Introduction
In Furious Minds: The Making of the New Right in America, Laura K. Field identifies German-Jewish political philosopher Leo Strauss as one of the founders of the New Right that constitutes a pillar of the second Trump administration.Footnote 1 She notes that Strauss was the graduate supervisor of Harry V. Jaffa who created a school that has become known as West Coast Straussianism. This school created the Claremont Institute and the Claremont Review of Books, and its orbit includes Claremont McKenna College professor Charles Kesler, State Department official Michael Anton, Vice President J. D. Vance, PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, and political commentator Ben Shapiro.Footnote 2 Strauss also taught Allan Bloom and influenced Harvey C. Mansfield, and these professors formed the movement known as East Coast Straussianism. East Coast Straussians tend to work more within academia than the think-tank or policy world, yet Bloom and Mansfield both participated in the culture wars through the publication of their respective books, The Closing of the American Mind Footnote 3 and Manliness. Footnote 4 Straussians have educated or influenced many important politicians and policymakers, including Senate Intelligence Committee chair Tom Cotton and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Field maps the lineages connecting Strauss to conservative scholars and policymakers, but she does not marshal textual evidence to show that Strauss advocated so-called neoconservatism. Do Strauss’s books justify telling noble lies to legitimate war against one’s enemies?Footnote 5 Can one find in his mature political philosophy a worldview that supports an aggressive US foreign policy in places such as the Middle East, Venezuela, or Ukraine? Might it not be more accurate to describe Strauss as “a man of peace” who supports international law, as Robert Howse claims?Footnote 6
Prominent scholars have argued that it is almost impossible to extract a political teaching from Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli. Bloom declares it “is not at all a book as we ordinarily understand a book,” for if “one sits down and reads it as one reads a treatise, its contents are guarded by seven seals.”Footnote 7 Mansfield explains the book is stated “in a manner either so elusive or so challenging as to cause [any ordinary reader] to give up trying to understand it.”Footnote 8 Heinrich Meier says the book “has a special place in the oeuvre of Leo Strauss” and is a “theologico-political treatise … written with the greatest care.”Footnote 9 Scholars have read the book as a treatise that enters a conversation with Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and other political philosophers about the “permanent problems” such as the relationship between reason and revelation, philosophy and theology, and antiquity and modernity.Footnote 10 In this article, I contend that Strauss spoke and wrote plainly enough about his political teaching. He aimed to convince US leaders to exercise a muscular foreign policy to aid allies around the world and not have their hands tied by international law or institutions. The political teaching of Thoughts on Machiavelli is that US leaders need to embrace Machiavellian realism on occasion to defend the West from its enemies.
Strauss advises readers to assume that great books follow “the law of logographic necessity” and that readers should seek to comprehend each part and the whole.Footnote 11 At the same time, he says readers may study an author’s biography and context to discern their intention. “The Prince is not the only classic of political philosophy which is both a treatise and a tract for the times.”Footnote 12 Machiavelli was a political philosopher who wrote to his friend Francesco Vettori on December 10, 1513 that he spent his evenings in “the ancient courts of ancient men,” conversing with the greatest minds of antiquity about politics.Footnote 13 Simultaneously, Machiavelli was an Italian patriot whose book “culminates in a passionate call for action,” and readers need to discern the connection between the general and the particular, the timeless and the timely, and the way in which his philosophical reflections inform his political praxis and vice versa.Footnote 14 Strauss indicates that he is thinking about the present while writing his book, including a reference to “President Eisenhower” and “Premier Bulganin” that seems out of place if the book only wants to discuss an author living during the Italian Renaissance.Footnote 15 My method is to read Thoughts on Machiavelli alongside his correspondence, seminar transcripts, and recorded lectures with the conviction that we can discern that his books were as much interventions into contemporary political debates as commentaries on philosophers in ancient Greece or Renaissance Italy. Strauss’s contemporary Alexandre Kojève recognized that his commentary on Xenophon was a way for him to speak about tyrants like Hitler and Stalin, and I maintain likewise that Strauss’s commentary on Machiavelli was a way for him to discuss the founding and maintenance of new states or regimes.Footnote 16
This article argues that Strauss was a modern political philosopher who wanted his ideas to change the world. Mansfield does not mention Strauss’s political Zionism in his articles on Strauss and Machiavelli.Footnote 17 He thus overlooks, I believe, the perlocutionary intention of Thoughts on Machiavelli, namely, to convince American conservatives to abandon the anti-interventionist tradition and embrace a strong US role on the global stage.Footnote 18 Responding to political theorists Nicholas Xenos and Anne Norton who claimed that Strauss was a founder of neoconservatism, Michael Zuckert and Catherine Zuckert note that “the character of his studies had limited appeal; they were distant from the concrete issues of politics.”Footnote 19 However, Thoughts on Machiavelli observes that Machiavelli discussed France to “surreptitiously” discuss Italy, and my inference is that the book is replete with contemporary lessons if we entertain the possibility that Strauss is discussing the founding and maintenance of new regimes during his lifetime.Footnote 20 Strauss critic Shadia B. Drury remarks that he “refers to Machiavelli’s conception of the relationship between politics and morality as shocking, repugnant, evil, irreligious, diabolical and dangerous, but never as false. On the contrary, he thinks it is a true account of the real nature of politics.”Footnote 21 Drury accuses Strauss of being Machiavellian yet does not discuss his political commitments as evinced by his statements about the State of Israel, Vietnam, or Cuba. Miles Burnyeat diagnosed Strauss as “a sphinx without a secret,”Footnote 22 but the (re)publication of his early articles for German-Jewish magazines such as Der Jüdische Student, Jüdische Rundschau, and Der Jude: Eine Monatschrift reveal the depth of his commitments to political Zionism that he reaffirmed in late autobiographical reflections. Adrian Blau observes that Strauss overstates “the plausibility of esoteric claims based on numerology,”Footnote 23 but my argument is that his primary goal was to convince American elites to support beleaguered allies around the world rather than to win methodological battles. Bloom said that Strauss’s “intellectual odyssey began with Zionism,”Footnote 24 and though his odyssey took him many places, I suggest that scholars need to understand his lifelong, complex relationship to Zionism to appreciate the political teaching of his mature political philosophy.
