straussian constitutional history and the straussian political project
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Straussian constitutional historyand the Straussian politicalprojectJohnathan O'Neill aa Georgia Southern University, Department of History ,Box 8054, 1105 Forest Drive, Statesboro, GA, 30460,USAPublished online: 20 Nov 2009.
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Straussian constitutional history and the Straussian political
project
Johnathan O’Neill*
Georgia Southern University, Department of History, Box 8054, 1105 Forest Drive,Statesboro, GA 30460, USA
Few recent intellectual figures have attracted as much attention as LeoStrauss (1899–1973). Although he did not write much about the UnitedStates or its history, his students have. This article first gives an overviewof Strauss’s understanding of the history of political thought and thenrelates it to his students’ distinctive understanding of Americanconstitutional history. Strauss’s thought led his students to rejecthistoricism and positivism in favor of an Aristotelian perspectiveon America that produced a qualified defense of its liberalconstitutionalism.
Keywords: Leo Strauss; constitutionalism; historicism; conservatism;Aristotle; postmodernism
Leo Strauss (1899–73) was a German-Jewish emigre who spent most of hiscareer at the University of Chicago. Though recently condemned byopponents of ‘neo-Conservatism’ in American foreign policy as its supposedsource, in fact Strauss mostly influenced the study of the history of politicalthought. His examination of reason, nature, and morality in the ‘GreatBooks’ of western civilization was part of the post-Second World Warconservative intellectual ascendance. He became widely noted for attackingpositivism and value relativism in mid-twentieth century political science,and is often credited with reviving interest in the natural right and naturallaw traditions in the United States. Allan Bloom’s bestselling The closing ofthe American mind (1987) brought Strauss’s influence into the ‘culture wars’of the 1980s.
Strauss wrote little about the United States, but his students areprominent in the study of its constitutionalism. ‘Straussians’ sometimesheatedly disagree among themselves, but their inquiry into America’s pastoften has a clear political goal: to defend, preserve, and improve Americanconstitutionalism, understood as a modern liberal project based on natural
*Email: [email protected]
Rethinking HistoryVol. 13, No. 4, December 2009, 459–478
ISSN 1364-2529 print/ISSN 1470-1154 online
� 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13642520903292898
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rights and consent which nevertheless includes the salutary influence ofpremodern principles. Historians have not yet fully appreciated theStraussian perspective on American constitutionalism, despite the recentoutpouring of scholarship on Strauss and his legacy (Wood 1988 is an earlierassessment). Understanding Strauss’s basic position and its influence is anappropriate way to consider the relationship between political ideas andhistorical writing.
Straussian assessments of American constitutional history commencedfrom Strauss’s critique of modernity, particularly of historicism andpositivist social science. This critique led to two of his major goals: arecovery of the fruitful competition between the conceptions of morality andhuman excellence found in the Bible and the ancient idea of natural right –and the conservation of modern regimes which permitted such a recovery.Strauss’s ‘return to the ancients’, to the study of Greek political philosophy,led his students to reject historicism and positivism in favor of anAristotelian perspective on America that produced a qualified defense ofits liberal constitutionalism. In confronting Strauss and his legacy forAmerican historical writing, then, the historian encounters a school ofthought which rethinks – and then rejects – the historicist and positivistpremises of modern historical scholarship as it developed since thenineteenth century.
The volume and complexity of Strauss’s thought and recent scholarshipabout him permit only a compressed synopsis to orient discussion of hisstudents’ approach to American constitutional history. (Here I call onZuckert and Zuckert 2006; Pangle 2006; Tanguay 2007.) Strauss described‘the theological-political problem’, a formulation he gleaned from Spinoza,as the central theme of his work (Tanguay 2007, 4). It was the mostfundamental of human problems: whether the good life was guided only bythe distinctly human faculty of reason, or consisted in obedience to whatoffered itself as God’s revealed law. Strauss insisted that ultimately theseoptions were mutually exclusive. Yet ancient philosophy and the Bible, thetwo roots of western civilization, were in practical accord on the content ofmorality – Strauss pointed to the congruence between Greek natural lawand the second table of the Decalogue, plus the shared emphases on justiceand divine law. Even though ancient philosophy and revelation differed onthe ultimate basis of morality and on the good life for human beings, hefamously insisted that ‘this unresolved conflict is the secret vitality ofWestern civilization’ that must be preserved and re-enacted to defend thatcivilization. (Strauss 1981, 34–5, 44 (quote)). Thus, given the utterincompatibility of the premises of philosophy and revelation, modernthinkers (beginning with Spinoza) had only mocked but not refuted thepossibility of revelation (Tanguay 2007, 22–37; Strauss 1953, 75).
In Strauss’s view, the modern West was in crisis because it had come todoubt its normative standards in either revelation or reason’s discernment of
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what is right by nature, as well as the Enlightenment’s promise of continualprogress through science toward universal prosperity, freedom, and justice.A defining characteristic of the crisis was the inability to ‘know what is goodand bad, what is right and wrong’ (Strauss 1989, 81 (quote); Strauss 1981,30). As a result, the Socratic question, and Strauss insisted, the fundamentalhuman question – ‘What is the best way of life?’ – had become pointless.Moderns merely indulged their shallow appetites in a mass consumeristculture with no sense of nobility or ambition for truth. How had the Westcome to this dangerous pass, and why did Strauss and his followers thinkthat a project of recovery was even possible or needed in specific aid ofAmerican constitutionalism? Strauss traced the decline of the West to theincreasingly more destructive and destabilizing ‘three waves of modernity’that eventually had replaced ancient political philosophy and biblicalmorality with historicism, positivism, and nihilism. As a historian ofpolitical thought, Strauss undertook this diagnosis, to which he then applieda preliminary antidote – a critique of historicism as a philosophical claim,along with an attack on the positivist Weberian social science that was itsclose cousin.
