Since he was born and reared in Germany, it is not difficult to understand why Leo Strauss felt affection and gratitude towards the United States, his adopted country. On more than one occasion he expressed an acute appreciation for the decencies liberal democracy managed to preserve amid the savagery of the twentieth century.
In the years since his death in 1973, liberal democracy has — in its own peculiar way — returned the appreciation, as Strauss has become the focus of increased scholarly attention, both for his own thought and for his perceived influence on contemporary American politics and political theory.
The latest volume to take up Strauss focuses on his understanding of America. Unlike other recent studies, however, Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Regime was written by students and followers of Strauss. And since Strauss has been portrayed as everything from a dogmatic theocrat to a closet Nietzschean, a volume by Straussians should be a welcome corrective.
To some degree, it is. But, unfortunately, Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Regime fails to make good on the promise of its comprehensive title. A collection of twenty-nine essays edited by Kenneth L. Deutsch and John A. Murley, the book is misleading about its primary subjects: Its account of the “regime” contradicts Strauss’s articulation of the term, and the picture it paints of Strauss and his teaching sometimes seems as distorted as a portrait by Picasso. There is also a surprising neglect of Strauss’s genuine impact on American political thought and practice.
The book devotes two sections of its essays to “the American regime,” with articles on Strauss’s influence on the study of the Congress, the presidency, the Supreme Court, the bureaucracy, and other areas of practical concern. Though these pieces are for the most part well done, they have little to do with the American regime as Strauss understood it.
Strauss defined “regime” as “the way of life of a society,” which, he taught, is determined by the manner in which a society answers the question, “Who should rule?” A democracy, for example, asserts “the common man” should rule.
“When the authoritative type is the common man,” Strauss wrote in his most famous work, Natural Right and History, “everything has to justify itself before the tribunal of the common man; everything which cannot be justified before that tribunal becomes, at best, merely tolerated, if not despised or suspect.” Such a democracy produces a way of life that is, above all, determined by its understanding of equality.
Thus, a genuinely “Straussian” account of the American regime would resemble that provided by Tocqueville in Democracy in America more than the “institutional” one provided by, say, The Federalist Papers. In Natural Right and History, Strauss used the term “American Constitution” only once. At the outset of the thematic articulation of “regime” in his chapter on “Classic Natural Right,” Strauss cautioned against mistaking our specific legal arrangements for what we are as a political whole: “The American Constitution is not the same thing as the American way of life.” Yet the focus of most of the essays in Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Regime is far more on our Constitution than our way of life.
The best two essays in the book are Mark Blitz’s “Government Practice and the School of Strauss” and Charles Kesler’s “A New Birth of Freedom: Harry V. Jaffa and the Study of America.” Blitz’s brilliant essay, the last of the book’s twenty-nine, is the only one to address thematically the important subject of Strauss and American conservatism. Kesler’s account of Jaffa’s achievement provides a model of a Straussian analysis of a regime. It focuses almost exclusively on Jaffa’s great study of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Crisis of the House Divided, first published in 1959. Expounding that work sympathetically and perceptively, Kesler reproduces in distilled form Jaffa’s demonstration of the tremendous extent to which American political life is governed by its self-definition of equality. (Though, by confining himself largely to Crisis of the House Divided, Kesler implicitly offers a telling commentary on Jaffa’s subsequent work.)
Kesler’s essay points to the considerable extent to which Jaffa informs the approach taken by many of this volume’s contributors. No doubt Strauss admired Jaffa’s achievement — particularly his articulation of Lincoln’s greatness. Yet admiration should not be confused with agreement. Kesler brings out two aspects of Crisis of the House Divided that are distant from Strauss’s own work: the Lincolnian attempt to synthesize liberal democracy and Christianity, and the promotion of equality (albeit an equality incompatible with vulgar egalitarianism). Strauss would have been doubtful about the Lincolnian synthesis, and he would not have endorsed the “categorical imperative” of equality Jaffa discerned in Lincoln’s thought and action. As Kesler notes, it is “impossible to do justice to human equality and human inequality at the same time in politics.” Strauss’s “classic natural right” teaching leaves no doubt where he stood: “Since the classics viewed moral and political matters in the light of man’s perfection, they were not egalitarians.”
In Crisis of the House Divided, Jaffa established and endorsed the paramount moral purpose of Lincoln’s career. Jaffa claims (as do a number of contributors to this volume, George Anastaplo and Hadley Arkes, in particular) there was an analogous intention in Strauss’s own work. Strauss was not indifferent to the claims of moral virtue, but such claims did not fundamentally animate and inform his writing.
Jaffa’s own self-consciously authoritative contribution to Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Regime is called “Strauss at One Hundred,” and it demonstrates a marked indifference to what Strauss promoted as the primary responsibility of an interpreter: textual fidelity. Only by failing to engage Strauss’s texts is Jaffa able to conclude that “to secure recognition . . . of the moral authority based upon the dignity of man, supported by both reason and revelation” was “the essential purpose of Leo Strauss’s life and work.” Jaffa quotes only three passages, two of which are opening lines from Strauss’s writings. Strauss’s beginnings are, as a rule, ironic — a fact Jaffa ignores, there-by falling into the trap that Strauss identified as the chief failing of contemporary interpreters of Socrates: He mistakes the “ambiguous starting point or the ambiguous results of his inquiries for the substance of his thought,” to quote Natural Right and History. As a philosopher — a man passionately devoted above all to understanding the truth about all things — Strauss’s chief intention could not have been the establishment of any sort of “authority.” Political philosophy, though respectful of political life’s need for authoritative opinion, cannot recognize authority as binding upon thought: “By uprooting authority, philosophy recognizes nature as the standard.”
It would be unjust, however, to lay all the blame at Jaffa’s feet. Among the essays devoted to articulating Strauss’s thought, only Eugene Miller’s thoughtful contribution shows any awareness of the need to interpret Strauss in the manner in which Strauss interpreted the work of others.
In Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss stated that “one writes as one reads.” Since Strauss must be considered a leading contender for the greatest reader of all-time, any interpreter who wishes to be taken seriously must show that he recognizes the need to give Strauss’s texts the most exacting and detailed attention possible. Instead, the contributors to this volume tend not to engage his writings in the manner those texts demand.
Strauss’s enemies show no reluctance to distort his teaching. This is regrettable, but not surprising. Yet as long as this is the case, his friends have a special responsibility to do justice to his thought.
