by John Gray
The proposition that ‘western liberal democracy’ is ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution’ is a confession of eschatological faith. It is curious that this fact has gone unnoticed. It was only to be expected that in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse long-suppressed conflicts would be reactivated. In other words history was set to resume, but in an entertaining inversion of language those who noted this fact were accused of doom-mongering. The truly apocalyptic notion that history had ended was accepted as realism.32
In recent years Fukuyama has attacked the Bush administration’s foreign policy, criticizing the push to democracy in Iraq and elsewhere on the ground that it attempts to force long-term trends to a premature conclusion. He has condemned this policy as Leninist but it is a judgement that is unfair to Lenin. Certainly Lenin’s goals were utopian, but he was supremely realistic in reformulating his policies. He reversed War Communism when it became obvious that it was leading to famine, and signed a humiliating treaty with the Germans at Brest-Litovsk in 1918 in order to allow Russia to exit from the First World War. Lenin displayed a capacity to learn from experience that has never been visible among neo-conservatives, who attacked the Bush administration’s conduct of the Iraq war only on grounds of incompetence (and for the most part only when it was clear voters were about to repudiate the war).33
While Fukuyama has criticized the attempt to spread democracy by force he has not abandoned the neo-conservative idea that American-style government is the model for the world. His work exemplifies what one scholar describes as Fukuyama’s ‘passive “Marxist” social teleology’ – a description he has endorsed.34 He still holds to a view of history in which it has an overall goal, and that goal has not changed. The end-point of history continues to be America, which he believes embodies the only type of government that can be legitimate in contemporary conditions.
In fact legitimacy in government depends on many things that often cannot be achieved together, and no one type of regime can be everywhere the best. Security against anarchy and conquest by other states; an acceptable level of subsistence for the majority and the prospect of rising prosperity; institutions that respect and reflect the identities of those who are ruled – these conditions are necessary if any government is to possess legitimacy in modern times. Often liberal democracy meets them better than available alternatives, but there is no universal rule. When they cannot ensure tolerable living standards for the majority, liberal democratic regimes may be rejected – as happened when Russian voters repudiated Yeltsin in favour of Putin. Again, when they run strongly counter to the religious beliefs of the majority, liberal democracies tend to mutate into some kind of popular theocracy – as is happening in much of Iraq. Liberal democracy is far from being universally accepted as the only or most legitimate regime. Human affairs are too complicated and difficult for any one kind of government to be universally practicable or desirable.
An earlier generation of neo-conservative thinkers grasped this truth. In her book, Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics (1982), Jeane Kirkpatrick – who was appointed US ambassador to the UNduring the Reagan administration and was until her death in 2006 a fellow of the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute – identified the consequences of imposed regime change with great clarity. As Kirkpatrick notes, the global promotion of democracy blends rationalism with utopianism:
Rationalism encourages us to believe that anything that can be conceived can be brought into being. The rationalist perversion in modern politics consists in the determined effort to understand and shape people and societies on the basis of inadequate, oversimplified theories of human behaviour … Rationalism not only encourages utopianism, but utopianism is a form of rationalism.