Machiavelli initiated the first wave of modernity by abandoning as tooutopian the ancient standards of the best regime and human virtue. (Thisand the next two paragraphs call on Strauss’s most compressed andaccessible formulation, 1989, 81–98, 39–57. I am aided especially by Zuckertand Zuckert 2006; Pangle 2006; Smith 1997; Blitz 2004). Aiming atexcellence, the ancients were too ineffectual and too reliant on the chancecoincidence of wisdom and rule. Machiavelli sought to conquer chance byconstructing politics on the more reliable and effectual passions or appetitesshared by all, namely fear, ambition or love of glory, and greed. The newpolitical good for citizens would become the much more achievablesatisfaction of desire, prosperity, and security. Forsaken were restraints onthe passions enforced by laws that were themselves oriented toward virtue orbiblical morality, and Strauss underscored the foundation of modernity in‘antitheological ire’ (Strauss 1989, 44). In modern politics, institutions aimedonly to channel the passions so that enough order could be maintained forthere to be widespread satisfaction. This first wave of modernity was abettedby the Enlightenment understanding of reason which, following Bacon andDescartes, saw it as a tool for conquering nature. It was further advanced byHobbes’s overtly materialist-atheist reinvention of natural right asindividual self-preservation in a hostile state of nature; and completed byLocke, who added limited government under the rule of law, religioustoleration, and acquisitiveness – but who prudently veiled their roots inHobbes by appearing to reconcile his teaching with Christianity.
Rousseau inaugurated the second wave by rejecting even the reducedconcept of nature that had survived the first. He sought virtue not byreturning to the ancient notion of natural human ends discerned by reason,
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nor to the first wave’s state of nature and rights as the ground and limit ofpolitics, but to history. It was a nonteleogical but humanizing process whichcreated changeable though rational and universalizable standards, asarticulated in a given society’s ‘general will’. The second wave culminatedin the German philosophers of history (especially Hegel and Marx), whofollowed Rousseau but taught that history actually did move inevitably andprogressively toward a rational and just social order.
Nietzsche began the third wave by turning Enlightenment rationalismagainst the mature second wave’s claim about the intrinsic meaning ordirection of history. Rather, in what came to be called ‘historicism,’Nietzsche said that history revealed that all standards for judging itsdirection, including claims about good and evil, be they grounded on reason,God, or nature, were the result of creative human acts that shaped andlimited all cultures. All perspectives were partial and transitory, and claimsof truth were incapable of rational demonstration according to the canonsof Enlightenment reason. Each had been constructed to overcome humanbeings’ terror about the meaninglessness of existence. The appropriateresponse to the human predicament was the conscious construction of‘values’ to govern one’s own reality, and perhaps that of others – the will topower. In Nietzsche’s historicism, with its readily apparent nihilist andtotalitarian potential, Strauss believed that modern rationalism and atheismhad nearly reached their full depth, achieved finally in Heidegger’s explicitrejection of the very notions of eternity and the good society, and in hisconsequent welcoming of the Nazis as a dispensation of fate.
Strauss treated historicism as a profound threat to western civilizationand modern America because, in dismissing philosophy and religion, itdeprived public life of any ethical orientation. Building on the Platonicmetaphor of the cave, he described historicism as a cave beneath the naturalcave. It obscured the first cave’s original, natural contest betweenphilosophy and inherited opinion (including religious belief) as competingapproaches to the truth and the best way of life. However, Strauss alsoinsisted that it was impossible to ignore Nietzsche’s explosion of modernrationalism’s claims to have derived permanent standards from history.When combined with the prior modern rejection of classical rationalism,virtue, and the Bible, Nietzsche had expressed and advanced modernity’scrisis. Yet Nietzsche also was liberating. In supposedly reducing to opinionor fantasy all claims to truth, he showed the way back to the theological-political problem of the original cave. Strauss saw that to undertake thisreturn as an activity that might reveal something true or good required thathistoricism itself be rethought (Strauss 1989, 23–4, 98; Strauss 1972, 228;Tarcov and Pangle 1987, 918–9; Tanguay 2007, 44–6).
To do so he first observed that successive disagreements about the natureof justice or the best form of government did not prove that newerphilosophies had refuted or justifiably superseded older ones. It proved only
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that competing philosophies contradicted one another. History as the mererecord of succession was therefore an insufficient criterion for judging theircompeting truth claims (Strauss 1953, 10, 19; Strauss 1949, 35–6). Indeed,analysis of the past that did not assume the truth of historicism might reveala striking transhistorical continuity: the ‘‘‘experience of history’’ does notmake doubtful the view that the fundamental problems, such as the problemof justice, persist or retain their identity in all historical change’ (Strauss1953, 32 (quote); Strauss 1952, 586). If history exhibited the persistence ofphilosophy understood as knowledge of permanent problems and theiralternative solutions, then in principle, reasoning about this commonexperience could produce the true or most just solution (natural right).Strauss next observed that as a matter of logic, historicism was self-refutingand survived only by exempting itself from its own claims. In alleging thatall thought is determined by its historical context, historicism had the same‘trans-historical character or pretension as any natural right doctrine’(Strauss 1953, 24). Yet historicism could not logically insist that all thoughtis historical and itself require an absolute historical moment in which thatfinal truth was revealed once and for all. Thus the ‘historicist thesis is self-contradictory or absurd’ and to assert it ‘means to doubt it and thus totranscend it’ (Strauss 1953, 25 (quote), 29).
