For manifold reasons that I am not competent to explain, the "serious" media in Europe and in America have recently been rife with dramatic surmises about the possible significance of the impact of Leo Strauss’s political theorizing on contemporary American policy makers and policy shapers. The media have become aware of an important fact about contemporary intellectual life: Strauss’s complex philosophical reflections do exercise a quietly growing deep influence, not only in America but abroad, in the East (near and far) as well as in Europe. And the chief good that might conceivably result from the flurry is the spurring of some to a more serious consideration of Strauss’s writings. Unfortunately, however, it does not appear that the journalists who have recently been moved to pronounce in print about Strauss’s teaching have been able to devote much time to a study of his philosophic corpus. At any rate, they have advanced all sorts of extravagant (and even preposterous) claims about what Strauss thought or taught. These assertions have been marked by their lack of substantiation through genuine quotations from, or even through accurate summaries of, what Strauss wrote. In what follows, I would like to try to provide a brief, introductory guide to some of the most manifest ways in which Strauss’s writings may be said to offer a deepening of our understanding of contemporary politics. As goes without saying, I must be selective: I will stress especially those aspects of Strauss’s published reflections that have been most grossly misunderstood in the media.

Strauss’s Revival of Classical Political Philosophy

In the massive foreground of Strauss’s lifework stands his resuscitation of classical republican political philosophy. Here Strauss finds the standpoint for a searching and critical, if sympathetic and even somewhat admiring, appraisal of contemporary liberal democracy. Here Strauss finds the key to a recovery of our lost or obscured self-consciousness as moderns. For our civic existence is rooted in a vast cultural revolution-what was called "the Enlightenment," of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--that defined itself in opposition to the previously regnant tradition that took its inspiration ultimately from the citizen-philosopher Socrates.

We may circumscribe the heart of Strauss’s reopening of what was once well known as "the Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns" by focusing on the contrast Strauss highlights between ancient utopianism and modern idealism. At the dawn of the modern era, one of the greatest adherents of the ancient outlook, St. Thomas More, invented the neologism "utopia" (Greek for "good place/no place") as a revealing designation for what is the theme of classical political philosophy. For that theorizing is centered on the elaboration of "the best regime," conceived not as an "ideal" to be realized, or even approached and worked toward, but rather as a subtly playful thought-experiment meant to reveal the limitations on what we can expect from all actual political life. As Strauss puts it, concluding his major analysis of Plato: "Socrates makes clear in the Republic of what character the city would have to be in order to satisfy the highest need of man. By letting us see that the city constructed in accordance with this requirement is not possible, he lets us see the essential limits, the nature, of the city." A bit earlier in the same essay, Strauss stated this "in a manner which is perhaps more easily intelligible today": "the Republic conveys the broadest and deepest analysis of political idealism ever made" (CM, 61, 127, 138).

The classical teaching on the best regime as utopia is simultaneously a teaching about human nature. Human nature as understood by the Socratics is characterized by a profound, passionate longing for self-transcending union with the eternal or divine. This "erotic" yearning is inevitably if obscurely at work everywhere in political action; but this deepest need of the human soul cannot find its clarification and hence its true object through political accomplishment. "Man is so built" that his spirit finds its fullest satisfaction only in the life of the essentially private, restless mind, given over to "articulating the riddle of being" (NRH, 75). This contemplative life, which is rooted in an intellectual and spiritual purification of eros, cannot be politicized, cannot animate political ambition or authority.

This conclusion carries the parlous implication that the philosopher is somewhat deficient in the virtues or capacities required for self-defense in an essentially political world. The still more somber consequence is that only a very, very few individuals can be fortunate enough to surmount the enormous spiritual as well as material obstacles to this best life of the mind. For humankind is primarily not philosophic; rather--to go so far as Aristotle (Politics 1.2 and 3.6)-"the human is by nature a political animal." In other words, humanity’s deepest, philosophic longing is encased in, penetrated and molded by, a complex concatenation of more immediate physical and spiritual needs, personal as well as social. It is chiefly in response to these sub-philosophic natural requirements that civil society (with its cornerstone the family) and its specific excellences and demands and (partial) fulfillment comes into being.

