// essays //
Fall 2006
The Other Side of Strauss
Andrew Flynn
Reading Leo Strauss:
Politics, Philsophy, Judiasm
by Steven B. Smith
University of Chicago Press, 268 pgs.
I remember well my first introduction to Leo Strauss. Thumbing through an issue of The Economist on a long car ride to visit colleges in Washington D.C., I became immediately engrossed in that week's Lexington column, "Philosophers and Kings: A strange waltz involving George Bush, ancient Greece and a dead German thinker." The prospect that our policies might have mysterious intellectual roots was enticing; the results were upsetting. "There's this political philosopher who thinks it's okay to lie to people for their own good," I murmured. "That," my mother replied reflexively, "is a very bad idea."
I indulge in autobiography only to point out that my reaction was typical—typical of both the sort of reaction most people have when they read or hear such ideas are fueling our supposedly democratic leaders, as well as of the visceral reactions to Strauss's work embodied in these popular accounts themselves. Rereading the column three years later, I realize that it is far less bombastic than most popular lore about the philosopher—it merely reported that other sources had pegged Strauss as a lying-enthusiast. But it was the idea that stuck with me. That Strauss might be a defender of cynical, Machiavellian sort of manipulation, and was at best an academic crotchety enough to have an axe to grind with modernity's sacred value—equality—was certainly sufficient reason for dismissal without further thought.
Reading Leo Strauss by Steven B. Smith presents itself as an antidote to this sort of cliché-ridden discourse. Smith, a professor of political science at Yale, has spent many years doing exactly what his title suggests—actually reading Strauss. From the basis of careful reading, Smith presents his conclusion:that, far from the devious subject of countless op-eds, Strauss was actually a "friend to liberal democracy."
Smith's book is not a tome of acrobatic apologetics for the cult of Strauss. In fact, the book begins (and ends) quite cautiously. Within paragraphs, Smith dispels any notions that he might be documenting the Strauss of the Straussians, and his initial sketches of the philosopher are striking. "On the basis of my own reading," Smith writes, "Strauss had no politics in the sense in which that term is generally meant. His works do not endorse any political party or program, whether of the Left or of the Right, Democratic or Republican. He was a philosopher." Smith's aim seems to be twofold. One is to have his readers appreciate the neglected genius of Strauss's ideas. The second is to convince readers that Strauss was not political.
However, Smith does believe that Strauss would have disapproved highly of his neoconservative offspring, and he makes this belief entirely transparent, particularly in his concluding sections. Thus, in arguing that Strauss would have been anti-neoconservative, Smith seems to contradict a key aim of the book: to prove Strauss was not political. This tension—or perhaps more accurately, this contradiction—in Smith's argument certainly forces the reader to question the validity of the Strauss-as-apolitical argument. Yet in terms of Smith's other aim, namely, to introduce readers to Strauss's most important ideas, he is quite successful. The result is a compelling survey of Strauss's philosophical ideas, marred to a certain extent by Smith's attempts to make Strauss's ideas mesh with his own contemporary liberal agenda.
The book's introduction engages in an almost immediate de-politicization of controversial themes which reappear throughout Strauss's works. Strauss's fascination with esoteric writing—the practice by which philosophers write on two levels, concealing their most radical opinions so that only those readers trained to ferret them out can see them—has been widely presented as evidence for his justification of state lies. Smith disputes this connection. "He did not sanction the selective use of lies in public life, as has been asserted," Smith writes, "and he certainly nowhere claimed that his own works, much less those of others, were written to convey the opposite of what they said." Smith disassembles such readings as one dimensional, or even non-readings of Strauss. Yet, this disassembly is not performed solely for the purpose of rooting out misconception, but moreover to suggest the absurdity that such claims are being made in the first place. Smith doesn't pause to defend Strauss's interest in esoteric writing until well into a discussion on that topic, and he does so with a sighing necessity. If only we could turn our gaze away from these oversimplified misreadings, Smith is suggesting, much more fascinating problems would arise. With misconceptions sidelined, Smith is free to discuss the actual depth of Strauss's work, along with the weightier controversies which envelop his intellectual legacy.
