Arguably, no European émigré exerted greater influence over twentieth-century American political science than did Leo Strauss. Strauss’s penchant for framing fundamental political-philosophical issues as tantalizing conceptual juxtapositions gave his postemigration writings remarkable reach and longevity. During his American career, Strauss introduced the distinction between “esoteric” and “exoteric” writing, he revived the “quarrel” between the “ancients” and “moderns,” and he insisted that the respective claims of “Athens and Jerusalem” were fundamentally irreconcilable—that is, “reason” can never refute “revelation,” and revelation ultimately cannot be justified on rational grounds.Footnote 1
This article demonstrates that Strauss’s pre-emigration writings posited a more harmonious—indeed, mutually reinforcing—relationship between reason and revelation. I argue that Strauss, in Philosophy and Law,Footnote 2 draws upon both Jerusalem and Athens to revive a morally perfectionist political order, Platonic theocracy: a divinely legitimated and rationally justified state model that Strauss offers as a more just and stable alternative to both contemporary liberalism and authoritarianism. While most scholars read PL as an antiquarian exposition upon medieval theology, I offer an alternative, more pragmatically political interpretation. With liberal democracies collapsing and authoritarianism ascendant in the 1930s, Strauss’s book attempts to retrieve—philosophically and politically—Jewish, Islamic, or Platonic theocracy as a state model that is more appropriate for what he considered a dawning post-Enlightenment epoch. Strauss’s long-neglected book, I submit, proves especially relevant for our own “postsecular age” when religious groups more frequently request concessions from liberal democracies and resurgent state authoritarianism increasingly cloaks itself in religious trappings.
Strauss assists contemporary liberals, still baffled by political claims made by the religiously orthodox, to better understand why religious adherents resist confinement to a private sphere and aspire to live within a political community dedicated to divinely sanctioned human flourishing. In PL, Strauss argues that a substantively moral political order can only be established by a prophet to whom God has dictated objectively just and valid laws; it cannot be established by the consent of the governed, whose knowledge of the good is inherently imperfect and destined to degenerate into politically corrosive discord. Moreover, because liberalism attempts to avoid inevitable disagreement by reducing morality to the lowest common denominator, in Strauss’s view, it invariably underestimates humanity’s capacity for evil and underrates its yearning for moral flourishing; thus, liberal democracies will inevitably fail to both repress abject sinfulness and facilitate moral perfection.
Since human beings require political community to deter their evil inclinations and promote their disposition toward the good, Strauss insists, government cannot remain neutral regarding either good or evil, but on the contrary it must rigorously condition all aspects of human existence; in his words, it must undertake “the total regimen of human life” (PL, 73). Following medieval Jewish and Islamic political philosophers, especially Maimonides and Farabi, Strauss promotes a “true” or “beautiful” state—a “regime” definitively founded on divine revelation and constantly reevaluated through Platonic rationality—as a superior alternative to morally indifferent, philosophically degenerate and politically precarious liberalism.
Written in England while Strauss, a German-Jew, was exiled from Nazi Germany, PL also offers a critique of modern authoritarianism, especially statist movements that drape themselves in the cloak of religious authority. A genuinely theological orientation toward politics elevates religious over worldly goods (if it even contemplates their separation); thus, Strauss charges, Christian authoritarians, such as Paul de Lagarde and Carl Schmitt, effectively commit idolatry by prioritizing “state” or “nation” over God’s revealed laws—that is, by politically instrumentalizing theology to promote a nationalist state. Furthermore, Christian authoritarians engage in the idolatrous worship of living leaders, “great men” whose capricious dictates are asserted as self-evidently just. Platonic theocracy, by contrast, is leaderless: its “sovereign” is a divinely inspired legislator-prophet from the distant past, not an ordinary ruler arbitrarily exercising power in the present. The prophet possesses divinely communicated knowledge of the transcendent good; the leader professes to personally embody the inherently worldly nation’s Will. On Strauss’s view, laws established by a prophet are directed to the moral perfection of members of a just community; laws dictated by authoritarian leaders, even if feigning a restoration of “throne and altar,” merely promote the nation’s “existence” or “greatness,” and not its moral rectitude.
