by John Marini
Wisdom and Moderation: Leo Strauss’s On Tyranny: Modern Thought and Its “Unmanly Contempt for Politics”
THE PARTICIPANTS ON THIS PANEL have had access to four good and thoughtful papers on the Strauss-Kojève debate.1 They range from analysis of the philosophic and theological dimensions of the debate, to the hidden influence of Heidegger. There is even an attempt to make the case that Kojève won the debate. All of the papers are quite abstract and theoretical. Yet, the experience of tyranny is not an abstraction but a political reality, which manifests itself in enormous human suffering. Modern historicist political thought, and the social sciences that accompanied it, have failed to recognize tyranny, because they have failed to understand it. Tyranny is a danger that accompanies all political life and can be understood only on the basis of a political science capable of evaluating politics and making sound moral judgments concerning opinion about right and wrong, or good and evil. I will limit myself to a few questions and observations concerning the papers of Professor Murray Bessette and Professor Bryan Frost. Nonetheless, my observations and questions were raised in response to themes common to all of the papers and may apply generally to dilemmas posed by the debate itself.
In Professor Bessette’s paper, we are given a philosophic critique of Kojève’s understanding of tyranny, which is dependent upon and requires Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. As Bessette notes: “Granting the Hegelian assumptions that there is meaning to History and historical progress, Kojève sees the coming completion of History in the gradual conquest, through the political action of reforming tyrants, of the Socratic idea of a common essence of man (i.e., logos) and its synthesis with the secularized Christian idea of the equality of believers before god.” That is, History is seen to be “the continuous succession of political actions guided more or less by the evolution of philosophy. This historical-philosophical process issues forth in the universal and homogeneous state wherein the quest for wisdom finally can be transformed into Wisdom simply.” What are we to make of this? Can tyranny reveal itself as a practical phenomenon, if the actions of tyrants are justified theoretically as necessary for historical progress? Are those who experience tyranny ever aware that they suffer for a good cause? Leo Strauss was certain that the actual experience of tyranny, understood simply in terms of common sense, was what it had always been. It was modern political science’s understanding of tyranny that had changed and obscured the reality of tyranny. The most extreme formulation of the new thought rested on the assumption that the end of History was also the end of philosophy (because wisdom had been actualized) and the end of politics (because in the absence of principled quarrels, politics could be rationalized and understood as a merely technological phenomenon). Politics would be transformed into an ongoing administrative process organized and operated by scientific and technologically trained elites.
Strauss rejected the historicist assumptions of modern philosophy. He denied that philosophy, as the quest for wisdom in its Socratic form, had ended, or could end. And, he denied that politics as a human problem could be transcended. On the contrary, he insisted that “tyranny is a danger coeval with political life. The analysis of tyranny is therefore as old as political science itself. The analysis of tyranny that was made by the first political scientists was so clear, so comprehensive, and so unforgettably expressed that it was remembered and understood by generations which did not have any direct experience of actual tyranny. On the other hand, when we were brought face to face with tyranny—with a kind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imagination of the powerful thinkers of the past—our political science failed to recognize it.”2 Although the massive destruction unleashed by those tyrannies, animated by the triumph of will in the service of History, resulted in totally undermining the racial superiority theories of Hitler, and partially discrediting the class analysis of the Marxist regimes; the social sciences emerged unscathed with their racial and class theories still an integral part of their theoretical perspective and their methodology.
The constitutional democracies had triumphed on the basis of the defense of principles and practices of government that predated the discovery of History. Nonetheless, the social sciences, in the very heart of those regimes, had denied the possibility of natural right and were unable to profit from the great lessons presented by the evils of the twentieth century. Strauss has noted: “Natural right must be mutable in order to be able to cope with the inventiveness of wickedness. What cannot be decided in advance by universal rules, what can be decided in the critical moment by the most competent and most conscientious statesman on the spot, can be made visible as just, in retrospect, to all; the objective discrimination between extreme actions which were just and extreme actions which were unjust is one of the noblest duties of the historian.”3 The historians, under the spell of History and animated by social science methodology, not only failed in their duty to reveal the injustice of those tyrannies, they continued to understand political phenomena in terms of the theoretical perspective of those defeated on the battlefield.
