Becoming Leo Strauss

IN RECENT YEARS, the political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973) has become something of a household name. This has been a mixed blessing.

With a few notable exceptions, reports in the press, journals, and even the odd book have betrayed a scandalous incompetence in their presentation of Strauss’s thought and his “sinister” influence. Of course, these efforts will soon be forgotten, their damage to the study of Strauss’s thought minimal. Strauss’s work is of such a character that it will inevitably receive the attention of the thoughtful and open-minded. Still, it would be a great misfortune if this opportunity to introduce the newly famous/infamous Strauss to students today were squandered. For this reason, Heinrich Meier’s excellent Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem is particularly timely and welcome.

With its publication, Meier is bound to begin to receive the sort of attention here that he has enjoyed in Europe as a prominent interpreter of Rousseau, the political theologian Carl Schmitt, and, above all, Leo Strauss. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that his monumental editorial labors and outstanding scholarship have made Meier–director of the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation and professor of philosophy at the University of Munich–largely responsible for making Strauss a subject of serious study in Europe. Those editorial labors have already produced three massive volumes of Strauss’s collected writings, with two more slated to appear in the coming years. He has made widely available Strauss’s early books on Spinoza and Maimonides (in the original German), as well as all of the young Strauss’s shorter works, including some whose existence was previously unknown. In addition, Meier has uncovered a complete, hitherto unknown Strauss manuscript on Hobbes’s critique of religion, and has published the remarkable correspondence between Strauss and some of his most distinguished contemporaries, including Jacob Klein and Gershom Scholem.

According to Machiavelli, there is no good thing, however splendid, that does not have its accompanying “inconvenience.” Whatever the general merits of this contention, it certainly holds true in the academic world. Scholars have a gift for alchemy, of a peculiar kind: They transform the valuable into dust. Meier’s focus on the early Strauss in the first volumes of the collected writings was, in part, dictated by the “scholarly” desire to fill the gaps in a remarkably incomplete historical record. Yet far more fundamental was his desire to understand, and to make understandable, the philosophic thoughts of the mature Strauss, the author of such works as Natural Right and History (1953) Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), and Socrates and Aristophanes (1966). In seeking to explicate “How Strauss Became Strauss,” Meier does not provide a genetic account of Strauss’s “development” that reduces the philosopher Strauss to a product of the opinions and influences of his youth. Yet, in recent years, Meier’s labors have occasionally been used (and abused) by academics as part of their procrustean attempt to reduce Strauss to another case study in 20th-century intellectual history.

Put another way, the scholars in question seek to understand the late Strauss in light of the early one. Meier takes precisely the opposite approach: He seeks to understand the young Strauss in light of the mature one. He attempts to uncover the key insights that allowed, or caused, Strauss to become Strauss. In doing so, he takes guidance from the handful of personal statements Strauss made in his later years regarding the decisive moments in his philosophic education.

Three such statements stand out. In his 1965 “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion”–the “autobiographical preface”–Strauss speaks of “a change of orientation” in his thought that was first given voice in a 1932 review essay of Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political. In 1970, Strauss remarked that it was coming across a sentence of the Arab philosopher and physician Avicenna–“The standard work on prophecy and revelation is Plato’s Laws“–that allowed him, as a young man, to begin to understand Maimonides. That understanding, in turn, led to his famous rediscovery, in the late 1930s, of exoteric writing. Finally, there is Strauss’s statement in his 1965 preface to the publication of the German original of The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (1936):

That first statement provided the theme of Meier’s first book on Strauss, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, and the third statement provides the theme for this volume. In The Hidden Dialogue, Meier showed how Schmitt substantially amended subsequent editions of The Concept of the Political in response to Strauss’s pointed 1932 critique, “Notes on The Concept of the Political.” That critique presented Schmitt’s fundamental intention more clearly and coherently than the author had himself.

