Must God be a Conversation-stopper for the Political Philosopher?: Leo Strauss on Philosophy, Religion and Legality

Transcription

1 Must God be a Conversation-stopper for the Political Philosopher?: Leo Strauss on Philosophy, Religion and Legality Miguel Vatter Theory & Event, Volume 20, Number 1, January 2017, pp (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press For additional information about this article No institutional affiliation (22 Sep :43 GMT)

2 Must God be a Conversation-stopper for the Political Philosopher? Leo Strauss on Philosophy, Religion and Legality Miguel Vatter Jeffrey A. Bernstein, Leo Strauss. On the Borders of Judaism, Philosophy, and History (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015), pp.228. $85.00 (hc). $24.95 (pbk) ISBN Grant Havers, Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy. A Conservative Critique (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013), pp $37.00 (hc) ISBN Robert Howse, Leo Strauss. Man of Peace (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp (hc). $34.20 (pbk) ISBN Introduction These three books offer a fairly accurate reflection of the current trends in Strauss scholarship. All three authors wish to depart from the highly charged Strauss wars of the previous decade. 1 One of the unintended consequences of this departure is that Strauss s actual politics recede into a sphere of indeterminacy. Though all three authors imply that if it were at all possible to fix Strauss s politics, then they would most likely fall on the moderate Left rather than on the hard Right of the political spectrum, the focus of their concern lies elsewhere. I would say it concerns Strauss s approach to religion and its significance for philosophy as well as for politics. Put another way, Strauss is queried here in order to propose some reasonable approaches to the problem of inevitable disagreement about absolute matters, in societies where freedom of thought is most valued. Twenty years ago, Richard Rorty argued that for contemporary North Americans (and these days some would say for Europeans as well), to bring up religion when having a political discussion was a conversation-stopper. 2 He had in mind issues like funding for abortion clinics and teaching creationism in public schools. Given what has transpired since in relation to religion in the public sphere, these issues look rather parochial. Today, it seems we can hardly afford having the attitude that bringing up religion in the public sphere is a conversation-stopper. With the advent of post-secularism, when jurists and Theory & Event Vol. 20, No. 1, Johns Hopkins University Press

3 Vatter Leo Strauss on Philosophy, Religion and Legality 239 historians are looking into the religious origins of secular constitutions, we may even say that if God is not part of it, no public and philosophical conversation really matters. And herein lies the interest of these three books, in so far as they all, in different ways and to varying degrees of success, present Leo Strauss as a political thinker who is uniquely interested in getting the conversation moving not only between atheists and believers, between liberals and critics of liberalism, but also across traditional religious and philosophical divides. Strauss s thought has generally been approached from two main problem areas: that of Platonic political philosophy (sometimes called the problem of the Quarrel between Ancients and Moderns) and that of Athens and Jerusalem (which Strauss also calls the theologico-political problem and I shall address as political theology ). For Strauss, the first problem concerns the antagonism between philosophy and democracy, whereas the second problem concerns the relation between philosophy and divine law. In the extant literature, the first problem area has received much more attention than the latter. This is in part due to the allergic reaction of a great many first generation Straussians to the theological component of Strauss s thought. This decision was usually justified by Strauss s presumed atheism and/or Nietzscheanism. 3 The books by Bernstein and Havers make significant contributions to redress the balance by focusing on the second problem and buttressing the claims of Jerusalem to be an essential component of political philosophy in the West. 4 The contribution made by Howse s book to this problem is perhaps less significant; however, the value of the book consists in focusing attention on a crucial element that joins both problem areas, namely, the status of legality in Strauss s thought. Is Maimonides an Athenian Citizen? Bernstein s book is probably the best non-straussian treatment of the problem of Athens and Jerusalem in the thought of Leo Strauss. Within the different Straussian camps, this problem was never properly posed because from the start Athens (meaning Greek political philosophy) was assigned a position of superiority with respect to Jerusalem (meaning Biblical revelation). Previous attempts to address the tension between philosophy and Judaism in Strauss suffered under two related shortcomings. 5 First, the standpoint of Jerusalem was not thought through as that of a city in its own right, and thus the political and philosophical status of divine revelation (what we can call political theology ) was not properly addressed. Second, since Athens and Jerusalem were not taken to symbolize two distinct ways of leading a political and philosophical life, they were assumed to symbolize either two spiritual possibilities found in every individual (e.g., reason and faith) or two dimensions of human life (e.g., theory and practice).

