The Letter

Scott Horton

Was Leo Strauss democracy’s best friend? In a letter written at the time of his emigration, Strauss describes his political principles - Fascist, Authoritarian, Imperialist

“We believe that failing to call a spade a spade is not scientific.”
— Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958)

In the last several months, the New York Times has run four pieces defending Leo Strauss from his critics. By comparison, the Times has run no pieces in which Strauss is actually criticized, which suggests an odd editorial posture. Indeed, the Times seems to have mounted a veritable campaign for the defense of the beleaguered Leo Strauss, which seems strange considering that he has been dead for over thirty years.

These pieces are remarkably consistent. For one, each turns the very serious criticism of Strauss and his relationship with the American Neoconservative movement into a point of ridicule. The criticism is grossly distorted and key elements are misstated. For another, they present Strauss as a “liberal democrat,” not in a domestic political context, but rather as a defender of the tradition of liberal democracy we associate with Locke, Hume and J.S. Mill.

The Liberal Critique of Strauss
The key criticisms of Straussian political thought are complex and difficult to summarize. There are a great number of liberal critics, but three seem to take the leading position: Shadia Drury, Stephen Holmes and Anne Norton (though Norton’s work may more accurately be called a criticism of Straussians than of Strauss himself, a point which is true to some extent of all three). Of these, Holmes does the most convincing job of contrasting Strauss with the thinking of the liberal tradition, and his critique can be summarized as follows:

(1) Strauss rejects the fundamental liberal idea that wide-open, uncensored public disagreement is a creative force, mobilizing decentralized knowledge and bringing it to bear on issues of public importance. Liberalism, above all, insists that the factual premises of the use of force must be tested in an open adversarial process, but Strauss’s entire philosophical posture is a sarcastic rejection of this idea. For Strauss, knowledge belongs to a few - we know ahead of time who can and who cannot contribute something serious to a discussion. This “closed club” view of knowledge and debate with its essentially anti-democratic premise contributed to the atmospherics of the Bush drive to war against Iraq.

(2) Strauss believed that the liberal-Enlightenment tradition was naïve, and in particular the notion of Enlightenment thinkers that “revelation” (religious myths and dreams) could be banned from politics (as noted below, this was the crux of Strauss’ dissertation done under the great Neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer). For Strauss, this is impossible; the repressed will return; hence it is crucial for the secular few, the men of science, to bring religion into politics on their own terms. The American Neocons' bizarre alliance with America’s Religious Right follows directly from this analysis.

(3) One of the pillars of liberal democracy is the embrace of the Rule of Law, and the notion that no one, even the king or Executive, stands above the law. For Strauss this idea was foolishness. Strauss’ critique can be seen in his writings on Plato and Xenophon, but their origin clearly lies with the Nietzschean criticism of Christianity as a slave morality designed to trick and “tie down” the natural geniuses. Strauss applies this criticism to law; law spells weakness; law is a trick of the weak to tie down the strong. Hence, Strauss applauds the decisive leader who acts outside of the law to achieve his goals. Nevertheless, the consequences of Strauss’ dismissive attitude towards the Rule of Law can be seen today in the Neocon advocacy of jettisoning traditional norms of the law of armed conflict and in allowing the president to operate outside of clear criminal statutes (like FISA) as an aspect of his war-making powers.

(4) Strauss always said that liberalism was unable to defend itself; that it must be defended, if at all, by non-liberals, willing to go outside the rules. This argument again has a firmly Nietzschean aspect. While Strauss seeks to cast it in terms of writers of classical antiquity, it is hard to read much of his writings without having an image of Carl Schmitt come to mind. Strauss would present himself as a “savior” of liberalism, but in the end, like Schmitt, one must fear that he would “save” liberal democracy by putting it to death.

See Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (1993).

Put simply, Strauss takes firm target at the core values of liberal democracy, and particularly the American variant. Before his arrival in America, Strauss was blunt in these criticisms. After his arrival, he adopted a far more circumspect approach. After all, he was in America and writing in English, and his own philosophy would demand that he flatter or indulge national prejudices and write as if he believed in them. Like his mentor, Ernst Cassirer, Strauss had concluded by the mid-thirties that Europe, and even Britain, was simply unsafe. Only America, with its formidable resources and protected by expansive oceans from its potential adversaries, offered the prospect of safe haven.