Strauss criticized the noted philosopher and historian R.G. Collingwoodfor typifying historicist errors. By reducing past philosophies to reflectionsof their times, Collingwood actually had decided beforehand on preciselythe issue between historicism and all previous philosophies. He assumed‘that to know the human mind is to know its history, or that self-knowledgeis historical understanding. But this belief contradicts the tacit premise of allearlier thought, that premise being the view that to know the human mind issomething different from knowing the history of the human mind.Collingwood therefore rejected the thought of the past as untrue in thisdecisive respect’ (Strauss 1952, 575. See also Strauss 1949, 41, 44). Torecognize and then seriously entertain the transhistorical truth claims of apast philosophy, rather than presupposing that it merely expressed its timeand thus was true only for its time, was to engage history on nonhistoricistterms and constituted the ‘self-destruction of historicism’ (Strauss 1952a,158; Pangle 2006, 63–5). Just such ‘nonhistoricist understanding ofnonhistoricist philosophy’ was urgently needed if the issue betweenhistoricist and nonhistoricist philosophy remained open, as Strauss thoughtit was. Such studies would attempt to understand earlier philosophers asthey understood themselves – as presenting a true, transhistorical teachingabout human beings and politics (Strauss 1953, 33 (quote); Strauss 1952, 39–42. See also Meier 2006, 55–73). Equally necessary was ‘a nonhistoricistunderstanding of historicism, that is, an understanding of historicism thatdoes not take for granted the soundness of historicism,’ which seems an aptdescription of Strauss’s thesis about how the three waves of modernity
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logically culminated in the philosophically dubious doctrine of historicism(Strauss 1953, 33). Strauss thus presented himself, at least in the firstinstance, as a historian of thought who did not assume the truth of thehistoricist philosophy of his own age, and therefore as better prepared thanhistoricists to learn something from the past, perhaps the truth, as opposedto merely the past’s contribution to the beliefs of the present (Strauss 1949,41–2; Strauss 1952, 576, 582–3). One might justifiably conclude that Straussrethought the status of historical knowledge as profoundly and critically asanyone in the twentieth century.
A direct outcome of this rethinking was Strauss’s controversial thesisthat some philosophic texts were written esoterically. The surface of such atext offered a benign, publicly acceptable (exoteric) doctrine that accom-modated itself to reigning opinions (including religion); its depth whencarefully studied revealed the philosopher’s own (esoteric) teaching, whichmight challenge or reject those opinions with a true answer to a permanentphilosophical problem. The intricacies and controversy surrounding thisclaim cannot be pursued here, but Strauss could not have made it withoutcarefully attending to past thinkers’ repeated assertions of having presenteda true teaching that had to be insulated or hidden; that is to say, Strauss wasled to assert the existence of esoteric writing by first questioning whether aparticular thinker’s relationship to his times might be one of deliberate andsuperficial ‘adaptation rather than unconscious reflection,’ something thatwas impossible from within historicism. (The issue is treated mostextensively in Strauss 1952a. My summary here is aided by Tarcov andPangle 1987, 914–6, 914 (quote); Pangle 2006, 56–65).
Strauss also repeatedly attacked the fact-value distinction at the core ofmodern positivist social science. He did so even though positivism, the claimthat reason can verify only empirical sense data and not the validity of‘value’ judgments, collapsed into historicism if and when positivistsrecognized the subjectivity and historicity of the questions they asked(Strauss 1989, 21–3). Positivism still had to be confronted because it defined‘behavioralism,’ whose dominance of mid-century American politicalscience obstructed any return to the ancients. Strauss, again as a historianof thought, argued that Max Weber, the father of modern social sciencepositivism and the fact-value distinction, in practice had recurred regularlyto exactly the value judgments he supposedly abjured. Strauss gave a litanyof examples of how ‘Weber, like every other man who ever discussed socialmatters in a relevant manner . . . [made] value judgments.’ Weber spoke‘almost constantly of practically all intellectual and moral virtues and vicesin the appropriate language, i.e. in the language of praise and blame’(Strauss 1953, 49–62, quotes at 52, 51).
Strauss applied this criticism more broadly in a noted polemic againstbehavioralism in American political science. The discipline’s attempt toderive objective laws of politics on the basis of the fact-value distinction
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assumed the norms and institutions of contemporary America as both thestandard of judgment and the protective cover for its enterprise. America’sindividualistic, relativistic liberal democracy and the fact-value distinctionentailed and reinforced one another. Additionally, while sheltered by thedecaying moral norms and political institutions of the West, this socialscience denied the possibility of establishing any ground on which to defendor criticize them. On its own logic it could neither name a brutally eviltyranny when it saw one, nor say why the United States was manifestlybetter than the Soviet Union. Accordingly, behavioralist political scienceonly deepened, as it obscured, the modern crisis (Strauss 1962; Strauss1968a, 189; Strauss 1953, 1–5; Behnegar 2003, 187, 189–94, 199–206. Seealso Strauss 1989, 98).