4 240 Theory & Event The merit of Bernstein s book is to have avoided these pitfalls by assuming from the start that both cities represent two complete forms of life, in both of which human life can develop and flourish (rather than posit, for instance, that Jerusalem requires sacrifice of intellect or that Athens requires immoralism ), and, therefore, both cities stand for inherently political forms of life. Furthermore, Bernstein sees that insofar as both cities in Strauss s terms acknowledge that the only way to provide an absolute foundation for law and politics is by reference to divine authority, it [the problem of what is the best or most just life? ] is a theological problem (xix xx). With this statement, Bernstein shifts the emphasis from Athens to Jerusalem, in the sense that political philosophy as a product of Athens is always already under the shadow cast by the more fundamental theologico-political problem formulated in Jerusalem. In another departure from received Straussian wisdom, Bernstein argues that in Strauss these two cities, despite their different approaches to divine law, are not ultimately at war. Bernstein thinks that Strauss is more at home in one of them (Athens), but that he is happy to sojourn in the other (Jerusalem) as some sort of benevolent stranger. This raises the central question posed by Bernstein s book: what need does the Platonic philosopher have to travel to distant lands? What role does Jerusalem play for Athens, and, vice versa, what can Jerusalem learn from Athens? Why is it that, to quote Strauss, every one of us can be and ought to be either the one or the other, the philosopher open to the challenge of theology, or the theologian open to the challenge of philosophy? 6 Bernstein argues that Maimonides becomes the central figure for Strauss because he best embodies the productive tension between Athens and Jerusalem. For Bernstein, Maimonides is a philosopher ( a citizen of Athens [xxii]), but he is also a defender of the Torah. Agreeing with other commentators that Strauss was not a believing Jew, Bernstein nonetheless wants to claim that Strauss s engagement with Jerusalem is itself an aspect of philosophy as a contemplative way of life. In other words, Strauss does not think that philosophers ought to travel to Jerusalem merely for pragmatic or practical reasons (e.g., because philosophers, like other human beings, need social order, or morality, or justice) but for theoretical reasons. This is what Bernstein means by saying that Strauss is a citizen of Athens on the border of Jerusalem (xxix). It seems to me that this is an invaluable and original hypothesis. Bernstein rejects a reasoning often found in the Straussian secondary literature that goes roughly like this: if Maimonides is really an Athenian philosopher, then he must be an atheist; if Maimonides is an atheist, then he cannot possibly defend Jerusalem; if not even Maimonides, who codified the law, can defend Jerusalem, then that city lacks entirely a foundation.

5 Vatter Leo Strauss on Philosophy, Religion and Legality 241 Bernstein can put forward such a refreshing interpretation of the problem of Athens and Jerusalem in Strauss because, in an excellent first chapter, he takes the trouble to place Strauss within the development of 20 th century Jewish philosophy. Thus, he knows that the relation between Athens and Jerusalem cannot be encapsulated by a neat either/or between reason and faith because, at least since Hermann Cohen, Jerusalem stands for a position for which our philosophy is at the same time our faith (Cohen, Jüdische Schriften vol. III, 173). Minimally interpreted, Jerusalem must offer a dwelling place for Athens. 7 Maximally interpreted, Jerusalem can be construed as a standpoint that can be thoroughly permeated by pagan philosophy without losing its essence. This was the standpoint of Cohen; it may also have been the standpoint of Philo; and perhaps even that of Maimonides. Fraenkel has recently called this standpoint that of philosophical religions, a problematic expression that for the moment will have to do. 8 Bernstein does not go that far: for him, Athens remains the sole legitimate locus of philosophy, and it needs Jerusalem because the philosopher comes to knowledge of his or her own position precisely through the engagement with the religious claim concerning divine law (14). But whether Jerusalem needs Athens as much. That question serves as the limit case of my investigation. Insofar as he identifies himself as a citizen of Athens, we do not know how Strauss conceives of Jerusalemite engagement with Athens (15). Is that really so? Could Strauss s Maimonides not be exactly the Jerusalemite engagement with Athens? And, for that matter, what makes us so sure that Strauss was really a citizen of Athens? Could he not have been a stranger in Athens? 9 In my opinion, Bernstein never conclusively shows that Strauss became a citizen of Athens. Being a non-believer, even an atheist, does not place oneself automatically on the side of Athens: leaving aside medieval philosophers, there are plenty of counterexamples, from Spinoza to Freud and Einstein. 10 When Strauss says that the pure reason in Plato s sense is closer to the Bible than the pure reason in Kant or, for that matter, Anaxagoras s or Aristotle s sense (Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity 396, cited at 16) Bernstein concludes that Strauss, as a citizen of Athens, would prefer Anaxagoras and Aristotle (we can also add here Farabi and Averroes) to the (mythical) narratives of Plato and the Bible. But this is far from clear. Strauss may actually be much closer to Cohen (who sided with Plato and the Bible, on one side, against Aristotle and Averroes, on the other). In what is the pièce de resistance of this rich book, Bernstein gives an exquisitely subtle and clever reading of Strauss s What is Political Philosophy? as an enactment of the pas de deux between Athens and Jerusalem, focusing on its first essay, which Strauss delivered as lectures in Jerusalem. Bernstein is the first commentator, to my knowledge,