Classical political philosophy is not concerned to rule, but it is concerned to understand, political society--and to share its understanding, in a constructive fashion, with political society, as much as possible. The focus of classical political theory is on illuminating the goals or aspirations that give political society its meaningfulness. Strauss re-articulates the nerve of classical political theory by beginning from the classic contention that the most natural human society is not large, anonymous, and open (the ethnos or "nation") but small and closed: the polis or city, understood as "that complete association which corresponds to the natural range of man’s power of knowing and loving" (NRH, 254). Only in the life of an independent city (which is by no means essentially Greek, or even Greco-Roman) is there a good chance that a substantial portion of the members may participate directly and in a fraternal spirit in the spiritually enlarging responsibilities of shaping the collective destiny--as rulers, but also, and more widely, as ruled citizens.

The city at its best is "liberal" in the classic sense of the term: meaning to say, decisively influenced by "the morally serious" (spoudaioi), the "gentlemen" (kaloikagathoi), who possess the virtues aimed at (though by no means automatically produced) by a truly liberating or "liberal education." In its original, natural form such an education proceeds by "familiar intercourse" with "elder statesmen," by "receiving instruction from paid teachers in the art of speaking," by "reading histories and books of travel, by meditating on the works of the poets" ("the fountains of that education"), and, "of course by taking part in political life." "All this requires leisure on the part of youths as well as on the part of their elders"; it is the preserve of "wealth of a certain kind: a kind of wealth the administration of which, to say nothing of its acquisition, does not take up much of [one’s] time" (LAM, 10-11).

Classical republicanism recognizes that this essential economic basis of the liberally educated (inherited land) implies an insuperable defect in the justice of their rule: "only the accident of birth decides whether a given individual has a chance of becoming a gentlemen or will necessarily become a villain; hence aristocracy is unjust." It does not follow, however, that democracy is more just, for its economic basis subjects it to an even more serious moral flaw: a corruption of justice as the common good of society. Strauss quotes in this connection Rousseau’s Social Contract (3.4): "If there were a people consisting of gods, it would rule itself democratically. A government of such perfection is not suitable for human beings." Democracy means rule by the majority, who in all actual human societies are the unleisured and uneducated, or at best illiberally educated--"because they have to work for their livelihood and to rest so that they can work the next day." In their needy (or even wealthy) lack of experience of a life preoccupied with the striving after virtue, the majority are overwhelmingly prone to make, not virtue or human excellence society’s goal, but instead material prosperity and "freedom as a right of every citizen to live as he likes." The workers when citizens do make a substantial civic contribution. They form the backbone of the militia. They can become vigilant watchdogs against oppression. But unlike the morally serious, the majority (including the rich as well as the poor) tend to "praise virtue as a means for acquiring wealth and honor"; they do not reliably "regard virtue as choiceworthy for its own sake." To be sure, it is also apparent to classical theory that "the existing aristocracies proved to be oligarchies, rather than aristocracies." Certainly "for all practical purposes," the classics "were satisfied with a regime in which the gentlemen share power with the people in such a way that the people elect the magistrates and the council from among the gentlemen and demand an account of them at the end of their term of office." "A variation of this thought" is "the notion of the mixed regime." The mixed regime is far from being perfectly just, but, if well structured, it can repress some of the characteristic vices, and promote some virtues, of rich and poor. But it is crucial that, as much as possible, the small minority of the morally serious, the gentlemen, set the tone (LAM, 4-5, 10-13, 15, 21).

