Leo Strauss. Neil G. Robertson
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him at the center of human existence: what is the best or right life? Strauss’s work was a continuous response to this question.
The first thing is to provide an outline of Strauss’s life, and then to describe briefly some of the basic themes and claims of his thought as it seeks to think the question of the best life.
Who is Leo Strauss?
Leo Strauss was born in 1899 into an observant Jewish family in Germany. Even before attending university, he converted to “simple, straightforward political Zionism” (JPCM 460), and was involved in the Zionist movement during his twenties. Strauss studied philosophy at the University of Marburg and the University of Hamburg. While a student, he served as an assistant to Edmund Husserl, the founder of the school of phenomenology. Strauss attended some classes and seminars of Martin Heidegger, whom Strauss considered to be the greatest thinker of his generation. After completing a doctorate at the University of Hamburg under Ernst Cassirer in 1921, Strauss became a researcher at the Academy for the Science of Judaism in Berlin, focusing on the history of Jewish philosophy, including work on Moses Mendelssohn, Spinoza, and Maimonides. His first book, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, was published in 1930. At about this time, Strauss had what he described later as a “change of orientation” that opened up for him the possibility of a recovery of pre-modern rationalism. He later stated that the first expression of his “change of orientation” was to be found in his 1932 review of a book by Carl Schmitt, the important legal theorist who joined the Nazi Party shortly afterward. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Strauss was in France on a Rockefeller research fellowship. The following year, he moved to England to work on Thomas Hobbes. In 1937, he went to the United States, eventually securing a permanent position at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In 1949, Strauss began two decades of teaching in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He retired and was named Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago in 1968, but continued teaching and giving guest lectures at Claremont Men’s College and then at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, until his death in 1973.
Themes in Strauss’s Thought
What matters most about Leo Strauss’s life is not primarily his deeds but his thoughts. There are two basic ways we could approach Strauss’s importance as a “key contemporary thinker”: one would be chronological, and the second thematic. This book will do a bit of both, but it is primarily thematically structured. This is not an intellectual biography, but in chapters 1 and 2, I will consider Strauss’s intellectual development in the context of the Weimar Republic, and especially the significance and meaning of what he calls his “change of orientation.” We will also follow him to the United States, where he taught for over thirty years and published the books that established him as one of the leading figures in political philosophy and the history of political philosophy in the mid-twentieth century. We will conclude the book by looking at his influence especially upon American conservative thought and American politics.
While there is a general biographical trajectory through the course of the book, its more basic structure is thematic – and, in order to explore these themes across the range of Strauss’s thought, we will often look at writings from different decades in his life. The primary justification for this is that, once Strauss underwent his “change of orientation” sometime around 1930, his thought retained a basic stability of outlook. This is not to deny some important developments and even corrections within his thought, and certainly we will note them when they arise. Nonetheless, the essence of Strauss’s philosophical orientation and vision remained remarkably consistent.
Let me turn, then, to the themes that will organize this book and help orient us in making sense of Strauss’s thought. This list is by no means exhaustive, but I want to suggest that these five themes do form something like the most fundamental aspects of Strauss’s thinking:
1 the return to natural right and the recovery of classical rationalism;
2 the theological-political problem;
3 the recovery of the exoteric/esoteric distinction;
4 classical political philosophy; and
5 the critique of modern political philosophy.
The first three themes will form our first three chapters, and we will explore the development of Strauss’s thought in the context of the Weimar Republic in Germany, and in his first few years of exile from Germany in France, England, and the United States. Chapters 4 and 5 will consider the two crucial components of his mature thought, which find expression particularly in work Strauss published while he was at the University of Chicago, and, above all, in his most comprehensive book, Natural Right and History (1953). But it is important to remember that the key earlier themes remain active right through his work: Strauss himself explicitly states that the theological-political problem was the theme of his investigations throughout his scholarly career. In chapter 6, we will consider Strauss’s legacy and specifically his influence on American politics.
It is a basic claim of this book that Strauss’s work as a whole cannot be understood or properly assessed except by seeing it as a response to the crisis of politics, thought, and culture that belonged to the Weimar Republic. Strauss’s intellectual project clearly emerged from this context, and understood that crisis as indicative of a deeper and more fundamental crisis in western civilization: the crisis of the West, or nihilism. Our first three chapters will be an effort to understand and explain Strauss’s standpoint as a response to the crisis of nihilism. Of course, many of the most significant thinkers of the twentieth century were engaged in responding to similar circumstances. We need to see Strauss’s as one such response, but an importantly distinct and compelling one.
Before considering these themes, it will be useful briefly to introduce three thinkers who are especially important in understanding and locating Strauss’s position. Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger were crucial figures in articulating the intellectual world in which Strauss came to his own standpoint.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), while he lived in the nineteenth century, only came to cultural and intellectual prominence in the first decades of the twentieth century and was, by Strauss’s own account, the dominating intellectual presence of the Weimar Republic (1918–33), where Strauss came to intellectual maturity. Nietzsche is famous for his account of European civilization as having been subject to the claim “God is dead.” Nietzsche provided the most radical consideration of the implications of this insight into modern culture: the death of God implied the loss not only of religious belief but of the whole framework of morality and science that depended on the claim of an otherworldly foundation. Nietzsche therefore saw his own time as one that was experiencing nihilism. In the face of the abysmal experience of the death of God, Nietzsche saw as illusionary and unsustainable the claims that the end of religion issued in a new egalitarian humanism and new scientific understanding of the world. Nietzsche proposed an alternative way to live in the face of nihilism through three “teachings”: the world as “will to power”; the proclamation of the Übermensch, the “Overman”; and the doctrine of the Eternal Return of the Same. Nietzsche explores these thoughts in a number of works, but especially central is Thus Spoke Zarathustra. As we shall see, Strauss understood himself as trying to face the demands of Nietzsche’s thought.
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) was important to Strauss in pointing to a way of philosophizing that might allow for a standpoint that could escape Nietzsche’s devastating critique of the western tradition of philosophy as implicated in the nihilism western culture found itself possessed by. Husserl developed “phenomenology” as a way to engage in a philosophic reflection on the experienced world that avoids the kind of causal or