There's Something About Leo
In Pursuit of the First Things
In a new introduction for the third printing of his masterpiece, Crisis of the House Divided, Harry Jaffa offered this illuminating remark about the origin of his work:
It was born in my mind when I discovered—at a time when I was studying the Republic with Leo Strauss—that the issue between Lincoln and Douglas was in substance, and very nearly in form, identical with the issue between Socrates and Thrasymachus. Douglas’s doctrine of “popular sovereignty” meant no more than that: in a democracy, justice is the interest of the majority, which is “the stronger.” Lincoln, however, insisted that the case for popular government depended upon a standard of right and wrong independent of mere opinion and one which was not justified merely by the counting of heads.
Initially, my lawyer-brain fixed upon the latter sentences; they do summarize the book remarkably well. The first sentence I dismissed jointly as necessary introductory fluff, rhetorical flourish, and continued evidence of Jaffa’s tendency to approach the condition of human chattel bondage too theoretically. Yet continued appreciation for the text eventually turned my mind to the question: where did Jaffa get it all? Inquiry into the student led naturally to the master, in particular, a book compiling several lectures Prof. Strauss delivered toward the end of Jaffa’s time with him at the University of Chicago.
There’s no escaping it: Leo Strauss’ Natural Right & History is an exhausting read. And given how many times I rolled my eyes at Jaffa’s invocations of natural right in Crisis, I won’t pretend to have approached this book with anything other than skepticism. Moments of brilliance interspersed among half-hours of drudgery (not escaping any German stereotypes), Strauss’ work may easily be read and dismissed as an old man’s diatribe about, well, everything these days. In bleaker moments, one might simply take solace playing Bingo with the same quirks evident in Crisis. Fixation with the Declaration? Check. Digging through political thinkers’ seemingly inconsistent statements to find some obscure, embedded, consistent principles? Check again. Tangential swipes at Marxists and modern liberals? Of course. Indeed, at the unresolved cessation of text (I dare not call it a conclusion), which one suspects even Wagner could suppress his antisemitism to admire, one wonders what the hell the book was about in the first place. On reflection, however—and crediting the master with a (perhaps excessive) caution of prose not evinced by the student—Natural Right & History lays a greater and more lasting foundation for Jaffa’s work than even the later acknowledgment lets on.
But first, the diatribe. Kids these days have turned from the eternal truths of natural right and instead taken to relativism and historicism:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness?” The nation dedicated to this proposition has now become, no doubt partly as a consequence of this dedication, the most powerful and prosperous of the nations of the earth. Does this nation in its maturity still cherish the faith in which it was conceived and raised? Does it hold those “truths to be self-evident?”
In the name of unreflective tolerance and openness, modern political thinkers have rejected the possibility of a universal justice or Right. Instead, reasoning that across time and space, different peoples have settled on different concepts of right and wrong, they dismiss all human thought as historically contingent. Thus our modern concept of justice has devolved into local and temporal custom. The historicist lacks any basis to pick between “civilization” and “cannibalism.”
Strauss would reject this trend outright, but apparently it gets worse. For its flaws, at least this softer form of historicism recognizes some rough-justice in local custom. Max Weber and his followers (read: Strauss’ Weber, and Strauss’ ______, throughout) rejected even the belief that communal custom might reflect an objective or intelligible justice. Human dignity lies in unfettered autonomy—individual self-actualization. Excellence becomes one’s devotion to a cause; it doesn’t really matter which. Though shalt have preferences. Conflicts between different values cannot be resolved by human reason. “Peace” denotes no more than the will of last victor to define it. So who are we to judge? Do as you will. Soon enough come the camps.
So that escalated quickly. Setting aside for the moment that Strauss hasn’t really given us a reason to prefer stuffy-old natural right, let alone any reason to think the medievals or classics offer a better path to avoiding racial or religious genocide, Strauss does answer the historicism’s challenge convincingly enough. In the great funhouse of the universe: 1) everything will look a little different depending on where one stands—diversity is the condition precedent for the search for truth, not its preclusion; and 2) anyone telling you it’s all mirrors and there’s no way out is, in fact, also promulgating a universal truth (one which, by the way, he inexplicably exempts from his own hypothesis). So, at least logically, historicism’s attempt to refute natural right fails. Maybe there are so universal tenets of justice?
But so what? What does natural right theory have to offer us today other than obsessively homophobic trad-Caths? Besides, Strauss’ quick jump from the abandonment of natural right theory to the amoral mass murder of the twentieth century seems a bit much; he doesn’t really account for the difference between the conduct of the liberal democracies and the fascist and communist dictatorships of the century. Several dozen million lives can’t be ignored that easily. Although, considering the pace with which American liberals swung from screaming about kids in cages on the Mexican border to gleefully exterminating them in Gaza, maybe Strauss is on to something. Couldn’t hurt to hear him out.
