Leo Strauss is perhaps best known for his project to renew political philosophy in a period when historicist and positivist social sciences had pronounced it dead. He did so as a scholar who put forward original interpretations of early modern, medieval, and ancient political thinkers. But he also developed a meta-conception of what political philosophy ought to be, above and beyond its different incarnations in the history of political thought, which he called “Platonic political philosophy.” Consequently, one can approach Strauss in two ways: as a particularly clever reader of some canonical texts, whose interpretative hypotheses may turn out to be more or less fruitful for the project of coming to understand these texts; or as a philosopher in his own right, who has something like a system in place which, like all systems worthy of that name, generates the meaning of its key concepts from within, in a holistic fashion. Much of the difficulty and frustration encountered by readers of Strauss’s texts is that they operate in both registers simultaneously. So one is never quite sure with Strauss whether one is confronted with a brilliant hermeneutical insight or with a projection into a foreign text of a proposition or corollary of a rather obscure system.

One of the great paradoxes of Strauss’s interpretations of Islamic and Jewish medieval philosophy is that while he uncovered, as a scholar, an entire new area of research, as a philosopher he quickly covered it up again by putting his findings at the service of his own system. Depending on one’s perspective, Joshua Parens’s book either exploits or suffers under this paradox: It offers both a reading of Maimonides and Alfarabi as proto-Straussian thinkers and a new interpretation of the “turn” taken by Strauss under the influence of his recovery of Alfarabi’s thought.

Leo Strauss and the Recovery of Medieval Political Philosophy is divided into four parts. The first of these focuses on Strauss’s scholarly contribution to the study of Islamic and Jewish medieval philosophy. Strauss’s basic insight, which he took over from Hermann Cohen, is that these Islamic and Jewish thinkers were exoterically Aristotelian, but esoterically Platonists. This is made abundantly clear in Strauss’s essay “Cohen and Maimonides” of 1931, which is not mentioned in Parens’s book. For Strauss, this meant that although these Islamic and Jewish thinkers seemed to rank metaphysics above politics, in reality their foremost interest was in establishing what Plato called the “royal science,” or a true science of politics. The most important thesis derived from this royal science is that the prophets who founded their respective religions are to be understood as Platonic philosopher-kings. This is an interesting hypothesis because it opens up the possibility of taking the interpretation of revealed religion away from theologians and lawyers.

At this juncture, however, steps in a meta-Strauss, who develops his own original ideas about what “Platonic political philosophy” ought to be. According to Parens, the scholarly Strauss clashes with the meta-Strauss: Whereas the former “seems to have taken the philosopher-king, especially as it appeared in medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy, somewhat literally as the basis of the ideal state or the perfect law” (p. 20), the meta-Strauss “saw the depth of the tension between the way of life recommended by divine law (or the city) and the way of life of the philosopher (or man)” (p. 21). For the scholarly Strauss, Alfarabi and Maimonides see in the prophet the solution to the above tension; but for the meta-Strauss, according to Parens at least, that solution now becomes the problem. Like many other Straussians, he tends to take sides with the meta-Strauss against the scholar Strauss. Thus, Parens argues that the topos of the “solitude” of the philosopher in society, which is found in Islamic and Jewish thought, indicates the persistence of the tension between the philosopher and the city even in the age of prophets. For Parens, the philosopher as solitary and the philosopher as prophet are irreconcilable.

I fail to see why this must be the case, however. Is it not natural that Moses’s or Mohammed’s teachings will become corrupt after their deaths, that their respective cities or “great nations” will return to be ruled by would-be kings and their coteries of priests and judges, and so the philosopher—as solitary—will always be needed to remind the city of the guidance offered by a correct understanding of divine law? This is also, incidentally, why Parens’s constant identification of divine law with the laws of the city is highly problematic, for it amounts to denying the difference between a prophet and a king.

The second part of the book, again following the meta-Strauss, is a critique of those interpretations of medieval philosophy, first and foremost the one provided by Harry A. Wolfson, who see its great achievement in the development of “philosophical religion.” Wolfson thought that medieval philosophy, across the three monotheisms, built on Philo’s belief, put crudely, that Plato is just Moses translated into Greek. Thus, Jews (and Muslims and Christians) and philosophers are potentially convertible into each other. Parens, instead, takes literally Strauss’s claim that: “Jews of the philosophic competence of Halevi and Maimonides took it for granted that being a Jew and being a philosopher are mutually exclusive” (cited on p. 49). This statement causes Parens a lot of headaches, for it implies that Maimonides must have chosen one identity over the other: The book spends a considerable amount of time trying to figure out which identity was sacrificed, and for what reason. But there is a tertium datur: All that Strauss might be saying is that for Halevi and Maimonides, the God of Moses is not the God of Aristotle (also known as “the philosopher”). This does not exclude the possibility that Plato is closer to Moses than to Aristotle, if one can put this way. And if Maimonides is a Platonist, as maintained by Strauss, then the solution to the conundrum is in view.

In the third part, the book returns to the treatment of Strauss as a scholar of medieval philosophy. The crucial finding here is that the Guide teaches that “the true science of the Law [i]s the political philosophic study of the aims of the Law” (p. 90). As far as I understand it, I tend to agree with this claim. However, if true, then Parens’s meta-Strauss is in trouble: for how can the divine Law both prescribe the (Platonic) philosophical life as man’s highest aim and at the same time be responsible for persecuting philosophers? Not to mention that for Maimonides, Moses was a perfect philosopher and the divine Law teaches that there will come a time when everyone will know the truth, that is, will be able to lead a philosophical life.

We thus arrive at the fourth and last part, which addresses the central claim of meta-Strauss, namely, that “first philosophy” or metaphysics/theology is in the end nothing but “political philosophy.” For Strauss the scholar, this claim is a consequence of the belief held by some Islamic and Jewish medieval philosophers like Alfarabi, Averroes, and Maimonides that some of the prophets were Platonic philosopher-kings. Parens rejects this scholarly or interpretative hypothesis as “a caricature of a moment in Leo Strauss’s early interpretation of Maimonides” (p. 113). Instead, Parens offers another reading of the identity between political philosophy and first philosophy. First, it means that “what makes a divine law truly divine . . . is that the Law should cultivate the intellect” of the “solitary” philosopher (p. 122)—I showed previously that this is putting the proverbial cart before the horse. But, second and most importantly, it means “that political philosophy might have some theoretical significance of its own” (p. 124). The last chapter of the book spells out what this entails: according to Parens, it means that Maimonides “seems to have codified Jewish law so that at least some Jews could study philosophy” (p. 125).

The reader may justifiably be unimpressed with this anodyne conclusion. More to the point, if this is what The Guide for the Perplexed accomplishes, then it only seems to reinforce Philo’s original point that saw in divine Law a philosophical religion, or, in the terms of Cohen, a “religion of reason.”