In his classic 1992 essay “The Intransigent Right at the End of the Century,” the great Marxist philosopher Perry Anderson listed the four most impactful right-wing intellectuals of the 1900s. They were: F.A. Hayek, Michael Oakeshott, Carl Schmitt, and Leo Strauss. Of these, Strauss was perhaps the most mysterious addition. Hayek and Schmitt were both fierce partisans for their respective views. Oakeshott was more the mercurial intellectual, but was still happy to publish essays with notably straightforward titles like “How to Be a Conservative.” While unabashedly interested in political philosophy in an age which, he thought, lacked the soul needed for such a rarefied inquiry, Strauss’ main contribution would seem to consist of careful (even pedantic) readings of icons past. To this day, there remains plenty of debate about whether Strauss even had a political teaching of his own—let alone the extent to which Straussianism’s true esoteric lessons must be pried out of their exoteric shell.
This hasn’t prevented defenders and critics alike from inferring deep lessons from the mandarin’s insights.
In 1996’s Revolt Against Modernity: Leo Strauss, Eric Voeglin and the Search for a Postliberal order, Ted McAllister reads Strauss as a cautious but unambiguous critic of liberal modernity who “deserves the label conservative.” For McAllister, Strauss followed his all too problematic teacher Heidegger in regarding “liberal democracy—at least in its twentieth century manifestations” as fatally flawed in coming to “doubt once-sacred truths, or worse to dogmatic assertions about the impossibility of metaphysical truths.” This led to a “dissociated society in which individuals pursue their own brand of happiness without regard to social myth,” meaning “society will slowly lose the means of protecting itself.” On this reading, Strauss honorably sought to reinject the conservative’s religious appreciation for myth and meaning into society to reconsecrate a hierarchy of higher values. For McAllister, qua Voeglin and Strauss, reconsecrating this hierarchy of values would also mean rejecting egalitarianism and instead respecting an associated order of higher and lower human types.
Critics like Shadia Drury largely agree with McAllister’s reading of Strauss as anti liberal. But in this case, for the purposes of condemning him. In her Leo Strauss and the American Right, Drury reads Strauss as illiberal to his core, going so far as to elevate the formativeness of his relationships with theorists like Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, who were themselves Nazis. For Drury, Strauss “shares Schmitt’s demonization of liberalism; he accepts Schmitt’s characterization of the political as the organization of men into fighting units, he accepts Schmitt’s analysis of politics in terms of the distinction between friend and foe, we and they.” Perhaps it is unsurprising then that Strauss went on not only to influence generations of illiberal conservatives, but also early 21st century “neoconservative” neoliberals who internalized the worst of both liberalism and conservatism. Straussian-inflected neoconservatism echoed “Leo Strauss’ enthusiasm for nature and for a natural aristocracy.” But they came to defend it along the lines of liberal meritocracy. Neoconservatives came to “assume that everyone who is rich must be clever and industrious, while everyone who is poor must be lazy and stupid.”
The portrait of Strauss as militantly anti-liberal is overdone. By the end of his career Strauss came to accept an unlovable but solid form of liberalism.
I’ll argue that the portrait of Strauss as militantly anti-liberal is overdone. By the end of his career, Strauss came to accept an unlovable but solid form of liberalism that permitted philosophers the space to pursue higher kinds of goods. But that absolutely doesn’t mean Straussianism is beyond reproach for the emergence of illiberal doctrines, and Strauss’s own idealism bears some of the blame for this.
Strauss’ Critique of Modernity
It is easy to see where both McAllister and Drury are coming from. There is much in Strauss to support one of the more interesting “decline and fall into vulgar liberal modernity” narratives to which the right has long been addicted.
Strauss’ most important work is the knowingly paradoxical book Natural Right and History. In it, Strauss describes the concept of natural right developed by Ancient thinkers like Plato and Aristotle, who tried to derive principles of justice by analyzing and extrapolating from the nature of what “is.” Of course, Plato, Aristotle, and their contemporaries often differed profoundly about the nature of what “is” and consequently about the nature of natural right. In Natural Right and History, Strauss “very roughly” distinguishes between the “Socratic-Platonic, the Aristotelian and the Thomistic.” Strauss is unusually sensitive to this diversity of opinions. I say unusually because it troubles the easy juxtaposition between antiquity and modernity that Strauss was otherwise attached to, as we will shortly get to. This is true on the modern end of history as well, since he understands that thinkers from Locke to the United States’ founding fathers, to proponents of universal rights also appeal to “natural” law and natural rights.