6 242 Theory & Event who investigates in great depth the meaning of Strauss delivering his lecture on What is political philosophy? precisely on a visit to Jerusalem. Since most Straussian interpreters agree that this question is key to Strauss s oeuvre, 11 the fact that he delivers this lecture in Jerusalem can mean one of two things: either that Strauss is indulging in the kind of subversion of the tradition that he says characterizes Machiavelli which is how it is sometimes taken by Straussians, for instance Lampert or that these Straussian interpreters do not understand the intention behind Strauss s question, which essentially and internally requires its relation to Jerusalem. Only the second implication explains why Strauss says that while being compelled, or compelling myself, to wander far away from our sacred heritage, or to be silent about it, I shall not for a moment forget what Jerusalem stands for (What is Political Philosophy? 10, discussed on 65ff). Bernstein argues that by posing the question what is political philosophy? Strauss silently brings Athens into contact with Jerusalem such that potentially philosophical listeners [in Jerusalem] can recollect the distinction for themselves (91). But the real question is: to what end does Strauss do this? Is it that Strauss (and for Bernstein this also means Maimonides) intends for potential philosophers among Jews to turn away from the Torah? Bernstein recognizes that for Strauss only divine legislation can bring about an identity of justice and law (103), but argues for that very reason his service to Jerusalem is to preserve the theologico-political problem as a question by highlighting the responses to it given in the Jerusalem/Athens distinction (103, emphasis mine). In other words, Strauss meant to highlight the fact that Athens gives a different response to divine law than the one coming from Jerusalem (represented by both Schmitt and Buber, who attempt to carry out a theologisation of politics and who according to Bernstein are the silent interlocutors in Strauss s Jerusalem lectures). But if the point of bringing Athens to Jerusalem is to teach Jews what Athens makes of divine law, then what is this Athenian teaching on divine law? Here Bernstein s book remains too cryptic and allusive. He says that Maimonides, while open to the claims of Jerusalem, is that philosopher who both rejects theocratic impulses and preserves the classical ordering principle of nature which includes an acknowledgment of nature s limits (i.e. of chance) (128). This seems to imply that an Athenian interpretation of divine law depends on a conception of natural law and avoids theocracy. If there is any criticism that can be levelled at Bernstein s wonderful book is that it does not delve into a sustained exploration of what divine law means in both traditions. Only towards the end of the book is there a brief discussion of natural law or law of reason in Halevi, and thus also in Judaism. As is well known, Strauss says that the term law of reason denotes rational nomoi that address the necessities of living together, but also that there is

7 Vatter Leo Strauss on Philosophy, Religion and Legality 243 another part of the law of reason which is intended to lead to knowledge of God. Bernstein takes Strauss to mean Aristotle s God, which is not the God of the prophets. But perhaps here Bernstein separates too quickly classical natural law from the God of Jerusalem, in more ways than one. Indeed, it is problematic to think that a reference to Aristotle s God means a conception of God that is politico-philosophical, since, as Eric Peterson famously showed in Monotheism as a Political Problem, it is precisely Aristotle s God (not to be confused with Aristotle s theology which in fact was an Arabic compendium of the Enneads), rather than Plato s or the prophets conceptions of God, that lies at the basis of Christian political theology, and Strauss was very clear already from Philosophy and Law that he rested great importance on the fact that Arab and Jewish philosophers, as opposed to Christian philosophers, gave a Platonic interpretation to divine law. More importantly, the goal of the divine law according to Maimonides is also intellectual perfection (which may or may not be Aristotelian in the end). All to say, in conclusion, that I am not certain that for Strauss, as Bernstein seems to be believe, one cannot have dual citizenship in Athens and Jerusalem. One would have to examine with more attention whether Strauss s idea of natural right or natural law may not offer a pathway to this dual citizenship. Such a path, for instance, was arguably re-opened by Spinoza s thinking of divine law as natural law. Indeed, one of the merits of Bernstein s book is that it concludes with a bold gesture, namely, by offering Strauss s thought as a non-antagonistic connection of Maimonides with Spinoza. Unfortunately, he does not exploit this connection in order to think the relation between divine and natural laws. Instead, Bernstein employs it in order to provide a liberal approach to Strauss s political philosophy and also to stage an explicit confrontation between the standpoints of political philosophy and political theology. For Bernstein to be a citizen of Athens on the border of Jerusalem means to be a philosopher who rejects the claims of revelation but acknowledges the necessity of (and even need for) Jerusalem (155). The reason is that the philosopher may theoretically reject revelation but he or she cannot simply reject morality. But morality is grounded, for Strauss, in (the belief in) the authority of law (161), and thus is rooted in Jerusalem. But is it the case that the Maimonidean line reduces Jerusalem to morality? Does the Torah only allow for the multitude s acquiring correct opinions corresponding to their respective capacities (Guide of the Perplexed, III,27 cited on 129), or does it also allow for the ultimate perfection to become rational in actu, I mean to have an intellect in actu (ibid.; also, III:54)? At one point, Bernstein quotes a remark that Strauss made about Maimonides: If he had not brought the greatest sacrifice, he could not have defended the Torah against the philosophers as admirably as he did in his Jewish books (What is Political Philosophy? 169 cited at 131).