Kirkpatrick goes on to identify the qualities of the rationalist mind in terms that apply to neo-conservatives today. Referring to the ‘rationalist spirit of the age’, she analyses it as
that spirit that assumes that human nature in the future may be qualitatively different than in the past, that views non-rational factors such as sentiment, habit, and custom as obstacles that can and should be overcome, the spirit that views each situation as a tabula rasa on which a plan can be imposed and therefore sees experience in other times and places as having no relevance … The rationalist spirit takes no note of the fact that institutions are patterned human behaviour that exist and function through the people of a society, and that radically changing institutions means radically changing the lives of people who may not want their lives changed. Because it assumes that man and society can be brought to a preferred plan, the rationalist orientation tends powerfully to see everything as possible and prospects for progress as unlimited.35
Though she did not mention him, Kirkpatrick’s critique has much in common with that of Michael Oakeshott. For Oakeshott the central error of rationalism in politics is a belief in principles of government that can be expressed in an ideology and applied anywhere. Rightly, Oakeshott believed such principles are summaries of particular historical experiences, with no universal authority. Oakeshott’s idea of tradition takes too little account of the plurality of values in modern societies and his view of politics is too narrowly English to be generally useful. His central insight that freedom is not an ideal that can be exported but a practice that grows up in particular historical circumstances remains sound. It is an insight fatal to missionary politics, neo-conservative or liberal.36
Kirkpatrick deployed her critique of political rationalism against American liberals who condemned the US in the 1980s for cultivating close relations with dictatorships in Latin America while favouring détente with the Soviet Union. In her hands it served the neo-conservative agenda, which was to undermine the policies of the Carter administration. The irony is that it rebounds against neo-conservatives today. Policies of regime change are political rationalism of the most primitive kind. They assume that freedom is a condition that can be achieved anywhere, even against the will of the peoples whose lives are turned upside down in the process. It is hard to think of a clearer example of the rationalist perversion of modern politics – as Kirkpatrick recognized when, in her posthumously published Making War to Keep Peace, she questioned the decision to invade Iraq and argued that the result had been to create chaos in the country.
Neo-conservatives have never doubted that one type of regime is best – the type of liberal democracy that existed, until quite recently, in the United States. In recent years they have argued that versions of this regime can be exported throughout the world. One of the paradoxes of the neo-conservative movement is that these convictions were not shared by its chief intellectual progenitor. Leo Strauss never assumed that liberal democracy was the best regime or that it could be secured against tyranny. He would have regarded the idea that liberal democracy could become universal with incredulity if not contempt.
Strauss’s political outlook was formed in Weimar Germany, a regime whose legitimacy was contested from the outset. In circumstances of this kind, political thinkers tend to be anti-liberal, and Strauss was no exception. Strauss’s chief early mentor was the German jurist Carl Schmitt, a thinker who continues to cast a spell over radical intellectuals, though these days his admirers are found mainly on the Left. Schmitt was instrumental in obtaining a Rockefeller grant that enabled Strauss to leave Germany for Paris in 1932. After the Nazis came to power Strauss – who came from an orthodox Jewish background and held a position in the Academy of Jewish Research in Berlin – severed his links with Schmitt, but Schmitt’s view of liberal democracy left a lasting imprint on Strauss’s thinking.
Schmitt – a devout Catholic – wrote a number of books on politics and religion and the crisis of parliamentary democracy before the Nazis came to power. He joined the Nazi party in 1933, becoming president of the Union of National Socialist Jurists and defending the political murders of the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 as a form of administrative justice. By 1936 he had thrust himself into the fore
front of the Nazi campaign of persecution of Jews, and proposed that publications by German Jewish scientists be marked with a special sign. Despite his active complicity, the Nazis did not trust Schmitt, suspecting him of opportunism. He lost his position as chief Nazi jurist but continued as professor of law in Berlin. In 1945 he was captured by American forces and interned for a time. Schmitt’s Nazi past did not stand in the way of his reputation after the war. Many leading European intellectuals visited him over the course of his lengthy retirement (he died in 1985 at the age of 96), including Alexandre Kojeve, who declared ‘Schmitt is the only man in Germany worth talking to.’37
Schmitt’s view of government has much in common with that of Hobbes. Law is the creature of the state; constitutional devices cannot ensure the survival of liberal democracy, for constitutions are created and destroyed by political decisions. In Strauss’s view, Schmitt – the authoritarian jurist who became a Nazi functionary – demonstrated the futility of liberalism. The statement may sound paradoxical but only so long as it is forgotten that for Strauss Hobbes was the progenitor of liberalism. ‘If we call liberalism that political doctrine that regards the rights, as distinguished from the duties, of man and which identifies the function of the state with the protection or the safeguarding of those rights,’ he writes in his book Natural Right and History, ‘then we must say that the founder of liberalism was Hobbes.’38 For Strauss, liberalism meant the assertion of freedom over virtue, a modern doctrine of natural right that turns politics into a conflict of wills in which anything is as good as anything else so long as someone wants it. The end result of liberalism is nihilism, which undermines liberalism itself.