There is by no means a harmony, though, between the virtues and demands of the gentleman-statesman’s life, and the virtues and demands of the contemplative life. On the contrary, between the two there exists a mutually dangerous, though not unfruitful, tension. The tension is heightened, paradoxically, by the Socratic philosopher’s appreciation of the evident power in the claims, and especially in the divine claims, belonging to the civic virtues. For his appreciation compels the philosopher to justify his apparently strange way of life, with its inner detachment from civil society and with its claim to transcend the gentlemanly virtues. The only conclusive and therefore satisfying justification must be on the premises of, or shared by, the gentlemen. The Socratic philosopher must therefore undertake a severely self-questioning, and therefore necessarily protracted and emotionally trying, argumentative dialogue with the most articulate and openminded adherents and advocates of the political life. The Socratic dialogues take place characteristically with self-selected young--who, despite or even because of their political talents and ambition, still have the free time and the passionate openness that enables them to engage in what, from society’s or their fathers’ perspective, may well appear to be at best a waste of time and energy. The success of the Socratic dialectic entails the "conversion [turning around] of the soul," as Socrates terms it (Republic 518c-d), of a few of these highly promising young. These "conversions" provide decisive evidence that the spiritual purification that Socrates himself once underwent, as a consequence of his thinking through of his own opinions about the noble and the just, was not idiosyncratic. Yet these "conversions" are not welcome to parents or to the authorities of civic education, who are strongly inclined to interpret them as "corrupting the young." "Precisely the best of the non-philosophers, the good citizens," are "passionately opposed to philosophy (Republic 517a)" (CM, 125).

This reaction is understandable. For the Socratic critique of civic life does indeed expose serious contradictions in the most authoritative, even the gentlemanly, civic opinions about justice and nobility. The Socratic critique can appear to be a denigration--rather than a transcendence--of civic life. Moreover, Socratic skepticism threatens always to weaken the citizenry’s attachment to authoritative moral and religious opinions, whose deep-rooted, habitual or tradition-grounded, hold on the heart is an essential basis for healthy politics, especially in public-spirited republican society. In short, there is something truly dangerous to society, to rulers and to ruled, in the Socratic inquiry and dialectic; and so it is no accident that there arises, in response, a counter-threat, to Socratic philosophy, from the self-preservative instincts of even or precisely a relatively healthy republican society.

Socratic political philosophizing is therefore compelled to respond to this twofold danger, and to take responsibility for mitigating it. The response takes the form of a carefully worked out art of public communication or rhetoric. The aim of this art is to blunt the potentially harmful effects of Socratic skepticism while stressing the constructive contribution Socratic inquiry can make to the edification of the civic virtues. Authentic Socratic writing always proceeds on at least two levels: what Strauss, following modern as well as ancient guides, termed the "exoteric" and the "esoteric." The latter, the "esoteric," is intended to arouse and to initiate--by a process of increasingly more challenging puzzles--a few of the strongest among the young or young at heart. The former, the "exoteric," delivers a message that is meant to illuminate the genuine though limited human greatness of which politics is susceptible; at the same time, the exoteric level of Socratic writing aims to enrich and to enlarge religious faith, through "theology" that conveys something of what philosophy has discovered about the truly eternal or divine; "political philosophy is the indispensable handmaid of theology" (CM, 1).

Yet the art of esoteric writing is complicated by a more basic function of such writing--a function made necessary by the unhappily pervasive presence of tyranny in political life. The human aspirations to partake of the divine, to achieve excellence and to live honorably and hence honored, are susceptible to terrible perversions. Tyranny assumes many guises, not always easy to penetrate. In most if not all times and places, the Socratics find themselves dwelling in societies under the thumb of more or less tyrannical rulers, usually dominating in the name of various narrow and narrowing orthodoxies. The philosopher will need to struggle to elude persecution, while unmasking tyranny--not only or mainly for himself, but especially for all those whom he wishes to reach and to teach by his public communication, both philosophic and republican. Socratic writings intended to live into many unrepublican times and places in the far and alien future are therefore designed to give the exaggerated impression of preaching obedience and conformity--generally, but also specifically (in relation to the powers that be in the writer’s own time and place). Only "between the lines" do such writings disclose ironic critiques of tyrannic orthodoxy, including religious tyranny, in its local but also in its typical or even universal penchants. These covertly subversive critiques are meant to help many readers to begin to learn techniques of writing and speaking by which freedom of critical thinking--not only philosophic, but also civic republican--can survive "underground" (waiting the rare chance to resurface) in all sorts of more or less oppressive regimes. Accordingly, Strauss’s major works that teach about esoteric writing are entitled "Persecution and the Art of Writing," and "On Tyranny."