In the first section, I analyze Strauss’s 1957 letter to The National Review about the State of Israel to glean what real-world political problems he was thinking about while writing Thoughts on Machiavelli. The next section argues that Strauss thinks that politics sometimes requires performing actions that transgress Christian and Enlightenment moral principles. The third section shows that he believes that political leaders must use extralegal violence to establish states, and the fourth that republics (or democracies) maintain states better than princes (or autocrats). In the fifth section I posit that Strauss’s unnamed opponent in the book is Immanuel Kant whose lack of prudenza contributed to the rise of communism and Nazism. In the sixth section I argue that his extensive discussion of propaganda in his writings on Machiavelli indicates how he aimed to teach conservative academics, policymakers, and the public to adopt a political realism at odds with liberal idealism. The conclusion reviews how this article changes how scholars read Strauss and interpret his influence on conservative politics.
Letter to Kendall
On November 17, 1956, Guy Ponce de Leon published an article, “The Myth we Call ‘Abroad’” in The National Review stating that “even the Jews, themselves the victims of the most notorious racial discrimination of modern times, did not hesitate to create the first racist state in modern history.”Footnote 25 Two days later, Strauss wrote to Willmoore Kendall objecting to “anti-Jewish animus” in The National Review; on December 5, Kendall asked him for permission to publish the letter; on December 7, Strauss told him that he had no objection; and The National Review published the letter in the January 5, 1957 issue.Footnote 26 Strauss’s marginalia to his own copy reveal that he began writing Thoughts on Machiavelli on March 2, 1956 and had finished the Introduction and chapters 1 and 2 by October 6, 1956.Footnote 27 Just as Strauss cites Machiavelli’s famous December 10, 1513 letter to Francesco Vettori as providing clues as to his intentions, so, I conjecture, we may learn at least four things from his letter to Kendall.Footnote 28
First, Strauss is thinking about the present and future of the modern State of Israel.
I taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for the whole academic year of 1954–55, and what I am going to say is based exclusively on what I have seen with my own eyes. The first thing which strikes one in Israel is that the country is a western country, which educates its many immigrants from the East in the ways of the West: Israel is the only country which as a country is an outpost of the West in the East. Furthermore, Israel is a country which is surrounded by mortal enemies of overwhelming numerical superiority.Footnote 29
This Western outpost in the East is under attack: “the university and government buildings are within easy range of Jordanian guns.”Footnote 30 Strauss could have been worried about the border conflicts between Jordan and Israel, armed Palestinians crossing the Egyptian border into Israel, and the possibility of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser closing the Suez Canal to Israeli use.Footnote 31 He thinks the West needs to defend its outposts around the world. He had a profound appreciation of medieval Islamic political thought, but in this letter, the Arabs surrounding Israel are “mortal enemies” of the West.Footnote 32
Second, Strauss draws a parallel between the founders of the United States and the founders of the State of Israel.
The men who are governing Israel at present came from Russia at the beginning of the century. They are much more properly described as pioneers than as labor unionists. They were the men who laid the foundations under hopelessly difficult conditions. They are justly looked up to by all nondoctrinaires as the natural aristocracy of the country, for the same reasons for which Americans look up to the Pilgrim fathers.Footnote 33
Strauss wants Kendall and the readers of The National Review to sympathize with the founders of the State of Israel and not be put off by their socialist rhetoric or kibbutzim. As a young man he met the Revisionist Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and Jabotinsky laid the foundation for the right-wing Likud Party in Israel.Footnote 34 Strauss has had an underappreciated influence on American Zionism.Footnote 35
Third, Strauss identified as a political Zionist even though he knew that the political ideology failed to solve the political-theological problem.Footnote 36
The moral spine of the Jews was in danger of being broken by the so-called emancipation, which in many cases had alienated them from their heritage, and yet not given them anything more than merely formal equality; it had brought about a condition which has been called “external freedom and inner servitude”; political Zionism was the attempt to restore that inner freedom, that simple dignity, of which only people who remember their heritage and are loyal to their fate are capable. … I can never forget what it achieved as a moral force in an era of complete dissolution.Footnote 37
Strauss recurrently identified as a political Zionist and said the State of Israel “procured a blessing for all Jews everywhere regardless of whether they admit it or not.”Footnote 38
On the other hand, Strauss says that “political Zionism is problematic for obvious reasons.”Footnote 39 Elsewhere, he explains that orthodox Jews “must regard as blasphemous the notion of a human solution to the Jewish problem” and “the State of Israel is a part of the galut [exile].”Footnote 40 He is under no illusions that political Zionism solves the perennial questions of the relationship between reason and revelation, ancients and moderns, or Athens and Jerusalem. Elsewhere, Strauss identifies Leon Pinsker and Theodor Herzl as political theorists who “dogmatically assume principles that can well be questioned.”Footnote 41 In Simon W. Taylor’s words, “Strauss the Philosopher” had the intellectual probity to challenge nationalist ideologies such as Zionism, but “Strauss the Man” embraced a “sectarian particularism.”Footnote 42 He may have had intellectual qualms about political Zionism, but he identified with the State of Israel and wanted to explain—in Hebrew, הַסְבָּרָה—to Americans why they had a responsibility to protect endangered outposts of Western civilization.
