STRAUSS'S RETURN TO THE QUARREL BETWEEN THE ANCIENTS AND THE MODERNS

It is well known that Strauss came to the view that ancient political philosophy, especially the thought of Plato and Aristotle, is superior to modern political philosophy in all of its various forms. He himself indicated this general conclusion clearly enough in some of his most important works (see, e.g., Strauss 1953, vii; 1995, 21–39; 1964, 1–12). It was not always his view, however. Strauss's first major work was a book on Spinoza's critique of religion, a theme to which he turned before entertaining serious thoughts of a return to classical thought. Although his study of Spinoza led to or increased his dissatisfaction with modern thought, it was nevertheless, as Strauss himself would later explain, “based on the premise, sanctioned by powerful prejudice, that a return to pre-modern philosophy is impossible” (1965a, 31). Strauss also indicates in the same account, however, that in the period immediately following his book on Spinoza that premise began to give way, and he speaks of a “change of orientation” as he began “to wonder whether the self-destruction of reason was not the inevitable outcome of modern rationalism as distinguished from pre-modern rationalism, especially Jewish-medieval rationalism and its classical (Aristotelian and Platonic) foundation” (31). The change of orientation to which Strauss refers found its first expression in a piece on Carl Schmitt that he wrote in 1932 (see 1965a, 31; 1965b, 331–51). In that piece, Strauss points to the need, in order to free oneself from modern thought, to understand and overcome Hobbes in particular (see especially 1965b, 344–45, 351; see also 1959a, 170–73; 1953, 165–66).

We can understand, then, why Strauss's work in the period following his book on Spinoza focused on exploratory studies of a number of premodern thinkers together with a rigorous analysis of Hobbes. The early and mid-1930s, despite the political turmoil that forced him to seek refuge outside Germany, was an extremely fertile period for Strauss in which he was finding the path that he would travel for the rest of his life (see Meier 2006b). The most important works he produced during this period are a collection of essays on Maimonides and his Islamic predecessors, which he gathered together in Philosophy and Law, and The Political Philosophy of Hobbes. Following in the wake of his essay on Schmitt, these two works offer fuller expressions of Strauss's change of orientation.²

Although these considerations should keep us from regarding Strauss's writings from the 1930s as expressions of his thought in its full maturity, his writings from this period are an excellent entryway into his thought. For the very fact that Strauss was at this point finding his own way makes his writings from this period, if more provisional and exploratory than his later work, more open and direct in important respects. Strauss's early writings also offer the instructive spectacle of his own struggle to find the path that would later define his thought. At this crucial juncture, Strauss set out, without awareness of where his path would lead, to “drag out the dusty books” and to reexamine the original arguments in quarrels most regarded as long settled.³

Strauss's attempt to reopen the case of the moderns against the ancients, as this last statement indicates, was motivated by an already emerging dissatisfaction with modern thought and thus was not carried out in a spirit of neutrality or detachment. Strauss's intentions, however, cannot be adequately expressed in terms of the common scholarly antithesis between detachment and dogmatism. He would not have reopened the case of the moderns against the ancients had he not had a strong suspicion that the case had been wrongly decided in favor of the moderns. That is not to say, though, that he was dismissive of modern thought or that he regarded a return to classical thought as an easy and clearly possible task (see Strauss 1946, 327–39; Tarcov 1994, 259–74). How, then, did the divide between the ancients and the moderns look to Strauss at this critical point in his career? What did he see as the decisive differences, both of substance and of method, between ancient and modern thought that led him to think that ancient thought could be superior?

In examining The Political Philosophy of Hobbes to answer these questions, I am turning to a work that has received considerable attention from scholars of Hobbes but less attention from scholars of Strauss (cf., however, Meier 2006b). The Political Philosophy of Hobbes was recognized as a major contribution to Hobbes scholarship when it first appeared, and it continues to be regarded as one of the most important interpretations of Hobbes's thought (see, e.g., Spragens 1973; Tuck 1987; Watkins 1965). Scholars of Hobbes who have confronted Strauss's book, however, have focused on his account of the moral basis of Hobbes's political philosophy without paying sufficient attention to the most profound section of the work in which Strauss draws his most direct and thorough comparison between Hobbes and the ancients. Strauss's interpretation of Hobbes cannot be fully understood without examining his complex analysis of Hobbes's rejection of the classical tradition and his reformulation of the task of political philosophy. Approaching Strauss's confrontation with Hobbes in light of his concern with the divide between the ancients and the moderns, then, is essential both for understanding his view of Hobbes's thought and for grasping the role this confrontation played in Strauss's own development. By focusing on the extensive and revealing comparison that Strauss draws between Hobbes and the ancients in The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, we can understand how, at this pivotal moment, Strauss came to conceive of the divide between the ancients and moderns in such a way that he thought that a return to classical thought might be possible and necessary.

