by John Marini
Indeed, race theory had become so pervasive by the beginning of the twentieth century that Hannah Arendt, writing during World War II, noted:
Few ideologies have won enough prominence to survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and only two have come out on top and essentially defeated all others: the ideology which interprets History as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets History as a natural fight of races. The appeal of both to large masses was so strong that they were able to enlist state support and establish themselves as official national doctrines. But far beyond the boundaries within which race-thinking and class-thinking have developed into obligatory patterns of thought, free public opinion has adopted them to such an extent that not only intellectuals but great masses of people will no longer accept any presentation of past or present facts that is not in agreement with either of these views.57
Although the legitimacy of the opinion that justifies the superiority of the white race is no longer defensible, it is still difficult for social science not to think in terms of race or class.
It was not until after the Second World War, when Hitler and the Nazi Party had completely discredited race theory, that the equal rights of blacks would become a serious concern of the intellectuals and the politicians. Unfortunately, the demise of race theory as a justification of inequality of citizenship did not result in reestablishing the principled meaning of equality as it was understood in the natural right teaching of the Founders and Lincoln. Ironically, although Lincoln and the North had won the political battle of the Civil War, the political thought that animated his judgment and his public rhetoric, not to mention his principles, had not triumphed in its aftermath. Lincoln’s memory was preserved, but his political thought, and that of the American Founders, did not survive the intellectual onslaught of Progressive thought. Consequently, the meaning of Lincoln’s legacy and that of the Founding Fathers would be determined by an intellectual authority animated by the spirit of historicism that was established in the newly created graduate schools where the historians and social scientists received their training.
Conclusion: Natural Right and History
It was already clear by the end of the nineteenth century that the intellectual triumph of historicism and the growth of the authority of the social sciences had all but undermined the Founders’ and Lincoln’s legacy in defense of natural right and constitutional government. It was not restored in the twentieth century. In his book Natural Right and History, published in 1953, Leo Strauss traced the crisis of the West to the abandonment of the idea of natural right. In the America of the twenty-first century, it is still difficult, if not impossible, intellectually and politically to defend the philosophic doctrine of natural right. The self-evident truths that had provided the foundation for the public philosophy of constitutionalism are no longer thought to be self-evident or true. Lincoln’s defense of the Constitution, which was simply a defense of the natural right doctrine that had established the meaning and purpose of constitutionalism, had been rejected even by his most ardent admirers in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Those philosophical truths and their political embodiment in a fundamental law have not been restored in a meaningful way.
The acceptance of a philosophy of History and its “historic sense,” as well as science and its empirical method, had provided the theoretical foundations of the state and the social sciences. Intellectually, the meaning of constitutionalism, and the philosophic authority of natural right as its ground, had been successfully undermined by historicism and positivism in the newly established universities of the post–Civil War era. Politically, however, constitutionalism retained some of its vitality simply because of the institutional structure of the Constitution and the separation of powers in the American government itself. Thus, it always remained a possibility that prudent leadership in a branch of the government could help mobilize constituencies on behalf of limited government or in defense of the Constitution. Nonetheless, it has been very difficult to establish a theoretical defense of constitutionalism in the absence of a philosophic doctrine or a public philosophy derived from metaphysics and dependent on practical reason, or prudence. Moreover, the political virtue of prudence has little place in the rational state, where passion or will establishes the ground of morality, and technical expertise is established with the purpose of implementing that will.
When Leo Strauss wrote at mid-century, he was well aware of the need to restore the foundation of natural right. But he noted that “the seriousness of the need of natural right does not prove that the need can be satisfied.” Strauss pointed to the reason for the difficulty in attempting to satisfy that need: “the problem of natural right is today a matter of recollection rather than of actual knowledge.” Consequently, he insisted that “we are therefore in need of historical studies in order to familiarize ourselves with the whole complexity of the issue.”58 However strange it must seem, given the abundance of historical scholarship, Strauss demanded that we must, once again, become students of “the history of ideas.” We need, he said, a “nonhistoricist understanding of nonhistoricist philosophy.… But we need no less urgently a nonhistoricist understanding of historicism, that is, an understanding of historicism that does not take for granted the soundness of historicism.”59 When Strauss wrote his book, those historical studies of American political thought that were open to the possibility of natural right had not been written. The intellectual triumph of historicism had precluded the kind of openness to the question of natural right necessary for its recovery. Consequently, the problem of natural right was merely a memory or recollection. In short, there was no meaningful knowledge of natural right. In the case of Lincoln, the scholarship of the historians and social scientists had made it nearly impossible to comprehend the doctrine of natural right, or, the theoretical perspective that had animated Lincoln’s self-understanding.