The rest of the book, that is to say everything after the introduction, follows this route. It largely circumvents the realm of partisan shouting matches, dealing mostly with substantial philosophical issues only occasionally referencing popular misunderstandings with the intention to defuse. The value of this approach becomes immediately apparent, for Strauss dealt not exclusively with issues as removed as esoteric writing, but also with a lengthy list of issues of immediate concern to the modern condition. Atheism and fascism, historicism and deconstruction all play key roles in Smith's series of essays, which is as wide-ranging and eclectic as Strauss's own work. With some skill, Smith is able to connect these musings to a central strand in Strauss' work—that of the irresolvable dilemma. For Strauss, he argues, there were some problematic features of reality which could simply find no happy intellectual resolution. Taking the difficulty of evil as a case in point, Strauss saw no way that a political philosopher could ignore such a central feature of the human condition, yet at the same time found no ultimate solution to the problem which would not lapse into indefensible dogmatism.
This dilemma is typified, however, in what Strauss dubbed the "Theologico-Political Problem." There is, Strauss contended, an irresolvable conflict between the claims of rational discourse and revealed religion. This was not a repetition of the familiar injunction against attempts to fuse these two radically incompatible disciplines. On this point, Strauss agreed. But, against the mainstream of Enlightenment thought, he saw no possibility for declaring philosophy as victor. Picking up from F.H. Jacobi's critique of Spinoza's rationalistic system, Strauss presented the choice starkly: one can either place faith in supernatural revelation or in the possibility for a totally rational description of the world. Each of these competing claims requires a leap of faith, according to Strauss, for neither the explanatory power of philosophic argument nor that of revealed law can be substantiated by prior argumentation which does not presuppose the truth of one of those modes of thought. The philosopher and the theologian stand in perhaps the most paradoxical of positions; by Strauss's lights they are both obligated and unable to speak to one another. For Strauss, the recognition of the power in the other's claims can only breed humility.
Such an exercise in lofty theorizing is almost inseparable from Strauss's own highly complex views about Zionism; it was no mistake that Strauss saw the opposing camps as Jerusalem and Athens. Smith divides the essays likewise, and the three which comprise "Jerusalem" contemplate the nexus of the theologico-political problem, the pressing political claims of Zionism, and centuries of the Jewish intellectual tradition. With the aforementioned problem as backdrop, Smith stakes out a position for Strauss amongst a lineage of prominent Jewish thinkers on the very possibility of solving Jewish woes through the creation of a modern, secular state.
Strauss's view of Judaism rests heavily on the recognition of the particularity of the Jews as a chosen people. In this regard, he aligned himself with Zionists against assimilationist strains in Jewish thought. However, Smith points out, Strauss stood equally at odds with the Zionists who saw the solution to the "Jewish problem" as the creation of a separate state where Jews would live pretty much like everyone else. Jews, Strauss wanted to insist, stand apart as Jews in as much as they are not members of an aimless herd searching for proximate solutions, but a divinely designated group looking to embody this theological knowledge in its politics. To place faith solely in secular, political struggles, neglecting the coming of the Messiah, was to forget what it meant to be Jewish.
Smith uses this as a launching platform to explore Strauss's rather creative commentaries on the history of Jewish thought and contemporary thinkers. Here Strauss himself appears deeply divided — an admirer of rational exposition with a simultaneous desire to retain the mystery of Judaism's revealed characteristics. In this vein, he is a defender of Spinoza's integrity and depth of thought while maintaining the insufficiency of his system. He appears in skeptical but interested dialogue with the mystical theology of Gershom Scholem. His assessment of the Hermann Cohen's neo-Kantian appropriation of Maimonides is negative; how can Cohen claim Judaism as a purely rational religion without making a false distinction between its merely contingent and its rational contents, he asks. Yet Strauss views Cohen's insistence that Jews remain pragmatically separate from the rest of the German state as somewhat admirable. Franz Rosenzweig fares a bit better in Strauss's eyes by not viewing Judaism as law, à la Kant, but as divine command; however, his work too is classified as philosophical, not Jewish.