8 244 Theory & Event Bernstein thinks this sacrifice consists in bringing the fundamental distinction between Jerusalem and Athens to Jerusalem without simply resting in an affirmation of either side (132). I think Strauss might have meant the opposite, namely that Maimonides sacrificed the greatest thing, namely, faith in God, precisely in order to defend the Torah as knowledge of God. What Does Western Constitutionalism Owe to Christianity? For the most part, Havers book is unpreoccupied with the role played by Judaism and Islam in Strauss s political philosophy. His problem which is today once again of burning actuality is whether the western secular modern political order rests on Christian foundations or, conversely, whether secular constitutionalism disavows all religious foundations. Havers defends the first option: the foundations of Anglo-American democracy are uniquely offered by Christianity (7), a single religious faith (8). He takes Strauss to defend the second option. For Havers Strauss is no anti-liberal. He writes, I am inclined to believe that he shares some important assumptions with the Left (4) because he interprets the principles or foundations of Anglo-American democracy as philosophically eternal credos. Moreover, he accepts the leftist view that religion is dogma. [and ignores] the best attempts of the Anglo-American tradition to defend religion Christianity as a quasi-rational influence that insists on the practice of charity (agape) in the political sphere (10). Havers claims that modern liberal democracy depends on Jerusalem having priority over Athens (70). He carries out an effective polemic against the prevailing Straussian interpretation on the grounds that the American Founders did not think in Greek terms (43). However, it is not just some Straussian interpreters who want to see the roots of modern constitutionalism in classical Greek political philosophy. This step was already taken by great constitutional thinkers like McIlwain in the 1940s in his classic Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modern, and McIlwain cannot be suspected of being either a Leftist or a Straussian. And, if only we are willing to admit that there is a lot of Plato in Cicero, then the argument in favor of the classical roots of modern constitutionalism is further strengthened by the neo-roman construal of modern republicanism by the Cambridge School. Naturally, Havers can always respond that Madison and Kant were both keen to distinguish the democracy of ancient Athens from the modern republic born out of revolution, but by the same token he perhaps overstates his case when he then asserts that The Federalist places reason in the hands of the people and pours scorn on the classical dream of rule at the hands of the few (52). After all, it is precisely the design of a mechanism of representation to select a natural aristocracy that underpins

9 Vatter Leo Strauss on Philosophy, Religion and Legality 245 Strauss s attribution to Jefferson of the Greek belief in the rule of the best over those who are, presumably, inferior by nature (citing What is Political Philosophy? 86 where Strauss quotes from Jefferson s letter to Adams, October 28, 1813 which mentions a pure selection of [the] natural aristoi into offices of the government ). Likewise, if Havers is right that it was not the Federalists but the opponents of Abraham Lincoln below the Mason-Dixon Line [who] were quite happy to embrace Aristotle on their own illiberal terms (55), it would have been appropriate to also cite Frederick Douglass on the much more frequent use of Christian theologemes (among them the racial and racist allegorical readings of the other son of Noah, namely Ham, who was taken to represent those peoples who belong neither to Jerusalem nor Athens and are therefore to be subjected to the kind of civilizational discourse characteristic of modern racism) employed to justify slavery in the American South. But the main critique Havers directs at Strauss is that by rejecting historicism and turning to classical political philosophy, he enters into an aporia, since he cannot then explain how an utterly modern philosophy like natural rights can spring from the works of a Greek philosopher who does not even refer to natural rights (58). As a matter of fact, there is a solution to the aporia signaled by Havers namely, the tradition of civil religion even though I am not sure whether it is the solution that Strauss himself adopts. But before I formulate the alternative, it behooves me to discuss Havers conviction that only the one tradition, Christianity contributed to the rise of natural rights philosophy (59). Havers believes that Strauss construes the difference between Athens and Jerusalem as an opposition between reason and revelation in order to undermine the latter. Strauss, we have seen, always claims that philosophy cannot refute revelation, but it is important to understand why he insists on this truth. This statement reflects his enduring view that religion is dogma, and philosophy must treat it as such. The absolute divorce of reason from revelation is at the core of Strauss s leftist position here. (73) From the above discussion of Bernstein s book, which shows Jerusalem s openness to Athens, we can see that this reading of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem is better suited to Calvinism than either Judaism or Islam. For Havers Calvinism distinguishes true religion from superstition (77), and he believes that both Hobbes and Spinoza pick up on this Calvinist tenet. However, Havers seems to forget that in Spinoza s Critique of Religion Strauss relies on Calvinist arguments to criticize Spinoza for using the distinction between reason and faith to downgrade the Bible to an infra-rational rather than a supra-rational status. For Strauss, unlike for Spinoza, the believer can know everything that the rational person knows, plus something supplementary.

10 246 Theory & Event In any case, the heart of the book is found in the pages where Havers explains that Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke see that biblical morality is crucial in keeping a stable political order from sliding back into the state of nature (81). They give a politicized reading of the Bible (84) which underpins liberal democracy. Here Havers really comes very close to Schmitt s line, according to which Hobbes is the founder of liberalism precisely because of his Christianity, meaning that in the last instance liberalism depends on a political theology. By way of contrast, he claims that for Strauss the undeniable and overwhelming presence of biblical charity in the works of Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke and Montesquieu cannot possibly be sincerely believed, since, in Straussian terms, no true political philosopher is a believer. (89) Havers is upset by Strauss s determination to portray the use of religion among modern political philosophers as purely political and cynical (71). For him, Strauss first downplays the difference between religion and dogma, and second, he downplays the sincerity of Hobbes and Spinoza s reduction of Christianity to charity. It is a pity that Havers never provides a close reading of Strauss s two books on Hobbes, nor of his book on Spinoza which cover all this territory in ways that remain, to date, unsurpassed. This is not the place to engage Strauss s late theologico-political reading of Machiavelli and the finality it pursues (a theme that is also touched on by Howse). However, one thing is certain: Strauss avows the need for religion in any political founding, as Machiavelli s conjuring of Moses and Numa makes clear. These figures, though, were tied together within a discourse on civil religion, and thus Strauss s point, minimally, should be taken to be that if Hobbes and Spinoza are skeptical towards a Calvinist foundation of modern liberal democracy, their skepticism may be in favor of another option, that of civil religion. 12 This conception sought to achieve two main tasks: first, to bring biblical charity together with classical republican virtues; second, to understand divine laws as philosophical or rational. Let me briefly say something on both counts. As Rousseau argued in the chapter on civil religion that concludes The Social Contract, echoing both Hobbes and Spinoza, there is a contradiction in construing a Christian republicanism because the charity preached by Jesus is supra-political. In order to bring Jesus s teaching on divine natural right into a form that is compatible with republicanism, natural right has to take the form of a human (natural) right, that is, it has to adopt the principle of toleration. 13 This was the kind of reinterpretation of Christianity that Spinoza and Jefferson worked hard to develop. One can say that it required placing Jesus in line with prophets like Moses and Mohammed and with political philosophers like Plato within the horizon of what the Renaissance called ancient theology or pia philosophia. So, the trend is not to make reli-

