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Leo Strauss as Cold War Liberal

Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy. Grant N. Havers. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013.

 

The work of German expatriate political philosopher Leo Strauss has in the past two decades gained increasing scholarly attention, the bulk of it from those favorably disposed. The cultural and political prominence of a few of Strauss’s students and associates has attracted additional critical attention, largely from the Left and occasionally from the Right. Leftist critics of Strauss and Straussianism typically criticize Strauss and his associates for their “elitist,” anti-democratic tendencies and for their alleged support for American imperialism. From the Right, Strauss is usually suspected of a quasi-Nietzschean hostility to religion and traditional morality. These critical camps have at least two things in common: a conviction that Strauss is “not one of us” and a determination to focus on the political and moral aims and consequences of Strauss’s work as the principal measure of its scholarly and philosophical worth. In my view, both camps are correct in their first conviction and tend to reveal more about themselves than about Strauss in their determination to judge him principally as a political actor.

Grant N. Havers’ Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy, a critique from the perspective of traditionalist conservatism, displays some genuine virtues as well as some of the aforementioned characteristic vices. Havers’ Strauss is a no conservative (traditionalist or otherwise, if indeed it is in the author’s view possible to be a conservative without being a traditionalist). Rather, he is a “cold war liberal” who recognizes the threat Communism poses to Anglo-American civilization, but whose proffered defense of that civilization is wrong-headed and ultimately destructive of what he is trying to defend. Instead of harkening back to the genuinely Christian roots of our Anglo-American order, Strauss tries to ground it solely in universal rational principles, accessible to all human beings. In so doing, he (and his students) at the very least mistake what it is they are defending and probably weaken it by adopting the kinds of arguments made by its enemies. Havers does not have to work hard to persuade me that Strauss is neither a Christian nor a traditionalist conservative. A more interesting issue – which Havers addresses in a way that I do not find fully satisfying – is whether Anglo-American traditionalist conservatives have anything to learn from Strauss and his students.

Let me begin by focusing on a couple of Havers’ critiques of Strauss and his students, one of which is, I think, for the most part well taken, while the other is misconceived. Havers is on the mark when he argues that Strauss and his students by and large pay much too little attention to the influential Christian elements in the American Founding, preferring instead to emphasize the role of heterodox thinkers like Locke and Montesquieu, on the one hand, and to stress the Aristotelian character of early American political action, on the other. He points out that there is plenty of evidence to demonstrate the American deprecation of classical political theory and practice, as well as ample support for the contention that many in the founding generation took Christianity quite seriously. A complete and accurate account of what it is traditionalist conservatives and “cold war liberals” alike were defending would surely give the overwhelmingly Christian culture of the colonial and founding eras its due. For Havers, this means recognizing that the Anglo-American order cannot be sustained without a vibrant Christian culture, that the limited government that Locke and his American students proposed makes sense only on the foundation of a faithful populace.

It also means that the principles of the American Founding are not and cannot be universal: where there is no Christian culture, there cannot be Anglo-American style democratic republicanism. To the degree that Strauss was indeed essentially a cold war liberal, and to the degree that many of his students and fellow travelers at one time or another identified as hawkish neo-conservatives, their theoretical and historical misunderstanding of the American Founding would seem to lead to significant errors in practical political judgment. The Anglo-American form of government cannot effectively be exported outside the “Anglosphere.”

There are a few problems with this argument, it seems to me. In the first place, Havers seems to believe that the liberal Protestantism that he finds at the core of the Anglo-American tradition provides a stable basis on which to ground a decent and restrained political order. Leaving aside the ample social scientific evidence that suggests that this version of Protestantism is in some substantial part a station on the way to “secular humanism” for some and a more theologically conservative Christianity for others, there is a deeper theoretical problem. Havers writes as if the charity he finds in an author like John Locke is identical with the teaching of the New Testament, that, in other words, Locke is for all intents and purposes an orthodox – albeit bourgeois or liberal – Christian believer. Given Locke’s emphasis on rights (as opposed to duties), the substitution of the state of nature for a prelapsarian Paradise, and his self-conscious misuse of scriptural passages, this is a hard position to sustain without much more argument than Havers provides.