Fourth, Strauss enjoins conservative Americans to support the State of Israel and American Jews to migrate to the right side of the political spectrum.
Whatever the failings of individuals may be, the spirit of the country as a whole can justly be described in these terms: heroic austerity supported by the nearness of biblical antiquity. A conservative, I take it, is a man who believes that “everything good is heritage.” I know of no country today in which this belief is stronger and less lethargic than in Israel.Footnote 43
In the 1920s and early 1930s, Strauss attacked Jewish philosophers such as Moses Mendelsohn, Hermann Cohen, and Julius Guttman who believed that it is possible to combine Judaism and Enlightenment philosophy, particularly Kant’s.Footnote 44 By invoking “biblical antiquity” in his letter, he seems to be aligning with religious believers, Jewish and Christian, against modern compromisers with atheism, including Jewish liberals, socialists, cultural Zionists, and members of the Jewish Labor Bund.Footnote 45 Liberals may criticize the State of Israel for only permitting Jewish, Christian, or Muslim marriages, but he replies: “I am not so certain that civil marriage is under all circumstances an unmitigated blessing, as to disapprove of this particular feature of the state of Israel.”Footnote 46
His letter also continues his youthful battle against anti-Zionist orthodox Jews or religious Zionists who want the State of Israel to be close to a theocracy. Strauss does not identify as an orthodox or practicing Jew in this letter, and his writings are interspersed with confessions of atheism. In an early article on Sigmund Freud’s The Future of an Illusion, he criticizes cultural Zionism for failing to decide between atheism and belief: “political Zionism, wishing to ground itself radically, must ground itself in unbelief.”Footnote 47 He may not be writing esoterically, but he is not making as clear as he could to Kendall and the readers of The National Review that his brand of conservatism is nationalistic and atheistic.
The twofold teaching about evil
The most famous line of Thoughts on Machiavelli is arguably its opening sentence: “We should not shock anyone, we shall merely expose ourselves to good-natured or at any rate harmless ridicule, if we profess ourselves inclined to the old-fashioned and simple opinion according to which Machiavelli was a teacher of evil.” The rest of the opening paragraph is filled with examples of Machiavelli’s wicked advice. Princes ought to “exterminate the families of rulers whose territory they wish to possess securely,” and “murder their opponents rather than to confiscate their property since those who have been robbed, but not those who are dead, can think of revenge.” If “one has to choose between inflicting severe injuries and inflicting light injuries, one ought to inflict severe injuries.” One “ought not to say to someone whom one wants to kill ‘Give me your gun, I want to kill you with it,’ but merely, ‘Give me your gun,’ for once you have the gun in your hand, you can satisfy your desire.” The conclusion of the opening paragraph is that “if it is true that only an evil man will stoop to teach maxims of public and private gangsterism, we are forced to say that Machiavelli was an evil man.”Footnote 48 The exoteric teaching of the book is that Machiavelli gives evil advice that decent political actors should not follow.
In the second paragraph, however, Strauss presents another teaching about the place of evil in politics. Plato put evil teachings into the mouths of Callicles and Thrasymachus, and Thucydides did the same with the Athenian ambassadors on the island of Melos. “Machiavelli proclaims openly and triumphantly a corrupting doctrine which ancient writers had taught covertly or with all signs of repugnance. He says in his own name shocking things which ancient writers had said through the mouths of their characters.”Footnote 49 Classical political philosophers knew that evil was coeval with politics but had the good sense not to publicize the fact. If the exoteric teaching of the book is that political actors should ignore Machiavelli’s evil teachings, its esoteric teaching is that politics requires acts of public and private gangsterism. Howse suggests that Strauss delivered an “almost silent” critique of Machiavelli, and Mansfield that he wanted to give the Florentine “his due.”Footnote 50 My view is that Strauss teaches his readers that politics sometimes requires breaking golden rules and categorical imperatives. According to Strauss, the talk about wine in Plato’s Symposium has “the effect of actual wine-drinking.”Footnote 51 Likewise, the discussion of violent acts of gangsterism prepares the audience to commit, or at least recognize the occasional need for, extralegal violence in politics.
In his handwritten copy of Thoughts on Machiavelli, Strauss wrote “M. and the USA” as the heading for the tenth and eleventh paragraphs of the introduction.Footnote 52 In the tenth paragraph, he pays his audience a compliment for living in the only country in the world founded on Enlightenment ideals of freedom, justice, moral theory, a system of universal peace, and human rights. “At least to the extent that the American reality is inseparable from the American aspiration, one cannot understand Americanism without understanding Machiavellianism which is its opposite.”Footnote 53 In the eleventh paragraph, however, he reminds the audience that the country was founded on the violent dispossession of the native inhabitants.
