6. Letter on What is Political Philosophy? by Leo Strauss

January 23, 1960

Mr. Kenneth S. Templeton

William Volker Fund

Dear Ken:

The first thing to note about Leo Strauss’s What Is Political Philosophy? is its surprising insubstantiality.⁴¹ This is a rag-tag, hodgepodge of a book, consisting of bits and pieces of reviews, journal debates, etc. There is little of note in the book one way or another, and the book could only be of possible interest to someone who believes that every word Leo Strauss writes is worthy of immortality—a view I hardly share. Most of the book, indeed, consists of either book reviews by Strauss or answers to reviews of his books.

The book itself is, therefore, valueless and is only perhaps useful in gleaning Strauss’s own political philosophy, about which bits and pieces come through to the reader. Fundamentally, I have always known, from Strauss’s previous writings, that his work exhibits one great virtue and one great defect: the virtue is that he is in the forefront of the fight to restore and resurrect political philosophy from the interment given it by modern positivists and adherents of scientism—in short, that he wants to restore values and political ethics to the study of politics. This is surely a virtue indeed. The great defect is that Strauss, while favoring what he considers to be the classical and Christian concepts of natural law, is bitterly opposed to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century conceptions of Locke and the rationalists, particularly to their “abstract,” “deductive” championing of the natural rights of the individual: liberty, property, etc.

Strauss, in fact, has been the leading champion, along with Russell Kirk⁴² and the Catholic scholars in America, of a recent trend in Locke historiography (e.g., in Peter Stanlis’s book on Edmund Burke and the Natural Law⁴³) to sunder completely the “bad,” individualist natural-rights type natural law of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from the “good” classical-Christian type—good, presumably, because it was so vague and so “prudential” that it offered very little chance to defend individual liberty against the state. In this reading, Hobbes and Locke are the great villains in the alleged perversion of natural law.

To my mind, this “perversion” was a healthy sharpening and development of the concept. My quarrel with Strauss, Kirk, et al., therefore, is not only valuational—that they are anti-natural rights and liberty, and I am for them—but also factual and historical: for they think that the Lockeans had an entirely different concept of natural law, whereas I think that the difference—while clearly there—was a sharpening development, rather than a perversion or a diametric opposite. Take, for example, the Strauss-Kirkian overlook that while it is true that Aristotle and Plato were statists in their approach to natural law, the Stoics were fine individualists. I am glad to see that John Wild, in his Plato’s Modern Enemies and the Natural Law,⁴⁴ agrees mainly with me, since he includes Tom Paine in his good natural-law galaxy—and no one is more anathema to the Strauss-Kirk types than Tom Paine.

Getting back to the book at hand, this defect and virtue are exhibited fully here, too. Strauss tilts lances at times against positivism, historicism, and scientism, and against modern democratic uniformity and conformity and its assault on privacy. He is opposed to the social-engineering amoralism of Machiavelli and to the pragmatism of Dewey. He even slaps down his leftish Thomist colleague Yves Simon for trying to maintain that Thomism implies democracy. But we also find more evidence of his concrete political position than was hitherto available, and much of it is disturbing.

We find Strauss backing nationalism and national tradition against cosmopolitans who prefer life and materialism; we find him praising “farsighted,” “sober,” British imperialism; we find him discoursing on the “good” Caesarism, on Caesarism as often necessary and not really tyranny, etc. He is suspicious, at least, of modern technology; in the fashion of Thomism, he persists in identifying society and the State (i.e., society with “political society”); he maintains that virtue is more important than freedom (the first cry of every statist); and he has the gall to talk about certain rulers not being tyrants because they were “legitimate,” i.e., they were in the proper line of monarchic succession.

So far, Leo Strauss has all the stigmata of the Kirkian conservative at his worst; but the case is even worse than this, for he includes in this an admixture of modern “progressivism”: for he also believes that we don’t really find the truth, the important thing being only to seek it (why bother seeking if it can never be found?), and he praises political philosophers for, yes, lying to their readers for the sake of the “social good”—i.e., to keep unpalatable truths from their readers because they believe that lies are necessary to the social fabric. I must say that this is an odd position for a supposed moralist to take. But then, this is one of the great weaknesses of the Kirkian-neo-Thomist approach to politics: its constant falling back upon the “prudential” as a great moral force, instead of an unfortunately necessary expediency of the moment. It is an approach that stems precisely from their refusal to be rationalist, “deductive,” abstract, etc., in their approach to moral principle.

Intrinsically valueless as this book is, it has performed one service for me: the heavy downgrading of Leo Strauss in my estimation.

Cordially,
Murray