THE ARGUMENT OF THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF HOBBES

For understanding the divide between the ancients and the moderns as it appeared to Strauss early in his career, the most important section of his book on Hobbes's political philosophy is the final chapter. Only in that chapter, entitled “The New Political Science,” does Strauss fulfill what he suggests was his ultimate purpose in turning to Hobbes, namely, to compare the political doctrine of the man whom he regarded at that time as the founder of modern political philosophy with the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle, “as the founders of traditional political philosophy” (viii). According to Strauss's view at the time, Hobbes's political philosophy was “the first peculiarly modern attempt to give a coherent and exhaustive answer to the question of man's right life, which is at the same time the question of the right order of society” (1). As the final chapter makes clear, however, Strauss had already come to doubt the adequacy of Hobbes's “peculiarly modern” attempt. The comparison between Hobbes and the ancients in which The Political Philosophy of Hobbes culminates is meant to be a critique of Hobbes, and, given “the epoch-making significance of Hobbes's political philosophy” (155), a critique of the entire development that he set in motion (consider 155–65). Strauss reserves this critique for the final chapter, however, because it could not be delivered before he removed “the obstacles” standing in the way of understanding the true character of Hobbes's political philosophy (ix).

The primary obstacle to an adequate understanding of Hobbes's political philosophy, in Strauss's view, was the view that its basis is modern natural science. The presence of this obstacle can be traced not just to the misunderstanding of earlier scholars but also in some measure to Hobbes himself, because Hobbes, according to Strauss, “tried to base his political philosophy on modern natural science” (ix). Strauss argues that this attempt had the effect of obscuring the true basis of Hobbes's political philosophy, which is not modern science but rather a “fundamental view of human life” rooted in a “specific moral attitude” (x). If the ultimate aim of Strauss's study of Hobbes is to compare Hobbes's political philosophy with that of the ancients, its more immediate task is to defend the view that Hobbes's political philosophy originated in a moral attitude that was independent of and prior to his turn to modern science and his discovery of Euclid's geometry. According to Strauss, the evolution of Hobbes's political philosophy was shaped by the progressive unfolding of the significance and novelty of a moral attitude that preceded his turn to scientific and mathematical sources. That attitude, far from being the product of modern science and mathematics, supplied the motive for Hobbes's turn to those sources as methods by which he could defend a position that was at bottom “pre-scientific” (2–29; see also ix–xi).

It is possible to give only a brief summary here of Strauss's rich account of the gradual unfolding of Hobbes's moral attitude, the tracing out of which is the main task of the seven chapters of The Political Philosophy of Hobbes leading up to the final one. The character of Hobbes's moral attitude can best be seen, Strauss suggests, by starting from Hobbes's emphasis on the antithesis between vanity and the fear of violent death. Although Hobbes saw each of these passions as rooted in human nature, vanity, in his view, is the source of injustice, whereas the fear of violent death is “the origin of the just intention” (25). In other words, the antithesis between vanity and the fear of violent death is a “moral and humanist antithesis,” according to Strauss, insofar as it expresses a distinction between moral and immoral intentions (23–29). The moral judgment expressed by Hobbes's crucial antithesis guided his ever more emphatic rejection, over the course of his life, of all notions of virtue that praise valor and insist that men are sometimes morally obligated to risk their lives (108–16). In particular, Hobbes became increasingly critical of the principle of honor as he developed “a progressively more and more decided criticism of aristocratic virtue” (114). He came to see the concern for honor as an expression of vain human pride, as a manifestation of “the most dangerous passion,” the passion which “dazzles and blinds men” by leading them to overestimate their power and seek their own preeminence at the expense of others (111, 113–14, 130). At the same time, Hobbes came increasingly to see the fear of violent death as the “sufficient motive for right behavior,” as the “power which makes men see” by piercing through the “cocoon of vain dreams” that man weaves about himself in his effort to deceive himself about “the horror of his natural situation” (111–16, 124–26, 130).