At first glance, the book reads as if Meier’s main concern is to delineate the contours of Schmitt’s political theology, with Strauss cast in the supporting role of guide; and this is how it was widely received. Yet it is clear that Meier is at least as interested in articulating–and is far more impressed by–the alternative of political philosophy to which Strauss’s “Notes” point.

Strauss showed that the underlying basis of Schmitt’s affirmation of the political was a profound dissatisfaction with liberalism–that is, with liberal universalism and its aspirations for boundless security and a life that seeks fulfillment in the “interesting and entertaining.” Liberalism, according to Schmitt, was above all a rejection of the political, the characteristic distinction of which he held to be the division into “friends” and “enemies.” Such a life–lacking the passion and commitment that would lead one to die for a cause–seemed to Schmitt a rejection of all that was high and vital in man. So, Schmitt preached commitment and enmity; in Strauss’s words: “He who affirms the political as such respects all who want to fight.”

Strauss was no more attracted to a debased liberalism than was Schmitt, but he sought not to negate it but to ascend from it. Like Schmitt, he asked, “What is the right way of life?” Yet unlike Schmitt, Strauss was unwilling to rest satisfied simply with any form of political commitment. When he raised the Socratic question, he did so in a Socratic manner–with a view to discovering the true answer. And in so doing, Strauss refounded political philosophy.

In The Hidden Dialogue, Meier paints a picture of political philosophy rediscovering itself in the confrontation with political theology. Now, in Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, he sets himself a similar, albeit more ambitious, goal; for in his title essay Meier seeks, to show how philosophy discovers itself in the confrontation with the claims of revealed religion. That impressive essay is one of four, a work that–in conjunction with The Hidden Dialogue and an intermediate volume entitled The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political Theology and Political Philosophy–constitutes an illumination of the distinguishing characteristics of philosophy, political philosophy, and political theology. (In addition, the book is graced by two remarkable Strauss essays–“Reason and Revelation” and “Living Issues in Postwar German Philosophy”–discovered by Meier among the Strauss papers, and which will be of interest to any serious student of political philosophy.)

In Meier’s first chapter, he highlights Strauss’s identification of “the theologico-political problem” as “the theme of my investigations,” and shows why any understanding of Strauss requires coherent reflection on that singularly enigmatic statement. Meier’s second chapter, “The History of Philosophy and the Intention of the Philosopher,” examines the relative status for Strauss of a philosopher’s historical influence, on the one hand, and his philosophic intention. In this tour de force Meier enables us to see that, for Strauss, a philosopher’s “intention” is of far greater importance than his doctrinal teaching and ascribed influence: A philosopher’s intention is revealed by the manner in which he engages the true objects of philosophical reflection, those objects identified by Strauss as “the fundamental and permanent problems.”

In tracing the “influence” of a philosophic doctrine, by way of contrast, it is the usual practice to contend with the manner in which a philosopher’s teaching is distorted, either when employed for broad practical aims or repackaged for mass consumption. A philosopher’s intention concerns his thoughts about the most important problems. The history of philosophy treats the way those same thoughts have been most frequently and powerfully misunderstood. Meier’s final two chapters help us to realize just how revolutionary was Strauss’s refounding of political philosophy. For, as he notes in his introduction, that refounding “granted the concept ‘political philosophy’ a weight and a visibility that it never had before.” Strauss’s historical and scholarly enterprise had more than its fair share of “originality.”

It would be impossible to do justice here to Meier’s complex exposition and arguments. It is possible to convey something of the care with which he supports the assertion that begins the chapter entitled “The Theologico-Political Problem”: “Nothing is as controversial in the thought of Leo Strauss and nothing is as central to it as a proper understanding of it as the theologico-political problem.” A good deal of the controversy can be attributed to Strauss’s own reticence: He rarely speaks of the “theologico-political” as such, and he deems it a “problem” only in the autobiographical passage I quoted earlier. Meier mined the whole of Strauss’s writings and found only two additional statements in which he “employs the epithet ‘theologico-political’ in his own name to characterize his historical situation, his theme, and his endeavor.”

