I am grateful to Michael Zuckert for his kindness in remembering my birthday—something that I am trying hard to forget—but I am still more grateful for the seriousness and competence with which he has subjected my work to analysis and scrutiny.

The main theme of Zuckert's critique is the difference between my thought and that of Leo Strauss, notwithstanding my professions of loyalty and fidelity to Strauss's teaching.

I would here, first of all, remind the reader of Churchill's essay on “Consistency in Politics,” which I quoted at length in my reply to Kraynak. Zuckert says, correctly, that Strauss was a thinker of dualities. But there are few if any of the great dualities, with respect to which one cannot find contrary assertions in Strauss's writings. As in the case of Edmund Burke, cited by Churchill, there is, however, always a singular purpose that is consistently served by the apparent dualities. In my essay on “Strauss at One Hundred,” I said that in all his work, Strauss's intention was to address the crisis of the West. At the heart of Western civilization were the principles of reason and revelation, whose symbolic homes were, respectively, Athens and Jerusalem. Neither of these principles could refute the other, but their dynamic interplay was the life-giving source of the greatness of our great tradition. Athens and Jerusalem may have disagreed on what they believed to be the “one thing needful.” They nonetheless agreed, almost entirely, on the moral foundations of civilized existence. In Strauss's world of dualities, there is always compensating unity. The crisis of the West, to which Strauss addressed himself, is precisely the decline of both reason and revelation, as sources of the meaning and purpose of life. Historicism and relativism, culminating in nihilism, have corroded not only our understanding but our belief that there is anything to understand in the great works and deeds which constitute the glory of the West. Whether any particular work looked ultimately to Athens or to Jerusalem, Strauss examined it relentlessly and passionately and with unsurpassed keenness of intellect.

He sought in the art informing each a reflection of that greater creativity that informs the mystery of the cosmos. He often praised the surpassing greatness of the art of Shakespeare, but he would always add that there was something greater than Shakespeare's art, in the nature that made Shakespeare possible. One could not read a truly great book with Strauss, without believing, at the end, that the author, whether right or wrong, had served the purpose for which he had been created. There is accordingly always a singular end underlying Strauss's exoteric dualities.

A great deal of Strauss's writing is devoted to refuting those who have ridiculed the Bible, as well as those who have ridiculed Plato or Aristotle or Xenophon. In the one case he appeared as a defender of revelation, in the others as a defender of reason. But his intention was always to defend the civilization that was built upon both. Strauss also believed that, notwithstanding the theoretical differences between reason and revelation, there was, as we have said, substantial agreement on morality. The dialogue on the differences of the two great principles need not, Strauss thought, disturb the harmony of moral reasoning. In exploring this harmony, I have, I believe, been faithful to Strauss's intention.

One ground of Strauss's opposition to any attempted synthesis of reason and revelation may be found in his opposition to modern philosophy. The great enterprise of the seventeenth century, notably in Descartes, Spinoza, and Hobbes, was to provide a geometric demonstration of the nature of the moral and political. It was the essence of the modern enterprise to leave no ground for either Socratic skepticism or biblical faith. In fact, in the world we now inhabit the aforesaid enterprise, to abolish both skepticism and faith, has succeeded remarkably. The morality recognized by both Socrates and the Bible has been utterly discredited, not only in our universities, but to a great degree in our churches as well. But modern philosophy has failed utterly to provide that account of the Whole that was to have proved its superiority and justified its authority. Instead of a superior understanding of the objects both of moral and of metaphysical knowledge, it has ended in a radical denial even of the possibility of knowing. If this was merely theoretical ignorance, as in the dilemmas in which most Socratic dialogues seem to end, it might, like the dialogues, have led to renewed and reinvigorated inquiry. That ever renewed inquiry, which pronounced the unexamined life to be not worth living, was not a commitment to any particular resolutions of the dilemmas, but to an inquiring way of life. However, the virtues of the skeptical life celebrated by the heirs of Socrates closely resembled the virtues of that other way of life, which consisted of obedience to the commandments of the living God. The modern attempt to provide a scientific account of reality has ended, not in knowledge superior to that of Jerusalem or Athens, but rather to the abandonment of any idea of knowing anything about the mystery of the universe, or of the conflict of good and evil within it. It has led to the abandonment of the morality that has sustained western civilization. Postmodernism has proved to be an aimless wandering in a chamber of horrors. Athwart the gates of that postmodernism Leo Strauss has cried Stop!