As these formulations suggest, Hobbes's opposition to vanity and his acceptance of fear are driven, in Strauss's account, by a set of interrelated thoughts and concerns. Hobbes rejects vanity, the passion which “makes men blind,” both because it gives rise to delusions and because it is the root of unjust self-assertion. By the same token, he embraces the fear of violent death, the passion which “makes men see,” both because it produces clarity and because it is the root of legitimate self-protection. These concerns are displayed in Hobbes's effort to supplant aristocratic virtue and defuse the conflicts caused by its demands by promoting a new moral and political order that would spread a general “enlightenment” and bring a lasting peace. The pursuit of this aim both required and was shaped by the acceptance of an outlook according to which it is morally acceptable—and even approved by genuine right—to acknowledge one's vulnerable humanity by giving in to fear and by placing one's own safety before any supposed obligation to risk one's life in the service of “higher” ideals. With this new outlook that welcomes the clarity and safety produced by fear as the cure for the delusion and conflict produced by vanity, Hobbes prepared the way, according to Strauss, for the emergence of bourgeois virtue and the new form of “self-consciousness” on which it rests.

This new form of self-consciousness, as an awareness of one's own vulnerability and of the ever-lurking dangers of the state of nature, is much bleaker than the view it was intended to replace. Nevertheless, it promised a new development. On the basis of a bleak view of the human condition, a view that Hobbes, far from hiding, wanted to proclaim as emphatically as possible, Hobbes thought he could lay the groundwork for a rational morality and show the way to a “true and permanent society” (see 122–23, 111–12; cf. Strauss 1953, 179–202). Because it would rest on the solid foundation of a passion that “compels prudence,” Hobbes's new morality would overcome the problem that Hobbes regarded as the decisive defect in traditional political philosophy, the problem of the applicability of the norms discovered by philosophy (see 116, 95–101). In the fear of violent death, Hobbes thought that he had found “a truly applicable principle of political philosophy” (101). Strauss also calls attention to another important difference between Hobbes's ideal and the standards of traditional political philosophy. Hobbes's “right self-consciousness,” as an awareness of the individual of his vulnerable relation to other individuals, and especially of the primacy of his own right to act in self-defense, stands in contrast to “all those conceptions which recognize obedience either as the essence of, or as an essential moment in, right living” (128; cf. Strauss, 1965b, 344–45).

In the first seven chapters of The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, Strauss devotes his efforts to bringing out Hobbes's moral attitude, to describing it and showing how it shaped Hobbes's thought in the various stages of its evolution. To repeat, Hobbes's moral attitude, according to Strauss, is prior to and independent of his turn to natural science and mathematics. Strauss affirms this contention again at the beginning of his eighth and final chapter (129, 135). He begins his transition to the final stage of his argument, however, by observing that, although Hobbes's moral attitude is prior both in time and in importance to “his preoccupation with the exact sciences,” “there remains the question how Hobbes's mathematical studies furthered or hindered his political philosophy; in other words, what had to be added to his fundamental moral attitude in order that his political philosophy should take on its final form” (129–30). Moreover, he suggests that Hobbes's turn to natural science and mathematics did play an important role at least in bringing Hobbes to full consciousness of his position and of his rebellion against tradition (see 136–38). The question of the role played by the methods of the “exact sciences” in shaping Hobbes's political philosophy in its mature form leads Strauss to a direct and extensive comparison of Hobbes with Plato and Aristotle. Surprisingly, however, this comparison begins from an opposition between Hobbes and Aristotle that would seem to reveal a similarity between Hobbes and Plato.

THE (MERELY) APPARENT PLATONISM OF HOBBES'S NEW POLITICAL SCIENCE

Throughout The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, Strauss gradually uncovers the divide between Hobbes and Aristotle. Although Hobbes was deeply influenced by Aristotle and took Aristotle's Rhetoric in particular as the model for his analysis of the passions (see 30–43), he moved further and further from Aristotle as his thought developed. His departure from Aristotle can be traced to his emphasis on the antithesis between vanity and the fear of violent death, an antithesis that accords supreme importance to the protection of what would be described by Aristotle as “mere life.” Through this antithesis, Hobbes suggests that fear rather than shame at potential dishonor is the proper motive for the good behavior of all men, not only of base men as Aristotle would have it (50–58, 111–16; cf. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1179b3-13). Hobbes's departure from Aristotle is closely connected, in Strauss's account, to his greater interest in application, that is, to his desire to find a solid basis in the passions for principles that would be universally applicable and reliable under all circumstances (see 95–102, 130–32).