Despite these differences within ancient and modern traditions, Strauss is convinced that a break occurred between antiquity and modernity. At different points, he suggests this break took place, or at least was registered, in the thinking of Hobbes or Machiavelli. In their hands, nature came to be understood as dynamic but valueless matter in motion, without any intrinsic meaning or significance in itself. This was tied to the advent of modern scientific or “technical” thinking, which desacralized a world that had previously been saturated with metaphysical and spiritual significance. These metaphysical shifts had political implications. In After Leo Strauss, Tucker Landy stresses Strauss’ concern that modern science (which formed the metaphysical basis of liberalism) had “acquired an almost unassailable prestige,” even if it remained unable to “explain human affairs adequately.” Nevertheless, Landy acknowledges that Strauss understood that “modern natural science, hypothetical as it may be, had somehow fundamentally altered our understanding of nature.” This, in turn, “had upset the foundation of the classical theory of natural right.”
The effects of this were enormously powerful, since breaking from the old spiritual metaphysics enabled the development of modern scientific techniques, which rapidly expanded human powers. This might have been a positive development, except that the same desacralization of nature eroded and then destroyed the metaphysical basis on which classical natural right had rested. This would eventually lead to a crisis of moral certainties in the West. We became more and more powerful even as we became increasingly skeptical about the necessity of using human power to obtain just ends. We had improved means for unimproved ends, as Henry David Thoreau put it. Or, to invoke Theodor Adorno, we sped up the process of moving from the slingshot to the hydrogen bomb.
Strauss noted that the great thinkers of liberal modernity were uncertain about how to respond to this dilemma. Some like Grotius, Locke, or the American founders tried, largely unsuccessfully, to coast on the residual ideological prestige of classical natural right by baptizing their eminently new ideas in antiquarian language. In this mode, George Washington’s fight against new taxes on tea could be rebranded as the spirit of Achilles and St. Paul resurrected. But, at his most cynical, Strauss saw the more honest moderns as grounding modern natural right in nothing but crude pleasure. Since nature had no intrinsic meaning itself, there was no objective natural right one could extrapolate from it. Instead, justice was to be a matter of crude cost-benefit calculations on the part of self-interested subjects. Hobbes, Bentham, and others implored liberal subjects to weigh the risk of harming others against the benefits of obeying the law, paying their taxes, and being left alone to enjoy the gloom of their private pleasures. As Strauss put it “hedonism becomes utilitarianism or political hedonism. The painful relief of pain culminates not so much in the greatest pleasures as in ‘having those things which produce the greatest pleasures.’ Life is the joyless quest for joy.”
Liberalism and Equality
The political consequence of modern thought was the promulgation of various flavors of egalitarianism. This too broke with antiquity. In The City and Man, Strauss notes that “for Aristotle, political inequality is ultimately justified by the natural inequality among men. The fact that some men are by nature rulers and others by nature ruled points in turn to the inequality which pervades nature as a whole: the whole as an ordered whole consists of beings of different rank.” He took the same to be broadly true of most thinkers in antiquity, who saw the best society as one which ensured that those who best embodied moral virtue and excellence were elevated over those who did not. Modern conservatives remain attached to this pre-modern social vision predicated on what Charles Taylor calls in Modern Social Imaginaries, “hierarchical complementarity.” As McAllister puts it:
A conservative principle related to this affirmation of the social character of the individual is the belief that a proper social and political order requires a hierarchy that is roughly commensurate with abilities and effort. Here conservatives swim upstream against a rather vigorous current of equalitarianism. Conservatives recognize two forms of equality: equality before God and equality before the law. (They do not even embrace equality of opportunity because they cannot separate that formally from equality of condition.) Otherwise, they see an enormous variety of talents that deserve distinct places. Here they stand upon the Platonic definition of justice in which each person receives his or her due.
Modern liberalism (and for that matter modern socialism) rejected this hierarchical vision of a great chain of being for one centered around human equality. Of course, equality of what, exactly, remains a major debate amongst liberal thinkers. Some liberals think people are entitled to equal respect for their basic dignity. Proto-liberals like Hobbes thought we were all more or less physically and mentally equal kinds of animals. Democrats tend to think citizens are entitled to equal concern for their interests. And, of course, the utilitarians Strauss so despised thought in the felicific calculus that each person’s happiness was to equally count as one and no more than one. This flows from a deeper metaphysical rejection of the antiquarian worldview, which holds that there are natural forms of right and excellence that can be better apprehended and embodied by an elite few who, on that basis, are entitled to rule. Liberals tend to regard this as mystifying nature by projecting values into it which are better explained by looking at human subjectivity, in the same way Marxists regard it as reifying human differences which are better explained by human all too human social practices.
