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A Leo Strauss for Our Time: From NeoCon Hawk to International Lawyer

Leo Strauss: Man of Peace. Robert Howse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

 

Robert Howse, the Lloyd C. Nelson Professor of International Law at NYU, has set out to vindicate Leo Strauss from his calumniators on the Left, in large measure by purporting to rescue him from those who call themselves or are called Straussians, largely his students and the students of his students (along with a few fellow travelers). The occasion for Howse’s book is, most immediately, the continued (now hackneyed and tiresome, not to say overwrought and oversimplified) effort to find somehow in Strauss’s work the inspiration and justification for the Bush Administration’s wars in the Middle East. Connected with this is the somewhat more sophisticated attempt to discover in Strauss’s early career as a scholar an affinity for fascism and National Socialism.

Howse proceeds by drawing a thread regarding political violence through Strauss’s works, beginning with his engagement with Carl Schmitt (the erstwhile Nazi legal theorist), and continuing through his encounters with Alexandre Kojève (the great Marxist interpreter of Hegel) and his writing and teaching on Machiavelli, Thucydides, Grotius, and Kant. Especially in regard to the last three thinkers, Howse makes extensive use of transcripts and recordings of Strauss’s seminar courses, available through the Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago.

Howse himself provides the best brief summary of his overall argument:

“In his mature writings that address political violence . . . we are presented by Strauss with the original temptation and transgression of the thinker/intellectual and an explanation of how it arises out of moral seriousness and/or philosophical Redlichkeit, that is, from high motives. This is then followed by the enactment of a kind of t’shuvah, a pulling back from the extreme through critique, often internal, of the extreme—a deeper, more radical level of philosophical reflection that…has the result of reestablishing the case for moral-political limits and for legality, hence moderation in Strauss’s sense.” (p. 16)

Applied to Strauss, what this means is that from an early dalliance with the extreme thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, which he had in common with those who found in the Weimar Republic little or nothing to compel their allegiance and admiration, he worked his way back to an attachment to the kind of humane moderation best exemplified by Thucydides’ Diodotus, Cleon’s opponent in the Mytilenian Debate. Indeed, Howse states the point of departure a bit more strongly than this: Strauss was “attracted to and—to the extent that it could be reconciled with Zionism—subscribed to the outlook that he would later characterize as ‘German nihilism’” (p. 14). As a result, Strauss “never ceased to be profoundly troubled that he had been tempted by and even subscribed to an outlook that… contributed to the political movement that led to the destruction of European Jewry” (p. 13).

Howse’s readings of Strauss’s texts are for the most part careful, thoughtful, and sensitive, certainly much more so than those of Strauss’s critics. In many cases, he arrives at conclusions that many of Strauss’s best students would share, though (sadly) he is much more likely to note a disagreement than to acknowledge the many instances in which scholars like Clifford Orwin (for example) might be in agreement.

Rather than rehearse Howse’s exegeses, which are (as I suggested), in outline at least, plausible and familiar to careful readers of Strauss, I think it more worthwhile to dwell on the larger argument that they serve. To begin with, there is the question of Strauss’s point of departure in his strong youthful attachment to Nietzsche. Reading Strauss’s essay on “German Nihilism,” not simply as an analysis of how morally and philosophically serious Germans could have rejected Weimar liberalism, not to say liberalism tout court (and have been attracted to apparently more serious and militaristic alternatives), but as a kind of revelation of his own youthful attitude and understanding, Howse turns the trajectory of Strauss’s maturing and mature thought into a t’shuvah, a turning away from this extreme position.

To be sure, there is some textual evidence for this early extremism, but Howse’s qualification—“to the extent that it could be reconciled with Zionism”—strikes me as opening an important line of inquiry that he does not follow. Much of what Strauss wrote during the period in which he seems to have called himself a Nietzschean dealt with Jewish and Zionist matters. Surely it would be important to examine those works for clues as to what that enigmatic line meant to Strauss in practice, not to mention in theory. While I recognize that there are some who would polemically equate Zionism and fascism, there are surely cultural and religious elements of Zionism that would pull its intellectually and morally serious adherents away from the temptations represented by the European right in the interwar years.

In sum, while Howse’s account of Strauss’s point of departure is suggestive, I am far from persuaded that he is right. Indeed, I find the tensions between reason and revelation and between religion and politics—that is to say, the so-called “theologico-political problem”—evident in Strauss’s earliest writings a potentially much more fruitful clue to the trajectory of his work.

That is not to say that Howse’s analysis has nothing to say to serious students of Strauss, especially with respect to his understanding of the proper approach to the exigencies of political life. In this connection, Howse juxtaposes Strauss’s analyses of Machiavelli and Thucydides, showing how each attempts to provide an immanent—as opposed to transcendental or theological—ground for human conduct. According to Howse’s account of Strauss, Machiavelli, though hardly the simple teacher of evil, relies upon enlightened calculation to conduct statecraft with an economy of violence, using justice and injustice, violence and persuasion, as the times require.

