8. Letter on On Tyranny by Leo Strauss

July 4, 1960 Dr. Ivan R. Bierly

William Volker Fund

Dear Ivan:

In Leo Strauss’s On Tyranny, the author pursues the same sort of historical method in discussing political thought of the past that he later continued in his Thoughts on Machiavelli, i.e., the tortuous—and tortured—misreading of an author’s work.⁵² Strauss’s specialty is the brusque rejection of the work, to search for—and quickly find—all manner of “hidden meanings” that diametrically contradict much of the actual text, and are based on unwarranted biases with which Strauss approaches the book. It must be emphasized that these “hidden meanings” are not “found” by searching the historical context in which the author wrote; Strauss is frankly a purely textual critic who is concerned with the text itself rather than the historical, or archaeological, setting.

On Tyranny is an analysis of the dialogue Hiero, written by the Greek philosopher Xenophon. In the dialogue, Hiero first tells the wise, visiting Greek Simonides that tyranny (Hiero is a tyrant) is a terrible thing, and then Simonides patiently explains to Hiero that only bad tyranny is wicked; that “good” tyranny, motivated by concern for the general welfare, is really good, and should bring happiness to the tyrant. Hiero is apparently convinced.

Now, this is certainly a straightforward enough dialogue, consistent with the general position of the Greek philosophers, who—in contrast to their many virtues—always tended to assume that the State is the best instrument for achieving human goodness. Strauss, however, doesn’t like this clear interpretation, and tries to spin an apologia for Xenophon by labored, and even absurd attempts to try to show that tyranny wasn’t really defended, that Simonides was just trying to comfort his host, etc. Simonides was just wisely trying to work with given systems (e.g., tyranny) and trying to improve them—which, if true, I don’t think says very much for the political philosophy of Simonides or his author, Xenophon—or, for that matter, of Strauss.

It is impossible to detail here the flights of fancy of the Straussian method, the unsupported assumptions of strategies, games, rhetorical victories and traps, etc., that he claims the two men engaged in to support his odd thesis—and with none of these assumptions really backed by solid evidence. I can only conclude that the book itself is worth little or nothing, and that Strauss himself is at his weakest when dealing in historical discussions of past political thinkers.

I can only conclude, once again, from my readings of Strauss, that Strauss is at his best on only one fundamental point: when he is criticizing ethical relativism and advocating a grounding of ethics on natural law (as he did in his relativism paper). Any more specific topics, however, either in detailed content of the natural law or in historical discussions of political philosophers, shows Strauss to be a fallacious political philosopher and a worse historian.

Cordially,
Murray