These aspects of Neocon thought are extremely important to Americans today. While the Bush Administration cannot really be cast as a bearer of pure Neocon thought, it does appear to have embraced many of these ideas with gusto, and has scored astonishing successes in implementing them.

Both the Rothstein review and the Smith book attempt to present Strauss as a person right at home with the land to which he emigrated and its Enlightenment tradition. This is extremely doubtful. But it is an act of serious deception to present Strauss as “democracy’s best friend” (to quote the last, a review essay by Edward Rothstein published on July 10, in turn quoting Steven Smith’s new book, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism) without at least making clear the deep-boring criticism that Strauss directs at American democracy.

Strauss’ Intellectual Milieu
One thing consistent among these defenses of Strauss is either a remarkable ignorance of Strauss, the intellectual milieu from which he came, his life and his thinking, or conscious dissembling about them. Strauss is a fascinating figure, well worth reading today. His scholarship had a strong focus on a handful of texts from classical antiquity – principally Greeks such as Plato, Xenophon and Thucydides. This approach seems quaint to Americans, but for those who emerged from the academic milieu of the German-speaking world in the first decades of the twentieth century (think of novels such as Heinrich Mann’s Professor Unrat [The Blue Angel] or Hermann Hesse’s Unterm Rad [Beneath the Wheel]) it is actually typical. Strauss contemporaries like Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt, who like Strauss were close to Heidegger, had a focus on many of the same texts, though they do not adopt Strauss’ at times quite eccentric interpretations.

Strauss’ writing at the time he went into emigration and started the series of moves that led, ultimately, to the United States, serves powerfully to show just how doubtful the current efforts to rehabilitate Strauss are. Two contemporaries weigh heavily in Strauss’ writing and thinking: Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt. Strauss’ thinking and attitudes towards the politics of this seminal era make sense when seen against this background, but otherwise can be confusing. There seems little doubt that Strauss saw himself as an acolyte of Heidegger’s, and the thrust of his criticism of modern society (and his intellectually arrogant supposition to be the leader of a tiny clan of intellectuals who are fully cognizant of the depth of “the crisis of modern times”) and his fascination with texts of antiquity reveals a Heideggerian hallmark. Carl Schmitt was likewise a critical influence on Strauss’ concept on the state, and Schmitt’s own positive assessment of Strauss’ work on Hobbes enabled Strauss to secure a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study in Paris, and thus exit the disintegrating remains of Weimar Germany. As reflected by Strauss’ comments on Schmitt’s Der Begriff des Politischen (The Concept of the Political), there were few barbs hurled in this love fest. Like Diogenes Laërtius’ Pythagoras, Strauss puts his faith in the philosopher to salvage mankind from the cruel degradations of modern society. Schmitt, on the other hand, counts on the man of action. We might call it a guild distinction between an academically inclined lawyer and a philosopher tout court.

The Löwith-Strauss Relationship
Karl Löwith was another Heideggerian who was close to Leo Strauss in this period. Like Strauss, Löwith faced the dilemma of being a Jew anchored in the German academic community. By 1933 it was clear that Jews had no future in this system and that emigration was essential to those who wanted to pursue a livelihood in the academy. It was against this background that, on May 19, 1933, Strauss penned a letter that he consciously marks as a political confession.

The Letter
I attach below my translation of the letter, which I am posting in blog form to solicit comments and corrections or improvements. This is a document of great importance to understanding Strauss and his politics, and it’s important to get this right. My translation should at this point be viewed as a work-in-progress. The letter has a number of ambiguous turns of phrase, and ripped from its historical context it may be difficult to understand (I say this in part with irony because of Strauss’ fierce opposition to an analytical approach that puts writers in the historical framework of their times, but with respect to correspondence, I have no doubt that Strauss would agree with me). Moreover, whereas to one of Strauss’ contemporaries, anyone who did not master classical Greek (much less Latin) would be considered a hopeless rube, few serious scholars today have such linguistic tools. I have therefore incorporated annotations which provide necessary explanations, as well as translations of the non-German phrases (which I leave untranslated in the text) with some musings on the thoughts that I suspect they are designed to evoke.