All of this kowtowing to orthodoxy is liable to strike the casual, modern reader as a bit absurd. This is the point. Smith draws out important tendencies in Strauss, designed both to undermine assumptions without a simplistic regress to pre-modern political thought. The acceptance of "political atheism" — the total divorce of the modern state from any "religious" grounding — is, in Strauss's account, to wrongly forsake the roots of the Western tradition. The ancient city, even as epitomized in Plato's Republic, was the object of devotion and fervent desire; it was not a project of progress which somehow thought that it might eventually solve all human qualms and ameliorate the tension between civil and religious law. Here, Smith suggests, Strauss saw another irresolvable dilemma in the conflict between the philosopher and the ruler. Commenting on Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed, Strauss made one of his famous attempts at esoteric reading. Maimonides, he claimed, while remaining overtly orthodox, included hidden conflicting teachings for the highly perceptive which place philosophy above the Torah and suggest that Judaism ought to ultimately conform to the politically pragmatic. Teachings like this were hidden, and to some degree must still be hidden, because they threaten the sources of political power. This appears to somewhat contradict Smith's earlier assertion that Strauss never claimed that works were written to convey opposite meanings. Out of this messy tangle, however, Smith extracts a Straussian political paradigm: skepticism. Smith doubts that Strauss himself could have accepted orthodoxy as a viable alternative. Thus, Smith argues, Strauss's rationality would have decided in favor of a liberal state, but not without provisions for private discrimination based on the powerful claims of divine premises.
In "Athens," Smith extends the scope of this political skepticism, presenting Strauss as, among other things, a foil to Heidegger's apolitical naiveté and Alexander Kojève's Stalinist impulses. To this point, Smith has delivered a great book. For the uninitiated, Reading Leo Strauss would serve as a fine introduction to his thought, covering a broad range of topics while simultaneously rearticulating Strauss's major themes throughout. For the political philosopher, the text opens new avenues for thinking about Strauss's agendas.
Ironically though, for all its focus on de-politicization, Smith's book has a clear political agenda—to stick it to the neo-cons. Beginning in "Athens," once Smith engages in attempts to apply Strauss's thought to contemporary scenarios, his conclusions feel like a stretch. Strauss's ideas become distorted to meet Smith's own political goals. Thus, some of Strauss's idealistic, conservative tendencies, which Smith himself highlighted in earlier chapters, are simultaneously ignored.
This "Strauss as friend of liberals" notion has been semi-suppressed for the bulk of the book. While Smith's focus has been theory, the supposition that this investigation of Strauss's ideas would bolster some principles, other than neoconservative ones, has been implicit. There are, needless to say, numerous complications with Smith's reading of Strauss's "political skepticism" as bolstering a liberal position. For one, Smith openly stakes his claim in the East Coast camp — opposing himself to a whole group of Straussians (including Claremont's Harry Jaffa, who would award philosophy a much more central place in the arbitration of political disputes). Smith declines to engage with any of these opposing interpretations in his essays.
Once Smith has proposed a reading of Strauss as a skeptic, however, more confusion arises. For, while the skeptical mindset is well and good, it is exactly that — a mindset, a framework by which one can grasp the central issues of political existence. Skepticism, as Smith seems more than willing to admit, is not a policy position. So what does it mean when applied to actual policy? Smith concludes the book's final chapter, the punny "WWLSD; Or, What Would Leo Strauss Do?" with the suggestion that "[f]ar from justifying war, Strauss's writings may plausibly provide a stinging critique of current policy." Smith then briefly employs Strauss's reading of Plato's Republic to critique the idealistic nature of Bush Administration's War on Terror. By his version of Strauss, Smith is quite correct. Things become thornier, though, when one asks just what sort of idealistic agendas could not be plausibly critiqued. With the broad notion of skepticism, does it make any more sense to critique neoconservative escapades overseas than, say, the welfare state at home?