In linking liberalism with nihilism Strauss was following a path much trodden in Germany. Nietzsche and Heidegger viewed nihilism as the defining modern disorder, which infected liberal politics as well as culture. Nietzsche viewed nihilism as an after-effect of Christianity, which (partly under the influence of Plato) had devalued the world in favour of a non-existent spiritual realm, while Heidegger interpreted nihilism as an attempt to understand ‘Being’ in a way that obscured its true nature. However it was spelt out, the idea that nihilism is the essential modern malady had an enormous appeal in interwar Germany. Taken up by Oswald Spengler and Moeller van den Bruck, the diarist and novelist Ernst Jünger and the Expressionist poet Gottfried Benn, it fostered the dangerous belief that overcoming nihilism meant leaving liberal values behind.
Strauss’s belief that the liberal Weimar regime was destroyed by nihilism invokes a common, but over-simple and in some ways mistaken view of Nazism and, by implication, of the Nazi leader. As a bohemian autodidact of a kind that was common in central Europe in the early twentieth century, Hitler absorbed a popular world-view in which scraps of Social Darwinism were mixed with vulgarized versions of Nietzsche. In this scheme of ideas, survival and power were the only values – a position that might well be seen as nihilistic. Hitler’s actions suggest a different view – one closer to the negative eschatology of some pagan traditions, as was noted in Chapter 2. In 1944–5, when it was clear the Allies had won, he continued a hopeless war and was ready to put Germany to the torch rather than surrender. Hitler chose to wreak maximum destruction on the world even at the cost of his life and destroying his country. It was his indifference to patriotism that led some of Hitler’s early conservative supporters, who initially turned to him to protect Germany from the threat of communism, to see him as a nihilist who posed a mortal threat to Germany (a view that seems to have informed the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler that was mounted by Claus von Stauffenberg, Adam von Trott and other conservative nationalists). Along with other Nazis Hitler shared in the ideas that were current in interwar Europe – including the belief, accepted by many on the Left, that advancing knowledge enabled the artificial development of a higher human type. It was debased science of this kind, together with apocalyptic beliefs derived partly from pagan and partly (in the case of Hitler’s anti-Semitic demonology) from Christian sources, that formed the Nazi world-view. While this was a deeply repugnant mix, it was too incoherent to be straightforwardly nihilistic.
If Strauss’s analysis of Nazism was faulty, his larger analysis of liberal democracy is also implausible. No liberal democratic regime – not even the most powerful or long lasting – is secure from the temptations of tyranny, but where these regimes are subverted it is rarely by an excess of scepticism. Liberal democracy has existed for long periods in countries without any consensus on metaphysical beliefs. In Switzerland it has thrived for centuries against a background of religious diversity, while in Britain it has advanced as religious belief has waned. The countries of northern Europe are among the most successful liberal democracies in the world and they are post-Christian. Strauss’s analysis of democracy is mostly a diagnosis of Weimar Germany, but mass unemployment, hyperinflation, war reparations and national humiliation destroyed any legitimacy the Weimar regime ever had. As has been seen, the Nazis were able to make use of Christian millenarian traditions and of anti-Semitic Christian demonology, but it was the built-in lack of legitimacy of the Weimar regime rather than a largely imaginary state of mass nihilism that enabled them to come to power.
Despite being based on events that had no American parallels, Strauss’s analysis found a receptive audience among American conservatives. Unnerved by mass protest against the Vietnam War they found the argument that liberal democracy needs firm metaphysical foundations reassuring. At the time American democracy was in no danger, but the cultural shifts that flowed from the 1960s engendered a spurious sense of crisis. In some ways Strauss’s style of thinking was tailor-made for American use. His claim that political order rests on the acceptance of moral constraints that lie outside the human sphere matched the creedal character of American public life. America has always been hospitable to the belief that its values are God-given, and so long as he was not read too closely Strauss could be seen as suggesting that the United States was the best regime.