Strauss was led to rediscover the lost art of writing, and thus the forgotten core, of classical political philosophy in part by his early intense study of the great Platonic political theorists within medieval Islam--Farabi, Avicenna, Maimonides, and Averroes. These philosophers helped Strauss to realize that the supreme question for the Socratics is what Strauss called "the theologico-political problem"--which, Strauss declared in one of his pithy published autobiographical statements near the end of his life, "has remained the theme of my investigations" (PHPW). In his major work Natural Right and History, Strauss articulated the "theologico-political problem," in a nutshell, as the "fundamental question," whether "men can acquire that knowledge of the good without which they cannot guide their lives individually or collectively by the unaided efforts of their natural powers, or whether they are dependent for that knowledge on Divine Revelation." "No alternative," Strauss continued, "is more fundamental than this: . . . a life of obedient love versus a life of free insight." And, he added, "In every attempt at harmonization, in every synthesis however impressive, one of the two opposed elements is sacrificed, more or less subtly but in any event surely, to the other."

The Anti-Classical Foundations of Modern Idealism

This last brings us into a position to begin to appreciate Strauss’s understanding of the deepest cause of the rebellion by "the moderns" against "the ancients." The philosophers who initiated and elaborated distinctively modern rationalism and republicanism--Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Montesquieu--were moved by public-spirited dissatisfaction with the utopian conservatism or lack of political ambition of ancient political philosophy. For this left social existence at the mercy of theocracy in one form or another. Still worse, this conceded to the claimants of revelation that the human spirit was so constituted as irrepressibly to long for a transcendence of secular social existence. And this appeared to leave unshaken--nay, even could be used, and was used, to strengthen--the claimed evidence of the experience of divine revelations demanding the chastening or sacrifice, the subordination and thus (in the modern rationalists’ eyes) mutilation, of human reason and rational social felicity. The modern rationalists sought and claimed to find a superior resolution of the theologico-political problem. They did so through attempting a wholesale re-conception of the human condition and its prospects--a comprehensive theoretical and practical project which has yet to reach a satisfactory conclusion.

Strauss sums up the unifying core of "the modern project" as "the secular movement which tries to guarantee the actualization of the ideal, or to prove the necessary coincidence of the rational and the real, or to get rid of that which essentially transcends every possible human reality" (WIPP, 51). Strauss thus sees modern "idealism" and "realism" as revolving in twin orbits around one another. In the modern perspective, humanity is no longer to be conceived in terms of a hierarchy of spiritual needs directed by and toward a natural perfection or order of rank within the soul. Instead, what is to be regarded as natural to the human species are animal passions, the strongest of which are the drives for security and superiority or control, given scope in a uniquely human plasticity that is shapeable and hence shaped by reason or through an integration with reason. Mankind can and should devise for itself artificial structures of existence that allow the most gratifying expression of its passions, rendered human through conscious and unconscious construction and reconstruction. Viewing modernity synoptically, Strauss saw it as exhibiting a historical-dialectical drama of a never-fully-accomplished and ever-more-radical effort to complete an account of the human essence or condition that would provide worldly standards of aspiration for human action guided by reason--or by a supra- or sub-rational but still secular "historical process." However intense are the mutual disagreements among the different stages and philosophic giants of modernity, all share a defining common ground in the rejection of the key elements in the classical outlook.

First and foremost, the modern doctrines abandon the classical contention that human nature is directed toward the mind’s pursuit of knowledge of nature for its own sake, launched by the erotic longing for eternity: "oblivion of eternity, or, in other words, estrangement from man’s deepest desire and therewith from the primary issues, is the price which modern man had to pay, from the very beginning, for attempting to be absolutely sovereign, to become the master and owner of nature, to conquer chance" (WIPP, 55). In the modern scheme of things, the needs that animate human nature are conceived as satisfiable in and through a well-constructed society supplemented by humanistic "education" or personal regimen. Philosophy is to serve and to guide, i.e., to rule indirectly, such a society and regimen.

This requires the reconception not only of philosophy and its role, but of civic and personal spiritual health. In the modern perspective, by contrast with the ancient, morality and religion are to be properly understood, and gradually reshaped, as "civil" and as personally liberating; what goes beyond, or, still worse, conflicts with, social well-being and personal freedom is to be hived off and jettisoned as unnatural and unnecessary "fanaticism" or "superstition."