Modern philosophy had undertaken to solve the differences of reason and of revelation by transcending them. The doubt that afflicted the conclusions of Socratic reason and of biblical faith could be eliminated, it was believed, and scientific method, made accessible to the common man no less than to philosophers. Thus wisdom would be accessible to all. This would point the way to democracy or, more precisely, democracy understood as the general will. This, however, has resulted, in one instance, in the belief that the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party represented the wisdom and authority of the common man. Another version claimed that the evolutionary process, as discerned by science, led to the absolute right of the white over the black race, and later to the absolute right of the Aryan race, embodied in its leader. Still another version, milder in practice but not very different in theory, believed that constitutional government could be set aside for a pure democracy of unlimited majority rule. An elected government of the common man would turn over the application of power to a highly trained bureaucracy that would bring scientific method to bear upon the problems of society. Science and democracy would march in lockstep. We can see that the distance between communism and progressivism is not great. We can also see that the obstructions to tyranny by constitutionalism are the only defenses left to us. And the only coherent defense of constitutionalism is in the legacy of Athens and Jerusalem.

Zuckert's major preoccupation is the relationship between my thought and Strauss's, particularly as found in A New Birth of Freedom. The reader should know, however, that that is a subject explored at greater length in The Truth About Leo Strauss, a book authored by himself and that other very distinguished Professor Zuckert, his wife. I am grateful to both for the attention they have given my work, and my gratitude goes beyond any agreements or disagreements. I should also mention, however, that I am planning a collection of my own essays on Strauss, and I am writing an autobiographical preface to that collection, which will include a more extensive response to their critique than is possible here.

We have seen that, according to Professor Zuckert, “Strauss was a thinker of dualities”; I, on the other hand, he says, collapse Strauss's great dualities into unities. The preeminent example, according to Zuckert, is that I make “John Locke, a preeminent modern according to Strauss,” represent “what Aristotle would have said had he lived at Locke's time.”

I would remind the reader of what I have already written on this theme in my reply to Professor Kraynack. In Strauss's essay “On Classical Political Philosophy,” a work of unsurpassed authority in the Strauss canon, Strauss finds the maxim that best expresses the meaning of the best regime—the central topic in classical political philosophy—in the words of Thomas Jefferson. This maxim is preceded by Jefferson's agreement with John Adams, an agreement with which Strauss would enthusiastically concur, “that there is a natural aristocracy among men.” The maxim itself, quoted by Strauss, declares “that that form of government is the best which provides the most effectually for the pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government.” Here is the doctrine that unifies Jefferson and classical political philosophy. But it also unifies Jefferson, the American Founding “as originally intended,” Locke, and Strauss. Here is e pluribus unum exhibited in its most uncompromising form! I do not think that anyone can suppose it was inadvertence that led Strauss to present the author of the Declaration of Independence as a preeminent authority on classical political philosophy. Nor is it possible to suppose (unless one is Garry Wills) that the influence of Locke on the Declaration is other than paramount.

“The natural aristocracy I consider the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and the government of society. And indeed it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society.” The foregoing Jeffersonianism is unsurpassed Aristotelianism. I do not see how one can fail to see the irrelevance of a merely chronological divide between ancients and moderns. Jefferson's Aristotelianism, like Aristotle's, is based upon resemblances and differences of man, beast, and God, resemblances and differences accessible to all human beings at all times by means of sense perception. The recognition of these differences is the ground of the proposition that all men are created equal. The opinion that some human beings are well born, while others are basely born, and many other such distinctions, assumes a distinction within the species that resembles that between species. This fallacy finds its ultimate expression in the idea of chattel slavery that found its place within the original 1787 Constitution of the United States. To put the matter as succinctly as possible, a chattel is a piece of moveable property without a rational will (a dog, a horse, a chair, a table); a person (that is, a human being) is possessed of a rational will. By the law of the antebellum Constitution, Negro slaves were at once chattels and human persons. What was legally possible, however, was logically impossible and, ultimately, morally impossible. The drama of this conflict forms the substance of American history.