In this letter, Strauss looks at the fate he faces in consequence of the Nazi seizure of power in Germany. He admits that it is impossible for him as a Jew to live under their regime, since they have adopted anti-Semitism as a keynote of their rule. But while expressing abhorrence at their anti-Semitism, Strauss consciously refuses fully to repudiate Nazi fascism. To the contrary, he accepts fascism as a legitimate bearer of “the principles of the right,” and he embraces them, namely: fascism, authoritarianism and imperialism. He then proceeds to ridicule the Enlightenment values of inalienable rights, quoting the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from 1789 (though he could just as easily have quoted the American Declaration of Independence), and he quotes a passage of Virgil’s Aeneid, a passage which Carl Schmitt was also fond of quoting.

I am convinced that this is a very candid statement of Strauss’ politics at the time he wrote it, a reading signaled by his confessional closing. Indeed, anyone who carefully reads Strauss’ book on Hobbes (Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft in ihrer Genesis, 1936, but largely complete in 1933; translated in English as The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis) or his dissertation, written on the anti-Enlightenment writer Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, would suspect these sentiments.

Was Strauss a fascist?
It seems almost impossible to imagine a German-Jewish refugee in France, a man who describes his religious upbringing as “Conservative, if not Orthodox” actually embracing the political philosophy of his persecutors. On the other hand, we should be cautious about projecting postwar sensibilities back into the thirties. Strauss was a Middle European intellectual living in a period where liberalism looked exhausted and unable to function, and many of his contemporaries, and indeed many of Strauss’ mentors, were engaging with fascist thought. Specifically, we should consider that the two contemporary thinkers who appear to have exerted the greatest influence on Strauss at this time – Heidegger and Schmitt – were each entering into a dalliance with fascism. In their respective Faustian pacts, one emerged as the rector magnificus of one of Germany’s most famous universities, while the other (indeed, the week of this letter) became a Prussian State Councillor and key legal advisor to the Reich-Chancellor. This situation no doubt contributed to Strauss’ inability to make a clean break.

It seems fair to say that fascist thought was appealing to Strauss, otherwise why would he be willing to toy with the label? At the same time, the aspect of fascism that most appealed to Strauss is also evident from the letter: it is the reliance on thoughts of classical antiquity, particularly of the early imperial era of Rome, as they were distorted in the political mirror of the thirties - most effectively by the Italian fascists. We should take care to note the time of the letter: it comes a year before the famous Night of the Long Knives (Nacht der langen Messer), the point at which the Nazi regime first revealed its fangs by summarily executing Ernst Röhm and roughly a hundred figures associated with him, including a former chancellor and other prominent persons. There can be no doubt but that this and later events would have produced a more resolute turn by Strauss against the Hitler regime.

Nevertheless, the Löwith letter is profoundly revealing of the nature of Leo Strauss’ conservatism. It places his conservatism outside of the Anglo-American tradition that links to figures like Locke, Hume and Burke. Instead, it springs from a traditional Continental European variant which is deeply rooted in religion and in the notion of a benevolent (though sometimes not particularly benevolent) authoritarian leader legitimized by religion.

I note that Andrew Sullivan, in his forthcoming book, The Conservative Soul, takes a different view, putting Strauss in the tradition of conservatism of doubt. Andrew’s book is a significant accomplishment, and his dissection of trends in conservative thought in the last generation is little short of dazzling. However, I disagree with him about Strauss, and am particularly confident of my conclusions as to the young Strauss.