There is in principle, then, no tension between philosophy and society, in the modern matrix. The Socratic dialectic becomes apparently superfluous. So, the central meaning of "esotericism" (hidden teaching) undergoes a radical change. In the classical framework, esoteric writing is the device by which an essentially and forever dissident philosophic minority constructively shields itself and society from a potentially destructive intimacy. Esotericism is for the classical philosophers, one may say, the way they avoid ever having to rule, even indirectly. In modern rationalism, esotericism is reconceived as subtle propaganda and deception aimed at manipulating the unphilosophic leaders, and even the mass, of the citizenry so as to make them subject, indirectly and unawares, to a ruling philosophic or quasi-philosophic elite. In the late modern, and eventually all-too-common worst cases, tyranny itself is embraced, rather than subverted, by the new "philosophy"--which is not ashamed to sponsor "ideological" mass political parties or movements (communists, fascists, Nazis, Baathists, Islamicists, etc.). As Strauss expressed it in his book On Tyranny, we have been "brought face to face with"

a kind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imagination of the most powerful thinkers of the past . . .. In contradistinction to classical tyranny, present-day tyranny has at its disposal "technology" as well as "ideology"; 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, actually or potentially, by a science which was not meant to be applied to the "conquest of nature" or to be popularized and diffused. . . . Confronted by the appalling alternative that man, or human thought, must be collectivized either by one stroke and without mercy or else by slow and gentle processes, we are forced to wonder how we could escape from this dilemma. We reconsider therefore the elementary and unobtrusive conditions of human freedom. (OT, 23, 27)

Strauss’s Assessment of Modern Liberal Democracy

Still, there is an enormous, and politically most significant, difference between the earlier, and more moderate, expression of the modern project, and its later, ever-more-desperate waves. The experience of twentieth century politics showed decisively the practical, humane superiority of what Strauss calls "the first wave" of modernity, whose supreme political expression is the representative democracy structured by the American Constitution. Proven conclusively inferior, on the other hand, were the politics generated by the "second wave," of Rousseau and German idealism, culminating in Marx and Marxism, and by the "third wave," of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Strauss’s classical liberalism finds important points of kinship with the modern liberalism based on Locke and Montesquieu.

In the first place, the essentially dissident character of classical philosophy finds harbor in the fact that "liberals regard as sacred the right of everyone, however humble, odd, or inarticulate, to criticize the government, including the man at the top." In the second place, "with the increasing abundance" produced by the liberation of competitive acquisitiveness in the modern scheme, "it became increasingly possible to admit the element of hypocrisy which had entered into the traditional notion of aristocracy," and, from the classical viewpoint, it became "increasingly easy" to argue "practically or politically" that "all men have the same natural rights, provided one uses this rule of thumb as the major premise for reaching the conclusion that everyone should be given the same opportunity as everyone else: natural inequality has its rightful place in the use, nonuse, or abuse of opportunity" (LAM, Pref. and 21).

Most important of all, Strauss stresses, modern liberal-democratic political life is capable in practice of surmounting the low moral ceiling of its theoretical provenance. Most obviously in the American founding period, and then in the careers of Lincoln and Churchill, among others, liberal constitutionalism, at least when it is embattled, has shown that it can produce statesmanship worthy of Plutarch. This is not simply accidental. Strauss limns the Federalist’s argument that representative government, when based on an "electorate [that] is not depraved," has a "fair chance" of electing delegates "who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good" (quoting Fed. #57). I believe that it is fair to say that the most massive legacy of Strauss as a university teacher has been the legion of scholars and teachers he has spawned who have devoted their writings and their own teaching to a renewal of reverence for the high moral and intellectual achievements of American statesmanship and political thought. The polestar of this movement has been Strauss’s insistence that "there is a direct connection between the [classic] notion of the mixed regime and modern republicanism"(LAM, 15-16).