On the question of the meaning of the proposition that all men are created equal, Zuckert takes note of my argument, drawn from Aristotle, that every common noun—man, no less than dog or chair—is a universal applying equally to every particular to which it applies, so that one chair, or one dog, or one human being, is no more or less a dog or chair or a human being, than another. Lincoln had praised Jefferson for incorporating in the Declaration “an abstract truth applicable to all men and all times.” I had noted, on Aristotelian grounds, that every common noun is an intelligible form abstracted from a sensible form, just as every sensible form is abstracted from sensible matter. I have made this argument in many of my publications including—as noted by Zuckert—in A New Birth of Freedom. I have also argued that it is a violation of natural right—and of the laws of nature and of nature's God—for one man to assert a right to rule another, as if his nature is superior to the other's. This would be like asserting that the nature of the one human being differed from that of another as the nature of the rider differs from that of the horse he is riding. No human being differs from any other human being as any human being differs from any one of the lower animals.

To this Zuckert objects: “All men may be equally men but some men have virtue to a higher degree than others and thus derive a claim to rule. Does the argument about species character really rule this out? All chairs are chairs, but are not some chairs better chairs than others? … All wolves are wolves, but are there not leaders, even natural leaders of the pack?”

Here I remind the reader of Strauss's agreement with Jefferson, that there is a natural aristocracy among men, and that the best form of government is the one that provides the most effectually for the pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government. But Jefferson also reminds us that there is an artificial, or false, aristocracy that is an enemy of good government and the rights of mankind. In fact, throughout history there have been ruling classes, or royal families, asserting a superiority of birth, which amounts to a claim to being a superior species. Strauss also warns that no wise man would ever assert a right to rule based upon wisdom. The assertion of such a right is a sure sign of a lack of wisdom. Throughout history, however, mankind has been vulnerable to absurd claims of natural or divinely appointed superiority. The Declaration says that all such claims are false, and that the only valid basis of the right to rule is the consent of the governed, on the basis of the rights with which we are all equally endowed by our Creator.

I would, therefore, reply to Zuckert that the claim of a species-like superiority has in fact been the basis of the most invidious of the many false claims to rule. The idea that some human beings are either gods, or descended from gods, or descended from ancestors who had a proximity to gods, has been the basis of political authority for most of the human race during most of its history. The Declaration of Independence asserts the irrationality of all such claims. But the recognition of the equality of human beings within their species does not inhibit the recognition of those qualities—those virtues—in which human beings as members of the same species are nonetheless different and unequal. In fact it is only by first recognizing the rights with respect to which all human beings are equal, that we can distinguish those qualities, or virtues, with respect to which human beings differ widely, but which the political community needs to select into the offices of government. Government requires armed forces, and these require good officers, and in particular good generals. But good generals or good judges or good economists or good doctors or good pilots cannot be selected by lot. They must be selected on the basis of training and experience. In every case, the many want to be governed by the few they believe are wise in the matters in which they are to have authority. The ancient wisdom of classical political philosophy, as expounded by Leo Strauss, is that all of us want in every instance, so far as possible, to be governed by those who know, by the wise. And this is precisely true of the community of those associated on the basis of natural equality, and who set up a government to increase the security of their natural rights, who want that government to know as much as possible how to achieve its ends. It is thus the recognition of the differences within the species—which constitute that natural aristocracy in which, as we have seen, Adams and Jefferson believed, no less than Aristotle and Leo Strauss. It is by the recognition of these differences among the fellow citizens, that the natural equality of the state of nature is transformed into government by the natural aristoi.Footnote ¹

To understand exactly how the claims of equality and inequality—of democracy and aristocracy—are reconciled, let us recur once more to the social contract. This is the agreement, the necessarily unanimous agreement, whereby human beings, being equally free and independent, no one having authority over another, are transformed into fellow citizens, each equally subject to a government with lawful authority over them all. The agreement by which this transformation is accomplished is one in which the exercise of the right that each individual has by nature to preserve his life is transferred to a government. The power of the entire community can now be called forth, organized, and applied by the government to the protection of each. The agreement by which this is achieved is, as we have noted, unanimous. No one is bound by it, or becomes a fellow citizen, who does not agree to it. And everyone agreeing agrees to share equally in the advantages and burdens of citizenship. No one can, at a time of danger, say that his life is more valuable than others, and ought not, therefore, to be put at risk. No one can claim that his property ought not to be taxed to support the government he expects to protect that property. This is the basic idea underlying the meaning of the equal protection of the law.