11 Vatter Leo Strauss on Philosophy, Religion and Legality 247 gion less philosophical but if anything, more philosophical or more reasonable. Now, the great paradigm for this exercise is to formulate Judaism (and Islam) as religions of reason, which is roughly the strategy employed by Arabic and Jewish philosophers to whom Strauss dedicated so much attention. If this is correct, then Strauss s attention to Judaism, his openness to Jerusalem has nothing to do with a pang of historicist conscience in Strauss, with Strauss s preoccupation with the survival of Judaism (92) as an expression of fidelity to the ancestral. To the contrary, it signals Strauss s radicalization of Cohen s idea of Judaism as a religion of reason. Thus, I cannot agree with Havers claim that nothing could be less Straussian than Cohen s claim that the concept of reason must engender the concept of religion. (93) I fear that here Havers simply misunderstands both Cohen and Strauss. Havers thinks that Strauss has a problem with Judaism as universalistic religion because what worries Strauss here is that the historical particularity of Judaism will be lost in the liberal assimilation that Spinoza desired (94). I am not entirely sure what Havers means by historical particularity but if he is referring to the revelation of divine Law on Mt. Sinai, then the point of Judaism as a messianic tradition is precisely that this particularistic Law is not the law of a specific nation, but is that Law which shows the path for all nations towards a durable state of peace. Spinoza s interpretation of Judaism remains well within the messianic interpretation of Judaism shared by Cohen, Rosenzweig, Buber and Scholem despite their obvious differences. At one point Havers again repeats the point that Strauss is wrong to attack Spinoza s liberal theology because the latter is a major foundation of the Anglo-American democratic tradition it is hard to imagine the universalism of Western democracy without its Christian foundation (96). This statement leaves the reader perplexed: what kind of Christianity is Havers defending? Is it the Calvinist conception of Christianity or the rational and liberal one of Spinoza? For Spinoza s liberal theology is hardly historicist or particularist. In the end, it is unclear how Havers wants to square his Christian historicism with Spinoza s naturalism and universalism. Havers poses the right question: how can an ethic of universal obligation love of all humanity be taught to all human beings if this ethic is based on a particular faith tradition (155)? But he does not point to the most evident solution offered by the traditions of monotheism to this dilemma: namely, the messianic interpretations given to divine law. So, if it is formally correct to say that if biblical morality is not natural (that is, known to all human beings by the sheer use of reason) then it must be revealed to all humanity by God who, once again, is above nature (161), this is only a first step. Things can by no means be left there precisely because if a particular revelation is designed for all humanity then it is

12 248 Theory & Event necessary to tie it back to what all humanity shares ab initio, and that is something natural. Thus, a second step would be to show that from a messianic standpoint, which is at once also a rational standpoint, the God of Creation and Nature s God are closer than may be thought at first. It is therefore a pity that Havers never turns to Strauss s treatment of Maimonides and al-farabi to see whether and how it is possible to fit biblical morality together with a robust conception of nature. Is Strauss a Thinker of the Rule of Law? Howse s book, like the previous two, situates Strauss on the center-left of the political spectrum. Unlike the other two, Howse s main justification for this turns on his attempt to reconstruct Strauss s mature views on international law and its tendency to act as a gentle civilizer of nations (see Koskenniemi, who is strangely never referenced by Howse). Interpreting his late writings on Thucydides and Athenian imperialism, on Machiavelli, and his lectures on Grotius and Kant, Howse argues that Strauss is a defender of the principles of international law as opposed to power politics. The novelty of this book, then, lies in the second part, where Howse projects onto Strauss some of the current concerns of international legal theory. Here the book is refreshing, if not entirely convincing, and adds to the composite picture of Strauss as a political moderate that emerges from the other two books. However, the first part of the book sees Howse embroiled in a defense of Strauss s more radical pre-war reputation, in particular by analyzing Strauss s lengthy engagement with Schmitt and Kojève. This part of the book, oddly spare in scholarly references, disappoints and falls below the level of scholarship that is to be expected at this point in the development of studies on Strauss. Howse understands Strauss as being involved in a combat with Machiavelli and Machiavellians of the right (represented by the fascist/nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt) and the left (represented by Strauss s friend, the Marxist-Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève) (2). The reason that Strauss spent so much time and energy fighting this philosophical combat is, according to Howse, that as a young man he was indeed anti-liberal, but after leaving Germany in 1933 he sided with classical republican theory. In reality this book says nothing further about republicanism, whether ancient or modern (of course, the main line of transmission of the two traditions is none other than Machiavelli, but Howse ignores this inconvenient fact). Instead, Howse focuses on Strauss s preoccupation with the city at war in the 1950s and 1960s, and therefore with Schmittian themes like the friend/enemy distinction, the decision on the state of exception, and the like. He cites Strauss s letter to Hasso Hoffmann of 1965 where he reaffirms the very great importance of Schmitt s work (cited on 11).