Section 1 of this article situates Strauss’s PL in the historical context of mid-1930s Europe, sketching his attempt to offer Platonic theocracy as a superior alternative to fading liberalism and ascending authoritarianism; Section 2 shows how Strauss uses the atheisms of Nietzsche and Heidegger to argue that the Enlightenment epoch is over, and hence, that a revival of religious orthodoxy is possible; Section 3 traces lines of continuity between Strauss’s earlier criticisms of Schmitt within PL, particularly his charge that state authoritarianism treats human evil and flourishing with moral agnosticism and that it theorizes religion and politics in an idolatrous manner; Section 4 elucidates Strauss’s criticisms of Jewish liberals for abandoning the genuine rationalism of medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy in favor of the philosophically and politically debased rationality of the Enlightenment; Section 5 details Strauss’s reconstruction of the divinely legitimated and rationally interrogated model of Platonic theocracy, associated with Maimonides and Farabi, which institutes the morally perfectionist “total regimen of human life”; and Section 6 shows how Strauss attributes the origins of liberalism to Aristotle and Gersonides, who undermined Platonic theocracy’s commitment to a divinely decreed political order dedicated to suppressing human evil and encouraging moral perfection.
1
In 1935, as Enlightenment philosophy succumbed to existentialist assault and liberal democracies yielded to authoritarian coups throughout Europe, Strauss proposes Platonic theocracy as a philosophically and politically superior “authoritarian” alternative to liberal and statist politics. Since they both profess agnosticism regarding “the good,” he insists, both modern ideologies operate within the “horizon of liberalism.” A platonically theocratic “regime,” unlike a Hobbesian state—in either its liberal or authoritarian form—seeks neither to merely satisfy an individual’s desire for self-preservation nor pursue the collective goal of national greatness. With the guidance of divine revelation, enacted by a lawgiving prophet, a “regime,” in the sense of “regimen,” instills habits of behavior with respect to sexuality, art, education, hygiene, economics, etc. Such a “true” state, which Strauss finds definitively elaborated by Islamic and Jewish philosophers operating within “the horizon of Platonism,” affects “the total regimen of human life”: it rigorously conditions all dimensions of individual and community life, thereby suppressing human “evil” and encouraging human “perfection” well beyond the modern state’s aspirations.
Scholars of both the left and right often charge that liberal democracies share much more in common with authoritarian states than liberals care to admit. In PL, Strauss makes the rather astounding, opposite argument: modern authoritarians are actually liberals. Strauss charges that Christian-nationalist authoritarians, such as Paul de Lagarde and Carl Schmitt, unwittingly share similar presuppositions as liberals (such as neutrality over a substantive vision of “the good life”), despite the fact that they prioritize the state over the individual. A state narrowly organized for the sake of collective self-preservation or geopolitical self-assertion differs fundamentally from a “true” state organized as a divinely sanctioned “regimen,” or Lebensordnung (literally, “Life-Order”) (PL, 123), the justice of which is constantly reinterrogated through Platonic philosophy.
Strauss’s difficult and understudied PL, on my reading, argues that only theocracy can effectively govern the vulgar many, subdue the proud few, and facilitate human perfection in the manner (1) advocated by ancient Greek philosophy and monotheisms of The Law and (2) necessitated by the contemporary collapse of Enlightenment philosophy and liberal democracy in Europe. Conversely, Strauss suggests, Christian theology and its Enlightenment heirs—including both Christian anti-liberals and Jewish contributors to the German Enlightenment—are not sufficiently authoritarian, in a specific sense, to accomplish any of these political-philosophical goals regarding the vulgar, the proud, and human perfectibility. In this spirit, PL represents a philosophical and political intervention into the dual crisis of Enlightenment rationality (exemplified by German existential philosophy) and of liberal democracy (signaled by the collapse of the Weimar Republic)—a crisis intensified for a Jewish audience grappling with rising anti-Semitism in Europe and prospects for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.Footnote 3