Hobbes had already departed from Aristotle, then, prior to his turn to natural science and mathematics. Still, the departure was not complete, according to Strauss, until Hobbes became acquainted with Galileo's “resolutive-compositive” method and until he discovered Euclid's geometry (compare Johnston 1989, 22–23; Martinich 2005, 6, 18–19; Tuck 2002, 52). Only with these discoveries did Hobbes become fully conscious of his dissatisfaction with traditional political philosophy, and only then did he become convinced of the need for a radically new political philosophy (136). Strauss's statement on this crucial point is complex. What was awakened in Hobbes by his turn to modern science and by his discovery of Euclid was a hope for a new method in political philosophy that would allow it finally to achieve its aim of providing a truly scientific grounding of moral and political norms. That this had always been the aim of political philosophy, and that political philosophy or political science in this sense is possible and necessary, were assumptions, according to Strauss, that Hobbes took from the philosophic tradition without questioning them (136). Hobbes accepted what he took to be the aim of traditional political philosophy, but he thought that traditional political philosophy had failed to achieve its aim. The methods of natural science and Euclidean geometry made Hobbes fully aware of this failure, and they pointed to a reform that would rescue political philosophy: “According to Hobbes's own view, the application of mathematical method to political philosophy means that politics is now for the first time raised to the rank of a science, a branch of rational knowledge” (136–37; see Hobbes De Cive, Epistle Dedicatory, Preface to the Readers; Elements of Law, Epistle Dedicatory; Leviathan, 31.41, 46.11).

The failure of traditional political philosophy to attain the rank of a science was particularly acute, in Hobbes's view, in the case of Aristotle. For Aristotle displayed most clearly the characteristic failing of traditional political philosophy as it came to appear to Hobbes as he considered the promise and demands of a truly scientific approach to politics. The appeal of natural science and especially mathematics for Hobbes were their exactitude or precision. To achieve such precision in political philosophy, however, Hobbes had to go beyond a simple application of the methods of natural science and mathematics. As Strauss explains, “exactitude in political philosophy has a scope and significance quite different from that of mathematics; exact passionless mathematics is indifferent to passions; exact passionless political philosophy is in conflict with the passions” (137). In other words, since political philosophy deals so much more directly with the most controversial questions of human life and must confront the delusions caused by vanity, it faces an obstacle not faced by natural science or mathematics. This obstacle is not only the force of human passions; it is “also and especially the opinions which are born of the passions and nourished by them” (137). Hobbes came to the conclusion, then, that an exact or truly scientific political philosophy had to attack, in Strauss's words, “all opinions of the good and fitting” (137). To be exact knowledge, political philosophy had to be “completely free of the character of opinion” (138); it had to be “opposed to pre-scientific morals and politics, i.e. to everyday praise and blame” (138). This opposition, and not the mere adoption of a new method, constitutes “the philosophic meaning of the turning to ‘Euclid’” defined in terms of “what that turning means for political philosophy” (138).⁴

To turn against the opinions expressed in everyday praise and blame and to demand an exact moral and political philosophy is to turn against Aristotle, because Aristotle's political philosophy begins from the insistence that the subjects of political philosophy cannot be treated with mathematical precision (see Nicomachean Ethics 1094b11-27, 1098a26-34). Moreover, Aristotle's insistence that the subjects of political philosophy must be treated roughly and in outline—an insistence to which Strauss calls attention (139)—is closely connected with his effort to present a political philosophy that takes its bearings by the opinions expressed in everyday praise and blame (138–41; consider Nicomachean Ethics 1094b27-1095a4, 1095a30-b14, 1098a34-b8, 1129a3-31). In other words, precisely what Hobbes came to see as the essential defect of political philosophy, as the source of its imprecision and its failure to attain the rank of a science, was, for Aristotle, its essential character. Thus, with his attempt to develop an exact political philosophy, Hobbes “stands for the first time in explicit opposition to Aristotle's political philosophy” (139). This opposition, however, would not necessarily have led him to a complete rejection of all traditional political philosophy, for Aristotle's contention about the necessary imprecision of political philosophy was delivered in apparent opposition to Plato. Unlike Aristotle, Plato “had demanded that the most important subjects—the just, the beautiful and, above all, the good—should be treated not in outline but with the greatest accuracy” (139). Whereas “the confusion with regard to the good, the just, and the beautiful” that belongs to everyday opinions was, for Aristotle, a reason not to demand precision in such matters, for Plato it was “a reason for transcending the whole field in which such confusion was possible” (139). Plato would seem, then, to have been the first to seek a political philosophy or a political science opposed to common opinions and guided by the demand for scientific precision. Strauss therefore draws this provisional conclusion: “Thus, when Hobbes, stimulated by mathematics, demands an exact and paradoxical political philosophy, he is departing from Aristotle and going back to Plato. The turning to Euclid is to be characterized at first as a turn to Plato” (139).