While Howse attempts to soften this Machiavellian teaching with the ultimately unpersuasive assertion that “the principle of Machiavelli’s republicanism is the self-interested control by the people of the excessive or abusive selfishness of the great” (p. 112), he has to concede that the Machiavellian founder is, so to speak, a social engineer (see p. 116), which suggests a greater role for the “prince” and prince-like types than for spirited and self-defensive republican peoples, who are at best created by them for their own purposes. There is at best an economy of violence, limited by enlightened self-interest, rather than a principled limitation of political violence. Machiavellian political will may be more reasonable and self-restrained than its Nietzschean counterpart, but certainly there seems to be no solid foundation for the rule of law in the teaching of the great Florentine.

Howse finds moderation and an attachment to the international rule of law in Strauss’s Thucydides, though here what he means by the rule of law is living up to one’s particular treaty commitments, not adhering to a formal international legal framework that exists apart from and conditions each actor’s pursuit of its interests. In this view, Thucydides is not (as he is often viewed) the forerunner of modern realism, with its emphasis on raison d’etat, but rather someone who within a human and humane horizon shows that true realism requires a serious engagement with justice and the moral concerns of the citizenry. For the most part, I cannot quarrel with this interpretation, but I hesitate to “update” Thucydides by using the language of international law to characterize the concerns that are addressed and depicted in his history.

In so doing, however, Howse lays the foundation for his treatments of Strauss on Grotius and Kant, where he finds (in seminar tapes and transcripts) the best evidence for his affinity for projects of international cooperation like the European Community. It is also in this section that Howse comes very close to claiming Strauss on behalf of liberal internationalists like himself, rather than the “neocon” proponents of national sovereignty and the American interest. The argument here is rooted in the self-conscious rationalism and cosmopolitanism of the philosopher, who seeks truth everywhere and from every source, and who recognizes both the arbitrariness of national boundaries and national allegiance and the necessity of peace (or, in Thucydidean terms, “rest”) as a precondition of civilization and hence of philosophy. There could be nothing more opposed to the “German nihilism” that finds its expression in Carl Schmitt’s bellicism and insistence upon the ultimate salience of differences.

I doubt that many serious people will quarrel with this description of Strauss’s understanding of philosophy and the philosopher. But I wonder whether the line can be drawn so directly from the cosmopolitanism of philosophy to the internationalist political practice that Howse so evidently favors. From Howse’s point of view, a post-Cold War and thoroughly consistent Leo Strauss would likely not behave all that differently from Alexandre Kojève, who spent the last part of his life as a Eurocrat, so to speak. A cosmopolitan in theory ought to be a cosmopolitan in practice. Strauss’s reservations about the universal homogeneous world state, administered by intellectual lawyer-bureaucrats, are ultimately, in Howse’s view arbitrary:

“To what extent is Strauss’s objection to the progressive narrative of peace through law based on his own experience of the Cold War and earlier German experience, where the greatest hopes for ending war, for peace through law in the 1920s . . . suffered the most extreme betrayal in World War II and the Holocaust? Is Strauss simply committed, as a matter of principle, to an account of the human condition that is hostile to notions of general human improvement?” (p. 150)

According to Howse, if Strauss is an anti-historicist, he cannot consistently rely upon past historical experience to deny that it is possible for the future to be different from, and (by universalist or rationalist lights, at least) better than, the past. “Kant himself shows the logical difficulty, given human freedom, of being guided by the past in determining what is possible in the future” (p. 166). It is Strauss’s crabbed vision of the human prospect, rather than any sort of insight into human nature, that makes him hesitate to endorse an internationalist future.

To be sure, Howse’s vision of the future—which he argues Strauss cannot consistently reject (see p. 170)—does not altogether obliterate national borders. He seems willing to allow “some aspects of group identity to have political significance and legal protection” (p. 169), despite the fact that they lack any rational or philosophical status. He does not, in other words, simply favor the proverbial universal and homogeneous world state, but only an essentially Kantian confederation of republics, with a “common judicial authority” (p. 166). He leaves unanswered the question of how the decisions of such an authority would be enforced, in the event that any group (no longer quite a nation-state, it would seem) resisted them.

The closest he comes to offering any sort of suggestion along these lines is to imply that the “spirit of commerce,” presumably facilitated and promoted by international legal arrangements, would serve to weaken the particularistic attachments that find their fullest and noblest expressions in religion. The less people are attached to their own little platoons, the less force will be necessary to compel them to obey the edicts of an international tribunal. What Howse has in mind may be indicated by his response to Strauss’s claim, against Kojeve, that there will always be andres, that is to say, emphatically manly men:

But surely this is debatable. After a considerable period of peace, such a human type would appear to be socially superfluous, and it is unclear why we wouldn’t have a world of metrosexuals and more or less adequately medicated or otherwise restrained psychopaths (i.e., those unlucky individuals with a brain chemistry that makes them hard-wired for [politically meaningless] violence). (pp. 74 – 75)

Leaving aside the insidiously intimate tyranny of defining psychopathology as disagreement with one’s moral and political preferences and then seeking chemically (or otherwise) to control it, there remains a disagreement between Howse and Strauss about human nature. Is the emphatically manly man, spiritedly devoted to his own people and place, a constant human possibility? Such a human type may or may not be open to philosophy—Socrates’ friends were of course not all philosophers—but he may constitute an element of the setting of philosophy that cannot be altered unless one is willing to become, in the words of the late Czech-Canadian novelist, Josef Skorvecky, an engineer of human souls.