Strauss explicitly intends PL to “awaken a prejudice” on behalf of medieval rationalism and Jewish orthodoxy against the “powerful” prejudice supporting modern rationalism in his time (PL, 21). I suggest that implicit in Strauss’s attempt to arouse a prejudice in favor of medieval philosophy and monotheistic orthodoxy, which Strauss repeatedly insists are inherently political, is a concomitant attempt to awaken a prejudice in favor of the politics of Platonic theocracy. To whatever extent Strauss thinks it actually possible to revive medieval rationalism and Platonic theocracy in his own time, he certainly wants readers to reconsider them “as though” they were in fact practically retrievable.Footnote 4 I attribute previous interpreters’ neglect to recognize the centrality of Platonic theocracy in the book not to any obfuscating effects of Strauss deploying esoteric writing (at this juncture in his career) but rather to the exceptionally dense quality of Strauss’s prose, to his exceedingly tight manner of argumentation, and to the book’s less than fully integrated structure.Footnote 5
In what follows, I trace lines of argument in PL that are continuous with Strauss’s 1932 critique of Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political ([1932] Reference Strauss, Lomax and Schwab2007)Footnote 6 and with his writings on Zionism from the 1920s, which lamented the fact that a Jewish homeland would likely be established on liberal—that is, German-Christian—foundations.Footnote 7 In his now famous commentary on Schmitt, Strauss charged that the philosophical presuppositions of Schmitt’s ostensibly authoritarian state theory are fundamentally liberal: much like liberal philosophies of culture, Schmitt polemically separates “the political” into a cultural sphere set apart from the likewise independent spheres of theology and morality. Moreover, Schmitt’s insufficiently radical conception of human evil, Strauss insists, inhibits the soon-to-be Nazi jurist from formulating a theory of law appropriate to realize “the principles of the Right.” In short, Strauss argues against Schmitt that human evil, understood as a manifestation of abject moral baseness, rather than as an expression of mere animalistic drives, necessitates rule, not by a state (however “conservative”) set over and above society, but rather by an all-encompassing Lebensordnung that regulates each and every aspect of human life—a Regimen rather than a Rechtsstaat.Footnote 8
Conventionally, scholars examining the Schmitt–Strauss exchange move directly from Strauss’s “Notes” on Schmitt from [1932] Reference Strauss, Lomax and Schwab2007 to Strauss’s Reference Strauss, Meier and Meier1936 study of Thomas Hobbes.Footnote 9 This is perfectly understandable: Strauss explicitly declares toward the conclusion of his “Notes” that, in order to overcome liberalism more successfully than Schmitt, one must more comprehensibly overcome the political philosophy of Hobbes. I focus instead on the often ignored and frequently misunderstood PL, which Strauss published between his “Notes” and his Hobbes book. Unable to return from postdoctoral studies in Paris to Nazi Germany, Strauss completed the book in England in 1935, submitting it to the Hebrew University pursuant to an academic position in Jerusalem. I explore below central themes raised concerning liberalism and authoritarianism in Strauss’s critique of Schmitt that persist within PL—especially, the problem of human evil, the nature of the “ideal state,” and a notion that figures prominently in Strauss’s correspondences around the time of the Weimar Republic’s collapse, “the Principles of the Right.”
2
In PL, Strauss astonishingly insists that the starting point for reestablishing the philosophical bases of political theocracy is a form of atheism—specifically, an atheism motivated by “probity.” Strauss defines this atheism from probity as the “new fortitude, the willingness to look man’s forsakenness in its face,” “the courage to welcome the terrible truth,” “toughness against the inclination of man to deceive himself about his situation” (PL, 37). Strauss attributes a specifically “biblical” quality to the forthright, conscientious, and courageous atheisms espoused by Nietzsche, whom he explicitly invokes, and by Heidegger, whom he does not.Footnote 10 The Hebrew University faculty would not have missed the fact that here, less than two years after Heidegger’s infamous Rektoratsrede (which merged the mission of philosophy and the fate of the German Volk with the establishment of the Third Reich), Strauss insinuates praise for “the probity” of Heideggerian existential philosophy.Footnote 11 Especially, in affirming the precariousness of human existence—the “primordial” experience of human finitude—and in expressing a fundamental moral aversion to comforting illusions regarding human existence, Strauss locates in this atheism affinities with the Hebrew Bible. Indeed, he identifies this atheism from probity (and not, as we will see, the complacent atheism of liberal Judaism) as a springboard for the revival of religious orthodoxy (PL, 37–38). (Perhaps not surprisingly, Strauss did not gain a professorship in Jerusalem.)