However, in the past half century, historical scholarship has begun to reveal the contours of a natural right teaching. Many of Strauss’s students have produced the kind of nonhistoricist historical studies that have shed light on this question. In terms of Lincoln scholarship, Harry V. Jaffa has provided an analysis of the Civil War in direct opposition to that of the Progressive historians after the Civil War. He has made the theoretical foundations of Lincoln’s thought and political prudence intelligible for the first time in more than a century. He has enlightened a generation of scholars on the problem of natural right by revealing the limitation imposed on Progressive scholarship by historicism itself. Now, many other scholars are producing historical studies of a kind that open up the possibility of understanding the past as it understood itself. Such historical scholarship must be done in a nonhistoricist manner. It must be open to the problem of natural right.
The problem of natural right could not be made meaningful again as long as the reigning authority of historicism and social science remained unquestioned. The road to the recovery of natural right would provoke bitter debate. Strauss was well aware that such scholarship would ignite an intellectual war, which would be fueled by the passions of those whose careers had been achieved in defense of the status quo. Strauss indicated that difficulty by referring to a quotation of Lord Acton: “Few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ideas. Sharp definitions and unsparing analysis would displace the veil beneath which society dissembles its divisions, would make political disputes too violent for compromise and political alliances too precarious for use, and would embitter politics with all the passions of social and religious strife.”60 What is true of political life is no less true when it comes to establishing the theoretical understanding by which meaningful knowledge of the factual or empirical world is made intelligible. Indeed, political life takes its shape and derives its intellectual and moral authority from those ideas that establish the foundation of human knowledge.
The recovery of the theoretical ground of natural right could not take place as
long as the authority and methodology of the social sciences dictated the manner of inquiry and the determination of the substance of meaningful knowledge. The social sciences required impartial, objective, or neutral observation as the only source of genuine knowledge. Natural right was established as a philosophic ethics derived from metaphysics. It could not be indifferent to the questions of justice, or equality, or liberty. Indeed, the method, which mandated a distinction between facts and values, and insisted that only factual knowledge is meaningful, stood in the way of the possibility of such a recovery. The scientific method was an essential element of the empiricism sanctioned by the acceptance of the authority of philosophy of History.
Thus, the social sciences owed their theoretical coherence to a “historical sense” that denied the possibility of truth or trans-historical knowledge. That denial makes relative all claims of knowledge except empirical, or scientific, knowledge. But it rests on the authority of a philosophy of History, which purports to be true as a complete and final teaching. The recovery of the problem of natural right would require bringing into question the entire edifice of Progressive political thought. Nonetheless, there is no question that historicism and the authority of the social sciences are still dominant in the academic and intellectual world. But, given the new unhistorical studies of ideas, the problem of natural right can now begin to be understood as something more than simply “a matter of recollection.”
The insurmountable problem posed by scientific political science is that the understanding of politics is no longer derived from practical observation of the conduct of political life itself. Modern political science had become wholly theoretical and scientific. It had separated itself from philosophy (or metaphysical reason) and had fallen under the authority of an ethically neutral, technically rational, methodology. In returning to Aristotelian political science, Strauss pointed the way back to a theoretical defense of prudential politics. He insisted that “prudence is always endangered by false doctrines about the whole of which man is a part; prudence is therefore always in need of defense against such opinions, and that defense is necessarily theoretical.” However, he knew that such a theory cannot be “taken to be the basis of prudence,” because of “the fact that the sphere of prudence is, as it were, only de jure but not de facto wholly independent of theoretical science.”61 As a result, the defense of prudence itself, both theoretically and practically, had become nearly impossible.62
The reason for this, Strauss suggests, is because of
the view underlying the new political science according to which no awareness inherent in practice, and in general no natural awareness, is genuine knowledge, or in other words only “scientific” knowledge is genuine knowledge. This view implies that there cannot be practical sciences proper, or that the distinction between practical and theoretical sciences must be replaced by the distinction between theoretical and applied sciences—applied sciences being sciences based on the theoretical sciences that precede the applied sciences in time and in order.63
In Strauss’s opinion, it was necessary to reaffirm the dignity of the political by returning to a natural, or prescientific, understanding of the political. In doing so, prudence could once again be seen for what it is.
