islamic political philosophy is one of the major Straussian contributions to philosophical scholarship outside the immediate Straussian school. Persecution and the Art of Writing, the early essays collected in Philosophy and Law, the late book Philosophy and Law (revised version 1965), and many shorter texts have shaped subsequent engagement with medieval Jewish and Islamic political-philosophical thought.

The Straussian School

The school of political philosophy that descended from Strauss's Chicago teaching includes the first generation of his immediate students (Joseph Cropsey, Allan Bloom, Harvey Mansfield, Werner Dannhauser, Stanley Rosen, Seth Benardete, Hilail Gildin), the second generation of their students (Harvey Mansfield Jr., Thomas Pangle, Nathan Tarcov, Mark Lilla, Catherine Zuckert, Robert Bartlett), and the broader institutional presence at the University of Chicago, Boston College, Claremont McKenna College, and elsewhere.

The school has produced a substantial body of scholarly work in political philosophy and the history of political thought. Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind (1987), the surprise best-seller that brought broader public attention to the Straussian critique of contemporary American cultural and educational life, was the most prominent single popular product of the school. The Straussian connection to the American neoconservative political movement of the 1970s through the 2000s has been continuously debated; the connection is real but is more complex than the simplified accounts (both sympathetic and hostile) have sometimes suggested.

Reception

Strauss's reception has been sharply polarized, perhaps more so than that of any other twentieth-century political philosopher. The Straussian school has treated him with the loyalty of devoted students; the mainstream of Anglophone academic political theory has frequently treated him with the suspicion appropriate to a writer whose esoteric hermeneutic could not be reconciled with standard historical-philological practice. The continental philosophical tradition has been somewhat more sympathetic, recognizing Strauss as a serious continental philosopher who happened to write in English in his American career.

The Strauss scholarship outside the Straussian school includes Eugene Sheppard's Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile (Brandeis University Press, 2006), Daniel Tanguay's Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography (Yale University Press, 2007), the journals Interpretation (the Straussian house journal) and Polity (where major debates have occurred), and the multi-volume Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Heinrich Meier's editorial work on Strauss's German correspondence and early German writings has made the German Strauss available in critical edition. The standard Anglophone collected works has not appeared; many of Strauss's essays are scattered in journals and edited volumes.

Significance

Strauss's importance has three dimensions. As interpreter of classical and medieval political philosophy, his readings — however controversial — reopened texts (Plato's dialogues, Maimonides's Guide, al-Farabi's political works, Xenophon, Machiavelli) to philosophical engagement after a period in which they had been treated principally as historical objects. As theorist of the quarrel between ancients and moderns, his narrative of Western political philosophy as the unfolding of a fundamental conflict supplied the most articulate twentieth-century alternative to both Whig progressive and orthodox Marxist accounts. As founder of the school of political philosophy that bears his name, he produced a body of students and successors whose work has continued to shape political-philosophical scholarship in the United States and beyond for over half a century.

See Also

Plato · Maimonides · al-Farabi · Machiavelli