Smith is well aware of this ambiguity, qualifying his discussion of politics with the reminder that Strauss's successors have been of all political stripes, and incantations that Strauss was essentially apolitical. By what means, then, can Smith justifiably group Strauss with Walter Lippmann and Lionel Trilling? Smith aligns Strauss with cold-war liberals because of his "kind of 'Tocquevillian' sensibility that regarded freedom of an educated mind as the best antidote to the pathologies of modern mass politics" and the fact that he "regarded himself as a teacher of moderation." This moderation then, Smith seems to be suggesting, is akin to the sort of pragmatism suggested in Reinhold Niebuhr's quote, "[d]emocracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems." On a second look, however, this doesn't quite sum up Strauss's politics correctly either. Here, Smith posits a distinction between present-day mass democracy, driven by degraded mass culture, and democracy as Strauss saw it, as a "universal aristocracy." Such a government would require a "liberal education" to counter mass culture and restore democracy in its original purity. This, along with Strauss's focus on interlocking issues of the natural right and the restoration of a sense of natural law aimed at combating historicism and nihilism, places Strauss's ideals in close proximity to those of the social conservative thinkers with which he has been linked and far from the sort of skepticism which Smith attributes to him.
As an admittedly amateur student of Strauss, Reading Leo Strauss served as a fine introduction to his thought, covering a broad range of topics while simultaneously rearticulating the most important themes in Strauss's work. While on a first blush Smith's goal of ripping Strauss's ideas from the claws of neoconservatism by positioning him as a nonpartisan friend of liberal democracy sounds good, in the end, Smith's attempt is unconvincing. Trying to paint Strauss as an anti-neoconservative (and therefore, as staking out a very particular political position), while at once trying to place him above politics is contradictory and will make the careful reader rightly suspicious of Smith's own manipulation of Strauss's ideas to suit his unspoken political agenda. Yet, nothing here suggests that liberal pundits will be moved to adopt Smith's reverence for the cantankerous philosopher. At best, they will stop cranking about Strauss, regard him as hopelessly removed and theoretical, and move on to a new target (Allan Bloom anyone?).
Politics, Philsophy, Judiasm
by Steven B. Smith
University of Chicago Press, 268 pgs.
I remember well my first introduction to Leo Strauss. Thumbing through an issue of The Economist on a long car ride to visit colleges in Washington D.C., I became immediately engrossed in that week's Lexington column, "Philosophers and Kings: A strange waltz involving George Bush, ancient Greece and a dead German thinker." The prospect that our policies might have mysterious intellectual roots was enticing; the results were upsetting. "There's this political philosopher who thinks it's okay to lie to people for their own good," I murmured. "That," my mother replied reflexively, "is a very bad idea."
I indulge in autobiography only to point out that my reaction was typical—typical of both the sort of reaction most people have when they read or hear such ideas are fueling our supposedly democratic leaders, as well as of the visceral reactions to Strauss's work embodied in these popular accounts themselves. Rereading the column three years later, I realize that it is far less bombastic than most popular lore about the philosopher—it merely reported that other sources had pegged Strauss as a lying-enthusiast. But it was the idea that stuck with me. That Strauss might be a defender of cynical, Machiavellian sort of manipulation, and was at best an academic crotchety enough to have an axe to grind with modernity's sacred value—equality—was certainly sufficient reason for dismissal without further thought.
Reading Leo Strauss by Steven B. Smith presents itself as an antidote to this sort of cliché-ridden discourse. Smith, a professor of political science at Yale, has spent many years doing exactly what his title suggests—actually reading Strauss. From the basis of careful reading, Smith presents his conclusion:that, far from the devious subject of countless op-eds, Strauss was actually a "friend to liberal democracy."
Smith's book is not a tome of acrobatic apologetics for the cult of Strauss. In fact, the book begins (and ends) quite cautiously. Within paragraphs, Smith dispels any notions that he might be documenting the Strauss of the Straussians, and his initial sketches of the philosopher are striking. "On the basis of my own reading," Smith writes, "Strauss had no politics in the sense in which that term is generally meant. His works do not endorse any political party or program, whether of the Left or of the Right, Democratic or Republican. He was a philosopher." Smith's aim seems to be twofold. One is to have his readers appreciate the neglected genius of Strauss's ideas. The second is to convince readers that Strauss was not political.