Tracing the history of the fact-value distinction, Strauss located itultimately in Weber’s despair at modern reason’s inability to justify the lifeof rational inquiry (science) in the face of revelation – its failure to solve thetheological-political problem. On the one hand, Weber rejected as absurdany notion of revelation and accepted the dogmatic atheism of theEnlightenment, but on the other hand he acknowledged that reason hadnot refuted the possibility of revelation and could not. On its own terms,then, science could not justify itself as the demonstrably true or best waylife – it depended on a decision or a leap of faith that sacrificed the intellect.At this impasse Weber announced that reason was able only to acknowledgefacts but could not evaluate among claims about better and worse, high andlow – ‘values’ could be neither rationally established nor defended (Strauss1953, 71–6; Behnegar 2003, esp. 112–37, 209–10; Pangle 2006). Straussresponded that actually Weber had not shown that reason was incapable ofestablishing universal norms or judging between them, but only that anethics proclaiming its ‘otherworldly’ source was incompatible with thestandards of human excellence or dignity that long had been discernible tothe human mind. Granting that modern reason could not refute revelationas the source of this ethics did not mandate the conclusion that reason wasunable to solve social problems, whose solutions in principle were alwaysopen to questioning ‘on the basis of superhuman knowledge or of divinerevelation’ (Strauss 1953, 70–1). If modern reason could not solve all or theultimate conflict between values (the theological-political problem), ‘if wecannot decide which of two mountains whose peaks are hidden by clouds ishigher than the other,’ Strauss asked, ‘cannot we decide that a mountain ishigher than a molehill? If we cannot decide, regarding a war between twoneighboring nations which have been fighting each other for centuries,which nation’s cause is more just, cannot we decide that Jezebel’s actionagainst Naboth was inexcusable?’ (Strauss 1989, 19). Weber’s positioninvolved a non sequitur: modern reason’s conflict with revelation simply didnot require abandonment of evaluating reason as it had developed from theancients up through the history of the West.
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Based on this critique of Weber and the earlier attack on historicism,along with the inevitability of value judgments in any humanly relevantassessment of social problems, Strauss held that the way was indeed openfor a historical inquiry that took seriously both the possibility of naturalright discernible by reason and the possibility of revelation. Such an inquirywould return as much as possible to the world as experienced prior to itsdescription by or interaction with any theoretical abstraction – the world ofcommon experience as people naturally expressed their relationship to it.This of course required not only getting behind the Enlightenment’sreduction of reason to a tool for modifying or conquering nature, but alsogetting ‘behind the first emergence of science or philosophy’ to humanbeings’ prescientific awareness. Strauss believed that it was just thisorientation that was available to be studied in the great books of Westerncivilization, starting with the ancients as they confronted legal conventionand the gods, and later, the moderns as they confronted biblical religion.This orientation and these confrontations had to be re-enacted in order todetermine whether reason alone could establish truth (Strauss 1953, 77–80,quote at 79; Pangle 2006, 38–9). Modern thought, concluded Strauss, hadnot settled the issue – but its conviction to the contrary had succeeded indepriving political discourse and analysis of any normative basis.
Upon making a nonhistoricist ‘return to the ancients,’ Straussemphasized (to simplify greatly) that Plato had conveyed the conflictbetween happiness for a philosopher, the life of free and reasoned inquiryinto the whole and the nature of things, and the basis of politicalcommunities in rationally indemonstrable convention and opinion (typicallyconcerning the gods and justice). Ancient philosophy as Strauss understoodit, then, was ‘zetetic,’ inquiring and skeptical – a quest for knowledge of theworld that was the opposite of dogmatism, faithful obedience, or theimposition of reductive theoretical abstraction. Philosophy taught notdoctrines, but that human existence and reason’s limits pointed to thepermanence of certain problems or questions, such as the nature of thewhole and man’s place in it, the best regime, and the content of justice. (See,for example, Strauss 1953, 32. This and the following paragraph draw onTanguay 2007, Tarcov 1983, and Zuckert and Zuckert 2006.) Platonicphilosophy did not hold that knowledge could replace opinion as the basisof political society, nor that philosophers were likely to rule or would wantto. Moreover, philosophy as a bold and free inquiry that inevitably fell shortof a rational articulation of the whole might appear useless or dangerous tononphilosophers. Its survival required that its public face be cautious andmoderate, yet enticing to potential philosophers fitted for it as a way of life.
If philosophy might never fully attain its goal, it yet could offer a portraitof the best conceivable regime as a guide to the best possible regime. Andbecause politics pointed to but could not fulfill the deepest human longingfor truth about the whole, philosophers also could moderate the zeal of
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those with misplaced ambitions and educate the prudence of potentialrulers. Politics thus conceived was a practical endeavor directed toward thehappiness of citizens, which was gained through the perfection of the virtuesor excellences understood as the natural human ends toward which allpeople were ‘inclined’ and had ‘some awareness’ (Zuckert and Zuckert 2006,56; Strauss 1962, 309 (quote)).