To complete the foregoing, we recall that the rights that are originally equal are the rights with which we have been “endowed by our Creator.” These rights, as the foundation of the aforesaid social contract, restore the relationship of God and law, which characterized the ancient city, before the conquests of Caesar and the subsequent ascent of Christian monotheism. No social contract was needed as long as it was believed the law was given directly by God (or a god). The Lockean social contract restores a breach in the web of argument that sustained classical political philosophy in a manner that Aristotle could only have approved. By this contract the authority of God does not come down from a prophet, but up from the people. The legislative function of each people is moreover performed with prudential regard to the circumstances of that people. But this authority is not a blank entitlement, but rather an enfranchisement to fulfill the purpose God had in making the foregoing endowment. Jefferson once remarked that the ultimate repository of the principles of the Constitution was in the people, en masse. They, he said, were free of everything “but moral law.” If the people, whether by the majority, or even unanimously, acted outside the boundaries of the morality implied in their God-given rights, they were no longer a people within the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. This is shown, within the Declaration itself, by the appeal of the Congress to the “Supreme Judge of the World” for the rectitude of their intentions. The Congress implies that they would not have been able to rely, as they did, upon the support of divine providence, had they not been confident that they were acting within the bounds approved by that Supreme Judge. We are also reminded of that other stricture of Jefferson, in the Notes on Virginia: “And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice can not sleep forever.” This passage, which Lincoln loved, has much, perhaps everything, of the philosophy and theology that informed Lincoln's Second Inaugural address. We might add that it also has much in common with the convictions of John Brown.

We conclude that the function of the Lockean social contract, as understood by Jefferson and Lincoln, and by Leo Strauss in the writings we have cited, does not justify the radical individualism imputed to the social contract, as in the writings of Thomas Hobbes. We would add that the Straussian argument, which is in harmony with Jefferson and Jefferson's Locke, is the only one consistent with Strauss's overriding concern with the crisis of the West, and is, indeed, the only one consistent with its salvation. It is, therefore, classical political philosophy in a form sanctioned by the practical wisdom at the heart of classical political philosophy, in a world dominated by postclassical, Christian monotheism.

One of the most emphatic expressions of Strauss's dedication to the central and unifying purpose of his life and work is in the beginning of The City and Man. That book was published in 1964, but the preface is dated July 1963. The first two paragraphs are extraordinary in their apparent difference from what both Professor Zuckert and I might think of as orthodox Straussianism. For that reason, I give them in full, lest I be suspected of selective quotation.

A full commentary on these two short paragraphs, with comparative analyses with what Strauss has written elsewhere on these topics, could fill at least a hundred pages. We begin with a short but inadequate notice of the antiquarianism and romanticism that Strauss dismisses in the first sentence. A movement that was both romantic and antiquarian was the conservatism brought into being by the Holy Alliance that defeated Napoleon. The goal of this movement was to turn back the French Revolution, and especially Napoleon's uprooting of the class distinctions of feudalism. The Holy Alliance sought to revive the ancien regime throughout Europe, with its union of altar and crown. It meant to stand astride the tide of egalitarian liberalism and shout “Stop!” When the aforesaid conservatism crossed the Atlantic in the 1830s, the defense of the ancien regme was replaced by the defense of slavery. This was the origin of what became American conservatism. What in Europe became the celebration of a heroic Middle AgesFootnote ³ in America became the utopian vision of the Old South, the South of “Gone With the Wind.” Even today, the stalwart loyalists of the Old South (like the Confederates in the Attic of a recent best seller) are, at one and the same time, harmless eccentrics living in their own imaginary world, and eccentrics who are anything but harmless, and who can be transformed at any moment into lynch mobs.