What Meier understands the theologico-political problem to be can be gleaned from his definition of a “theologico-political treatise” as “a philosophical writing that faces the theological and the political alternative and that leads, by way of the confrontation with the demands of politics and religion, to philosophy.” For Meier, that alternative is, above all, the claim of Biblical revelation, which “represents both a theoretical and an existential challenge” to philosophy. Revelation challenges philosophy theoretically by calling into question philosophy’s contention that free inquiry is the sole and sufficient means to pursue the truth about the most important matters. Moreover, it challenges “philosophy existentially by confronting philosophy with the commandment of obedience, which rejects the philosophical life in the name of the highest authority conceivable and imposes on that life the severest sanction imaginable.”

Such challenges call into question the very reasonableness of the life devoted to reason and, if left unanswered, seem to expose that way of life as nothing more than the product of an arbitrary whim or willful decision. No doubt for good reasons, Strauss declined to set forth explicitly what the philosophic response is–though at a cost: Many scholars have seized upon occasional statements in which he appears to say that philosophy, when confronted with the claims of divine revelation, betrays its incoherence. The most famous such passage occurs in a discussion in Natural Right and History where Strauss provides an account of the considerations that led Max Weber (not Strauss himself) to despair of the very possibility of a reasonable life devoted to reason: “The mere fact that philosophy and revelation cannot refute each other would constitute the refutation of philosophy by revelation.”

Meier makes abundantly clear why this apparent conclusion cannot reasonably be taken as Strauss’s last, or considered, word on the matter. Moreover, by using Strauss’s writings to construct an account of the philosophical response to the challenge presented by revelation, Meier demonstrates why reticence should not be confused with having nothing to say. Meier’s intention is not to settle the debate about what the “theologico-political” problem is, but to begin it in a manner that does justice to the considerable demands that Strauss’s writings place on the reader.

Let me note here two questions that are prompted by Meier’s arguments and reflections. Meier contends that the advent of revelation necessitates a change in the character of philosophy: To realize itself fully, philosophy, he suggests, needs revelation. Yet even if the conditions of one age are particularly congenial to the rise and flourishing of philosophy, doesn’t Strauss maintain that philosophy is a permanent possibility accessible to man as man? And can it be such a possibility if it is not always, in principle, capable of full realization?

Second, it is worth asking whether Meier’s articulation of “the theologico-political problem” as “the unifying theme of [Strauss’s] studies” is gainsaid by the “surface” of Strauss’s works. In The City and Man, Strauss wrote: “The literary question properly understood is the question of the relation between society and philosophy.” Is there a way in which this question–far and away the most prominent in Strauss’s corpus–could be further reformulated, and understood, as the “theologico-political problem”?

These questions can only be answered, as Meier suggests, by an intensive study of Strauss’s “most carefully written books”–those works that contain “his farthest reaching reflections, his most profound thoughts, and his most challenging considerations.” A good place to start would be Thoughts on Machiavelli, which is, at once, Strauss’s greatest, most misunderstood, and most neglected book, and the one to which Strauss confides his own “thoughts.” Meier not only identifies Thoughts as Strauss’s “most astonishing book,” but also makes the truly remarkable claim that it is “the most carefully written treatise on revealed religion.” So Meier suggests that Thoughts surpasses in artistry such works as Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica and Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed!

No lesson in Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem is as simple and valuable as what Meier conveys by the manner in which he approaches Strauss and his books. In contrast to the widespread abuse of mining Strauss’s works for snippets that ostensibly show Strauss’s “agenda,” Meier treats them as invitations to think about the most important problems; that is, to philosophize. And by serving as a timely and enticing summons to accept Strauss’s generosity, Meier’s work helps us begin to understand the greatness of Strauss as a philosopher. That is an achievement worthy of note and gratitude.

Steven J. Lenzner is a research fellow in political philosophy at the Henry Salvatori Center of Claremont McKenna College.