Why is this turn, though, to be characterized only at first as a turn to Plato? Before answering this question, we must consider further the difference between Aristotle and Plato as it appeared to Hobbes after his turn to Euclid. After this turn, Hobbes's previously high opinion of Aristotle fell, whereas his opinion of Plato rose. Strauss offers this broad formulation of Hobbes's view: “The most profound expression which Hobbes finds for the difference between Plato and Aristotle is that Plato's philosophy starts from ideas, and Aristotle's from words; that Plato frees himself from the spell of words, whereas Aristotle remains under that spell” (141; see Hobbes A Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England, 124; Leviathan, 46.11). What this formulation means is that Aristotle, in Hobbes's view, allowed himself to be guided by what men say and in particular by what they call good and bad. Yet ordinary speech about good and bad, about virtue and vice, is so shaped and dictated by men's passion-driven preferences that Aristotle's approach hardly allowed him to do more than give a description of the passions while calling them by the misleading names of the virtues (140). It certainly did not allow Aristotle to formulate “an uncompromising criticism” of common opinions and the passions on which they rest (141). Plato, by contrast, sought to avoid the problems posed by ordinary speech, to “free himself from the spell of words,” by turning to an approach akin to mathematics. Unlike Aristotle's reliance on the opinions expressed in everyday speech, Plato's approach begins from clear and precise “ideas,” not from indefinite and ambiguous “words” (139–41).

Such is the difference between Plato and Aristotle as it appeared to Hobbes. With his presentation of this view, however, Strauss launches his critique of Hobbes. Hobbes, he argues, fundamentally misunderstood the divide between Plato and Aristotle and failed to appreciate the true character of Plato's approach. Hobbes's characterization of the Platonic position, Strauss now declares, is “a caricature of the actual position, a caricature which was almost inevitable, for Hobbes, as a result of his disdain for classical philosophy, did not consider an unbiased study of the sources necessary” (141). The most important aspect of Hobbes's misunderstanding, in Strauss's presentation, is his view that Plato, by beginning from “ideas,” turns away from the opinions present in everyday speech. Far from differing from Aristotle by his neglect of speech, “it is precisely Plato,” according to Strauss, “who originally ‘takes refuge’ in speech, and Aristotle was in this respect only his disciple and successor” (141). If there is a genuine difference between Aristotle and Plato, Strauss insists, “it consists rather in this, that Plato, much more than Aristotle, orients himself by speech” (141).

In suggesting that Plato “takes refuge” in speech, Strauss draws from a passage in Plato's Phaedo in which Socrates describes his dissatisfaction with the scientific accounts of natural causality offered by his predecessors and explains his own subsequent turn to “the speeches” (see Phaedo 95e7-102a1, especially 99d4-100a8). Although Strauss is curiously silent about Socrates, he presents Plato as drawing the key Socratic conclusion: “Plato ‘takes refuge’ from things in human speech about things as the only entrance into the true reasons of things which is open to man” (142). Accepting Socrates' critique of the attempts of natural philosophers such as Anaxagoras to understand natural beings and processes by tracing them back to their underlying causes, Plato turns his attention to “what the ‘Athenians’ say” (143). This does not mean, of course, that Plato blindly accepts the opinions of his fellow citizens, for, as Strauss is quick to emphasize, “what men, in particular the Athenians, and in particular their spokesmen the Sophists, say, is contradictory,” and “the contradictions make necessary an investigation into which of the conflicting assertions is true” (143). In other words, Plato's turn to speech is a turn to dialectic, that is, to the rigorous examination of settled convictions and accepted opinions as they are revealed in discussion.

What emerges from this dialectical examination? To this crucial question, Strauss sketches only the beginnings of an answer in The Political Philosophy of Hobbes. Nevertheless, his statement, brief and incomplete as it is, is more direct and in some respects more revealing than his later statements on the same matter (compare 142–48 with Strauss 1946, 332–45; 1953, 145–53; 159b, 89–94; 1996, 178–93). Although Strauss begins his account of what is disclosed by Platonic dialectic by pointing to the contradictions in “what men say,” he weaves his discussion of these contradictions together with a discussion of another, perhaps related, aspect of Plato's analysis of everyday speech. That aspect concerns not so much the conflicts and tensions expressed in such speech as the character of the human yearning for the good that comes to sight in what men say about the good. Most important, Strauss indicates that Plato's examination of what men say about the good discloses, not only that all men wish for the good, but also that “they mean by ‘good’ what is in every respect the contrary of evil, that which is completely free from evil” (144). This belief in and yearning for a transcendent good free from evil is revealed, Strauss suggests, especially in what “virtuous youths” acknowledge as they express their longing to become virtuous and to possess the good that virtue promises (144). Yet, “what the youths confess of themselves is true of all men, if one is only exact enough, if one only considers accurately what speech means by virtue—virtue as absolutely unalloyed with vice” (144). Strauss goes so far as to suggest that Plato's doctrine of the ideas should be understood as an articulation of the aspirations and convictions that are embedded in everyday speech. Far from reflecting, as Hobbes thought, a flight from speech, the ideas as Plato understands them are, as it were, the ultimate expressions of the often buried longings and beliefs present in men's speech.⁵