Strauss, Lessing and the Spinozastreit
For Strauss, the Enlightenment and its embrace of reason over faith as a political lodestar was a monumental wrong turn in European intellectual history. Moreover, Strauss was particularly convinced that the American Republic was built on a shaky foundation. In his dissertation, Strauss dwells at length on the so-called Spinozastreit that erupted in late 18th century Germany, involving Jacobi, Samuel Reimarus and the shining twin stars of the German Enlightenment, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn. Considering Lessing’s towering position in the period as an advocate of tolerance (and notably also as an aggressive and convincing advocate for the emancipation of the Jews), Strauss has a hard time assailing him – but he attempts instead a bizarre and completely unconvincing posthumous conversion, suggesting that at the end of his life, Lessing had come back to religion and understood once again its proper role in society as a tool for those who govern. The particular vehicle that Strauss chooses for this purpose is reinterpretation of a less well known, but nevertheless important Lessing work. Ernst und Falk: Gespräche für Freimauer (1781) are the “Masonic Dialogues” in which Lessing quotes Benjamin Franklin and hails the American Revolution and the values it announced as the beginning of a new era for politics premised on reason and tolerance. The technique of dialogue introduces a hint of ambiguity to the work – ambiguity that Lessing felt he needed for a number of reasons, largely relating to his position as a public servant. However, Lessing’s preference for reason over faith, and particularly, his enthusiastic embrace of the American Revolution, lie at the undeniable center of the work. And they form precisely the perspective that Strauss struggles to debunk throughout his dissertation. All of which helps explain Strauss’ homesickness for Germany, and his lack of enthusiasm for the English-speaking world in general, and America in particular, at this snapshot point in 1933.

Strauss between Athens, Jerusalem… and Berlin
While Strauss appears alarmingly willing to accept the Nazis as the carriers of his Conservatism in May 1933, this certainly does not mean that he views fascism, or much less Nazism, as his political ideal. A close reading of his works at the time suggests a different perspective. He clearly had no love lost for the Weimar Republic and the values it embraced. He eagerly adopts Carl Schmitt’s critique of those values. While it is easy to cast Strauss in terms of the distant juxtaposition of Athens and Jerusalem, if we look for models of more immediate application, it seems clear that Strauss saw in Wilhelmine Germany a close approximation of his conservatism: an authoritarian state with a strong military tradition, a prodigious academy and flourishing art, and also a formal role for religion. Curiously, it’s precisely those elements of Wilhelmine Germany against which Strauss’ suspicions are turned – the left and the advocates of bourgeois liberalism - that seem to present something redeeming in an otherwise disturbing, if not suffocating intellectual landscape.

It may be argued that during his forty years in emigration, Strauss’ political views changed – that the horror of the Second World War, which clearly touched him deeply, caused a reassessment of his conservative principles. Strauss’ writings after the war present some basis for such argument. But they also are filled with passages that suggest straight-line continuity with the thinking he expressed in his letter to Löwith of May 1933. One example would be Strauss’ 1948 book On Tyranny, a study in Xenophon’s dialogue Hiero, in which Strauss embraces the concept of the philosopher-tyrant “who has committed any number of crimes” in the pursuit of the interests of his polis. The work and many of the thoughts expressed it in resonate with fascism, and particularly the Italian variant – and this resonance seems more closely linked to Strauss than to Xenophon.

I don’t ultimately consider Strauss a fascist, though I believe his writings fuel legitimate suspicion. I am troubled by the extent to which he is prepared to play with fascist thoughts, which now belong on history’s dust heap. But conversely, Strauss does not by any stretch of the imagination embrace democracy as the American Founding Fathers saw it. He is a clear critic of their project, and his criticisms seem remarkably consistent with the tactics that Neocons have used to come to power and hold on in the face of withering public criticism and rejection. All of which should suggest to the would-be guardians of America’s democratic traditions the wisdom of Isaiah Berlin’s words:

“I am bored by reading people who are allies, people of roughly the same views. What is interesting is to read the enemy; because the enemy penetrates the defenses.”

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The Letter: An English Translation

Paris, May 19, 1933

Dear Mr. Löwith,

On your behalf I have in the meantime made the necessary overture to Groethuysen, who is in London. Besides this I had occasion to speak with Van Sickle, the head of the Rockefeller Foundation, and informed him about you, your situation, your work and your interests. He made a note of your name, so I am sure he will remember it when he comes across it in Fehling’s letter.(1)

As concerns me, I will receive the second year. Berlin recommended me, and that was decisive.(2) I will also spend my second year in Paris, and I will attempt in this time to undertake something that will make my further work possible. Clearly I have major “competition”: the entire German-Jewish intellectual proletariat is assembled here. It’s terrible - I’d rather just run back to Germany.