Machiavelli would argue that America owes her greatness not only to her habitual adherence to the principles of freedom and justice, but also to her occasional deviation from them. He would not hesitate to suggest a mischievous interpretation of the Louisiana Purchase and of the fate of the Red Indians. He would conclude that facts like these are an additional proof for his contention that there cannot be a great and glorious society without the equivalent of the murder of Remus by his brother Romulus.Footnote 54
According to Strauss, one cannot make a daylight argument for why Europeans deserve the “new world” and have a right to expel the native peoples. His message to his American audience is that they have no right to lecture anyone else about using evil means to take land from people who were living there. Political societies always begin with an event like Romulus’s murder of Remus.Footnote 55 A political foundation “is a continuous foundation,” and “the founders of a republic are its leading men throughout the ages, or its ruling class.”Footnote 56 In his presentation of Machiavelli’s “new modes and orders,” Strauss conveys the teaching that a stable legal order or moral code is suitable for ordinary times, but that political actors need a free hand in exceptional circumstances to establish or preserve the state.
It is important to see the connection between Strauss’s early political Zionist writings and his mature political philosophy.Footnote 57 In two newspaper articles from the early 1920s, he cited Joshua 9:7: “And the men of Israel said unto the Hivites: ‘Peradventure ye dwell among us; and how shall we make a covenant with you?’”Footnote 58 This passage, according to Michael Zank, “provides the background for the specific story that exemplifies that the conquering Israelites are loath to transgress the injunction against making a covenant with the aliens who dwell among them (i.e., the original inhabitants of the land).”Footnote 59 According to Eugene Sheppard, “the disturbing passage of Joshua 9:7 that Strauss selected as his Zionist motto” suggests that “the greatest possibility of political existence is secured only under minimal conditions of normality.”Footnote 60 If one interprets the motto in light of his youthful defense of Herzl’s Realpolitik (against Max Nordau’s “honesty”),Footnote 61 Joshua 9:7 intimates that treaties may be abrogated in exceptional circumstances and that political conflicts are often settled by force (Gewalt) and not justice (Gerechtigkeit).Footnote 62 Strauss’s youthful and mature message, conveyed cautiously, is that a “hard-boiled” social science needs to account for the persistence and occasional necessity of “evil” in politics.Footnote 63
Strauss’s classic proffers a twofold teaching about evil. It is better to declare an old-fashioned opposition to evil, and politics requires evil actions on occasion. “Men are compelled by necessity to do many things of which reason disapproves. In such cases acting virtuously consists in submitting to necessity—and even to the necessity to sin. Necessity makes it impossible for men always to obey what we would call the moral law.”Footnote 64 And: “Generally stated, there is no good, simple or combined, without its accompanying evil, so much so that all choice can be said to be a choice among evils.”Footnote 65 Strauss says that both Machiavelli and Thucydides seem to share “the same ‘realism,’ i.e., the same denial of the power of the gods or of justice,” but “Thucydides never calls in question the intrinsic superiority of nobility to baseness.”Footnote 66 Thucydides’s History arouses sadness, but “in Machiavelli we find comedies, parodies, and satires.”Footnote 67 Perhaps Strauss shared Thucydides’s brand of tragic realism that has “a sense of the sacredness of ‘the common.’”Footnote 68 Be that as it may, this passage arrives at the end of a book that drives home the message that an effective ruler must not shrink from exterminating families and destroying cities to attain his or her end.Footnote 69
Princes and the founding of states
One of the puzzles of Machiavelli scholarship is the relationship between the Prince and the Discourses, two books in which he claims to share “everything he knows.”Footnote 70 Strauss’s proposal is that the Prince is addressed to actual princes and the Discourses to potential princes.Footnote 71 “Princes are superior to peoples as regards the founding of states” and “peoples are superior to princes as regards the preservation of states.”Footnote 72 Strauss’s view of political founders is virtually the same as Machiavelli’s: “let a prince win and maintain his state: the means will always be judged honorable, and will be praised by everyone.”Footnote 73 The main difference between Strauss and Machiavelli is that the former must not only challenge Christian political morality but also its secular successor: Kantian liberalism.
Strauss provides a clue that he has current events in mind when he discusses Machiavelli’s choice of examples. In the Prince, Machiavelli compares Turkey, a principality with one king and everyone else a slave, and France, in which a king coexists uneasily with powerful barons, and suggests the former is hard to conquer but easy to hold, while the latter is the opposite.Footnote 74
In discussing Alexander’s conquest of Persia, Machiavelli is compelled to discuss the conquest of a country of the opposite kind, i.e., the conquest of France. This, however, means that he is enabled to continue surreptitiously the discussion, begun in the preceding chapter, of the conquest of Italy.Footnote 75
I conjecture that Strauss may be “surreptitiously” discussing world events when he comments on Machiavelli’s books. According to Alan Gilbert, Strauss’s papers reveal that he wanted the United States to support allies in Vietnam and potentially conquer Cuba. Strauss wrote to Senator Charles Percy of Illinois about the Kennedy administration: “The meetings of the PACC [the Public Affairs Council at Chicago] dealing with foreign affairs convinced me perfectly that the President has surrounded himself with advisors who are completely deluded about the character of the Communist menace.”Footnote 76 As a political philosopher, Strauss was dealing with fundamental problems involved in establishing new regimes; as a citizen of the United States, he wanted the country to defend its allies around the world.