Men's speech, however, is also contradictory—a point to which Strauss returns. The purpose of Plato's turn to speech is not only to uncover the longings and convictions that are revealed in speech but also to examine and press the contradictions in men's opinions that are expressed in what men say about the just, the beautiful, and the good. It is this latter aspect of dialectic as Plato understands it that gives some warrant to Hobbes's view that Plato, more than Aristotle, opposes the ordinary opinions found in everyday speech. Plato opposes those opinions, however, not because they appear at the outset to be imprecise and distorted by passions, but because they reveal themselves on examination to be beset by contradictions (145). The contradictions in common opinions lead to an investigation into which of the conflicting claims or convictions are true, and hence to an ascent to a view that becomes truly consistent by preserving those convictions that must be maintained while discarding those that must be given up (143). By making consistency possible, the convictions that are maintained prove themselves to be true. At the same time, however, they become paradoxical by their separation from the conflicting convictions with which they are joined in ordinary speech (143). Plato's demand for “an exact and, therefore, paradoxical philosophy,” which “Hobbes recognizes,” is thus the result, not the premise, of an approach that begins by taking ordinary speech as seriously as possible (145).

Strauss indicates the departure from ordinary opinions that results from Plato's dialectical examination of such opinions by pointing to Plato's distinction between true virtue and pseudo-virtue. Strauss's statement on this distinction is difficult and delicate. He starts from this formulation:

Plato's dialectical approach and the conclusions to which it leads were misunderstood, however, by Hobbes. Hobbes would seem to be following Plato insofar as, especially after his turn to natural science and mathematics, he demands a moral and political philosophy that is exact and paradoxical (148; see also 138–41). That is, Hobbes, too, opposes the judgments or valuations expressed in ordinary moral opinions. Like Plato, he distinguishes pseudo-virtue from true virtue. He also criticizes the ideal of courage. Most important, he seeks to establish a rational ideal that is superior to the distorted, passion-colored opinions that shape everyday political life (148–49). Strauss is even led by the apparent similarity between Hobbes's thought and Plato's to speak of “what Hobbes's philosophy owes to Platonism,” and of Hobbes's “Platonic approach” (149–50). Strauss's attempt to sketch out the similarity between Hobbes and Plato, however, is merely a prelude to his effort to uncover the more fundamental opposition between the two thinkers. Although Hobbes's turn to Euclid is “to be characterized at first as a return to Plato,” this turn “hides the deepest antithesis to Plato which can be imagined” (150). What is the character of that antithesis? And why, in Strauss's eyes, is Plato's approach superior to Hobbes's?

THE DIVIDE BETWEEN HOBBES AND PLATO

In his effort to capture the apparent similarity between Hobbes and Plato, Strauss several times uses the formulation that each seeks an exact and paradoxical political philosophy or political science. That this similarity is merely apparent and hides a deeper antithesis can be seen by considering the different meanings of “exact” and “paradoxical” in the two cases. For Plato, as we have seen, the “exactness” of political philosophy lies in the consistency that distinguishes the view that emerges out of a rigorous dialectical analysis from the everyday views that precede such an analysis. Only in this sense does Plato demand a “standard” that is “exact.” The Platonic standard that is arrived at in this way is “paradoxical” only in the sense that a position that has been “purified” by dialectical analysis will differ in important ways from the more common and widely accepted views that precede that analysis (see 145–46). Plato never thought that such a purification could be carried out by more than a few people, and thus he never expected the exact position to replace the common and widely accepted views. Hence, “the paradoxical nature of Platonic moral philosophy is as irreversible as the ‘cave’ existence of men bound to the body” (163). By contrast, Hobbes's moral philosophy, according to Strauss, “is destined sooner or later to change from paradox to an accepted part of public opinion” (164; cf. Strauss 1988, 32–37; 1953, 196–200).