However, Smith does believe that Strauss would have disapproved highly of his neoconservative offspring, and he makes this belief entirely transparent, particularly in his concluding sections. Thus, in arguing that Strauss would have been anti-neoconservative, Smith seems to contradict a key aim of the book: to prove Strauss was not political. This tension—or perhaps more accurately, this contradiction—in Smith's argument certainly forces the reader to question the validity of the Strauss-as-apolitical argument. Yet in terms of Smith's other aim, namely, to introduce readers to Strauss's most important ideas, he is quite successful. The result is a compelling survey of Strauss's philosophical ideas, marred to a certain extent by Smith's attempts to make Strauss's ideas mesh with his own contemporary liberal agenda.
The book's introduction engages in an almost immediate de-politicization of controversial themes which reappear throughout Strauss's works. Strauss's fascination with esoteric writing—the practice by which philosophers write on two levels, concealing their most radical opinions so that only those readers trained to ferret them out can see them—has been widely presented as evidence for his justification of state lies. Smith disputes this connection. "He did not sanction the selective use of lies in public life, as has been asserted," Smith writes, "and he certainly nowhere claimed that his own works, much less those of others, were written to convey the opposite of what they said." Smith disassembles such readings as one dimensional, or even non-readings of Strauss. Yet, this disassembly is not performed solely for the purpose of rooting out misconception, but moreover to suggest the absurdity that such claims are being made in the first place. Smith doesn't pause to defend Strauss's interest in esoteric writing until well into a discussion on that topic, and he does so with a sighing necessity. If only we could turn our gaze away from these oversimplified misreadings, Smith is suggesting, much more fascinating problems would arise. With misconceptions sidelined, Smith is free to discuss the actual depth of Strauss's work, along with the weightier controversies which envelop his intellectual legacy.
The rest of the book, that is to say everything after the introduction, follows this route. It largely circumvents the realm of partisan shouting matches, dealing mostly with substantial philosophical issues only occasionally referencing popular misunderstandings with the intention to defuse. The value of this approach becomes immediately apparent, for Strauss dealt not exclusively with issues as removed as esoteric writing, but also with a lengthy list of issues of immediate concern to the modern condition. Atheism and fascism, historicism and deconstruction all play key roles in Smith's series of essays, which is as wide-ranging and eclectic as Strauss's own work. With some skill, Smith is able to connect these musings to a central strand in Strauss' work—that of the irresolvable dilemma. For Strauss, he argues, there were some problematic features of reality which could simply find no happy intellectual resolution. Taking the difficulty of evil as a case in point, Strauss saw no way that a political philosopher could ignore such a central feature of the human condition, yet at the same time found no ultimate solution to the problem which would not lapse into indefensible dogmatism.
This dilemma is typified, however, in what Strauss dubbed the "Theologico-Political Problem." There is, Strauss contended, an irresolvable conflict between the claims of rational discourse and revealed religion. This was not a repetition of the familiar injunction against attempts to fuse these two radically incompatible disciplines. On this point, Strauss agreed. But, against the mainstream of Enlightenment thought, he saw no possibility for declaring philosophy as victor. Picking up from F.H. Jacobi's critique of Spinoza's rationalistic system, Strauss presented the choice starkly: one can either place faith in supernatural revelation or in the possibility for a totally rational description of the world. Each of these competing claims requires a leap of faith, according to Strauss, for neither the explanatory power of philosophic argument nor that of revealed law can be substantiated by prior argumentation which does not presuppose the truth of one of those modes of thought. The philosopher and the theologian stand in perhaps the most paradoxical of positions; by Strauss's lights they are both obligated and unable to speak to one another. For Strauss, the recognition of the power in the other's claims can only breed humility.