Strauss’s book is filled with advice about how the founder of new modes and orders must use extralegal violence to establish a state. “The liberator of Italy is described as a new prince, for the liberation of Italy presupposes the introduction of new laws and new orders: he must do for Italy what Moses did for the people of Israel.”Footnote 77 He quotes Machiavelli to elaborate what Moses did: “he who reads the Bible judiciously, will see that Moses was forced, in order that his laws and his orders should prosper, to massacre innumerable human beings who, moved by nothing but envy, opposed his designs.”Footnote 78 He also points to King David as a model founder of a new state: “The measures that men like King David must employ at the beginning of their reign, i.e., in order to found or establish their states, are described by Machiavelli as ‘most cruel and inimical, not only to every Christian manner of living but to every humane manner of living as well’.”Footnote 79 Establishing a state is “a continuous act” that may sometimes require a return to the founding terror.Footnote 80
According to Strauss, Machiavelli asserts that founders must use terror to forge a disparate mass of people into a unified state and kill or frighten away enemies: “the primacy of Love must be replaced by the primacy of Terror if republics are to be established in accordance with nature and on the basis of knowledge of nature.”Footnote 81 “If the common good in the sense stated is the ultimate end, every means, regardless of whether it is morally good or not, is good if it is conducive to that end. The killing of innocent men, even of one’s own brother, will be good if it is needed for that most just and laudable end.”Footnote 82 Here, it is worth pondering the possibility that Strauss is thinking about the recent history of Israel when discussing terror at the founding of a state. On July 22, 1946, the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, blew up the King David Hotel killing 91 people in what was debatably an act of terrorism.Footnote 83 Regardless of what Strauss thought about this incident, Thoughts on Machiavelli conveys the message that state formation requires the murder and displacement of innocent people.
When Strauss was writing about a “new prince” in Thoughts on Machiavelli, he may have been thinking about David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the modern State of Israel.Footnote 84 Ben-Gurion was the leader of the Jewish community in the Yishuv before independence, the leader of Israeli forces during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the first prime minister of Israel, the head of the Mapai Party, and the boss of the Histradrut labor federation. Haaretz columnist Dahlia Scheindlin says although Ben-Gurion “envisioned democratic systems of governance in a future state,” democracy “was neither his core ideology nor his favored political strategy.” According to Scheindlin, “Ben-Gurion unsentimentally cut corners on democratic institutions, practice, and values for the sake of state-building, and he presided over the least democratic era in Israel’s postindependence history.”Footnote 85 Strauss’s political teaching is that new princes do not have the luxury to respect human rights, civil liberties, or democratic means until their state is established.
One of Strauss’s hermeneutical principles is that alert readers take note of an author’s silence. “In Discourses II 2,” he writes, “Machiavelli notes that Livy’s History is silent as how to how the race of Porsenna, king of Tuscany, became extinct,” and that Machiavelli himself “is silent concerning the extreme measures required for the liberation of Italy.”Footnote 86 It is noteworthy that Strauss remained silent about the Nakba—the Arabic term for “catastrophe” used by Palestinians to describe their violent expulsion from the land in 1948 and beyond—or how the Palestinian city of Jaffa became the Israeli city of Tel Aviv.Footnote 87 It is worth contrasting his approach with that of his fellow German-Jewish émigré to the United States, Hannah Arendt. In her 1948 article, “To Save the Jewish Homeland,” Arendt decried the forced evacuations of the Arab populations from Haifa and Tiberias and how the Irgun had thrown bombs at Arab workers outside a Haifa refinery. She maintained that “local self-government and mixed Jewish-Arab municipal and rural councils … are the only realistic political measures that can eventually lead to the political emancipation of Palestine.”Footnote 88 Strauss, to my knowledge, never put in print what he thought should happen to the people living on the land before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
Thoughts on Machiavelli treats the theme of the relationship between the political founder and religion. The text discloses itself in a new way if you consider Ben-Gurion’s relationship to religious Zionism and the anti-Zionist Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) in the Yishuv. According to Strauss, Machiavelli avows founders must be careful about how they use religion to mobilize and consolidate a people. Romulus murdered his brother to found Rome, but Numa served an equally vital function as “the founder of the religion of the ancient Romans.”Footnote 89 A founder can use religion to bind people together into a fighting force, or a founder can enervate a people by making them forsake this world for dreams of another one. “Whereas the Roman Church is the greatest enemy of the well-being of Italy, the pagan auguries were the cause of ‘the well-being of the Roman Republic.’”Footnote 90 Strauss’s Machiavelli is an atheist who knows that political founders need religion to bind the people together into a fighting force. “On the whole Machiavelli teaches in the section on the Roman religion that fear of God’s or the gods’ power and wrath can be very useful; he is silent as to whether God and the gods are powerful or exist.”Footnote 91 According to Dov Waxman, “while early Zionists appropriated many words, symbols, and themes from the Jewish religious tradition, most of them were staunchly secular in their beliefs and lifestyle and often dismissive of Judaism.”Footnote 92 Over time, political Zionists realized that “religious Jews in Israel and the diaspora have become the most vocal and energetic adherents of Zionism.”Footnote 93 Regardless of their personal atheism, political Zionists could not achieve their aims without the support of religious Zionists. Thus, the challenge for the founders of the State of Israel was to earn the support of religious Zionists and contain the threat posed by anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews.Footnote 94 Ben-Gurion made the following compromises to accommodate Orthodox Jews: Saturday would be a day of rest; establishments would preserve kosher rules; family law would be adjudicated by religious courts; yeshivas would have autonomy; and yeshiva students would be exempt from military service.Footnote 95 Strauss’s Machiavelli understood that sometimes Fortuna thwarts human plans; nevertheless, he insists the founder must manipulate religion to strengthen the state, not the reverse.