Consequently, Strauss also resurrected ancient political science, asexpressed especially in Aristotle’s Politics. It began from the inherently andirreducibly evaluative perspective of the citizen who judged political thingsin terms of better and worse, just and unjust (and to whom the fact–valuedistinction was alien). Aristotelian political science aimed to understand theinevitably partial view of justice in various regimes as expressed in theirlaws; to move regimes as much as possible toward greater justice and virtueby improving their deliberation and legislation; and to preserve regimes bymoderating their tendencies toward conflict, decline, and transformation.Given that the absolute rule of the wise was unattainable, Aristotle praisedthe ‘mixed’ regime or ‘polity’ under the rule of law, in which the middlingelement of society stabilized a combination of democracy (rule of the manypoor) and oligarchy (rule of the wealthy few). He seemingly preferred as thebest practicable reconciliation of wisdom and consent an aristocraticrepublic mixed with monarchic and democratic elements, which abided bythe rule of law yet also needed prudent statesmen, enlightened as much aspossible by philosophy, to respond to unforeseen circumstances. (Strauss1962, 309–11; Strauss 1953, 140–3, 157–63; Strauss 1972, 233–42; Pangle2006, 89–91, 94–9; Zuckert and Zuckert 2006, 56, 60–1, 76–8). Law andprudence ordered political life toward natural human excellences, and assuch politics need not give a full theoretical account of itself or its place inthe cosmos. Based on this view Strauss defended noble and decent politicalpractice against any totalizing or reductive theories that attempted todispense with restraint or prudential statesmanship.
Armed with Strauss’s insights, many of his students turned to Americanhistory with an openness to the claims of truth and goodness featured in itsfounding principles and constitutional arrangements. Yet Strauss’s thoughtalso presented a conundrum. As one recent study put it, for Straussmodernity was ‘bad’ because it was low, having based politics on thepassions and thus a truncated understanding of human reason and dignity.But America was modern because its government did not cultivate virtueand was rooted in the philosophy of Locke, which depended on institutionsto channel individuals’ passions and protect their rights (derived in Locke,as in Hobbes, from their passions). How then to understand thecharacteristic Straussian position, typically associated with Americanconservatism, that America was ‘good’ and that its constitutionalism wasworthy of defense and preservation? (Zuckert and Zuckert 2006, 58–79,197–202) In the broadest sense, Straussians defended American
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constitutionalism by redescribing its origins, development, and currenttendencies from the perspective of Aristotelian political science. In someversions, they argued that America was not an entirely modern regime andtherefore that it allowed and benefited from virtue and prudentialstatesmanship; or to the extent that it was modern, its political practiceand discourse were supplemented and elevated by ancient insights. In otherversions Straussians defended the philosophy of natural rights and socialcontract as America’s definitive political commitment, arguing that it wasfar superior to other modern options and that to some extent it could bereconciled to Aristotelian political science and biblical morality. Thefollowing brief summary considers a few leading examples of theseapproaches in Straussian constitutional scholarship.
Some Straussians frankly conceded America’s shortcomings as a modernregime, urging, as Strauss had, that its democratic freedom be used toreopen the conflict between ancient and modern political philosophy andthrough it an encounter with the theological-political problem. Such aneducation in the ‘Great Books’ would be the ‘counterpoison to mass culture’because it liberated people from modern vulgarity and exposed them tonobility and beauty (Strauss 1968, 24). The ‘premodern thought of ourwestern tradition’ also might ameliorate contemporary ills if brought intopublic life (Strauss 1989, 98. See also, Fuller 1995; Pangle 2006, 87–8). Thisapproach accorded with Aristotelian political science because it aimed topreserve America by moderating and elevating its potential leaders.Probably the best-known such effort was Allan Bloom’s The closing of theAmerican mind (1987), a pointed attack on modern relativism that offeredthe Great Books as an antidote (see also Pangle 1992). Strauss’s studentsalso advanced this effort in ‘nonhistoricist studies of nonhistoricist thought’ranging from Thucydides to Locke and beyond, as well as in many carefultranslations of ancient and modern philosophical works that frequentlybecame standard scholarly editions.
Still, Strauss cautioned that though his students should not expect toomuch from modern politics, neither should they simply withdraw tocultivate their gardens. An education in the great ideas of westerncivilization, particularly after the horrors of communism and fascism,taught that ‘wisdom cannot be separated from moderation’ and hence that‘wisdom requires unhesitating loyalty to a decent constitution and even tothe cause of constitutionalism’ (Strauss 1968, 24).
One of Strauss’s first students to focus specifically on Americanconstitutionalism (starting in the 1950s) was Martin Diamond (1992),whose analysis of the Federalist papers remains influential. Diamondattacked the dominant economic determinist interpretation of the Americanfounding advanced by Progressive historiography in general and CharlesBeard in particular. In that interpretation the founders had created theConstitution as an oligarchic, antidemocratic bulwark in defense of their
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property interests. Natural rights, the separation of powers, and federalismwere for Progressives anachronisms that only obstructed a properlycentralized, regulatory state. On the contrary, responded Diamond, thefounding contained enduring political wisdom that far surpassed mere self-interest. While the rights-based egalitarianism of the Declaration ofIndependence made America democratic (and modern) at its core, theConstitution, especially via the logic of the ‘extended republic’ in Federalist10 and in the operation of its limiting and checking institutions, had wiselyaccounted for the characteristic ills of democracy.