In his Thoughts on Machiavelli, Leo Strauss suggested that “contemporary tyranny has its roots in Machiavelli’s thought, in the Machiavellian principle that the good end justifies every means” (emphasis mine).4 Since Machiavelli, all specifically modern political thought, including modern science and social science, has justified itself in terms of its practice, or its ability to approximate or realize its goals or ends made good by success, or the rationality of the historical process itself. As a result, the actual experience of tyranny could not be understood from the perspective of a political thought that had become ideological and scientifically technological. Therefore, Strauss insisted:
that there is an essential difference between the tyranny analyzed by the classics and that of our age. In contradistinction to classical tyranny present day tyranny has at its disposal “technology” as well as “ideologies”; more generally expressed, it presupposes the existence of “science”, i.e. of a particular interpretation, or kind, of science. Conversely, classical tyranny, unlike modern tyranny, was confronted … by a science which was not meant to be applied to the ‘conquest of nature’ or to be popularized and diffused. But in noting this one implicitly grants that one cannot understand modern tyranny in its specific character before one has understood the elementary and in a sense natural form of tyranny which is pre-modern tyranny. This basic stratum of modern tyranny remains, for all practical purposes, unintelligible to us if we do not have recourse to the political science of the classics.5 (emphasis mine)
In returning to the classics, Strauss denied that the “issue has been finally settled by historicism.” Rather, “the ‘experience of history’ and the less ambiguous experience of the complexity of human affairs may blur, but they cannot extinguish, the evidence of those simple experiences regarding right and wrong which are at the bottom of the philosophic contention that there is a natural right. Historicism either ignores or else distorts these experiences.”6 Strauss insisted that
the existence and even the possibility of natural right must remain an open question as long as the issue between historicism and nonhistoricist philosophy is not settled. The issue is not understood if it is seen merely in the way in which it presents itself from the point of view of historicist philosophy. This means, for all practical purposes, that the problem of historicism must first be considered from the point of view of classical philosophy, which is nonhistoricist thought in its pure form.
Thus, Strauss further insisted that “our most urgent need can then be satisfied only by means of historical studies which would enable us to understand classical philosophy exactly as it understood itself, and not in the way in which it presents itself on the basis of historicism.” 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.”7<
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In other words, Strauss contended that we need an adequate interpretation of “the experience of history”; one that
does not make doubtful the view that the fundamental problems, such as the problems of justice, persist or retain their identity in all historical change, however much they may be obscured by the temporary denial of their relevance and however variable or provisional all human solutions to these problems may be. In grasping these problems as problems, the human mind liberates itself from its historical limitations. No more is needed to legitimize philosophy in its original, Socratic sense: philosophy is knowledge that one does not know; that is to say, it is knowledge of what one does not know, or awareness of the fundamental problems and, therewith, of the fundamental alternatives regarding their solution that are coeval with human thought.8 (emphasis mine)
In turning away from contemporary philosophy to its Socratic original, Strauss returns to political philosophy, one which recognizes the importance of politics and opinion to the understanding of human things. In doing so, he sides with Socrates against the pre-Socratics. As Strauss noted,
Socrates seems to have regarded the change which he brought about as a return to “sobriety” and “moderation” from the “madness” of his predecessors. In contradistinction to his predecessors, he did not separate wisdom from moderation. In present-day parlance one can describe the change in question as a return to “common sense” or to “the world of common sense.” That to which the question “What is?” points is the eidos of a thing, the shape or form or character or “idea” of a thing. It is no accident that the term eidos signifies primarily that which is visible to all without any particular effort or what one might call the “surface” of the things. Socrates started not from what is first in itself or first by nature but from what is first for us, from what comes to sight first, from the phenomena. But the being of things, their What, comes first to sight, not in what we see of them, but in what is said about them or in opinions about them. Accordingly, Socrates started in his understanding of the natures of things from the opinions about their natures. For every opinion is based on some awareness, on some perception with the mind’s eye, of something. Socrates implied that disregarding the opinions about the natures of things would amount to abandoning the most important access to reality which we have or the most important vestiges of the truth which are within our reach.9
The return to Socratic political philosophy is a return to the world of common sense, of opinion derived from convention as the first access to an understanding of nature, which makes the dialectic or the quest for wisdom or knowledge both possible and necessary.
Strauss, therefore, attempted to provide a philosophic critique which would make it possible to recover an understanding of the theoretical roots of Socratic rationality and prudential politics, which had been undermined by the victory of historicism. He knew better than most that the immoderate political practice of the twentieth century was a consequence of the utopian, scientific, and ideological character of its political thought. In turning to classical political thought, he showed that Socratic rationality provided a political solution to the problem of reconciling wisdom and moderation. He noted:
the political problem consists in reconciling the requirement for wisdom with the requirement for consent. But whereas, from the point of view of egalitarian natural right, consent takes precedence over wisdom; from the point of view of classic natural right, wisdom takes precedence over consent. According to the classics, the best way of meeting these two entirely different requirements—that for wisdom and that for consent or for freedom—would be that a wise legislator frame a code which the citizen body, duly persuaded, freely adopts. That code, which is, as it were, the embodiment of wisdom, must be as little subject to alteration as possible; the rule of law is to take the place of the rule of men, however wise.10
In the modern or post-Christian world, Strauss believed that the political manifestation of egalitarian natural right, or the rule of law established in a constitutional regime, would provide the best foundation for moderate or reasonable government.
