Robert Howse, Cambridge University Press, 200 pages
The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name.
—Exodus 15:3
There is an old story that the Archangel Michael and the devil feuded over Moses’ remains. While Michael aimed to convey the prophet’s body up to heaven, Satan was determined to keep him buried in the dirt.
If the comparison is not impious, we may speak of a similar contest for custody of Leo Strauss. According to his admirers, Strauss earned a place among the angels by promoting Greek-inspired rationalism and a cautious liberalism. Strauss’s critics contend that he was a demonic figure, who encouraged his acolytes to disregard both scholarly probity and basic morality in favor of a Nietzschean will to power.
Strauss’s supporters held the upper hand so long as debate was focused on works that Strauss prepared for publication after his arrival in the United States in 1937. Yet they have struggled to explain the early works in German that have come to light over the last decade. These texts do not appear to be the work of a liberal rationalist. In a notorious letter to philosopher of history Karl Löwith, Strauss even expressed support for “the principles of the Right, fascist, authoritarian, imperialist principles…”
Robert Howse, who teaches law at New York University, is the latest combatant in the Strauss wars. In Leo Strauss: Man of Peace, Howse defends Strauss from his enemies while distancing him from some of his self-appointed friends. Howse acknowledges that Strauss flirted with extremism. But he argues that Strauss devoted the rest of his career to t’shuvah, a Hebrew word that is usually translated “repentance.”
Howse’s study has the merit of drawing on newly available sources from Strauss’s intellectual maturity: the archive of seminars made available by the Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago. And Howse is among very few writers on Strauss who are sympathetic to their subject without being sycophantic. Despite these virtues, I do not think Howse wins the battle for Strauss’s legacy, at least if this means distancing him from the politics of national self-assertion. That is because Howse does not draw the connection between Strauss’s early critique of liberalism and his lifelong Zionism.
Howse focuses on political violence. Departing from Strauss’s alleged influence on supporters of the Iraq War, Howse asks whether Strauss thought violence should be regulated by a normative standard or deployed according to its user’s interest. He answers that Strauss sought “a middle way between strict morality and sheer Machiavellian[ism].”
In itself, this conclusion is not very interesting. Every significant political theorist, including Machiavelli, has tried in some way to steer between the rocks of moral absolutism and political solipsism. Howse’s contribution is an argument about the character of the “middle way” that Strauss preferred. In courses on Thucydides, Kant, and Grotius from the 1960s, Howse finds Strauss praising the Nuremberg trials, United Nations, and nascent European Community. He argues that Strauss was essentially a Cold War liberal internationalist.
To make his case, Howse has to refute an interpretation of Strauss that has become dominant over the last decade or so. According to this interpretation, the most important influence on Strauss was the reactionary legal philosopher Carl Schmitt. In seminal works from the 1920s, Schmitt argued that the basis of politics is the distinction between friend and foe realized in mortal combat.
The Schmitt connection has been a centerpiece of attacks on Strauss since the mid-1990s. But Howse is more interested in confronting Strauss’s allies than in rehashing old debates. In particular, Howse accuses Heinrich Meier, the German scholar who edited Strauss’s Gesammelte Schriften, of “misreading Strauss as a hyper-Schmittian.” According to Howse, Meier not only inflates the significance of Schmitt for Strauss but also presents Strauss as agreeing with Schmitt’s politics of existential opposition.
Howse’s response to Meier has several dimensions. On the textual level, Howse shows that there is not enough evidence to support claims that Schmitt was among Strauss’s most important interlocutors. Strauss wrote a 1932 review of Schmitt’s seminal work, The Concept of the Political, that Schmitt recognized as the most searching he received. On that basis, he wrote a letter of recommendation for the Rockefeller Foundation grant that allowed Strauss to leave Germany. But these facts demonstrate no more than a professional relationship between scholars. And Schmitt’s anti-Semitism may have given him personal reasons to wish that Jewish intellectuals would make their careers elsewhere.
On the philosophical level, Howse reaffirms that Strauss was deeply critical of Schmitt’s approach. Although Schmitt claimed that he was distinguishing politics from morality, his argument was based on the assumption that a life devoted to existential confrontation is more worthy than one devoted to peace and prosperity. Although opposed to Christian and bourgeois norms, this assumption is inextricably normative. Strauss exposed Schmitt’s hard-boiled realism as a cover for his own brand of moralism.
Finally, Howse also offers a plausible if not novel account of the historical setting in which Strauss could have been attracted to antiliberalism without endorsing Schmitt’s theory of enmity. Given the failure of the Weimar republic, it seemed that a politics of militant self-assertion was necessary to protect Germany’s Jews. Strauss’s praise of “the principles of the Right, fascist, authoritarian, imperialist principles…” has to be read with this consideration in mind. The full context of the letter makes it clear that Strauss believed that only such principles were capable of standing up to the National Socialist regime.
When he wrote those words in 1933, Strauss may have been thinking of Mussolini, who was at the time an opponent of Hitler. As the 1930s continued, however, he associated them with Churchill. After Strauss arrived in the United States, he was known for insisting that “I am not liberal, I am not conservative, I always follow Churchill.” As Paul Gottfried pointed out in Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America, Strauss was far more enthusiastic about England than the land of his birth.
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