Diamond never denied that America was fundamentally modern, but bythe time of his premature death he had called upon Aristotle (andTocqueville’s Aristotelianism) to describe America as a genuine politicalcommunity (or regime) in the ancient sense: its citizens shared a view of thejust and advantageous that formed their character. The ‘solid but low’foundation of American politics in individual rights and democratic opinionmeant that the goods it aimed at – prosperity and government by consent –were ‘less lofty’ but therefore imminently more achievable than those of theancients. America called on and cultivated virtues, albeit in the privatesphere (not as a matter of rule as for the ancients), and though they were thedistinctly modern bourgeois virtues, they reached ‘at least to decency if notnobility.’ Likewise, Tocquevillean ‘self-interest rightly understood’ led to akind of public spirit and virtuous republican citizenship. Diamondcounselled that Americans accept the foundation of their political order inmodernity’s ‘human interests and passions’ at the same time that theyappreciate its presupposition of ‘certain enduring qualities that can andshould be achieved in the American character.’ In a sentence that suggestedboth the philosophical basis and conservative bent of much of the ensuingStraussian work on American constitutionalism, he concluded that ‘thepreservation of that foundation and at the same time the nurturing of theappropriate ethical excellences remains the compound political task ofenlightened American statesmen and citizens’ (Diamond 1992, 355, 365, 361,367; see also Zuckert and Zuckert 2006, 209–17).
Another early Straussian analysis of the Constitution was PaulEidelberg’s (1968) argument (against Diamond specifically) that thefounders all along had intended the Constitution as an Aristotelian ‘mixedregime.’ The separation of powers and the composition, selection, andresponsibilities of various offices introduced principles of justice thatchecked and moderated the modern, natural rights-derived basis ofAmerican popular sovereignty. The Senate especially was an oligarchicinstitution that compensated for the democratic House, while thePresidency, also like the Senate indirectly elected for a relatively longterm, instantiated the monarchical element of political rule by providing anoutlet for ambitious leadership. The President also tempered Congress andled public opinion. The Supreme Court, in turn, enabled an aristocratic
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defense of the rule of law against the gusts of democratic public opinion,while early state constitutions provided for the education in religiousmorality and self-restraint that the federal Constitution conspicuouslylacked. As such, the Constitution aimed at achieving justice and cultivatingvirtue as much as had been possible within the modern political culture thatdominated the founding era (Morrisey 1999).
Yet another early Aristotelianizing corrective was Walter Berns’sindictment of modern First Amendment free-speech jurisprudence (1965).Constrained by America’s fundamentally modern Constitution, free-speechjurisprudence had been conceived only as a battle between majoritarianrestraint and individual liberty. Rather, as understood by Aristotle, thepurpose of politics was virtue, not liberty for its own sake. Americaendangered itself by permitting illiberal speech, and Berns urged the Courtto limit speech that undermined moral standards and to defer more often tolocal regulations that promoted them. He also suggested that if the Courtwere properly instructed in Aristotelian political science, it could activelyimprove the regime, compensating for the Constitution’s modern short-comings by ‘unit[ing] constitutionality and wisdom’ (Berns 1965, 189;Zuckert and Zuckert 2006, 202–9, Glenn 1999). In addition to advocatingrestraint on some speech to protect public morality, Berns also latersupported nonpreferential government assistance to religion (Berns 1976,188–228, 34–5, 60, 70–1).
Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr also fortified American constitutionalism bydrawing on Aristotle. He emphasized that American politics need not be lowbecause its constitutional institutions ‘call forth virtue’ even though they donot guarantee it, and foster reasoned deliberation about the public goodwithout ensuring it. For example, Mansfield’s history of executive powerargued that America was an ‘Aristotelian regime formalized in writing’(Mansfield 1989, 281, 276) that had ‘republicanized’ this dangerous yetinevitably necessary force since Machiavelli had bequeathed it to modernity.As an office that relied on prudence in emergencies and invited leadershiptoward long-term policy goals, the Presidency attracted those ambitious forhonor and glory who emerged in all regimes. Yet in creating the Presidencywithout very precisely defining its authority, the Constitution asked itsoccupants voluntarily to act virtuously and for the common good. That theConstitution could not guarantee this result but needed the officenonetheless was the regime’s recognition of a truth about politics obscuredby modernity – that it involved attributes of the human soul, as well aschance. Mansfield similarly argued that institutional features of Americanconstitutionalism such as representation, federalism, and the separation ofpowers maintained it precisely to the extent that they moderated andelevated democratic public opinion in the direction of the common goodand reason. Institutions put a certain distance between popular will andgovernment action, thereby facilitating (again, without guaranteeing) the
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public’s more deliberative and informed self-government. (This is a majortheme of Mansfield 1991. My discussion is aided by Kraynak 2000 and Eden1999.) Numerous other Straussian studies of the Federalist papersconsidered such themes (for example, Kesler 1987).
Aristotle also loomed large in the work of Harry V. Jaffa. His influentialCrisis of the house divided (1959), a study of the Lincoln–Douglas debates of1858, argued that Abraham Lincoln used the crisis over slavery and union torescue America from its low, modern, Lockean natural right foundations –in essence by refounding it in accordance with a Christian-inflectedAristotle. Lincoln was akin to Aristotle’s magnanimous man, proud of hissuperior virtue and strength and deserving and capable of ruling his unequalfellows. But Lincoln, in his superiority, chose to serve and to save republicanself-government. He insisted that the equality principle of the Declaration ofIndependence become a principle of justice, and not merely the basis forindividual rights – the latter having been the original, Lockean formulationthat had not in fact and could not in logic forbid the majority fromenslaving the minority. Lincoln ‘transcends and transforms’ the originalmeaning of equality into the proposition that ‘every man had an equal rightto be treated justly,’ confounding ‘the meaning of a right, meaning anindefeasible desire or passion, with what is right, meaning an objective stateor condition in which justice is done’ and ‘every man is rendered his due’(Jaffa 1959, 318, 320, 328 emphasis in original, 329). Jaffa thus argued forthe superiority of Aristotelian political science in understanding Lincolnwhile also showing how Lincoln, in appealing to a natural law standard andto Christian morality, had placed American politics on a higher and moremoral foundation than originally it had had. Lincoln elevated the equalityprinciple of the Declaration into a ‘passionate and passion-conqueringconviction,’ and incorporated its truths into ‘a sacred and ritual canon,making them objects of faith as well as cognition’ (Jaffa 1959, 229). As onestudy has concluded, Jaffa’s project was prompted by Strauss’s core themesand by Jaffa’s attempt to overcome Strauss’s ‘lukewarm and hesitantendorsement of America’ as a modern regime. To defend America byarriving at a view of it better than its modern origins, Jaffa offered Lincolnas ‘the Aristoteleian-philosopher-statesman-refounder’ (Zuckert and Zuck-ert 2006, 226).