Thoughts on Machiavelli contains many passages that suggest it is naïve to believe that founders ever establish their regimes without extralegal violence that defines the tyrant’s rule. “As far as founders are concerned, the distinction between virtuous heroes and extremely able criminals has ceased to exist.”Footnote 96 “If one says that the tyrant must use fraud in order to rise to power, Machiavelli replies to him that the model king Cyrus and the model republic Rome rose to greatness in no other way.”Footnote 97 In his 1953 Walgreen Lectures, he says that even a republic’s foreign policy is “bound to be of such a character that, to quote Macaulay, ‘the most depraved criminal, working with his most intimate friends, in the darkest corner of a cave, would blush even to allude to them’.”Footnote 98 Strauss lived and taught in Israel in 1954–55, between when he delivered the Walgreen lectures and finished writing Thoughts on Machiavelli, so it is plausible that he had the country in mind even though his political philosophy applies in other times and places.Footnote 99 The political teaching of Thoughts on Machiavelli is that founding a state requires terror.
Republics and the maintaining of states
In his commentary on the Discourses, Strauss explains that founders may best preserve their states in the long run by turning them into “republics,” or regimes in which the people elect their rulers. He summarizes Machiavelli’s lessons about the advantages of a republic over a monarchy, at least under favorable circumstances. Republics can take advantage of the wisdom of the multitude and are not subject to the capricious whims of a ruler. Hereditary monarchies mean that a fool can become king or queen; republics may choose their leaders from many qualified candidates. Republics are both more stable and nimbler than monarchies. Tyrants can become power hungry and murder scores of people out of fear of real or imagined threats; elected rulers in a system with a stable judiciary have their hands tied against performing acts of injustice that precipitate civil war. Strauss’s Machiavelli holds that republics are the best realistic regime for achieving the common good because they achieve “freedom from foreign domination and from despotic rule, rule of law, security of the lives, the property and the honor of every citizen, ever increasing wealth and power, and last but not least glory or empire.”Footnote 100 If we assume that Strauss’s commentary on Machiavelli is a way for him to share his own thoughts, then he seems to advocate republics as the best way to preserve the common good. States may originate in extralegal violence, for Strauss, but maintaining them requires elected officials making and enforcing laws.
John P. McCormick accuses Strauss of transforming Machiavelli from a defender of plebeian democracy into a proponent of “better executed aristocratic rule.”Footnote 101 Machiavelli praises the Ciceronian-aristocratic quality of onestà (goodness) of the people, but Strauss’s Machiavelli underscores the insolenza (insolence) of the people.Footnote 102 Machiavelli maintains that “the multitude is wiser than the prince,” but Strauss emphasizes Machiavelli’s teaching that “the multitude without a head is useless” and thereby implants the iron law of oligarchy into the Florentine’s thought.Footnote 103 While McCormick is right that Strauss is an elitist, Strauss agrees with Machiavelli that republics thwart the corrupting influence of self-serving elites.Footnote 104 Furthermore, Strauss’s Machiavelli declares the Swiss are “sturdy republicans” and wisely train the citizenry to use weapons: “the Swiss are armed to the highest degree and free to the highest.”Footnote 105 The political teaching of Thoughts on Machiavelli is that the long-term stability of a state depends upon it maintaining republican modes and orders.
According to Strauss, Machiavelli teaches that “good arms are the necessary and sufficient condition for good laws” and that “unarmed modern states” need to emulate “armed ancient states.”Footnote 106 To understand why Strauss discusses this theme in Machiavelli, I suggest that we consider his 1962 account of meeting Jabotinsky:
I visited him, and he asked me: What are you doing? I said: Well, we read [the] Bible, we study Jewish history, we have Zionist theory, and of course keep abreast of developments. He said: And rifle practice? And I had to say no, which was of course a very great inconsistency on our part.Footnote 107
For Strauss, it was important for Zionists to take rifle practice and, more generally, have a powerful army to defend themselves. According to Samuel Goldman, “from his youth to near the end of his life, Strauss prescribed hardheaded ‘Romanness’ as an antidote to the weakness that beset the Jewish diaspora,” where Romanness means refusing to allow moral or religious considerations to restrain the exercise of power.Footnote 108 For Strauss, political Zionists needed to embody the Roman confidence in using military might to conquer their enemies: “the Jews should return to their land with their heads up, but not by virtue of a divine act but rather of political and military action—fighting.”Footnote 109 Thoughts on Machiavelli conveys the message that republics—including Israel and the United States—should have a military and technological advantage over their enemies and inculcate martial virtues in the citizenry.
The obfuscation of the Enlightenment
At the end of chapter 3, Strauss raises the question of whether “the Enlightenment deserves its name or whether its true name is Obfuscation.”Footnote 110 Strauss, I believe, indicates that he is waging a war of ideas against the great figure of the Aufklärung, Kant, on whose philosophy of history he taught a seminar at the University of Chicago in 1958. In her introduction to the transcript of the seminar, Susan Meld Shell notes that a youthful Strauss saw in Kant “an unmanly liberal idealism and romanticism” that refused “to face the harsh reality of a world divided among political communities that were always at least potentially mutually hostile.”Footnote 111 The transcript reveals that Strauss respected Kant as a philosopher but tried to discredit Kantianism as a serious option for thinking about international affairs.