13 Vatter Leo Strauss on Philosophy, Religion and Legality 249 The question, of course, is why Schmitt remains so critical for Strauss throughout his career. Howse s explanation is psychological: He sought, through writing as he did, to show how his youthful temptation toward fascist thought was motivated by high-minded considerations, no matter how misguided, and to atone before God and the Jewish people, through providing a critique of the kind of thought represented by German nihilism, which would be persuasive to others who might be tempted by similar motives (13). Unfortunately, this book drops God and Judaism as soon as they are mentioned (14), and we are left with the pure combat (for the sake of combat?) of Strauss against Schmitt and his warrior morality. Howse never asks what resources from Judaism (or even religion) are brought to play in Strauss s political thought. Thus, his central hypothesis is quite curious: Strauss makes a turn towards God that is accomplished without appealing to God. One would be tempted to say at this point that Howse has unconsciously adopted Altman s claim that Strauss proposes a Judaism without God. Having no recourse to Jerusalem, Howse argues that Strauss enacts a kind of t shuvah, a pulling back from the extreme through critique, often internal, of the extreme [His work] has the result of re-establishing the case for moral-political limits and for legality, hence moderation in Strauss s sense (16). The central problem with Howse s book is that he conceives of these moral-political limits and of the legality that Strauss upholds (despite siding, in an internally critical way, with Schmitt s theory of the exception) entirely without relation to the problem of divine nomoi which Strauss admitted to be central to his development since the 1930s. Thus, we see in Howse an attempt to moderate Machiavellianism by applying Strauss s reading of Thucydides and Grotius. For this reason, his use of the trope of t shuvah is rather empty and non-jewish: it has nothing to do with the use of the term by Strauss himself. 14 Howse is nevertheless convinced that Strauss ends up with a subtle and sober case for constitutionalism and the rule of law that turns the Schmittian attack on its head (16). Let s see whether this is really the case. Howse s story starts late, namely, in the 1930s with Strauss s first open engagement with Schmitt in his well-known review essay on The Concept of the Political. He thus seems to concede Strauss s early involvement with right-wing Zionist movements and the complicated politics of the 1920s detailed in works by Altman and Dotti, among many others. 15 But he disagrees violently with those who have read Strauss s review as anything but a dismissal of Schmitt. He launches an ad hominem attack on Heinrich Meier for having brought out the intensity of the connection between Strauss and Schmitt (27), despite the fact that Meier goes out of his way to find ways to detach Strauss from Schmitt. 16 Howse even claims that Schmitt only wrote Strauss a

14 250 Theory & Event letter of recommendation to study Hobbes in England because given his [anti-semitic] attitude toward Jewish scholars at the time, it is not so surprising that Schmitt would have been happy to facilitate in the early 1930s Strauss getting out of Germany (27). This odd explanation is not only contradicted by Schmitt s admiration for Strauss, but also by Löwith s claim that Schmitt never carried out his theory of enmity into private relationships. In a 1935 essay on Schmitt, Löwith wrote: an analogous situation is present today in the problem of the Jews, a problem which has become political and whose characteristic case is that of anti-semites who are friendly toward Jews; these are people who publicly are enemies of Judaism and who privately are friends of Jews (on this see Schmitt s dedication to his Verfassungslehre and his study of Däubler s Nordlicht). 17 In general, Howse tends to downplay the fact that Schmitt, Strauss, and Kojève deeply engaged with each other s work and displayed mutual respect despite taking political positions that are entirely opposed. 18 It is fairly typical of their philosophical attitude towards political affiliations that Kojève would simultaneously lecture the generation of 68 in Paris and plan a visit to Schmitt, the only philosopher he deemed worth talking to in Germany. For that matter, Schmitt was flattered that his theory of the partisan was taken up by the German extra-parliamentary Left in the 60s and 70s. Howse needs Strauss to be radically opposed to Schmitt, despite all evidence to the contrary, because he believes that Schmitt stands for warrior morality and nihilism (29ff) whereas Strauss purportedly rejects wholesale this kind of morality and instead sides with civilization, strongly associated with the love of peace, whereas the politics of culture are associated with war and conflict. (31) It is slightly ironical that Howse here employs the distinction between culture and civilization that is essentially related to classical German philosophy, from Goethe to Nietzsche. But it is more problematic that he fails to register the tension between the moral standpoint of Jerusalem and the very distinction between culture and civilization. Indeed, civilization is always associated in German philosophy with Rome and the pax romana, not with Athens nor with Jerusalem, and an echo of this usage is still found in Buber s and Levinas oppositions of Judaism to civilization and civilizational discourses. The fact that, in the infamous letter to Löwith that Howse interprets, Strauss appeals to Roman fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles to block Hitler rather than to Christian human rights is more than anything a provocative and heretical call for a romanized form of Judaism. 19 Howse takes his starting point from a lecture by Strauss given in New York in 1941 entitled German Nihilism which was an analysis of the so-called conservative revolution in Germany, associated with Heidegger, Schmitt, and Jünger. In this lecture, Strauss makes the point