Genuinely biblical religion, Strauss argues, embraces the fearfulness and precariousness of human life when it affirms the existence of a creator God, and the absolute necessity of obedience to Him; it does not, as does Christianity, turn to God in the hope of escaping fearful experiences generated by human existence; that is, Nietzsche and Heidegger harbor no Epicurean expectations that such primordial fear might be, in any manner whatsoever, alleviated. Therefore, on Strauss’s reading, when Nietzsche and Heidegger reject God, they do so in a singularly biblical way. Nietzsche and Heidegger valiantly reject the Epicurean impulse toward safety and security exhibited by unreflective, undemanding Enlightenment atheism—moreover, Strauss insists, their rejection of the Enlightenment is fundamentally moral. From the standpoint of this moral orientation, Strauss suggests, anything other than a courageous embracing of primordial fear would be dishonest, ignoble, and unmanly.Footnote 12
Strauss insists that the Epicurean impulse toward security undergirding both Christianity and the Enlightenment is inherently corrosive of both the philosophical pursuit of truth and the political realization of the good life—that is, the possibility of a political order capable of simultaneously taming human evil and cultivating human perfection. In this manner, PL sharpens Strauss’s criticism of Christian authoritarians, such as the arch-German-nationalist and anti-Semite, Lagarde and, of course, Schmitt, both of whose writings he had engaged over the previous decade.Footnote 13 Because Christian authoritarians insufficiently theorize human evil and perfection, Strauss argues, they unintentionally operate within the “horizon of liberalism.” Strauss also meticulously traces how the intellectual giants of the Jewish Enlightenment—most prominently, Spinoza, Mendelssohn, and Cohen—contributed to the formation of that “horizon,” one within which the Bible came to be read as simply one book among others, a subjectively generated horizon within which Judaism’s connection to the objective truth of Revelation and The Law is radically severed. Therefore, if morally agnostic Christian authoritarians like Lagarde and Schmitt fail to formulate a state theory beyond the horizon of liberalism, then contemporary Jewish liberals like Julius Guttman fail to retrieve what is essentially Jewish about orthodoxy by consistently reducing it to the precepts of Kantian rationality, never realizing that the two orientations are fundamentally antithetical.
Strauss devotes lengthy, substantive footnotes to Lagarde and Schmitt: he dismisses Lagarde as a Christian Averroist who instrumentalizes religion in the service of a nationalist state; and he derides Schmitt as a defective political theologian who elevates a sovereign state above society, thereby leaving free, rather than meticulously regulated, various spheres of “culture” (PL, 141 n. 25, 138 n. 2). In other words, because these German-Christian authoritarians theorize only state and nation, they cannot imagine a Lebensordnung that institutes a thoroughgoing regimen of social life.
In this light, at an important juncture, Strauss contrasts the political-theological views of Christians, like Lagarde and Schmitt, with the philosophy of medieval Muslims and Jews such as the Falasifa and Maimonides:
Islamic and Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages are “more primitive” than modern philosophers because they are guided not, like [the moderns], by the derived idea of natural right, but by the primary, ancient idea of law as a unified, total regimen of human life [totalen Ordnung des menschlichen Lebens]; in other words, because they are pupils of Plato and not pupils of Christians. (PL, 73, emphasis added)
Strauss would again invoke Plato and “the total regimen of human life” in his Hobbes book of the following year. There, Strauss elevates Plato over Aristotle for treating “the most important subjects”—namely, “the just, the beautiful, and, above all, the good”—not with multiple qualifications and accommodations to human weakness “but with the greatest accuracy” (Strauss [1936] Reference Strauss and Sinclair1996, 139). Only a modern approximation of the regimes laid out in The Republic and, especially, The Laws , regimes that regulate the “most important subjects [with] the greatest accuracy”—with the greatest specificity about what human behavior conforms to the good—can fully and appropriately replace liberalism. In PL, interpretations of The Law offered by the Falasifa and Maimonides—intuitively anticipated by Plato—serve as Strauss’s guides for pursuing genuine “love of truth” and for positing the “Ideal State.” Love of truth is incompatible with the dogmatic subjectivism of Enlightenment philosophy, a subjectivism entwined with the “derived idea of natural right” palpable even in the thought of Christian reactionaries like Lagarde and Schmitt. Moreover, the Ideal State qua regime is incompatible with the modern state, with a Rechtsstaat, whether liberal or authoritarian.