Strauss opens his seminar by describing Kant as “the first philosopher of the highest rank who discussed the philosophy of history under this name.”Footnote 112 Kant influenced a long line of thinkers including Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger who believed “all human thought depends fundamentally on premises which appear to a given time or to a given type of man as evident but which are unevident to all other men.”Footnote 113 Kant maintained that human beings could postulate a progressive trajectory in history and permissively tell themselves “the stream of history flows in a desirable direction on the whole.”Footnote 114 Kant, according to Strauss, justified a rational faith in progress that has influenced political idealists who believe that human beings are not doomed to live in a Machiavellian world of violence and deceit.
Though Strauss primarily aims to understand Kant’s philosophy of history, he observes that Kant builds his philosophy of history on a wobbly foundation. His moral philosophy posits the intrinsic dignity of humanity’s lawmaking capacity and demands that we treat all other human beings as ends in themselves and coworkers towards the kingdom of ends. That is the Kant of the Groundwork. However, Kant’s political philosophy asserts that we may believe in moral progress because of the innate selfishness of humanity. Human beings will not form pacific federations or honor the right to asylum because of morality but rather because we want to do business with people around the world. Strauss thinks that Kant’s philosophy falls apart because it presents itself as moral and amoral at the same time: “I think all the problems of Kant are rooted in that, because the realism allows him to develop his philosophy of history where, by purely amoral or immoral means, the just society is produced.”Footnote 115
Strauss partly blames Kant for the rise of communism and its attendant problems. It is fair game to start “from the political consequences of Kant’s teaching … because only in this way one understands much better what the thinker in question is driving at in practical terms.”Footnote 116 Strauss blames Kant’s philosophy of history for motivating leftists to execute their opponents in the name of progress. He acknowledges that “Kant, the great moralist, had here some qualms which neither Hegel nor Marx ever felt.”Footnote 117 But Kant’s view of the “asocial sociability” of humanity provides “the origin of the class struggle in the Marxist doctrine and of similar things.”Footnote 118
Strauss’s primary critique of Kantianism, however, is that it did not stop the rise of the Nazis in the historic homeland of the Enlightenment. According to Kant, publicity is the great engine of Enlightenment. The public will disapprove of maxims that do not pass the transcendental principle of public right, or the universalizability test. Reason will purify politics as politicians wither under the scorn of the reading public that calls out hypocrisy. Strauss asks his students to reflect upon Hitler’s anti-Jewish policy in Germany: “It would have been impossible without the publication of the maxim, and it is a question whether that agrees with morality. … But as for the policy of abandoning all democratic procedures proper, and especially the anti-Jewish policy, that was open and no one could have any doubt about it.”Footnote 119 Furthermore, Kant called for a pacific federation that eventually became the League of Nations and the United Nations. After World War I, Germans were tired of war. However, according to Strauss, “in about 1925 they began to show war films, and there was a young generation, you know, and they were very popular.”Footnote 120 Kant’s philosophy has no way to account for the young’s thirst for violence and adventure and abhorrence of a “perfectly just society.”Footnote 121
Ultimately, Strauss rejects Kant’s philosophy of history for its lack of prudence. “Kant can have the absoluteness of these rules, which is so conducive to the purity of moral actions,” according to Strauss, “only at the heavy price of abandoning prudence as the traditional test, which always requires careful examination.”Footnote 122 Strauss blames Kant and the Enlightenment in general for obfuscating the need for Western leaders to exercise a Machiavellian prudenza to thwart enemies such as communists and Nazis.
Propaganda
Thoughts on Machiavelli offers a teaching on how political philosophers may wage a spiritual war against their enemies with propaganda — thereby revealing, I contend, how Strauss wanted his scholarship to change the minds of countless people who would never read his books. At the end of chapter 3, he says:
Just as Christianity defeated paganism by propaganda, [Machiavelli] believes that he can defeat Christianity by propaganda … Machiavelli is the first philosopher who believes that the coincidence of philosophy and political power can be brought about by propaganda which wins over ever larger multitudes to the new modes and orders and thus transforms the thought of one or a few into the opinion of the public and therewith into public power.Footnote 123
In his lectures on political philosophy at the Hebrew University in 1954–55, Strauss said more about Machiavelli’s strategy to convince Christians to adopt his worldview:
The only element of Christianity which Machiavelli took over was the idea of propaganda. This idea is the only link between his thought and Christianity. He attempted to destroy Christianity by the same means by which Christianity was originally established. He desired to imitate, not Moses, the armed prophet, but Jesus.Footnote 124
He tells his audience in Jerusalem that Christianity conquered Western civilization not because it is true but because it had a book capable of winning the hearts and minds of philosophers as capable as Augustine and Aquinas, political leaders, and ordinary people who read the Bible and admire the stain-glassed windows in their churches. He is not criticizing Machiavelli’s use of propaganda or his spiritual war against Christianity. After all, Machiavelli was one of the only non-Jews during the Spanish Inquisition to protest the “pious cruelty” of Ferdinand of Aragon and “seems to have diagnosed the great evils of religious persecution as a necessary consequence of the Christian principle.”Footnote 125
The first thing to note about Strauss’s discussion of propaganda is that Machiavelli never uses the term. According to Philip M. Taylor, “the Vatican gave us the word ‘propaganda’ in the seventeenth-century to describe its organization to defend ‘the true faith’ against the challenge of the Protestant Reformation.”Footnote 126 The more proximate context for Strauss’s use of the term is the role of propaganda during World War I. To generate support for the war, President Woodrow Wilson established the Committee on Public Information (CPI). This committee promoted the narrative that the United States was fighting for democracy at home and abroad and circulated cartoons to inflame violent passions. If we read Strauss in historical context, we see that he is participating in a debate in his own time about the validity of propaganda in democratic societies. On one side, democrats such as John Dewey viewed propaganda as “a pathology of flawed systems of inquiry.”Footnote 127 On the other, elitists such as Friedrich Hayek held that it is impossible to expect ordinary people to make informed decisions about politics and that it is necessary for intellectual elites to rule and mollify the masses with propaganda. Though Hayek appreciated scholarship and science, he still recognized the “decisive power of the professional secondhand dealers in ideas.”Footnote 128 For all their differences, Strauss and Hayek agreed that philosophers needed the help of journalists, public intellectuals, publicists, and advertisers to change the minds and hearts of many people.