15 Vatter Leo Strauss on Philosophy, Religion and Legality 251 that German nihilists do not love war as much as morality (cited on p. 29). This is the same argument found in his earlier review essay on Schmitt. Indeed, although Howse speaks in this context of the nonmercenary morality of German nihilism (30) which is characterized by its atheistic standpoint, and he correctly indicates that Strauss s point in the lecture is to show that these thinkers do not believe it is possible to return to a pre-modern horizon in which God is still felt to be present (30), he forgets to add that Strauss also says that traditional Jewish morality is not mercenary: the reward for the [fulfilment of the commandment] is the commandment ( Preface to Spinoza s Critique of Religion in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 171). Howse rightly points out that Meier does not thematize all of Strauss s Jewish interlocutors (28), of which Buber would be a major one, but neither does Howse. In a long footnote on p. 33 (fn. 16) he attacks Meier s opposition of faith and reason on the grounds that because the quest for wisdom remains open to the possibility that it is faith and not reason that may be what is ultimately needful and because revealed religion, as Strauss knows, always welcomes the return of those who have lost their faith or the conversion of those who have found it, there is no need for a blind decision between faith and reason as Meier suggests. This bland acknowledgment of the problem of Athens and Jerusalem does not answer the crucial question, namely, whether the nonmercenary morality that Strauss is after in returning to a pre-modern horizon requires belief in God and divine laws, and, if so, in what form. Finally, as for Schmitt, Strauss never for a moment viewed him as a political theologian but rather always as an example of that form of political atheism that he labelled German nihilism (p. 34, see also 39). In his 1997 article Howse says that in any case, there is no transcendent morality that vindicates human seriousness behind the thought of Schmitt. Schmitt was not waiting for a god, but rather a Führer who would combine animal vitality with Christian probity (91). This kind of statement not only shows ignorance about Schmitt s thought, which always maintained the necessity of opening the political to a moment of transcendence, as is generally recognized by serious Schmitt scholarship, but it also betrays a lack of imagination in believing that the problem of nihilism is somehow separate and opposed to that of political theology, just as it is mistaken to want to separate atheism from religion in the early 20 th century. This is to forget that German Jewish philosophy during the Weimar period was perhaps the main laboratory for working out the issue of religious atheism from Rosenzweig to Benjamin, and finds one of its highpoints in Strauss himself. In a famous letter of 1935, Scholem reports to Benjamin about Strauss s Philosophy and Law, the book begins with an unfeigned and copiously argued (if completely ludicrous) affirmation of atheism as the most important Jewish watchword. One should remember that

16 252 Theory & Event Benjamin had himself espoused nihilism as the only method for cosmopolitanism: For nature is messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away. To strive after such passing is the task of world politics, whose method must be called nihilism. Benjamin himself had no compunction in citing extensively from Schmitt s work for his habilitation, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, despite having already turned towards communism. 20 According to Howse, Strauss began to turn from Nietzsche and antiliberalism when he began seriously to study the Jewish and Arab philosophers of the Middle Ages (34). A reasonably careful reading of the Introduction to Philosophy and Law would cast into doubt this assertion. But, be that as it may, Howse never seeks to verify whether Strauss s turn to Maimonides is or not Nietzschean, nor does he attempt to connect the texts in which Strauss addresses Schmittian issues to texts in which he works out his new interpretation of medieval philosophy: the trend started in the early 1930s continues straight through the 1940s and culminates in Natural Right and History as well as What is Political Philosophy? In what seems to be a non-sequitur, Howse instead refers to a letter to Löwith of 1932 where Strauss writes that I find [in the Greeks] all elements of a humanism, a human philosophy of/for human beings. How this recovery of Plato and Aristotle is related to Arab and Jewish medieval thought remains unclear and yet it is an essential question, for if Strauss returns to Plato thanks to Al-Farabi, it would be rash to assume that all elements of a humanism refers to a philosophy deprived of God or theology or revelation, as Howse implies (36). Howse s thesis is that, like Schmitt, Strauss was critical of Kelsen and legal positivism, but unlike Schmitt, the inadequacy of legal positivism to subdue human dangerousness does not for Strauss lead in the direction of decisionism or nihilism but rather to a reconsideration of the positivists rejection of natural right, which cannot be fully positivized, cannot be fully coded juridically in an unambiguous manner but that does provide unambiguous directives for deciding all fundamental questions. (37) It is surprising that Howse forgets to mention that in the above cited phrase Strauss is evidently referring to the Platonic critique of rule by laws found in the Statesman and the Laws, according to which the wise man is always above the (positive) laws because he is a living law. This Platonic critique was already adopted by Hegel in his early essay on natural right, referenced by Rosenzweig s Hegel and the State, and thus certainly known to Strauss from early on, much before his reorientation toward Platonic political philosophy. Thus, there is an extremely close relation between the turn backwards to Platonic natural right and the problematization of positive laws with the problem of sovereignty and state of exception thematized by Schmitt. Indeed, this turn towards Plato and Aristotle