Such an exercise in lofty theorizing is almost inseparable from Strauss's own highly complex views about Zionism; it was no mistake that Strauss saw the opposing camps as Jerusalem and Athens. Smith divides the essays likewise, and the three which comprise "Jerusalem" contemplate the nexus of the theologico-political problem, the pressing political claims of Zionism, and centuries of the Jewish intellectual tradition. With the aforementioned problem as backdrop, Smith stakes out a position for Strauss amongst a lineage of prominent Jewish thinkers on the very possibility of solving Jewish woes through the creation of a modern, secular state.
Strauss's view of Judaism rests heavily on the recognition of the particularity of the Jews as a chosen people. In this regard, he aligned himself with Zionists against assimilationist strains in Jewish thought. However, Smith points out, Strauss stood equally at odds with the Zionists who saw the solution to the "Jewish problem" as the creation of a separate state where Jews would live pretty much like everyone else. Jews, Strauss wanted to insist, stand apart as Jews in as much as they are not members of an aimless herd searching for proximate solutions, but a divinely designated group looking to embody this theological knowledge in its politics. To place faith solely in secular, political struggles, neglecting the coming of the Messiah, was to forget what it meant to be Jewish.
Smith uses this as a launching platform to explore Strauss's rather creative commentaries on the history of Jewish thought and contemporary thinkers. Here Strauss himself appears deeply divided — an admirer of rational exposition with a simultaneous desire to retain the mystery of Judaism's revealed characteristics. In this vein, he is a defender of Spinoza's integrity and depth of thought while maintaining the insufficiency of his system. He appears in skeptical but interested dialogue with the mystical theology of Gershom Scholem. His assessment of the Hermann Cohen's neo-Kantian appropriation of Maimonides is negative; how can Cohen claim Judaism as a purely rational religion without making a false distinction between its merely contingent and its rational contents, he asks. Yet Strauss views Cohen's insistence that Jews remain pragmatically separate from the rest of the German state as somewhat admirable. Franz Rosenzweig fares a bit better in Strauss's eyes by not viewing Judaism as law, à la Kant, but as divine command; however, his work too is classified as philosophical, not Jewish.
All of this kowtowing to orthodoxy is liable to strike the casual, modern reader as a bit absurd. This is the point. Smith draws out important tendencies in Strauss, designed both to undermine assumptions without a simplistic regress to pre-modern political thought. The acceptance of "political atheism" — the total divorce of the modern state from any "religious" grounding — is, in Strauss's account, to wrongly forsake the roots of the Western tradition. The ancient city, even as epitomized in Plato's Republic, was the object of devotion and fervent desire; it was not a project of progress which somehow thought that it might eventually solve all human qualms and ameliorate the tension between civil and religious law. Here, Smith suggests, Strauss saw another irresolvable dilemma in the conflict between the philosopher and the ruler. Commenting on Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed, Strauss made one of his famous attempts at esoteric reading. Maimonides, he claimed, while remaining overtly orthodox, included hidden conflicting teachings for the highly perceptive which place philosophy above the Torah and suggest that Judaism ought to ultimately conform to the politically pragmatic. Teachings like this were hidden, and to some degree must still be hidden, because they threaten the sources of political power. This appears to somewhat contradict Smith's earlier assertion that Strauss never claimed that works were written to convey opposite meanings. Out of this messy tangle, however, Smith extracts a Straussian political paradigm: skepticism. Smith doubts that Strauss himself could have accepted orthodoxy as a viable alternative. Thus, Smith argues, Strauss's rationality would have decided in favor of a liberal state, but not without provisions for private discrimination based on the powerful claims of divine premises.
In "Athens," Smith extends the scope of this political skepticism, presenting Strauss as, among other things, a foil to Heidegger's apolitical naiveté and Alexander Kojève's Stalinist impulses. To this point, Smith has delivered a great book. For the uninitiated, Reading Leo Strauss would serve as a fine introduction to his thought, covering a broad range of topics while simultaneously rearticulating Strauss's major themes throughout. For the political philosopher, the text opens new avenues for thinking about Strauss's agendas.