3
To more firmly establish the theme of human evil that Strauss introduces in his engagement with Schmitt, one that persists in his rehabilitation of the medieval rationalists in PL, I here review certain aspects of Strauss’s critique of Schmitt. Strauss asks if Schmitt—whether Schmitt the expressly Catholic moralist of Political Theology ([1922] Reference Schmitt and Schwab2006) or the evasively agnostic moralist of the Concept of the Political ([1932] Reference Strauss, Lomax and Schwab2007)—has a sufficiently pessimistic view of human evil to overcome liberalism? Strauss appears uncertain whether, even in Political Theology, Schmitt agrees with Catholic Counter-Revolutionary Juan Donoso-Cortés that humanity is morally base, inherently sinful, and hence in need, in Strauss’s words, of dominion, of rule, as such. In Political Theology, Schmitt does not fully endorse the reactionary Spaniard’s argument for the fundamental moral baseness of humanity because he identifies such a position as heretical. Schmitt concedes that human beings are sinful—flawed, corrupted—but the incarnation of Christ explicitly attests to the fact that human beings are partly divine. Because they are partly divine in nature, for Schmitt, they are capable, under the right circumstances, and with appropriate guidance, of choosing to do what is good, what is right.
In Concept of the Political it is apparently no longer relatively permissive Catholic orthodoxy that prevents Schmitt from adopting the pessimistic standard of evil as moral baseness but rather the fact that, now following Hobbes, he formally divorces the categories of moral virtue–moral baseness from considerations of the political. As Strauss asserts, since Hobbes has no notion of human evil as arising from “sin,” from an inherent human desire to transgress the boundaries of what is felt and known to be morally right, Hobbes—perhaps very much like the orthodox Christianity that the Malmesbury philosopher wished to supplant—grants too much freedom of conscience and behavior to the subjects of his Leviathan state.
Ultimately Strauss and Schmitt diverge quite drastically on the question of subjective conscience and its relationship to the human need for “being ruled.” Conscience, as explained below, is a consistent target for Strauss; unlike The Law, in a theocratic sense, conscience—or, given human depravity, what amounts to the same thing, “opinion”—is an irredeemable source of philosophical degradation and political anarchy. The subjectivism of modern rationality cannot generate the latter’s own condition of possibility; it requires some external standard of objectivity with or against which it can orient itself. Hence, ever more elaborate if specious postulations of pseudo-foundations buttress modern subjectivity with the effect that Enlightenment rationality evinces ever-diminishing truth content.
Moreover, Strauss suggests, subjective conscience possesses no inherently good or practically actionable moral content, thus encouraging promiscuous nonobservance of the law (PL, 37). For Schmitt, on the other hand, conscience can and should maintain a place of prominence in moral philosophy, so long as it, in his early Catholic writings, remains subservient to the authority of transcendental divinity (made flesh in political form).Footnote 14 This freedom of conscience remains prominent in Schmitt’s secular endorsement of Hobbes’s state, which prescribes and proscribes little belief or behavior that does not directly affect “public peace.” However, from Strauss’s interwar perspective, either to be a Christian, or to be a Hobbesian, is ultimately to be a liberal. For instance, in Strauss’s early engagement with Lagarde, Strauss locates a fundamental spiritual individualism at the core of his thought—an individualism at odds with Lagarde’s counter-Enlightenment authoritarian-nationalist aspirations. In Strauss’s estimation, Christianity and the Enlightenment were inextricably bound. To drive home this point, in a now notorious letter to Karl Löwith, penned a year after his critique of Schmitt, Strauss exclaimed, “Tis better to live in a ghetto than crawl to the cross … of liberalism.”Footnote 15
In this context, Strauss elucidates, in a manner that no doubt shocked Schmitt, the self-consciously conservative jurist, just how “liberal” was his compartmentalizing of the theological, the moral, and the political in the Concept of the Political. Moreover, Schmitt’s refusal to attribute abject moral baseness to humankind in Political Theology a decade before indicates that his overtly Catholic position was already proto-liberal (despite the fact that Strauss favorably notes Schmitt’s binding together the moral, the theological, and the political in that work). Strauss presses Schmitt to affirm that human beings are morally base because they inevitably commit wrong even when their immediate physical needs are met and when their security is guaranteed—especially when they suffer only the limited control of a night-watchman, Leviathan state. In his “Notes,” Strauss challenges Schmitt to concede that human beings require “rule,” more fundamentally and with greater specificity than Schmitt, in full Hobbesian mode, articulates in Concept of the Political.
In a letter following his “Notes,” the young Strauss continued to press Schmitt on the issues of human evil, moral baseness, and the necessity of “rule” as such. Sensing Schmitt’s hesitation, Strauss asks him point-blank whether “the ultimate foundation of the Right” does not require a foundational belief in “the natural evil of man” (Strauss Reference Strauss and Lomax1995, 125). In the letter to Löwith, composed only months after this missive to Schmitt, Strauss elaborated his own sense of what constituted the fundamental “principles of the Right,” principles that even, or especially, a now triumphant Nazism should not be permitted to discredit: genuinely “authoritarian, fascist, imperial principles.”Footnote 16 Strauss’s subsequent works from the thirties, including PL, illuminate the full thrust of his critique of Schmitt and help us better understand what Strauss means by the “principles of the Right” and the human need for “rule.”