Propaganda, on Strauss’s account, works in two stages. First, political philosophers write books that influence a small cadre. Machiavelli’s “long-range success depended on the full conversion of some men” who “would inspire, in favorable circumstances, the formation of a new ruling class, a new kind of princes, comparable to the patriciate of ancient Rome.”Footnote 129 I suspect that Strauss is describing his own intention as a scholar and a mentor. According to Gilbert, he referred to his best students as “the boys” and helped them find academic jobs and powerful policy positions. He wanted to “place students in liberal arts colleges where they would be the most knowledgeable and charismatic people on the faculty, and then in rightwing foundations and receptive administrations,”Footnote 130 and used his connection with Robert Goldwin, director of the Public Affairs Conference Center at the University of Chicago, and Hans Speier, head of the Rand Corporation, to place students in the strategic establishment.Footnote 131
The next stage of a propaganda campaign is spreading a simple political ideology among many people. According to Strauss, Machiavelli captivated readers who “would not be able to understand the full meaning of his undertaking, but they could be counted upon to guarantee that his books would get some hearing. They would make his books publicly defensible.”Footnote 132 According to Gilbert, Strauss advocated US “aggression to intimidate the Soviet Union, including the conquest of Cuba, even after the Cuban missile crisis,” and disseminated his ideas through the Public Affairs Conference Center at the University of Chicago run by his student Goldwin.Footnote 133 Donald Rumsfeld referred to Goldwin as “the Ford administration’s one-man think tank.”Footnote 134 Today, think tanks such as the Manhattan Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and the Heritage Foundation advise conservative politicians that the US should take an aggressive role on the world stage.Footnote 135 Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Christopher F. Rufo posted on social media that “Strauss’s insistence that Machiavelli was a teacher of evil” is “mystifying to me.”Footnote 136 Strauss’s political teaching is not that conservative Americans need to become scholars of the history of political philosophy; it is that they need to support US allies around the world—a message that conservative think tanks reinforce daily in Congressional hearings, op-eds, and cable news programming. For Strauss, a propaganda campaign works when political philosophers and their supporters change common sense—or, in his case, return common sense to its classical sense uncontaminated by the Enlightenment.Footnote 137
Conclusion
The first aim of this article has been to demonstrate the value of reading Strauss in biographical and historical context. Strauss, I have argued, was a German-Jewish émigré trying to convince Americans to defend embattled outposts of the West. Jerry Z. Muller observes that the academic division of labor means that professors in Jewish studies or theology departments read and comment on Strauss’s Jewish thought, political scientists focus on Strauss’s interpretations of canonical political philosophers, and few scholars write on Strauss’s relationship to political Zionists such as Leon Pinsker or Theodor Herzl.Footnote 138 Strauss’s correspondence and lecture transcripts reveal that he wanted the United States to use its military and diplomatic power to protect its allies in Cuba, Vietnam, and the State of Israel. Based on Strauss’s words and the actions of some of the people trained in his school, I speculate that he would want the US to protect its allies (and its interests) in places like Ukraine, Taiwan, and Argentina.Footnote 139 Strauss’s defenders have argued that he became a critical supporter of liberal democracy after his move to the United States.Footnote 140 This article has shown that Thoughts on Machiavelli justifies Gertrude Himmelfarb’s description of Strauss as a “prophet of a new conservatism.”Footnote 141 He wanted American conservatives to embrace an aggressive Realpolitik and reject the anti-interventionist tradition represented today by former Congresspeople Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia.
The second aim of this article is to gain a deeper understanding of contemporary global affairs. The opening paragraph considered how prominent American conservatives today read Strauss, were trained by Straussians, or move in the same social circles as Straussians. Though Strauss is not directly responsible for what anyone else says or does, he expresses at the highest level of sophistication a right-wing political realist outlook that has many supporters in the Israeli government and the second Trump administration.Footnote 142 Strauss waged a war of position against Kantian progressivism that today supports international legal bodies such as the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice.Footnote 143 Strauss provides a philosophical justification for politicians like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu telling the US Congress on July 25, 2024, that “the hands of the Jewish state will never be shackled,”Footnote 144 or public intellectuals like Rufo posting on social media that “international law is fake and the war in Gaza is not a genocide.”Footnote 145 To grasp contemporary politics—including the second Trump administration’s flaunting of international law and norms—we need to understand Strauss’s critique of the Enlightenment and his view that politics, at least during emergencies, is the realm of “iron and poison, of murder and treachery.”Footnote 146