17 Vatter Leo Strauss on Philosophy, Religion and Legality 253 was already evidenced in Schmitt himself in those very years ( ) when he was pursuing the Greek idea of nomos (or concrete orders ) in order to counteract Kelsenian legal formalism as well as decisionism. 21 By this I do not imply that Strauss and Schmitt had the same conception of classical natural right, but it is absurd to deny that they were looking at exactly the same texts in order to attack Kelsen s critique of natural right, which Kelsen always thought was a justification for autarchy rather than democracy. We thus arrive at the question of what Strauss s critique of Schmitt really means. Howse dedicates it a couple of pages, where he reiterates his previous interpretation of twenty years ago. Given the volumes of ink spilled on this text since, it is somewhat surprising that Howse only mentions one piece of secondary literature. The crux of the matter, for Howse, is that Strauss accuses Schmitt of sharing Hobbes s idea of the state of nature, in which the human being is evil in an innocent way, namely, in a way that can be mastered by moving to a civil society and thus Schmitt will not be able to criticize one of the features of this civil society, namely, human rights against sovereignty. (Schmitt responds to this Straussian reading in his Hobbes book where he argues, against Strauss, that only Spinoza draws that conclusion, not Hobbes.) Now, for Howse, what Strauss means is that this innocent idea of human nature and human evil takes as unnecessary any prior obligation that limits the claims based on the passions in the state of nature. In other words, Howse thinks that Strauss is opposing Schmitt by pointing out that in a state of nature there is already natural law. Even if this moral reading of Strauss s understanding of the state of nature were correct, one would still need to ask: on what is such a natural morality based? The only answer would be some form of teaching on divine laws as sole basis of nonmercenary morality, as Bernstein and Havers both recognize. In that case, Strauss would have to engage in some form of political theology something that Howse denies, not out of any perusal of the textual evidence, but simply out of his misconstrual of the relation between Strauss and Schmitt. Despite the ample evidence that Strauss turns to classical natural right in order to address the very same problems raised by Schmitt, Howse claims that far from reinterpreting the classics as proto-schmittian, Strauss seeks to show that, although not in the least naïve about the hard political difficulties pointed to by Schmitt, the classics pointed to answers that did not lead to undermining constitutionalism and the rule of law or sanctioning autocracy (49). The key argument is found in Howse s reading of Strauss s On Tyranny. In his early article on which he still relies in the new book, Howse puts emphasis on Strauss s point that in Plato the premise that those who rule absolutely will be wise is coupled with the appeal to consent alongside wisdom as necessary for rule of the wise to be accepted by the many (97,

18 254 Theory & Event citing Natural Right and History 141). Then Howse adds his own take on what this can mean: The many are unlikely to be able to consent to the absolute rule of the wise because the genuinely wise are unlikely to present themselves as candidates for the position (97). In the new book, he says that Strauss employs the Platonic view that only the wise can assert a title to rule absolutely as a foil (49). These claims seem to fly in the face of a Greek tradition in which philosophers regularly presented themselves as lawgivers (Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, Solon, etc.); Plato tried to do the same in Syracuse, just as Aristotle did with Alexander. But, above all, even if it is the case that in Athens the many may have rejected this self-presentation of philosophy (and thus in the end also killed Socrates despite the latter s prudence), it is sufficient to look at Jerusalem to see an example where the many did accept the guidance of a prophet-philosopher-king, namely, Moses. Disregarding previous scholarship on Tyranny that has highlighted how close Strauss preoccupations in this text are to Schmitt s conceptual universe, 22 Howse puts forward his thesis that Strauss ultimate aim is not the Socratic tyrannical teaching that he is trying to faithfully reconstruct, but rather its deconstruction! Since On Tyranny states that tyranny may live up to the highest political standards ; that between Socrates s and Machiavelli s teaching there is merely the subtlest and indeed decisive difference (OT 75, 27 ); and that the beneficent tyrant is the tyrant who listens to the counsels of the wise (OT 74 5), Howse argues that Strauss did not mean what he said because if legitimacy is a matter of openness of the ruler or ruling elements of the political community to wisdom then a ruler who is warlike would be least legitimate because he is at least open to influence by the unwarlike wise : the city at peace or ruled by those whose character is predominantly peace loving or peace seeking is inherently more open to wisdom or reason than the warlike city or the city at war. (59). In other words, Howse appears to contradict himself: he first argues that Strauss cannot uphold the Platonic wish that a philosopher encounter the right sort of tyrant (despite Laws book IV) because tyrants are warlike and philosophers are lovers of peace; then, to prove this, he refers to the possibility of wise men ruling the city at peace. So Howse both denies and affirms the philosopher-king option. At bottom, the connection Howse makes between the idea of the Platonic philosopher-king and peace is nonsense: even if one disregards Plato s advocacy of purging the city in both Laws and Statesman, it is enough to cite Al-Farabi who shows, first, that Plato teaches the idea of the Philosopher, Supreme Ruler, Prince, Legislator, and Imam is but a single idea (iv, 43, 15ff), and, second, that: Man s specific perfection is called supreme happiness, and to each man, according to his rank in the order of humanity, belongs the specific supreme happiness pertain-