To sum up Strauss’s criticism of Schmitt, Schmitt’s neo-Hobbesian state is agnostic with respect to the moral, theological, aesthetic, etc.—that is, it leaves judgment and action over these spheres to its subjects— so it exerts insufficient political authority over what he dismissively calls “culture” to forestall the civil war conditions that beset Weimar Germany and to prevent the general twentieth-century crisis of liberal democracy. The standards of classical political philosophy and monotheistic religions based on Law, Strauss suggests, unlike their Christian-Enlightenment successors (including Hobbes), taught that human beings require a “regime,” a Lebensordnung, that regulated every aspect of their lives.
A true regime, therefore, unlike the Hobbesian state, does not merely identify internal and external enemies and satisfy the human desire for self-preservation; with the guidance of Divine Revelation, enacted by a lawgiving prophet, it instills habits of behavior with respect to sexuality, art, education, hygiene, economics, etc., rigorously conditioning the internal and external dimensions of human life, thereby suppressing human evil and encouraging human perfection. In Strauss’s estimation, only such a regimen can rule a morally base humanity and make it possible for human beings to live the good life. In this sense, on one side stand Lycurgus’s Sparta, Plato’s Kallipolis and Magnesia, theocratic Islam, and Judaism; on the other stand Christianity and liberalism. The Hobbesian state, even authoritarianly reconstructed by Schmitt, allows “dangerous but educable” humanity to educate itself in so many supposedly nonpolitical spheres that it remains philosophically shallow, morally corrosive, fundamentally unruly, and hence inherently dangerous.
4
Philosophy and Law confronts, first and foremost, “the present situation of Judaism,” which Strauss declares is “determined by the Enlightenment”; but it also explicitly sets forth, as a nearly coequal concern, the possibility of philosophy, or as Strauss terms it, genuine “love of truth” (PL, 21–22). Hence the presence of both “philosophy” and the “Law” in Strauss’s title: both philosophy as love of truth and Law as the foundation of Jewish orthodoxy, have been shaken to the core by the modern Enlightenment—but not by “enlightenment” per se. Strauss insists that Jewish orthodoxy, Islamic theology, and Platonic philosophy are more compatible with reason than is the modern Enlightenment because ancient philosophy and medieval rationalism understand what the modern Enlightenment forgets or represses: Reason is not self-generating, and any political order resting on a nakedly subjectivist foundation is bound to collapse from within. Representatives of the medieval enlightenment demonstrated that Revelation structurally facilitates philosophy; and the Law, resting on the foundation of Revelation, facilitates human living-together—indeed flourishing.
Philosophy and Law begins on a polemical note, as Strauss admittedly asserts what he has yet to demonstrate: the superiority of medieval over modern rationalism. Strauss posits medieval rationalism as the very standard of rationalism itself, a standard in light of which Enlightenment rationality “proves to be only a semblance of rationalism” (PL, 21–22). To emphasize this point, Strauss denounces the inherent “irrationality” of modern rationalism: “‘Irrationalism’ is just a variety of modern rationalism, which in itself is already ‘irrationalistic’ enough” (135 n. 1). Strauss concedes that he attempts to “awaken a prejudice” in favor of medieval rationalism precisely because the counter-veiling prejudice in favor of modern rationalism remains today so “powerful” (21). But it is obvious that this court case will be a contest of prejudices (21). Strauss maintains a prejudice in favor of the “true rational model” of Maimonides, a model that must be “carefully protected” from any “distortion” (21), especially the violent distortion that he accuses liberal Jewish philosophers of perpetuating. True rationalism is therefore not free of prejudice; Strauss merely insists that this prejudice (in favor of Revelation and Law)—notwithstanding the Enlightenment’s characterizations of it as ridiculous premodern dogma—is superior to modern, presentist dogma, over which Strauss intends his work to “arouse suspicion” (21).