Society as an Open or Closed Question
For liberals, the upshot of natural equality is that, since there is no natural hierarchy that society is intended to mirror, the organization of society is subject to human choice and reorganization. In other words, the best organization of human society is an open question. Moreover, liberals and socialists alike think that, since it is an open question which cannot be settled by appeals to nature or deferring to natural betters, equal people should have a more or less equal say in how it will be organized. This is what contributes to the liberal tendency to emphasize free expression and experiments in living. This, coupled with an enduring resistance to strong claims that there are forms of hierarchy which conform to natural right or even common sense and which are apprehended by society’s elites. Many liberals were concerned about the levelling egalitarian potential this could open up, and consequently devised plans for educating and elevating ordinary citizens to fulfill the auspicious role intended for them. But its explosive power cannot be underestimated.
This rejection of natural hierarchy and opening the organization of society to continuous debate has, for the right, long been felt and experienced as a threat. Many on the right thus agree with Joseph de Maistre, who thought that authority should be treated dogmatically and that each person’s opinions should be ready-made for them at birth. In its more militant forms, this feeling can lead many on the right to insist that the moral and political questions liberals want to keep open should be closed, meaning there is little point in debating them. Indeed, the mere act of debating issues of metaphysical transcendence and natural right may be threatening, since it suggests that the order provided by one’s metaphysical and moral worldview may well be illusory. This sense that cosmic order is being undone aligns with the far more tangible sense that liberalism produces social chaos by challenging systems of allegiance and subordination. Each individual, no matter how foolish or vulgar, is granted an equal say in what is, what ought to be right, and of course who ought to be in charge. This needs to be resisted, and only a rarefied few ought to be allowed to ask first order questions – a rarefied few who are, by and large, already committed to the correct metaphysical and moral views held by the right.[1]
There are many expressions of this given form. In The Meaning of Conservatism, the great conservative philosopher Roger Scruton worked to “defend the unthinking prejudice of the normal active person” because “unthinking people” are “tolerant of the burdens that life lays on them, and unwilling to lodge blame where they seek no remedy, seek fulfillment in the world that is—to accept and endorse through their actions the institutions and practices into which they are born.”
But few were as emphatic as conservative philosopher Willmoore Kendall was in his “Was Athens Right to Kill Socrates?” Kendall was influenced by Strauss but took a dimmer view of the role philosophy might play in politics and society. Strauss agreed that philosophy can be dangerous to the status quo by undermining faith in traditional mores, but saw it as an edifying activity. Much of Strauss’ thinking in Persecution and the Art of Writing concerned how philosophers can retain their independence of mind and express their views safely, given a potentially hostile political climate. This, as I’ll explain, in part accounts for Strauss’ tepid but real admiration for liberalism.
Much of Strauss’ thought concerned how philosophers can retain their independence of mind and express their views safely, given a potentially hostile political climate.
Kendall was more emphatic in declaring the enterprise of philosophy itself too dangerously proto-liberal to be long tolerated by the powers that be. Drawing a throughline between Socrates’ “question everything” attitude and liberal socialist J.S. Mill’s call for endlessly open free discussion by an ever-expanding range of workers and women, Kendall insists it was sensible for Athenian elites to execute the gadfly of their city. They ought not to tolerate “him on the grounds that all questions are open questions because the very question at issue, whether their way of life is worth preserving, is for them a closed question, and became a closed question the moment the Athenians became a society.” For Kendall for conservative Athenian elites “to let Socrates go on talking, given his ability to fascinate youngsters who know no better than to be convinced by him, is to court that danger, and that is no less irresponsible and immoral than to carry out Socrates’ revolution themselves.”
Strauss’ Two Cheers for Liberalism
Strauss was never as reactionary as some of his more dogmatic admirers.
The contrast with Kendall showcases how Strauss was never as reactionary as some of his more dogmatic admirers. This is where McAllister and Drury overstate his illiberal bona fides. I mentioned the paradoxical quality of Natural Right and History earlier. This paradox emerges from the fact that it is a book lamenting the fall of antiquity, but it is also one that could only be written by a modern philosopher who was more than half convinced of the merits of modernity. Even the act of writing a history of the transition to modernity from antiquity showcases both the historicity of supposedly eternal ideas and exposes their contingency as they get continuously called into question. If “natural” right can be questioned seriously, it calls into question how much it is, in fact, natural and how much it is just another kind of ideology.
In the last sections of Natural Right and History, Strauss is contemptuous of the Burkean “historical school,” which held that justice is largely settled by deferring to accidental traditions and institutions that emerge spontaneously through history. But Strauss’ own work is largely a history of antiquity’s decline and fall into modernity, a history that one cannot wish away through vulgar nostalgia of the type that characterizes so much conservatism. At the opening of Natural Right and History, he sharply notes that “the seriousness of the need of natural right does not prove that the need can be satisfied. A wish is not a fact. Even by proving that a certain view is indispensable for living well, one proves merely that the view in question is a salutary myth: one does not prove it to be true. Utility and truth are two entirely different things.”