According to Havers, Locke wrote for an audience of “bourgeois Christians”; I think it much more plausible to contend that he (and his predecessors, Bacon and Hobbes) worked hard to create that audience, emphasizing (among other things) the relief of man’s (earthly) estate as the central function of charity and rephrasing the Golden Rule in negative terms, so that the law of love becomes essentially a law of respect. That Christians should be tolerant is certainly plausible; that toleration should be the “chief characteristical mark” of the true church strikes me as a distortion of the meaning of Christianity, one intended to use its spiritual influence for particular earthly purposes. But because he is apparently attached to the idea of a simply coherent and univocal Anglo-American tradition (in which Locke plays a central role), Havers more or less takes Locke at his very calculated and somewhat misleading word.

It would be better, and perhaps more bracingly clarifying, to employ Strauss’ hermeneutic of suspicion with respect to Locke. This would lead, I think, to an appreciation of a tension within our Anglo-American tradition between the liberal emphasis on rights and self-interest, on the one hand, and a Christian emphasis on love and duty, on the other. Havers may be right that our Christian heritage plays an important – perhaps even central – role in sustaining our decent and limited political order, but he seems not to want to concede that one cause of the fragility of that order follows closely upon the work of Lockean liberals. For all his indifference to the historical influence of Christianity in America, Strauss enables us to discern the problem in a way that Havers on his own does not.

Furthermore, the way in which Havers chooses to debunk the Straussian approach to America seems to me to blur the issue between himself and those he wishes to criticize. Thus, for example, Havers goes to great lengths to deprecate the influence of classical political philosophy in America, as if the question of “Aristotle and America” is simply a question that can be answered by consulting the historical record. This seems to me to mistake the Straussian claim, which is not so much about the historical and practical influence of Aristotle, but rather about the adequacy of Aristotelian political science, as compared with the “new science of politics” touted by the American founders. Such a question cannot be settled by citing chapter and verse about so-and-so’s disdain for the ancients, or even by citing quite frequently the fact that Aristotle seems to have made his peace with slavery (as, by the way, did the Apostle Paul). Rather, the question is whether political phenomena are better understood in the light of Aristotle’s concern with nobility and morality, on the one hand, or in terms of the Lockean language of rights (with its somewhat strained and problematical relationship with the Christian tradition), on the other. This is a serious question, one that Havers with his wide reading and deep thought ought to be able to address seriously. But he sells himself, and his readers, short by focusing on the narrower and less interesting question of historical influence.

Of course, for Strauss and/or Straussians (the distinction may be important, but Havers does not consistently make it), the claim regarding the adequacy of Aristotle or of classical thought altogether is an important foundation for the universalistic (sub speciae aeternitatis) approach to political life that the book criticizes. In a sense, Havers fights this battle on Straussian turf, which is not, I think, useful either for making his point or for clarifying the issues. By emphasizing the particularity of the Anglo-American tradition, he assimilates it to the “poetic” side of the old argument between philosophy and poetry that Plato (and Strauss, following him) thematizes in his work. If Anglo-America is just our version of Homer, if its claim on us is simply that it is “our own,” then the classical treatment of the tension between the good and one’s own may well be an adequate point of departure for our political science.

To be sure, Christianity makes its own universalistic claims, expressed in terms of natural law in Roman Catholic social teaching and in terms of common grace in neo-Calvinist thought. As such, it announces its difference from “mere” poetry and puts itself at odds with any simply national particularism. Havers gestures in this direction by adverting to the reasonableness of Christianity, but he seems to understand that reasonableness in essentially Lockean terms. It would be better, I think, to abandon the political frame he offers for conceiving the issue, thus confronting more squarely the Christian challenge, not only to Strauss and his followers, but also to his own version of traditionalist conservatism.

Havers has written a useful, if ultimately unsatisfying, book. By taking a too narrowly practical and present-oriented (in Straussian terms, “unphilosophic”) view of the matter, he points in the direction of the central issues between Strauss and his contemporary interlocutors, but does not treat them with the philosophic seriousness they deserve. It ultimately does Strauss an injustice to characterize him as a “cold war liberal,” even if some of his rhetoric lends itself to that characterization. But more importantly, by treating Christianity as merely part of a particular political and cultural tradition, Havers sells short even the faith he says he is defending.

I await eagerly a better treatment of the themes Havers has begun to address in this book.

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Joseph M. Knippenberg is Professor of Politics at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, GA, where he has taught since 1985. He received his B.A. from Michigan State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. His areas of specialization are the history of political philosophy (especially 18th century thinkers), constitutional law (especially the First Amendment), and liberal education. His essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of journals and edited collections. He currently sits on the Board of the Association for Core Texts and Courses.

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