Leo Strauss, Max Weber, and the Scientific Study of Politics.

By Nasser Behnegar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 221p. $30.00.

Leo Strauss was among the most influential figures in the revitalization of political philosophy in America in the second half of the twentieth century. Nasser Behnegar provides us a detailed examination of Leo Strauss's critique of and place in political science. It is often assumed by critics of Strauss's work that he rejected the accomplishments of the modern social sciences because he was sharply critical of certain features of the discipline of political science. The issue was joined with notoriety in Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics (1962), edited by Herbert Storing, which included Strauss's postscript that political scientists were fiddling while Rome was burning but did not know that they were fiddling or that Rome was burning. Behnegar brings the debates back before a new generation in political science, placing Strauss's position into the context of his work as a whole.

Readers of Natural Right and History (1953) know that Strauss carefully studied the work of Max Weber, expressing significant reservations about central features of Weber's work but acknowledging his centrality to any serious understanding of the assumptions that still dominate much of the social sciences. It was Strauss's Socratic task to reopen a dialogue over political science by reexamining classical political science as inherited from Aristotle.

Against a purely descriptive or explanatory, ethically neutral science of politics, and against relativism, Strauss offers the following alternative: to identify human excellence or virtue with a sufficient degree of clarity as to encourage political judgments that always aim at preserving and enhancing that excellence; to clarify what it means to be morally serious as opposed to sophisticatedly amoral, and to trust the former and distrust the latter; to maintain a sense of the political order as a whole and the relation to it of the more limited, specific examinations undertaken of features of it; and to overcome the temporal parochialism that dwells on what is current at the expense of our inheritance. In addition, we are then called upon to appreciate the characteristic predicaments of political life to which we must respond, but which will never be amenable to formulation as “problems” for which there is any definitive policy “solution,” requiring us always to seek reliable practical judgment (pp. 207–9). If politics is natural to human beings, it is absurd to conduct politics in the hope of ending politics. How can we want to eradicate a natural constituent of our being? There is nothing here that is antidemocratic. Even if a liberal democratic regime is achieved and maintained, and even if we agree that there is no more appropriate alternative, these other questions abide to be addressed in the liberal democratic context since they are implicated in every context. Strauss's questioning was intended as a friendly comment. Liberal democracy, as embodied in the modern constitutional state, is a long-developing, admirable response to the persistent realities of political life, but not a supersession of those realities.

The return to classical political philosophy in search of the foundation of a genuine science of politics may be friendly to liberal democracy but can be radical in its opposition to much of the modern philosophy prominent within liberal democracy. There is a disjunction between the achievement of liberal democracy itself and much intellectual discourse on that achievement. The search for universally valid “laws” of human behavior, which buoyed the spirits of the progressive social scientists but became an increasingly elusive and disappointing quest, instead of stimulating a return to the origins of inquiry, created a dispirited barrier to such a return. It is difficult to think around the modern attitude, even when disillusioned with claims made on its behalf. The historical attitude, in ruling out the notion of “going back” to something, is loath to consider that there is something to be rediscovered here and now because it is permanently with us. “Going back” is a prejudicial account of “seeing clearly.” As Behnegar says, the issue “is not whether one should be an advocate of the ancient or of the modern social science but to see more clearly the problems of social science. It is only by understanding these problems that one can even begin to consider whether a return to classical political philosophy is possible or necessary” (p. 27). It would thus be “scientific” to be truly open to questioning what an adequate understanding of “scientific” is. To rekindle hope in the face of the suspicion that there can be no knowledge of moral norms requires “working through relativism to its end” (p. 61). Behnegar sees Strauss as suggesting that to extricate ourselves from intellectual despair means courageously to labor in hope—hope already implying the search to encounter that which does not depend on us, but which is real.

Behnegar provides a fine account of Strauss's analysis of the fact/value distinction elaborated by Weber, and the difficulties it engenders. Strauss recognized that Weber was aware of difficulties and contradictions but saw no way to resolve them. For example, in encountering past thought, which does not rest on modern assumptions, one is tempted either to say that such thought is mistaken in light of the superior modern understanding or to admit that one has modern prejudices as opposed to outdated prejudices. But what is needed is the conviction that one should search for the best understanding, which means that one must question the assumptions on which one has been operating. To know that such assumptions are assumptions is to have the possibility of knowing the need and desire for what is more than assumptions. What is often taken today to be “intellectual honesty” is a prejudicial rejection of the search for transcendent meaning on the ground that it is “dishonest” to take that possibility seriously (pp. 197–99).

Behnegar's is an accurate account of Strauss's aims. He restores to us the inquiring Strauss who is neither a dogmatist nor a mere (neo-) conservative, but who was willing to think untimely Platonic/Aristotelian thoughts in response to untimely Nietzschean/Weberian thoughts. This is a valuable contribution.