Still: "lest this be misunderstood, one must immediately stress the important differences." More specifically, "the spring of this regime was held to be the desire of each to improve his material conditions. Accordingly the commercial and industrial elite, rather than the landed gentry, predominated." The intention of the Federalist, Strauss observes, is that the place held in the classical mixed regime by the liberally educated gentlemen is to be taken by "the learned professions," i.e., chiefly the lawyers. It is to those who are "most" virtuous "among" these that the Federalist looks for moral elevation of the regime. And Strauss endorses Burke’s judgment: while the Law is a "science which does more to quicken and invigorate the understanding, than all the other kinds of learning put together," it is unfortunately the case that the Law is "not apt" to "open and to liberalize the mind" (LAM, 15-17).

For Strauss, a relative strength of the politics flowing from the first wave of modernity was its "eminently sober" recognition of its "low but solid" foundations (using a Churchillian expression of which Strauss was fond). The question classical republicanism impels is, whether such foundations are sufficient, or whether they do not decisively rely on the supplement of a spiritual sustenance derived from what are ever more rapidly disappearing vestiges of an older religious and classical liberal education. Modern liberal republicanism instantiates modern philosophy, which, "by causing the purpose of the philosophers, or more generally the purpose which essentially transcends society, to collapse into the purpose of the non-philosophers," thereby "causes the purpose of the gentlemen to collapse into the purpose of the nongentlemen." With the passage of years, "the understanding of virtue as choiceworthy for its own sake gave way to an instrumental understanding of virtue"; "virtue took on a narrow meaning, with the final result that the word ‘virtue’ fell into desuetude"--replaced by the "calculating transition from unenlightened to enlightened self-interest." Most significant of all, the Founders built their new republic on what the Federalist (#9, 57) understandably boasts of as a "great improvement" in the "science of politics," by which a marvelously well-wrought mechanism of checking and balancing institutions channels vigorously competitive self-interest. But this meant that "the devising of the right kind of institutions and their implementation came to be regarded as more important than the formation of character by liberal education" (LAM, 19-21).

Beyond the problem of the dwindling of the spiritual resources required for liberal republican energy and stability--a problem even on the premises of the moderns--there lies the deeper human problem of cultural shallowness and hence spiritual emptiness. Athenian democracy devoted its leisure to religious festivals where the citizenry wept at the complex contradictions of Sophocles and laughed at the deeply provocative absurdities of Aristophanes. Modern democracy fosters "mass culture," that is, "a culture which can be appropriated by the meanest capacities without any intellectual and moral effort whatsoever." This culture is the mindless play of very hard-working "technicians" exercising "high-grade but strictly speaking unprincipled efficiency." "Thus we understand most easily what liberal education means here and now. Liberal education is the counterpoison to mass culture, to its inherent tendency to produce nothing but ‘specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart’ [quoting Weber’s conclusion to his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism]. Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant" (LAM, 5). This means, however, that for us today, "liberal education" has a different substance and purpose from what it had originally. The desperate character of this enterprise is the most widely and even deeply if dimly felt symptom of the failure of the first wave of the modern project to obviate the need for transcendent religious meaning. This profound failure explains the emergence of the second, and then the third, waves of modernity. These great movements of revolt against original modern rationalism strove, in what became fanatic failure, to implement a secular, radically modern or post-modern, high culture of exalted manmade humanity or super-humanity-first on a democratic footing (Rousseau to Marx) and then on an aristocratic (Nietzsche). The collapse of these "grandiose failures" ushers in what Strauss did not hesitate to call "the crisis of our time," a crisis whose most obvious symptom is "that the difference between intellectuals and philosophers" becomes "blurred and finally disappears."

The crisis of modern natural right or of modern political philosophy could become a crisis of philosophy as such only because in the modern centuries philosophy as such had become thoroughly politicized. Originally, philosophy had been a pure source of humane inspiration and aspiration. Since the seventeenth century, philosophy has become a weapon, and hence an instrument. (NRH, 34)