In establishing the theoretical ground of natural right, Strauss hoped to make it possible once again to illuminate the theoretical and prudential ground of constitutional or moderate government. The tyrannies of the twentieth century made it necessary to do so. In doing so, he made clear that “it would not be difficult to show that liberal or constitutional democracy comes closer to what the classics demanded than any alternative that is viable in our age.”64
He noted, “According to the classics, the best constitution is a contrivance of reason, i.e., of conscious activity or of planning on the part of an individual or a few individuals. It is in accordance with nature, or it is a natural order, since it fulfills to the highest degree the requirements of the perfection of human nature, or since its structure imitates the pattern of nature.”65
The defense of constitutionalism requires recognition of the necessity of philosophic reason (Socratic dialectic) as the theoretical means to illuminate the foundation of the distinction between nature and convention. In doing so, it becomes possible to establish a foundation for political right that is not derived from force or convention, but from nature, or in accordance with nature (i.e., natural right). Such a recognition makes it possible to understand that human nature itself establishes the necessity of limited government. It presupposes rational expectations regarding the ends of politics and prudential judgment concerning the means. The tyrannies and the immoderation of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century were a consequence of the ideological and utopian character of the political thought inspired by philosophy of History. The revival of constitutionalism was made more urgent by potential developments in science and technology that make possible the universal tyranny of the rational state. The political success of the universal homogenous state would open up the possibility of a global and perpetual tyranny. In attempting to elucidate the age-old problem of tyranny as it revealed itself in our time, Strauss saw the necessity of, once again, revitalizing the theoretical perspective of nature, or natural right.
Although natural right is now more than a memory, it has not established itself in any meaningful or influential way in our intellectual life or in our politics. This does not mean that there are no defenders of limited government. However, beneath the surface of the contemporary debate between defenders of limited government (and what is understood as constitutionalism) and those committed to the maintenance of the rational or administrative state, it is still necessary to confront the theoretical distinction that now animates partisan politics. And the ground of this distinction still rests on a philosophy of History—the acceptance of which has already helped to shape the outcome of the political struggle.
The moral foundations of constitutionalism, and the principled distinctions derived from them, have been undercut. The ground of political morality was established on an understanding of those permanent human problems made intelligible by nature through reason. The social compact was the political expression of that philosophic tradition. Consequently, it was primarily differences of opinion over the practical meaning of the Constitution and the limitations implicit within the social contract that were meant to animate political life. The moral foundations of society were established within the philosophical and religious traditions. Most importantly, philosophy and religion were in agreement concerning the content of morality and the traditional distinctions between good and evil or good and bad.66
However, with the establishment of the modern rational state, the moral foundation of constitutional government has been eroded by the Progressive understanding of the meaning of freedom and rights as constantly evolving in accordance with historical conditions. Those permanent truths embodied in the constitutional tradition have become less meaningful and far less important than the ideological differences that exist between Progressives and Reactionaries, or liberals and conservatives. Consequently, in the absence of a philosophic defense of natural right, politics cannot be understood prudentially, in terms of practical reason, or theoretically, in terms of the principles that established the moral foundation of constitutionalism. Furthermore, the ground of traditional morality, derived from that philosophic tradition and religion, which had established a nonpartisan consensus on cultural issues, has itself been undermined. As Strauss noted, “The substitution of the distinction between progressive and reactionary for the distinction between good and bad is another aspect of the discovery of History. The discovery of History … is identical with the substitution of the past or the future for the eternal—the substitution of the temporal for the eternal.”67
The American Founding had been established on the theoretical ground that reason and nature were meaningful and intelligible categories of human understanding. Furthermore, the Founders wer
e confident that the principles of natural right derived therefrom are eternal, or trans-historical. Those who have embraced History, whether they look to a glorious future (Progressives or liberals) or—disillusioned with the future—demand that the experience of the past must be our only guide (Reactionaries or conservatives); both deny theoretical metaphysics, or natural right. As Strauss has observed, “historicism … stands or falls by the denial of the possibility of theoretical metaphysics and of philosophic ethics or natural right.”68 Until the authority of natural right, or philosophy (and religion), can become meaningful again, contemporary politics will continue to be dominated by an intellectual authority derived from the understanding of History, which has become legitimized by the rational empirical methodology of the social sciences. The doctrine of History has established the measure and meaning of Western man in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, postmodernism may pose the most direct threat to the authority of History, understood in terms of its rationality. In addition, it may pose the greatest danger to social science, because it undermines the objective authority of science and the scientific method itself.
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