Considering Strauss

A couple of my professors are admirers of Leo Strauss, and I have only recently started to read him in more depth. This is very much worth the time. He is a radical thinker much abused these days by those cheaply wielding a political club so as to whack around those who, unlike them, are not foreign policy “realists” (which basically means they dare to disagree at this time on this point on this particular topic). Strauss, however, was much more concerned with ancient political philosophy than any contemporary controversy. Someone who understands Plato in the original language told me that Strauss is right about Plato, and eventually this will be in little dispute among scholars. To generalize quite crudely, he advanced the idea that ancient philosophers tended to not believe in the transcendent realities they were speculating over, that this is “hidden” in the writings, but that it was vital for the health of a functioning community that people believed in transcendent realities and in the human ability to speculate about them.

And there is much else besides: take a look at liberal democracy. In his early life in Germany, Strauss lived under the threat of fascist collectivism in its National Socialist and its Bolshevik forms. But by investigating classical philosophy, Strauss came to conclude that liberal democracy (defined chiefly as the ability to disagree and legislate with minority protections) is the best protector of individual and family freedom. For this, it deserves our devotion. Yet there are significant weaknesses, such as the ability to abuse political autonomy so as to destroy the same through populist, democratic uprisings. Free societies are inherently unstable. Thus there is a morality set apart from and superior to those that may exist and be debated under this form of political organization. Strauss was especially critical of Nietzsche, the man he felt to be the giant figure of his time: Nietzsche’s criticism of the emerging liberal orders relied on the very same classical and biblical sources he sought to cast aside. If this is true, it was significant evidence for him of the continuing strength of the biblical notion that man exists with a purpose, even as Strauss maintained a healthy skepticism of the transcendent. He was, after all, an admirer of Plato.