The problem of reconciling wisdom and moderation had been impossible in terms of pre-Socratic thought. Moreover, it had become increasingly difficult to maintain moderate governments in modern times as a consequence of the victory of historicist thought and the scientific methodology of the social sciences. But, insofar as modern natural right retained its authority in the political practice and institutional structures of constitutionalism, constitutional government and the rule of law remained the best defense of wisdom and moderation. Strauss noted, “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.”11 In providing a defense of constitutionalism, and in laying bare the tyranny implicit in the modern rational state, or its manifestation in the universal homogeneous state, Strauss provided the foundations for an analysis of modern political thought that could reveal its failure to understand “the actual experience of tyranny.”12
In Strauss’s view, modern historicist philosophy had corrupted the theory and practice of politics, undermining the possibility of understanding and therefore providing a defense of moderation and prudence as essential to good government. Moreover, the social science, which accompanied the modern state, showed itself to be incapable of making reasonable—or prudent—judgments concerning politics. It could not understand nor identify politics at its worst; it could not identify tyranny. Most importantly, however, the modern administrative state and its science, although incapable of recognizing tyranny, opened up the prospect of the greatest tyranny of all. “We are now brought face to face with a tyranny which holds out the threat of becoming, thanks to ‘the conquest of nature’ and in particular human nature, what no earlier tyranny ever became: perpetual and universal.”13
Why was this so? Modern political thought had so corrupted the relationship of theory and practice as to make it nearly impossible to understand the proper ground of either theory or practice. Strauss notes that:
Political theory became understanding of what practice has produced or of the actual and ceased to be the quest for what ought to be; political theory ceased to be “theoretically practical” (i.e., deliberative at a second remove) and became purely theoretical in the way in which metaphysics (and physics) were traditionally understood to be purely theoretical. There came into being a new type of theory, of metaphysics, having as its highest theme human action and its product rather than the whole, which is in no way the object of human action. With the whole and the metaphysic that is oriented upon it, human action occupies a high but subordinate place. When metaphysics came, as it now did, to regard human action and its product as the end toward which all other beings or processes are directed, metaphysics became philosophy of history [emphasis mine]. Philosophy of history was primarily theory, i.e., contemplation, of human practice; it presupposed that significant human action, History, was completed. By becoming the highest theme of philosophy, practice ceased to be practice proper, i.e., concern with agenda.14
But the end of philosophy created its own crisis, a crisis of meaning that was animated by the deadening effect of the recognition that History, as meaningful practice, had ended. Strauss insisted that the rebellion of the Right Hegelians was in the direction of reviving meaningful political and religious experience. It consisted in an attempt to make History compatible with life and human aspiration. He suggested that:
The revolts against Hegelianism on the part of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, in so far as they now exercise a strong influence on public opinion, thus appear as attempts to recover the possibility of practice, i.e., of a human life which has a significant and undetermined future. But these attempts increased the confusion, since they destroyed, as far as in them lay, the very possibility of theory. “Doctrinairism” and “existentialism” appear to us as the two faulty extremes. While being opposed to each other, they ag
ree with each other in the decisive respect—they agree in ignoring prudence, “the god of this lower world.” Prudence and “this lower world” cannot be seen properly without some knowledge of “the higher world”—without genuine theoria.15
It would seem that modern historicist political theory had returned to the “madness” of pre-Socratic thought, in terms of separating wisdom and moderation. The second and third waves of modern political thought had so distorted the relationship between theory and practice that it undercut the autonomy of prudence and deprived politics of its dignity.
The great thinkers of the nineteenth century, Strauss showed, had rejected nature as a standard. They had all, in one form or another, embraced the idea of History. In pointing specifically to the failures of Marx and Nietzsche, Strauss noted the importance of prudence and moderation in political life: “But perhaps one can say that their grandiose failures make it easier for us who have experienced those failures to understand again the old saying that wisdom cannot be separated from moderation and hence to understand that wisdom requires unhesitating loyalty to a decent constitution and even to the cause of constitutionalism. Moderation will protect us against the twin dangers of visionary expectations from politics and unmanly contempt for politics.”16 In the twentieth century, the rational administrative structures, which have become dominant in the modern state, are the product of “visionary expectations from politics.” At the same time, they reflect in their neutral bureaucracies an “unmanly contempt for politics,” an indulgence which accompanies the belief that partisanship has ended and rational rule has begun.
In his paper on the Strauss-Kojève debate, Professor Frost seeks to prove that Kojève had won the debate. That might be so if the debate is judged in terms of modern intellectual history, or contemporary political practice. There is no question that Hegelians of the Left or Right have dominated the political and social thought of the twentieth century. They have influenced the practical conduct of modern governments, when those institutions are animated by the theory of the rational or universal state. As a result, Frost assumes that there is an area of agreement between Strauss and Kojève concerning contemporary theory, if not concerning practice. Professor Frost noted that “both Strauss and Kojève strongly imply that theirs are the only two tenable philosophic understandings available, the rest being either contradictory or subsumed by their own.” He notes that “Kojève conceded that if ‘there is something like human nature, then you (Strauss) are surely right in everything’”; Strauss, similarly, states that “no one had made the case for modern thought in our time as brilliantly as you.” Does this constitute an area of agreement concerning the terms of the debate?