Jaffa subsequently developed this position into a much strongerconservative philosophical defense of American constitutionalism. Hecame to see the founding as more Aristotelian in its seeking to securenatural human ends and more Christian in its understanding of humanequality and dignity. (This thinking culminated in Jaffa 2000.) The shiftfocused on the Declaration’s appeal to ‘nature and nature’s God’ as agrounding for human equality and rights, which now were said to depend oneither the notion of man as god’s creation or on reason’s ability to deduce aperfection only approximated in human excellence. Human equality
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consisted in existence beneath perfection or God, but above the unreasoninganimals. Thus, as a philosophical doctrine it could be understood inAristotelian or Christian terms. Either basis for equality grounded the dutyto respect other people as expressed in the language of rights, justifiedgovernment by consent, and pointed to constitutionalism as the form ofgovernment that best secured these ends. In America, then, equality, naturalrights, and consent had finally replaced direct appeals to wisdom orrevelation as the basis of politics, thereby solving a problem that hadafflicted the West since the rise of Christianity. Moreover, in disqualifyingreligion as a claim to rule – in separating church and state – the regime ofequality, rights, and consent allowed piety to flourish, philosophy to besheltered, and virtue to be practiced for its own sake. From this Jaffanperspective the American founders had resolved, at least on the politicallevel, the version of the theological-political problem they had confronted(Kesler 1999, 277–8; Erler 2006, 448). Now Lincoln had not refounded andimproved America toward superior Aristotelian politics and Christianmorality – they had been there originally and needed only to be fullyexplicated and adhered to. Based on this philosophical-historical redescrip-tion of America, the proper political prescription for our time was ‘astraightforward and patriotic return to the founders’ and to Lincoln as theirheir (Zuckert and Zuckert 2006, 239–52, quote at 251).
Jaffa and his followers defended America by pronouncing that it was notfundamentally modern, which in turn involved the historical claim that itsfounders had not built wholly on Locke’s conception of rights. Rather, theyhad accepted Locke’s exoteric teaching, compatible with Aristotle andChristianity (Jaffa 2001; West 1991a), even though Strauss himself seemedto have had little doubt that Locke’s esoteric teaching was Hobbesian. TheJaffan position has generated a major battle among Strauss’s followersabout the core of Locke’s philosophy and its reception and effect inAmerica. At issue is whether America benefits from pre-modern elementsthat inoculated it against modern excesses from its beginning, whether it wasalways a low and unalloyed modern regime that must be improved, orwhether it is modern and therefore in some respects superior to ancientregimes (Zuckert and Zuckert 2006, 248–52; Pangle 1988; Zuckert 2004;Stoner 2004). The shape of this complex dispute derives from Strauss’sstudents’ turn to American constitutional history, and the ideas thatinformed the Constitution, to affirm both his judgment on the history ofpolitical thought and the goodness and defensibility of the Americanpolitical system (see also Pangle 2006, 124–5).
This orientation unites and informs a variety of other Straussian workthat has conservative political implications and can only be mentioned here.For example, Straussians frequently draw from Alexis de Tocqueville’sDemocracy in America as the best Aristotelian analysis of modern politicsand of the premodern elements in the United States that moderate and
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improve it – especially the ethics of moral self-restraint and obligationderived from Christianity and sustained in local self-government (Mansfieldand Winthrop 2000; Ceaser 1990; Kraynak 1987; Pangle 2006, 96–8).(A telling counterexample is a Jaffan criticism of Tocqueville for inadequateattention to the Declaration and natural rights, West 1991.) Another largetheme, often expressed in terms of ‘originalism,’ is criticism of the SupremeCourt’s modern jurisprudence of rights creation. It is attacked for bringingthe Court into an illegitimate legislative role that undermines government byconsent and the moral restraints of local majorities in favor of the moralrelativism and unmitigated individualism of modern culture (Wolfe 1994;Franck 1996. Good overviews are Rossum 1999 and Stevens 1997). Finally,the political thought and constitutional change of the Progressive era inAmerica (1900–20) also frequently have attracted Straussian criticism.Progressivism is treated as the watershed period in which the nation driftedfrom its decent, first-wave constitutionalism of federalism, separation ofpowers, and natural rights. Under the influence of second-wave Germanhistoricism and state theory, the descent began into the modern amoralismand statist growth that led to New Deal-Great Society liberalism (forexample, Pestritto 2005; Marini and Masugi 2005).