This difference points to a deeper difference of intention that shapes the meaning of “exactness” in the case of Hobbes's thought. According to Strauss, Hobbes differed from Plato in his overriding desire to establish a norm that is applicable under all circumstances. Hobbes's “predominating interest in application,” which Strauss already pointed to in earlier chapters, now reemerges in Strauss's account as the reason that, for Hobbes, “exactness means unconditional applicability” (150–51). Strauss suggests that Hobbes's concern for applicability lay behind his turn to Euclid and his effort to fuse the Euclidean model with a version of Galileo's resolutive-compositive method adapted to political philosophy. In the resolutive-compositive method, a given object of study is to be understood through a process that first breaks the object down by an analysis that reduces it to its first principles or elements, and then constructs or “composes” it again on the basis of those elements (see 2, 6, 151–52; Cassirer 1951, 253–58; Watkins 1973, 28–41). The attraction of applying this method to political philosophy, for Hobbes, is that it could make possible the reduction of the State to its essential foundations in human nature and then the reconstruction of it on an entirely reliable foundation (151–52; see Hobbes De Cive, Epistle Dedicatory, Preface to the Readers). In applying this method to political philosophy, however, Hobbes also modifies it, for his concern is not so much to understand the object in question—in his case, the State—as to transform it by proposing a “better synthesis” of its elements (152). Strauss writes:

If in adapting the resolutive-compositive method to political philosophy Hobbes departs from Galileo, he departs even further from Plato. For when he turns to seek the elements of the State in the aspects of human nature that precede any education by society, Hobbes abandons the plane on which Plato carries out his dialectical analysis. In other words, Hobbes's adaptation of the resolutive-compositive method marks the completion of his turn away from the opinions expressed in everyday speech, away from the “popular valuations,” which, according to Strauss, “one may with a certain justification call natural valuations” (163; cf. Strauss 1953, 78–80). Whereas Plato's thought is paradoxical in the sense that it ultimately departs from these “natural valuations” on the basis of a rigorous process of questioning, Hobbes's thought is paradoxical from the start insofar as his method rejects any orientation by such valuations. Rather than beginning from the “natural valuations” and seeking a purified or consistent position that remains rooted in these valuations, Hobbes seeks new and sounder principles arrived at by a method free of contamination by the questionable opinions expressed in everyday speech. Thus, “Hobbes, rejecting the natural valuations in principle, goes beyond them to a new a priori political philosophy, which is of the future and freely projected” (163). In contrast to “the paradoxical nature of Platonic moral philosophy,” which is “the paradox of the old and eternal,” “the paradoxical nature of Hobbes's moral philosophy is the paradox of the surprising new, unheard-of venture” (164).

Why is this a problem? What is wrong, in Strauss's view, with proceeding in this way? That Strauss objects to Hobbes's procedure is made clear by his repetition, in his own name, of the Platonic, or “Socratic-Platonic,” view that to relinquish orientation by ordinary speech is to relinquish “the only possible orientation, which is originally at the disposal of men” (153; cf. 142). He also speaks of the “disastrous” consequences of Hobbes's failure to grasp and to follow the Platonic path (145; see also 142, 152–54). What are these consequences? What is wrong with the distinctively modern or modernity-founding path that Hobbes follows?

Strauss's answers to these questions are long and intricate, even in their incomplete form in The Political Philosophy of Hobbes. It is possible, however, to highlight the most important points, bearing in mind that Strauss's position was in the process of development. To begin with, Strauss emphasizes that Hobbes's departure from Plato, or more importantly from the “natural valuations” on which Plato focused, led him to demand far more from political philosophy than either Plato or Aristotle had demanded from it. Because Hobbes departed from the orientation supplied by the valuations that guided both Plato and Aristotle, it was necessary for him to try to establish new moral and political principles that could replace those valuations. In Strauss's words, “Hobbes must raise an incomparably greater claim for his political science than Plato had done” (164). That political philosophy should have as its central task the establishment and grounding of rational and universally applicable moral and political principles is, according to Strauss, an assumption that Hobbes took from the philosophic tradition without questioning it (see 136; cf. Strauss 1953, 167–69). Hobbes questioned only whether Plato and Aristotle had accomplished this aim—and he judged that they had failed. Success and failure, however, must be judged in terms of the task one sets for oneself. By calling attention more than once to Hobbes's unquestioning acceptance of what he took to be the aim of traditional political philosophy, Strauss casts doubt also on this aspect of Hobbes's understanding of Plato and Aristotle. In other words, Strauss indicates that Hobbes's failure to understand the classical thinkers rested in part on a failure to raise the fundamental question of what they regarded as the true aims and character of political philosophy. By suggesting that, for Hobbes, “the possibility and necessity of political philosophy as a science is always taken as a matter of course” (136), Strauss indicates that, for Plato and Aristotle, this was not taken as a matter of course. More than that, Strauss suggests that, in asking political philosophy to establish universally applicable principles untainted by opinions, Hobbes asked it to perform a task that the ancients would have regarded as beyond its reach and purpose.