Ironically though, for all its focus on de-politicization, Smith's book has a clear political agenda—to stick it to the neo-cons. Beginning in "Athens," once Smith engages in attempts to apply Strauss's thought to contemporary scenarios, his conclusions feel like a stretch. Strauss's ideas become distorted to meet Smith's own political goals. Thus, some of Strauss's idealistic, conservative tendencies, which Smith himself highlighted in earlier chapters, are simultaneously ignored.
This "Strauss as friend of liberals" notion has been semi-suppressed for the bulk of the book. While Smith's focus has been theory, the supposition that this investigation of Strauss's ideas would bolster some principles, other than neoconservative ones, has been implicit. There are, needless to say, numerous complications with Smith's reading of Strauss's "political skepticism" as bolstering a liberal position. For one, Smith openly stakes his claim in the East Coast camp — opposing himself to a whole group of Straussians (including Claremont's Harry Jaffa, who would award philosophy a much more central place in the arbitration of political disputes). Smith declines to engage with any of these opposing interpretations in his essays.
Once Smith has proposed a reading of Strauss as a skeptic, however, more confusion arises. For, while the skeptical mindset is well and good, it is exactly that — a mindset, a framework by which one can grasp the central issues of political existence. Skepticism, as Smith seems more than willing to admit, is not a policy position. So what does it mean when applied to actual policy? Smith concludes the book's final chapter, the punny "WWLSD; Or, What Would Leo Strauss Do?" with the suggestion that "[f]ar from justifying war, Strauss's writings may plausibly provide a stinging critique of current policy." Smith then briefly employs Strauss's reading of Plato's Republic to critique the idealistic nature of Bush Administration's War on Terror. By his version of Strauss, Smith is quite correct. Things become thornier, though, when one asks just what sort of idealistic agendas could not be plausibly critiqued. With the broad notion of skepticism, does it make any more sense to critique neoconservative escapades overseas than, say, the welfare state at home?
Smith is well aware of this ambiguity, qualifying his discussion of politics with the reminder that Strauss's successors have been of all political stripes, and incantations that Strauss was essentially apolitical. By what means, then, can Smith justifiably group Strauss with Walter Lippmann and Lionel Trilling? Smith aligns Strauss with cold-war liberals because of his "kind of 'Tocquevillian' sensibility that regarded freedom of an educated mind as the best antidote to the pathologies of modern mass politics" and the fact that he "regarded himself as a teacher of moderation." This moderation then, Smith seems to be suggesting, is akin to the sort of pragmatism suggested in Reinhold Niebuhr's quote, "[d]emocracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems." On a second look, however, this doesn't quite sum up Strauss's politics correctly either. Here, Smith posits a distinction between present-day mass democracy, driven by degraded mass culture, and democracy as Strauss saw it, as a "universal aristocracy." Such a government would require a "liberal education" to counter mass culture and restore democracy in its original purity. This, along with Strauss's focus on interlocking issues of the natural right and the restoration of a sense of natural law aimed at combating historicism and nihilism, places Strauss's ideals in close proximity to those of the social conservative thinkers with which he has been linked and far from the sort of skepticism which Smith attributes to him.
As an admittedly amateur student of Strauss, Reading Leo Strauss served as a fine introduction to his thought, covering a broad range of topics while simultaneously rearticulating the most important themes in Strauss's work. While on a first blush Smith's goal of ripping Strauss's ideas from the claws of neoconservatism by positioning him as a nonpartisan friend of liberal democracy sounds good, in the end, Smith's attempt is unconvincing. Trying to paint Strauss as an anti-neoconservative (and therefore, as staking out a very particular political position), while at once trying to place him above politics is contradictory and will make the careful reader rightly suspicious of Smith's own manipulation of Strauss's ideas to suit his unspoken political agenda. Yet, nothing here suggests that liberal pundits will be moved to adopt Smith's reverence for the cantankerous philosopher. At best, they will stop cranking about Strauss, regard him as hopelessly removed and theoretical, and move on to a new target (Allan Bloom anyone?).
// ANDREW FLYNN is a Columbia College junior majoring in philosophy and concentrating in history. He is a senior editor of The Blue and White.