Straussians assess, defend, and seek to improve American constitutionalismby returning to Aristotelian political science. This approach derives fromStrauss’s philosophical-political project – a critique of modern thought and arecovery of the dispute between biblical morality and Socratic philosophy asthe basis of western civilization. Denying that modern philosophy settles thisdispute, the Straussians provocatively decline to offer their constitutionalscholarship in the way most historians would find amenable – as just onemore perspective – but rather precisely as a challenge to the notion that allviews about how to understand the past, and indeed how to live, have beenconclusively revealed as relative, historical, and constructed. This perspectivegenerates Socratic and Aristotelian criticism of scholars, historical actors,and public policies that advance the philosophically unsound and politicallydangerous teachings of historicism, positivism, and nihilism.
Strauss was conservative insofar as his return to the ancients aimed topreserve contemporary liberal democracy and to renew attention to thehighest achievements of western civilization. In the mid-twentieth centurythe marginalized forces of intellectual conservatism appreciated his focus onnatural right and natural law and his attack on the fact-value distinction andhistoricism (Nash 1996, 152; Germino 1967, 149–61). His students’ attemptsto defend or reconceive American constitutionalism continue this con-servative orientation. Nevertheless, the thought of Strauss and his studentsopposes the libertarian/laissez-faire and traditionalist wings of modern
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American conservatism. One finds no inkling of the supposed sovereignty ofthe market or the autonomous individual in a thinker so attuned to nobility,prudence, and moderation, and whose most prominent treatment ofLockean liberalism denominated it ‘political hedonism’ dedicated to ‘thejoyless quest for joy’ (Strauss 1953, 251. See also Mansfield 1991, 59, 77,190–1, 213–9; Bloom 1987, 167, 172, 174–8). Strauss was equally clear instating that philosophy originated and endured by questioning inherited,ancestral claims about the good, including religious ones that ultimatelydepended on belief instead of reason (Strauss 1953, 84–5). Consequently,Straussians’ most pronounced conflicts with other American conservativeshave been with traditionalists influenced by Burke and Christianity (forexample, Ryn 2005; Henrie 1994).
Given the typical association of Strauss with conservatism, it is arrestingto learn that some sympathetic scholars place him squarely in the context ofpostmodern thought (Zuckert 1996; Zuckert and Zuckert 2006, 80–114. Seealso Pangle 2006, 32–6). This is so because Strauss understood himself asresponding to the historicist destruction of modern rationalism wrought byNietzsche and Heidegger, and to the Enlightenment-induced breakdown ofbiblical morality, that together inform the postmodern dispensation.Nietzsche and Heidegger convinced Strauss that western civilization was incrisis because it could no longer affirm a basis for morality nor offer acoherent rational defense of its claims to truth and justice. Bereft ofnobility, aspiration, or transcendence, the future threatened only a shallowand uniform existence narcotized by comfort, entertainment, andtechnology.
But unlike the diagnoses of Nietzsche and Heidegger, let alone theirsolutions, Strauss argued that the postmodern situation had not resultedbecause revealed religion had been or could be refuted by modernrationalism. Nor did he accept that the self-destruction of modernrationalism had always inhered in philosophy, which since Greece hadallegedly obscured its failure to achieve metaphysical certainty withintellectual-moral systems that only masked the will to power (Nietzsche),or that were always derived from the shifting temporal horizons of language,place, and culture (Heidegger). Rather, the crisis of the West resulted fromthe modern choice, starting with Machiavelli, to put philosophy into theeffectual service of the passions. As we have seen above, Strauss argued thatbefore this move, philosophy was a zetetic, never-complete quest forknowledge of the whole and had had a more modest and moderating role inpractical politics. Philosophy could neither know the whole, nor prove theimpossibility of revelation, nor create a society free of contradiction andconflict. But it could help to sustain a decent civilization by directingattention to permanent human problems and using the natural humancapacities for reason, virtue, and moral choice to evaluate and moderateattempts at their resolution.
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Strauss’s challenge to the postmodern age, then – and the challenge thatenabled his students to return anew to the claims about nature, politics, andjustice in American constitutionalism – is to ‘free ourselves of from [our]historicist prejudices.’ He aimed Socratically to make ‘his contemporariesmore reasonable by showing them that they did not know what they thoughtthey did – that modern science made a return to antiquity – philosophicor religious – impossible, that human life is essentially historical, thatordinary human beings now know more than the most brilliant minds of thepast’ (Zuckert 1996, 127–8). Consequently, once again we might becometheologians or philosophers. No one could be both or some synthesis thattranscends them, but every one could be ‘either a philosopher open to thechallenge of theology or a theologian open to the challenge of philosophy’(Strauss 1981, 44–5). Maintaining this tension at the center of westerncivilization preserved ‘the possibility or ground for human nobility’ andStrauss thus ‘showed how it was possible to achieve Nietzsche’s fundamentalgoal’ (Zuckert 1996, 196). Straussians invite historians in the postmodernage to rethink our too-confident reduction or dismissal of philosophy andrevelation, to understand the irreconcilable but vitalizing tension betweenthem, and to account more prudently for the possible consequences ofobscuring or ignoring their claims on us. Such rethinking might suggest thenecessity, even the public duty, of investigating historically and judgingpolitically how modern constitutionalism protects and sustains this tension,and how in turn modern constitutionalism might be protected andsustained.
Acknowledgment
The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Earhart Foundation and theGeorgia Southern University faculty development program during the preparationof this article.
Notes on contributor
Johnathan O’Neill is Associate Professor of History at Georgia Southern University.He is the author of Originalism in American law and politics (2005) and his currentresearch is on ‘The idea of constitutional maintenance in twentieth-century America’.
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