The Political Implications of an Education in This Framework

The massive, primary, civic lesson that follows from all this would appear to be threefold. To begin with, the rebirth of classical republicanism restores civic statesmanship to its princely throne as the highest sub-philosophic human calling. And Strauss’s teaching instills a tempered appreciation for the nobility of the political life within liberal democracy as the best regime possible in our epoch, in full awareness of this democracy’s and that epoch’s intensifying spiritual and civic dilemmas. At the same time, Strauss provides an immunization against--precisely by arousing a deep sympathy for the original motivations of--the terrible delusions that inspire the political fanaticism of the contemporary Left and Right, in their desperate attempts to replace liberal democracy with more elevated and radical versions of the great modern project, or in their hopeless attempts to bring about a political return to a lost pre-liberal and pious order. By the same token, Strauss teaches one neither to expect nor to hope for an "end of history triumph" of American or of any other form of liberal democracy. It is by no means unreasonable to suppose that America and its liberal democracy will exercise planetary predominance or even hegemony for the foreseeable future. But it is unreasonable, given Strauss’s analysis, to expect that the human spirit will not rise up in unforeseeable forms of longing and rebellion against the spiritual deformations imposed by and attendant upon this regime’s hegemony. The yearning for transcendent purpose, and, most likely, the return to or recrudescence of some form of pre-liberal religiosity, will--if Strauss is right--remain permanent impulses bursting forth unpredictably from generation to generation. Nor is it likely that we will ever, so long as modernity prevails, see the end of various sorts of desperate nihilisms, that find perverse exaltation in dying to destroy that "evil" for which they cannot devise a viable replacement.

Those of civic ambition who are influenced by Strauss’s reflections will presumably not await passively these profound threats to our liberal democracy. They will try to awaken others to their likelihood, in part by raising awareness of the controversial character of the deepest moral and religious foundations of liberal democracy. To possess this awareness is to recognize the fragility at the heart of our regime and to become all the more aware of the need for thoughtful action not only to defend modern liberalism but to shore it up--in part by supplementing it with classical liberalism, in part by learning from classical liberalism to elucidate moral potentials still present in contemporary liberalism that are in danger of extinction.

This means to say that for most practical purposes Strauss’s influence inclines one toward the conservative part of the present-day spectrum. Classical political philosophy "cannot be simply conservative since it is guided by the awareness that all men seek by nature, not the ancestral or traditional, but the good." Besides, "the conservatism of our age is identical with what was originally [modern] liberalism, more or less modified by changes in the direction of present-day liberalism"; yet as such, Strauss was apt to think, contemporary conservatism puts healthy brakes on contemporary liberalism, which is more infected by the visionary delusions of the second and third waves of modernity. "Liberals" (using the term now in the more narrow current sense), tend to agree with "Communism as regards the ultimate goal," which "may be said to be" the "universal and homogeneous state." "Pragmatic" liberals would be "satisfied with a federation of all now existing or soon emerging states, with a truly universal and greatly strengthened United Nations." Conservatives tend to be soberly dubious about this trajectory. This is not because conservatives are still (as they tended overwhelmingly to be in the nineteenth century) simply nationalistic, let alone imperial: "there is no reason whatever," Strauss opined, "why they should be opposed to a United Free Europe, for instance. Yet they are likely to understand such units differently from the liberals. An outstanding European conservative [de Gaulle] has spoken of l’Europe des patries." In other words, "conservatives look with greater sympathy than liberals on the particular or particularist and the heterogeneous; at least they are more willing than liberals to respect and perpetuate a more fundamental diversity"--Strauss means, political diversity, rooted in the nations, with their distinct and healthily competing traditions (LAM, Pref.).

Behind this is a comprehensive conservative critique for which Strauss expresses his qualified respect, and which he summarizes as follows: today’s "politically relevant cosmopolitanism" tends to be accompanied by a "decay of the spirit, of taste, of the mind," because it is rooted in or strongly prone to "the belief that human life as such, i.e., independently of the kind of life one leads, is an absolute good." Accordingly it embraces and even promotes a peculiar "humanitarianism" that goes hand in hand with "an overriding concern with pleasure and unwillingness or inability to dedicate one’s life to ideals." "It does not leave room for reverence, the matrix of human nobility": for "reverence is primarily, i.e., for most men at all times and for all men most of the time, reverence for one’s heritage, for tradition." And "traditions are essentially particularistic," or "akin to nationalism rather than to cosmopolitanism" (WIPP, 236-38).