Strauss’ work is largely a history of antiquity’s decline and fall into modernity, a history that one cannot wish away through vulgar nostalgia of the type that characterizes so much conservatism.
This reprimand seems ready-made for post-liberals like McAllister who want to evoke a “Platonic definition of justice” while failing to recognize that evoking Platonism to shore up the authority of conservative elites is the opposite of Plato’s truth. It does not matter whether one’s delicate feelings insist that liberal modernity is vulgar if it turns out that Hobbes, Marx, Rawls, and Kant were simply right about the world and Aristotle was wrong. Wishing we would return to believing the antiquarian worldview is wishing mere myth and untruth if one cannot defend it comprehensively.
Strauss did not seem confident that a philosophical undoing of modernity would necessarily be a good thing. He seemed to make his peace with a liberal modernity that he could not love but came to accept.
Strauss seemed unsure (or unwilling to say openly) whether the turn to modernity was itself contingent and ungrounded, which would leave it vulnerable to being undone by new philosophers. Moreover, he often did not seem confident that such a philosophical undoing of modernity would necessarily be a good thing. A case in point could be Heidegger, whose call for a “new beginning” to overturn Western metaphysics ended in his support for Nazism and totalitarianism. This ambivalence is a throughline in Strauss’s work. In Liberalism: Ancient and Modern, published near the end of his life, Strauss seemed to make his peace with a liberal modernity that he could not love but came to accept. He insisted, “we are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely 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. No one prevents us from cultivating our garden or from setting up outposts which may come to be regarded as salutary to the republic and as deserving of giving to it its tone.” Philosophers who remained invested in the classical quest for excellence could still pursue them in the privacy and leisure of the university, amongst other refuges. This, of course, is what Strauss and his more moderate followers did. They accepted the broad contours of liberal democracy while seeing their job as the preservation of classical learning to be imparted to generations of American elites. It was philosophy as education for the Jared Kushners and Peter Thiels of the world.
This last observation attests to one of the core weaknesses in all Straussian thinking. In Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, Laura Field chastises many of Strauss’ contemporary disciples for adopting an “ideas first” outlook that ignores the boons of actually existing liberalism for women, minorities, and (once upon a time prior to neoliberalism) the poor by focusing on highly intellectualized narratives of decline and fall. As his two cheers for liberalism attitude shows, Strauss himself was at least partially inoculated against this. But his worldview still radically overemphasized the centrality of philosophers and philosophy to history, while inflating the role elite pedagogy could play in morally elevating a society.
The melancholic quality of his work comes from continuously examining real society and finding it wanting compared to an abstract ideal of excellence far more transcendent than the mundane gratification of ordinary people’s needs. Once one lapses into this kind of idealism, the endpoints tend to be of two kinds: (1) retreating into scholastic intellectual elitism (Strauss’ choice) or (2) resentment at the levelling vulgarity of the demos and the conclusion that the point of studying the world must be to change it. The second can all too easily end in calls to use state power to install a more virtuous elite that will swap skim reading Dewey for skim reading the Nichomachean Ethics (the choice of most post-liberals). One of the great virtues of liberalism is not, as so many Straussians insisted, swapping the pursuit of excellence for lower but firmer ground. It is swapping a world of abstractions for a real world. Conservatives have been and remain eager to spaceship away from this real world in the quest for an ever receding heaven on earth— the only reward proportionate to their peacocking majesty.
[1] Meaning intellectuals allowed to ask first-order questions will prefer to deliberate on the “classics” embodying correct wisdom rather than dangerous newfangled works promoting relativism and nihilism. This is at least one of the instincts that provokes resistance to encouraging students to study Marx, Judith Butler, etc. For many on the right, these latter works cannot be of value since their lessons are contrary to what is felt strongly to be evidently true. This means the promulgation of worthless but potentially dangerous falsehoods, meaning there is little to gain and much to lose in teaching them. This is one reason why many on the right agree with William Buckley in God and Man at Yale that the goal of education shouldn’t be the neutral presentation of competing ideas. That implies respect for the principle of openness endorsed by liberals, which they often don’t share. It’s also one of the reasons many on the right struggle to offer a deep or thoughtful critique of Marx, Butler, etc. Taking the “Franklin School” or post-modern neo-Marxists seriously enough to rebut them would imply there might be salience to their arguments, which would trouble the conviction that all metaphysically and morally important questions were settled long ago.
Matt McManus is an Assistant Professor at Spelman College. He is the author of The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism and The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, amongst other books.
Image made using “Leo Strauss USA 1939,” by Monozigote licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.