Strauss suggested that if America’s future could be secured it was by reviving the conception of natural law embodied in classical philosophy. In ancient and medieval thought natural laws contained prescriptions for the good life, which meant achieving the virtues that were appropriate to one’s nature. Early modern thinkers such as Hobbes broke with this conception by identifying natural law with self-preservation and the pursuit of power. Later the philosophers of the Enlightenment embraced a type of humanism in which science and technology were supposed to enable humanity to remake the world. For Strauss the end-point of this tradition was Nietzsche’s cult of the will, which was not so much a remedy for modern nihilism as its purest expression.
The only real remedy was to recover the classical conception of natural law, which Thomas Aquinas had formulated definitively. In Aquinas, Aristotle’s view of the world was reproduced in a Christian context; the classical philosophy of nature was joined with Christian theology. Rightly, Strauss was always deeply sceptical about this synthesis. As he observed: ‘The ultimate consequence of the Thomistic view of natural law is that natural law is practically inseparable not only from a natural theology which is, in fact, based on biblical revelation – but even from revealed theology.’39 Here we reach a crucial feature of Strauss’s thought – his insistence on the unbridgeable gulf between reason and revelation. The classical world-view that was reinstated by Aquinas rested on the assumption that reason and revelation could be made to point in the same direction. In rejecting this assumption, Strauss pointed to a breach in the western tradition. Like many after him Aquinas tried to show that faith and reason were complementary. Strauss understood that all such attempts are bound to fail: the rational cosmos of Greek philosophy and the biblical vision of divine creation – Athens and Jerusalem – are irreconcilable. Here Strauss joined hands with other early twentieth-century Jewish fideists – thinkers such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Lev Shestov – who accepted that first and last questions could be answered only by an a
ct of faith. Strauss’s own religious beliefs cannot be known (it has been claimed he was in fact an atheist). What is evident is that he did not think reason could supply a remedy for nihilism.
The difficulty with Strauss’s belief that we can cure nihilism by returning to a classical view of things is that he never gives any ground – other than the need to escape nihilism – for accepting such a view. The classical view of the world is that it is a rational order, but Strauss was proposing that we accept this view by an act of will. It is a contradictory position, which only shows how difficult it is to overcome the ‘modern project’. However much he might have wished otherwise, Strauss was in the end himself a modern thinker who had more in common with Nietzsche than with any ancient or medieval thinker. Aristotle and Aquinas held to a teleological view of the world that modern science has rendered obsolete. Each viewed the cosmos as a system in which everything has a purpose. Since Darwin, this view of the natural world has ceased to be available. Nature is ruled by chance and necessity, and natural laws are regularities rather than prescriptions for the good life. If there is a realm of value beyond the physical world it cannot be reached by human reason.
What does Strauss’s view of the limits of reason mean for politics? He denied that liberal democracy could be detached from metaphysical beliefs – without a belief in a moral order not created by human will, modern politics was vulnerable to nihilism. But in denying that these beliefs are rationally defensible he left liberal democracy without any publicly accessible justification. Strauss’s solution to this difficulty may be a modern variation of Plato’s noble lie: while philosophers may know the truth they also know that truth is deadly to the mass of humankind. It may be that Strauss himself suffered from nihilism while believing the masses could be protected from it by consoling myths – in contemporary America, Lockean myths of natural rights – but he does not explicitly advocate any of this. The idea that he supported deception can be maintained only by using his own, highly subjective technique of interpretation. If he writes in favour of the noble lie he does so cryptically, hiding his true meaning – as many philosophers did in the past, he believed. Notoriously, Strauss maintained that many of the greatest thinkers had a secret philosophy quite different from the one that is overtly presented in their writings. This view has led some critics of Strauss to attack him as a theorist whose teachings lie behind policies of disinformation implemented by neo-conservatives in the Bush administration.40