Hobbes's extension of the task of political philosophy, then, is perhaps the most important difference, in Strauss's view, between Hobbes's new political science and the classical approach, although this differ- ence is obscured by Hobbes's view that he had finally found a way to accomplish what he thought had always been the aim of political philosophy. Unlike Hobbes, the ancients, according to Strauss's understanding of them, did not seek to establish universally applicable principles untainted by opinions. Rather, they sought, on the one hand, to clarify and refine, without fundamentally altering, the pre-scientific opinions that guided ordinary political life, and, on the other hand, to ascend from such opinions to a view that would be free of contradictions but that could never come to dominate practical life or provide universally applicable principles for its conduct (see again 136–48, 163–64; cf. Strauss 1959b). In fact, the “purified” and thus paradoxical view reached by Plato in particular did more, according to Strauss, to illuminate the limits of politics than to make the principles of practical life more scientific and rational (145–48; cf. Strauss 1959b). It is in contrast to this understanding of the classical view of the limits of theory for transforming practice that Strauss speaks of Hobbes's “enormous extension of the claims made on political science” (164). Hobbes's “expectation from political philosophy,” he would later declare, “is incomparably greater than the expectation of the classics” (1953, 177).

Strauss points to several important consequences of the greater demands that Hobbes placed on political philosophy and of his transformation of the relationship between theory and ordinary opinions. The first is that, by rejecting the orientation supplied by the valuations expressed in ordinary opinions, Hobbes set a new task that political philosophy in modernity has struggled unsuccessfully to fulfill. By abandoning the classical orientation, “Hobbes travels the path which leads to formal ethics and finally to relativist skepticism” (164). Hobbes's “enormous extension of the claims made on political science” ultimately leads, when these claims are not met, “to a denial of the very idea of political science and to the replacement of political science by sociology” (164). What Strauss suggests with these provocative formulations is that, by inaugurating the modern effort to discover universally applicable standards untainted by ordinary opinions, Hobbes helped to set political philosophy up for a fall. As the assumption took hold in modernity that the task Hobbes set was an essential task of any genuine rationalism, the failure of the various efforts to carry out that task came to be interpreted as disclosing the impossibility of a truly rationalist political philosophy and even the weakness of reason itself.

If Strauss traces a connection in this way between Hobbes's innovations and the problem of relativist skepticism, he also suggests that Hobbes bears some responsibility for another troubling development in modern thought and practice. By denigrating far more emphatically than Plato ever did the worth of some of the virtues, Hobbes prepared the way for the reemergence of these despised virtues in fierce and dangerous forms. Strauss suggests that the Nietzschean celebration of courage, in particular, can be traced back to a Hobbesian root in the sense that it can be understood as a backlash against Hobbes's rejection of courage as a virtue (165; cf. Strauss 1995, 135–36 n. 2).

Perhaps even more important than these consequences, however, is that Hobbes's approach makes the path Plato and Aristotle traveled more difficult to recover. For not only does Hobbes, in Strauss's account, place unrealizable demands on political philosophy and thereby prepare the crises and rebellions that have arisen from the failure of modern philosophy to meet these demands, but he also reorients political philosophy in such a way that it loses sight of the questions and questioning at the heart of the ancient approach. This criticism can be seen most clearly in Strauss's discussion of what happens to “the question of the standard” in Hobbes's modified version of the resolutive-compositive method. The resolutive-compositive method, as it is applied to politics, promises to settle the question of the proper political standard by deconstructing the State into its principles in human nature, and then reconstructing the ideal State on a more solid foundation. Yet, aside from the difficulty of discerning which elements of the State are truly rooted in nature, this method requires one to pass judgment on the principles that are discovered by distinguishing those that are essential to the State from the questionable ones that have thus far prevented the adequate functioning of the State (152–54). In particular, Hobbes traces the State back to vanity and the fear of violent death. To “compose” the right State, he has to pass judgment on these principles. Of course, he does pass judgment on them—so much so that Strauss can say that Hobbes characterizes them as “the principle of wrong and the principle of right” (154). The problem, however, is that “this characterization does not arise from the analysis, for the analysis can only show the principles of the existing State, and cannot, therefore, teach anything about the rightness and wrongness of those principles” (154). In other words, Hobbes's modified resolutive-compositive method, if it is to answer the question of the standard and to base a synthesis of the right State on an analysis of the existing State, requires the importation of a moral judgment that the method itself does not supply.Thus we can see the role that the moral judgment at the basis of Hobbes's position plays in his application of the resolutive-compositive method. Yet, by importing such a judgment into the framework of a method that is neutral or silent about the standard, Hobbes buries the crucial question. “The justification of the standard, which is the fundamental part of the political philosophy, is hidden by the ‘resolutive-compositive’ method and even made unrecognizable” (154).

Because it is hidden, Hobbes's justification of his standard, insofar as he offers one,⁷