That Strauss would likely resist Howse’s solution is clear from a letter he wrote to Karl Löwith in 1946:

“I really believe . . . that the perfect political order, as Plato and Aristotle have sketched it, is the perfect political order. Or do you believe in the world state? It is true that genuine unity is only possible through knowledge of the truth, or through search for the truth, then there is a genuine unity of all men only on the basis of the popularized final teaching of philosophy (and naturally this does not exist) or if all men are philosophers . . . which likewise is not the case. Therefore there can only be closed societies, that is, states. But if that is so, then one can show from political considerations that the small city-state is in principle superior to the large state or to the territorial-feudal state. I know very well that today it cannot be restored . . . Whoever concedes that Horace did not speak nonsense when he said “one can expel nature with a pitchfork but it always returns” concedes thereby precisely the legitimacy in principle of Platonic-Aristotelian politics.”

Unfortunately, so far as I can tell, Howse does not deal directly with this letter, which implies that there is a permanent obstacle to universal human community. Strauss does not explicitly explain why “closed societies” of a certain sort are in principle best, but I assume the argument has something to do, in the first place, with the natural limits of ordinary human affections and allegiances—the power of the attachment to “one’s own,” in Platonic/Socratic parlance—and also with the classic understanding of self-government, which requires that citizens be genuinely acquainted with the character of those who occupy positions of political responsibility. This surely limits the size and scope of any government. Can we really say, for example, that we know well our representatives, let alone that we could know well those in the positions of international juridical authority that Howse would have us establish?

And then there is the existence of andreia (courage or manliness) as a permanent—that is, despite Howse’s hopes or expectations, ineradicable—feature of human nature. Virtue in the classic sense, for which courage is an essential prerequisite, involves a kind of agon, in which virtuous human beings seek competitively to take responsibility for and benefit others. This, as Aristotle argues in the Nicomachean Ethics, plays out both in friendship and in political life. And it exists in some tension with justice simply. To be sure, Aristotle shows that there is some distance between the contemplative life and the life devoted to moral and political action, but he never suggests, as Howse seems to, that it is possible, let alone desirable, to tie philosophy to some vision of justice and effectively to extirpate the agonistic elements of classical virtue.

In terms of the well-known cave image in Plato’s Republic, all philosophizing takes place within the context of a cave. Even if someone should escape the cave entirely, becoming wise, “political” activity would involve interacting with those whose horizons and understandings are still constituted by the shadows on the wall of the cave. And liberation, such as it is, consists in treating with particular individuals who can be freed from their shackles. Since Socratic dialectic requires a personal relationship, this liberation does not consist in fundamentally transforming the cave, as it were administering its common affairs for the universal good of all caves.

Perhaps Howse would concede some of this and argue that his vision of international law administered by cosmopolitan experts—philosopher-judges and jurisprudents, if not quite philosopher-kings—is consistent with the Platonic/Aristotelian understanding implicit in Strauss’s 1946 letter. But it seems to me that his vision, which he insists Strauss has no good reason to oppose, requires a coercive apparatus that goes far beyond “the Socratic method.” It also requires a greater self-confidence on the part of those who act on its behalf than the self-doubt implied in the letter. The most I am willing to concede to him is that “reasonable people can disagree” about what sorts of international political and legal arrangements are possible and prudent here and now, but I am willing to insist—with Strauss, I believe—that it is imprudent to trust too much in and grant too much power to those who seem to entertain the possibility that they can without real checks exercise responsible authority over the mass of mankind.

I think Robert Howse has done us a service by giving an account—albeit a contestable one—of Strauss’s thinking on the problem of political violence. He persuasively shows that it is difficult, if not impossible, to draw any sort of straight line from what Strauss actually wrote and taught to the nightmare vision of cynical and elitist neoconservatives deceiving us for our own good as they led us into two wars in the Middle East. Perhaps his target audience—surely not the “Straussians,” who for the most part he deprecates in relatively unkind terms—will be persuaded by this and abandon their fixation on the Strauss/neoconservative connection, and begin to read Strauss with a view actually to learning something from what they read. This would be a good thing. Others, however, are unlikely to find much comfort in Howse’s replacement of elitist neoconservatives confident about their understanding of America’s beneficent and dominant role in the world with elitist international lawyers confident about their understanding of what ought to be the beneficent and dominant role of international courts in the world.

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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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