Strauss parts company with this line of thought inasmuch as he is convinced by the classics that the "natural political community is, not the nation, but the city." "The nation would thus appear," Strauss concludes in demurral, as an unsatisfactory "half-way house between the polis and the cosmopolis." The deep truth groped toward but not grasped adequately by contemporary conservatism, in its appreciation of national political diversity, is the "substantive principle" of classical political philosophy: "every political society that ever has been or ever will be rests on a particular fundamental opinion which cannot be replaced by knowledge and hence is of necessity a particular or particularistic society" (WIPP, 237-38; LAM, Pref.).

In practical terms, this would imply, as regards foreign policy, a classical republican recognition of the permanence of international conflict--together with, and in some measure the basis of, international cooperation. I say "classical republican" because this would be a recognition of the permanence of competition among political societies, due not simply to a Hobbesian or Nietzschean competition for power, or even to the diversification of humanity into warring peoples by "history," but even more to humanity’s ever-present, terrible potential for tyrannic perversion of its natural political passions--which, to become healthy and ennobled, are so much in need of moral education. Against both liberal and communist idealism Strauss protested that "no bloody or unbloody change of society can eradicate the evil in man" (CM, 5). At the deepest level, however, the classical republican sees the inextirpable root of international conflict in the political insolubility of the problem of justice. If Socratic utopianism is right, then the impossibility in principle of a society that is not in some important way morally partial (blinded) entails a perpetually competing, and sometimes mortally competing, diversity of legitimate aspirations to the just society.

A citizen of our liberal democracies who was penetrated by this awareness would presumably attempt to cultivate in foreign policy a liberal outlook that, in a spirit ready to learn and to argue, holds open the door to dialogue with decent and thoughtful critics emerging from alien and especially more traditional sorts of social and religious outlooks. The fact that Strauss’s own education received its most important impulse from his intense study of philosophers within the world of Islam sets a pregnant example.

But such a citizen would also feel keenly the need to be prepared to struggle and to fight in defense of liberal democracy. This sad necessity and truth would appear to be not entirely without compensations. Resolute and active defense of liberal democracy, shoulder to shoulder with energetic and thoughtfully critical allies, can be a source of renewal of high purpose, of exemplary civic spirit and thoughtful reflection, of citizen engagement and even participation. At the same time, we may observe, the global foreign policy of an aroused superpower imposes an invigorating challenge on democratic leadership (and on that leadership’s electorate). A major part of this challenge involves resisting the temptations to imperial domination and close-minded self-satisfaction, or self-righteous superiority. All this implies that even foreign and defense policy needs to be viewed in terms not only of defense, and of benefit to others, but also--if only secondarily--in terms of the moral effects on domestic political life, on the virtues of the citizenry.

Preeminent among those virtues is moderation. Strauss often sums up what distinguishes his Socratic or classical republicanism from modern republicanism in "the old saying that wisdom cannot be separated from moderation." "Moderation will protect us against the twin dangers of visionary expectations from politics and unmanly contempt for politics." Strauss explicitly warns against the liberal idealism that holds that "to make the world safe for the Western democracies, one must make the whole globe democratic, each country in itself as well as the society of nations" (CM, 4). Strauss insists that the mating of moderation with wisdom entails among other things that "wisdom requires unhesitating loyalty to a decent constitution and even to the cause of constitutionalism." But this is so far from preventing, that it requires, constructive criticism. "We are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely because we are friends and allies of democracy." Yet "while we are not permitted to remain silent on the dangers to which democracy exposes itself as well as human excellence, we cannot forget the obvious fact that by giving freedom to all, democracy also gives freedom to those who care for human excellence." It is not enough to enjoy this freedom by "cultivating our garden," unless at the same time we see our gardening as "setting up outposts which may come to be regarded by many citizens as salutary to the republic and as deserving of giving to it its tone." "It is in this way that the liberally educated may again receive a hearing even in the market place" (LAM, 24). And this, we may conclude, is the heart of Straussian politics.

Works of Strauss Cited

CM: The City and Man
LAM: Liberalism Ancient and Modern
NRH: Natural Right and History
OT: On Tyranny
PHPW: Preface to Hobbes politische Wissenschaft
WIPP: What is Political Philosophy?