But here’s the catch. Of course I can’t opt for just any other country - one doesn’t choose a homeland and, above all, a mother tongue, and in any event I will never be able to write other than in German, even if I must write in another language. On the other hand, I see no acceptable possibility of living under the swastika, i.e., under a symbol that says nothing more to me than: you and your ilk, you are physei(3) subhumans and therefore justly pariahs. There is in this case just one solution. We must repeat: we, “men of science,” - as our predecessors in the Arab Middle Ages called themselves - non habemus locum manentem, sed quaerimus…(4) And, what concerns this matter: the fact that the new right-wing Germany does not tolerate us says nothing against the principles of the right. To the contrary: only from the principles of the right, that is from fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles, is it possible with seemliness, that is, without resort to the ludicrous and despicable appeal to the droits imprescriptibles de l’homme(5) to protest against the shabby abomination.(6) I am reading Caesar’s Commentaries with deep understanding, and I think of Virgil’s Tu regere imperio… parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.(7) There is no reason to crawl to the cross, neither to the cross of liberalism, as long as somewhere in the world there is a glimmer of the spark of the Roman thought. And even then: rather than any cross, I’ll take the ghetto.

I do not therefore fear the fate of the émigré - at most secundum carnem:(8) the hunger or similar deprivations. - In a sense our sort are always “emigrants”; and what concerns the rest, the fear of bitterness, which is certainly very great, and in this sense I think of Klein(9), who in every sense has always been an emigrant, living proof for the fact that it is not unconquerable.

Dixi, et animam meam salvavi.(10)

Live well! My heartiest greetings to you and your wife

Leo Strauss

My wife sends her thanks for your greetings, and reciprocates heartily.

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Published Source: Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 3: Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften, Briefe (Heinrich Meier, ed.), Metzler Verlag 2001, pp. 624-25.

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Notes:

(1) In 1934, Karl Löwith, another Heideggerian, received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation enabling him to leave Germany for studies in Italy; he subsequently traveled to Japan, and then to the United States, where he taught at the Hartford Theological Seminary and the New School in New York. He returned to Germany in 1952 with an appointment as professor of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg.

(2) Strauss had received notification that the Rockefeller Foundation was giving him a second year’s scholarship for post-graduate work in Paris.

(3) Greek in original, “by nature.” The following term, rendered here as “subhumans” is the Nietzschean expression Untermenschen.

(4) Latin, “We don’t have a lasting place, but seek…” The key phrase locum manentum appears repeatedly in the Vulgate Bible. Strauss’ sense would appear to be a conflation of Maimonides and Nietzsche – something like this: deterritorialized, uprooted, men of science cannot in good conscience identify with any exclusive group; that is for lesser men. On the other hand, identifying with diaspora Judaism may be a useful bridge.

(5) French, “inalienable rights of man” - quoted from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Aug. 26, 1789.

(6) In the original: “das meskine Unwesen,” the word “meskine” may be a Germanization of the French “mesquin” or Italian “meschino,” meaning “mean” or “shabby.”

(7) “Romans, be this thy care - these thine arts -/… to spare the humbled and/ to wear down the proud!” Virgil, Aeneid, lib. 6, line 851. In this quotation, Strauss characteristically elides the most famous portion of this passage, which relates to the obligation to “uphold the law of peace.” The passage is often quoted by Carl Schmitt.

(8) Latin, “with respect to the body.”

(9) Jacob Klein, another Heideggerian and friend of Strauss, with Strauss an advocate of the esoteric/exoteric approach to the study of classical texts, Klein emigrated and taught at St John’s College.

(10) Latin, “I have spoken and saved my soul.” A phrase associated with confessions, especially before the Holy Inquisition, though used ironically by Karl Marx and other political writers.

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I want to thank Alan Gilbert, Stephen Holmes and Fritz Stern for their many kind thoughts, suggestions and comments on the text. Any errors, however, are strictly the author’s.

Posted 12:37 PM by Scott Horton [link]