According to Strauss, philosophy has been one catastrophe after another since the decline of natural right in about 1600. To really understand how, we must go all the way back to understand how classical natural right developed. Philosophy, Strauss tells us, begins with doubt. Prephilosophic thought equated the good with the traditional or ancestral. Dogs wag. Birds fly. Our tribe foregoes pork. That tribe wears silly hats. Ways are; custom just is, if not divinely ordained. Somewhere along the line, humans grasp the abstract and recognize individuals as members of a class. The obvious diversity of things—different sizes and shapes of dogs and birds, varied custom—triggers one to turn the preference for observation over hearsay to “the most weighty matters.” Which custom is better? Why this diet, those hats? This leads into more fundamental questions. What makes a bird a bird, a dog a dog, or a person a person? Or put differently, what are our fundamental similarities? And if one custom is better than another, it can only be so by reason of some preceding thing. Nature precedes convention. So philosophy doubts tradition in search of the good not merely by convention, but by nature.
This, however, doesn’t necessarily get us to natural right theory. The distinction between nature and convention runs us pretty quickly into a problem: society. Humans create societies. Doesn’t that make society conventional and unnatural? Some thought so. The conventionalists (including the Epicureans) believed nature, in its fury and grandeur, to be wholly unconcerned with mortals. “Justice” and “right” were mere convention dictated by each city—convention atop convention! And since all political rule essentially rested on force or fraud, the common good was illusory. Instead the good became the pleasant, before and free of any human convention, to be truly sought (ultimately) only by the lone philosopher living at society’s fringe. Another group, the egalitarians, adhered to some notion of natural justice, but similarly rejected civil society as both artificial and as an affront to natural human freedom and equality. Society could be formed by compact, but it remained a depreciated form of humanity.
In the face of such antisocial pessimism, classical natural right flips the narrative. The diversity of concepts of justice and right prompt the search for a natural synthesis. Moreover, language points us not to solitude, but to natural sociability. That the city is a human construct does not make it unnatural. No one is an island, and more to the point, there’s no golf in the state of nature. The realm of freedom and pleasure begins where necessity ends. The good life, human cultivation toward perfection, requires society. It only comes about between citizens. We are political animals. Classical natural right seeks to construct the best society.
It should be emphasized here that classical natural right does not promulgate a code of conduct, or a natural law as some would later develop. Pursuit of the good life, or the common good—indeed, the pursuit of any principle—will vary according to ever-changing circumstance. Every rule has an exception. The exception that preserves the common good embodies justice just as much as the general rule might—a common good that is not durable is no common good at all. When push comes to shove, the closest thing to a classical natural law would be: 1) preserve the common good; 2) by all means; 3) without forgetting number 1. Practical results come ultimately from, well, practice.
Accepting for the purposes of the book that natural right had a good run from Socrates through Aquinas, it eventually all went to hell—fast. Hobbes recast nature not as man’s transcendent end but as his brutish beginnings. Reason could lead people to society by compact, but it could not overpower the fundamental moral truth: the individual fear of death—even if dressed up as a “right” to self-preservation. Locke, employing the Gospel according to Calvin, laundered that pessimism and even managed to steer Hobbes’ alienated flock toward democracy via a new underlying law of nature: fuck around and find out. But that fundamental Hobbesian death-drive toward self-preservation (along, one suspects, with no small dose of faith in providential ordering and election of the depraved) led Locke to a theory of selfish and unencumbered accumulation (in pursuit of the common good, of course), the sanctification of private property, and ultimately the “joyless quest for [accumulative] joy.”
Passion, emancipated by Hobbes, achieved its apotheosis under Rousseau. The natural brute became the noble savage; a pre-rational, sacral individual floating in the essentially random course of events. Only Rousseau’s fixation with classical virtue restrained him from equating, as did his students, liberty with license. And Burke took us to within one step of the abyss by equating the good with not so much the traditional but the is. Locke’s theory of property invaded politics, providence became progress. Human reason cannot match the wisdom of accidental history and time, which produce the common good out of acts and events not in themselves good, even if some can discern via prudence the present march of progress. “Everything good is inherited.”
For Strauss, pessimism, rejection of human reason, of nature supplying a standard, and individualization lead naturally to the rejection of any standards—either universal or local. Social science simultaneously contracts from the study of the ought to the is, from the human to the local to the individual. Without standards, anything goes. And when ideas don’t ultimately matter, force remains. Then indeed come the camps.
While there’s something to Strauss’ telling, left dangling so, one really is tempted to dismiss the work as a reactionary diatribe about the virtue of pre-seventeenth century thought. How are we supposed to fix this? Can we? Strauss never actually tells us. Yet, on reflection, one begins to suspect that’s the point. The books’ introduction parades around the opening of the Declaration of Independence as proclaiming the principles that propelled the United States to rise above all other nations. With a convert’s zeal, Strauss challenges our adherence to those principles. And then, for the remaining 300 pages, not a peep. The omission is too obvious. Why he doesn’t just come out and say it, that’s guesswork for another time (read, he’s German). For now it suffices to say that for Strauss, something in Jefferson is worth saving.