We see that in the thought that preceded Strauss there is a thin line dividing antiquarianism from romanticism. In the Germany of Strauss's younger days, there was an almost fanatical preoccupation with classical scholarship, animated in part by the belief that Germany was destined to be the reincarnation of ancient Athens.Footnote ⁴ The partisans of the Old South also identified with ancient Athens, especially with the conviction that a high civilization always rested upon a foundation of slavery.Footnote ⁵ Strauss in his youth may have been influenced by this celebration of the classics. Now clearly it is among the causes of the crisis of the West, not part of the solution, and he does not want to be identified with it in any way.

The next sentence is among the most astonishing Strauss, or perhaps anyone else in our time, ever wrote. On the surface he appears almost as a Billy Graham, peddling his own version of “the Divine message of the City of Righteousness, the Faithful City.” Notwithstanding the typographical eccentricity—all of which is Strauss's, and all of which seems to persuade us that he is speaking of Jerusalem—he never mentions it by name. In what follows, however, he invites us to consider “to what extent man could discern the outlines of that City if left … to the proper exercise of his own powers.” We would expect that the proper exercise of man's own unaided powers would discern the outlines of Athens, not of Jerusalem. Yet this city is said to be “the Faithful City,” which can hardly be Athens. Yet without doubt “that City” is one city, not two. This seems almost wantonly to negate the most fundamental of all the dualisms Zuckert attributes to Strauss, and which I am said to undermine.

The rest of this paragraph is a single sentence, although it is divided by a semicolon which ought to have been a full stop. The first part of this bifurcated sentence begins with the remarkable assertion that “in our age it is much less urgent to show that political philosophy is the indispensable handmaid of theology.” Strauss implies that although now it is much less urgent than it might be at some other time, there is no time at which it is not urgent to show political philosophy as the handmaid of theology. Unqualified and not contradicted, this assertion would place Strauss squarely in the camp of Thomas Aquinas. The cause of the aforesaid diminished urgency is the necessity “to show that political philosophy is the rightful queen of the social sciences, the sciences of man and of human affairs.”

Now the sovereign source of the doctrine that political philosophy is the rightful ruler of the practical sciences is the first two chapters of the Nicomachean Ethics. Here is the unsurpassed, unequaled, and irrefutable statement of that case. There is no room here to repeat it in full, but according to Aristotle (and Strauss), political philosophy is to the other practical sciences what architecture is to the other sciences of building. The original meaning of the word architect is “the one who rules the workmen.” The architect himself is not a mason, or plumber, or electrician, or carpenter, nor does he necessarily possess any of their skills. But to the extent that he is a good architect, it is his design of the completed building, and especially his understanding of the use that the inhabitants of the building intend—or ought to intend—to make of it, that informs his art. It is not by any compulsion but by the right of this knowledge that the architect rules his subordinates. They see that the fulfillment of their work is only possible through the fulfillment of his.

Aristotle's account of what he calls politike is the ground of the idea that human life has a rational end or purpose, and that it can be ruled by reason, in great matters as in lesser ones. The highest end of human action is happiness, and the political philosopher is the architect of the structure of a life culminating in happiness. The telos of any building is the purpose of the life to be lived within it, and how that life contributes to the larger purpose of life. Just as the plumber and carpenter are workmen ruled by the architect, the architect is himself a plumber or carpenter in the service of that greater architect. According to Aristotle—and by the very nature of human existence—all the other arts and sciences, like that of the plumber and carpenter in relation to the architect—are inherently subject, within the polity, to the judgment of politike.

Strauss's rhetoric is designed to give effect to the Aristotelian doctrine of life as a rational enterprise. Consider now that happiness appears within the Declaration of Independence, first as a natural right of individuals, and then as the collective right of those same individuals joined by the social contract. We have confirmation of this in the inaugural address of George Washington, as first president of the United States, in which he declared “that the foundation of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality … since there is no truth more thoroughly established than that there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness.” It is difficult to imagine a more succinct or pithy Aristotelianism. It is clear that for Washington and for the aristoi he represented, the pursuit of happiness, both privately and politically, meant the pursuit of virtue. Political philosophy is accordingly the architecture of virtue as it leads happiness. This is what Strauss meant by calling for its recognition as the queen of the social sciences. In the unity of this argument, all dualisms would seem to dissolve. The ignorance of this argument, or its treatment as at most romantic antiquarianism, is among the profoundest symptoms of the crisis of the West.