But what? Natural Right & History, after all, spends 200 pages detailing the crises of natural right in 1776, not its triumphs. What in the Declaration could be worth saving? It’s probably not the individual rights bit. Beside the aversion to individualization throughout, Strauss ends the book with this description of Burke:
The quarrel between the ancients and the moderns concerns eventually, and perhaps even from the beginning, the status of “individuality.” Burke himself was still too deeply imbued with the spirit of “sound antiquity” to allow concern with individuality to overpower concern with virtue.
He’s also likely not thrilled about the “right to life” insofar as it carries forward that Hobbesian death drive. And while Strauss would surely join the “pursuit of” the good life, he would just as surely oppose not just the apolitical and lonesome Epicurean pursuit but even more forcefully Locke’s happiness-via-accumulation or Rousseau’s passionately untethered individualism—pervasive notions at the Founding. So that’s unalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Soon enough, then, we must realize that the only aspect of the Declaration Strauss hasn’t criticized (or heavily circumscribed) is equality. This requires us to credit Strauss with a . . . let’s call it caution, which he admirably ascribed to men like Locke. But with a little digging, equality emerges as a consistent theme of the work.
To start, though, there’s no avoiding that classical natural right severely devalued human equality. That, and the concomitant tolerance for slavery and monarchy, might be considered its greatest oversight. The best regime is the uninhibited rule of the wise. Consent of the governed might be a necessary fudge where we cannot readily find a good philosopher-king. But make no mistake, wisdom trumps consent for the classics.
One imagines that Strauss would consider these not damning flaws, but inescapable human errors on the road to truth. Philosophy synthesizes two imperfect tools: reason and senses. Ideology tends to self-justify. And our eyes and ears may lie to us (though, to be sure, stomachs don’t—starving people do die). Wealthy academic men, tended by servants and slaves in a world thus far written only by similarly situated men and characterized by force, iniquity, and monarchic or oligarchic rule since time immemorial, would tend to overvalue their own contributions while devaluing the dignity of all others. Fortunately for them, philosophy asks not so much whether they got it right as whether they, in dialogue with their forebearers, left us closer.
This would certainly explain Strauss’ seemingly tangential discussion of the egalitarians at the end of his introduction to philosophy. Classical natural right seeks to address the egalitarian pessimistic view of society by designing a state founded on justice rather than force, natural because it permits human flourishing. And the egalitarian demand for consent corrects the classics’ primary oversight: far from contrasting, consent—that is, the communal dialogue and deliberation manifest in the Congress that adopted Jefferson’s Declaration—embodies wisdom in ways an individual can never hope to achieve. Strauss points to a synthesis, equality as an ongoing political goal, that neither alone grasped.
Equality plays a similar implicit but foundational role in modern natural right, prompting the greatest developments and highlighting the primary flaws. However pessimistic, Hobbes and Locke’s contractarianism rests on equality; consent applies to all of us. As one would not be a slave, so one might not be a master (paging Lincoln?). And it is remarkable that Locke, despite his pessimism, reasons his way to the Golden Rule (if in decidedly negative form). The notion that another might, or indeed has any claim to, reciprocate mistreatment rests inescapably on equality. For his flaws, Rousseau recovered a positive view of equality. His principle of generalization, that our wants and claimed rights become legitimate only to the extent we recognize them in others, simply calls for our mutual recognition of equal human dignity. And Burke’s great failing, his rejection of human equality as the basis for political enfranchisement, runs straight into his great achievement, the recognition that a constitution must, first and foremost, actually work. Both Hobbes and Locke would have been familiar with the adage that only the wearer can tell where the shoe pinches (Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy 147). That is, Burke’s inability to see how the British constitution did not, in fact, serve its constituents can be attributed directly to his failure to credit the views of precisely those whom the arrangement failed to serve.
But all of this has been too deep in the weeds. There’s a simpler explanation. In Strauss’ telling, Weber’s grappling with the question of reason versus revelation and ultimate distrust in the capacity of human reason to grasp anything resembling Truth can be distilled into a seemingly disconcerting question: if gravity didn’t already exist, could we reason our way to it? Strauss demurs, perhaps because the answer is simple. No. If gravity did not already exist, we could not reason our way to it. In fact, if the universe did not already exist, we could not reason our way to it either. That’s fine. Natural right does not seek to create a world from scratch; it seeks to understand and live rationally within the one we’ve got. Weber’s discomfort turns out to be discomfort with the fact that humans are not gods. But then, isn’t that the fundamental moral fact of the universe? All men are created equal, because no man is a God.
Strauss tells us that philosophy began when we first applied the recognition of humanity’s natural similarity to the “most weighty things.” The twenty-five hundred year quest for natural right, much of political science it seems, has sought to apply that fundamental equality to the weightiest of things. Far from bombast, Jaffa severely understated the matter in his introduction to Crisis. Human equality is not merely “a standard of right and wrong independent of mere opinion.” It is the standard. The quest for Right is the quest to fully recognize human equality. If there be Right, it governs humans as humans—equally. If not, then there can be no Right. Right and wrong reduce to convention, to the will of the majority, to the will of the more powerful, and ultimately, to force. In the end, all men are created equal, or else.
Olsen does a fine job of drawing us through Leo Strauss through Harry Jaffa to the present.