Strauss justifies, through a criticism of Julius Guttman, why it is necessary to take the side of medieval over modern rationalism in the philosophical investigation of Revelation:
Since the truths communicated by revelation are, in the view of [Maimonides and Farabi], accessible also to unassisted reason, there arises the still more dubious impression that these philosophers attributed to the revelation, ultimately and in earnest, a merely popular pedagogical significance. The community-founding, state-founding meaning of the revelation becomes in Guttmann a secondary end. (PL, 72)
In other words, by trying to retrieve the rational content of Maimonides’ and Farabi’s philosophies, and by dismissing the revelation-based elements of their theories as exoteric window dressing for the vulgar, Guttmann’s liberal interpretation eliminates the political foundation of medieval rationalism, the indispensable divinely sanctioned elements of the ideal state’s founding. Strauss writes, “this misconstruction of the leading idea of medieval philosophy follows from Guttmann’s modern formulation of the question,” and therefore, at least for heuristic purposes, one ought to compensate for these Enlightenment prejudices by assuming “the unconditional superiority of medieval philosophy over modern philosophy” (PL, 72). By accepting rationality’s basis in revelation, not only is the possibility of genuine philosophy revived but so too is the possibility of genuine politics.
This phenomenological move, through which Strauss alters the perspective of the reader by substituting a medieval philosophical-interpretive framework for a modern one, is signaled by Strauss’s invocation of the Husserlian term, “horizon” (Horizont) throughout PL. This term, and the interpretive method it represents, played a pivotal role in Strauss’s “Notes” on Concept of the Political: Strauss modified Schmitt’s interpretive frame by de-emphasizing Schmitt’s focus on the “state versus individual” issue and by accentuating his focus on the question of “human evil.” Schmitt failed to transcend liberalism’s “horizon,” Strauss argued, because he merely inverted liberalism’s elevation of the individual over the state, without imbuing his reprioritized authoritarian state with a substantive notion of evil and good. As such, Schmitt’s affirmation of the state proves to be just as morally vacuous as liberalism’s affirmation of the individual.Footnote 17
In PL, Strauss again invokes liberalism’s “horizon” when he cites his earlier criticism of Schmitt for treating theology (morality) and politics as separate aspects of “culture” rather than as mutually foundational for culture:
If “religion” and “politics” are the facts that transcend “culture,” or, to speak more precisely, are the original facts, then the radical critique of the concept of “culture” is possible only in the form of a “theologico-political treatise,” which of course, if it is not to lead back again to the foundation of “culture,” must take exactly the opposite direction from the theologico-political treatises of the seventeenth century, especially those of Hobbes and Spinoza. The first condition for this would be, of course, that these seventeenth-century works no longer be understood, as they almost always have been up to now, within the horizon of philosophy of culture. (PL, 138 n.2, second emphasis added)
Strauss thus argues that it is impossible to understand religion and politics as facts that precede and make possible “culture,” if they are understood as mere components of—that is, products of—culture, a liberal understanding that Hobbes and Spinoza successfully imposed on all subsequent political philosophy. Strauss’s task is to understand religion and politics in a theologico-political way that precedes the seventeenth-century theologico-political treatises that established the philosophy of culture, within whose horizon both Schmitt, the authoritarian, and Guttmann, the liberal, remain entrapped.
Indeed, the very terms “religion” and “politics” betray, for Strauss, the presupposition that these phenomena are components of something that preexists and takes precedence over them (culture, society, humanity, etc.). More accurately, he insists, “the theological” and “the political” are in fact cofoundational and cannot be understood as products of human invention—rather they are phenomena that precede and make possible human endeavors. Hence, they are irrevocably linked with each other in medieval rationalism and furthermore linked to the fact of revelation, something God-given rather than man-made—something beyond the apprehension of subjective rationality.
In pre-seventeenth-century fashion, Strauss argues that “religion” and “politics”—or rather the theological-political fact—ought to be understood as something externally provided as objective truth. Spinoza and Hobbes established the horizon within which religion and politics could be conceived as products of culture, of human endeavor; hence, in his attempt to revive the Hobbesian state, Schmitt lacked the means of gaining sufficient access to more fundamental, foundational forms of theological-political authority. His own “theologico-political treatises,” both Political Theology and The Concept of the Political, hearkened back to the very theologico-political treatises of the seventeenth century that established the horizon for the emergence of the philosophy of culture; in neither work, Strauss argues, does Schmitt fully avail himself of the more fundamentally theistic theologico-political treatises that preceded the Enlightenment.
In PL, Strauss suggests that modern Jewish interpreters of medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophers like Guttmann, suffer from a theological-political myopia similar to that of authoritarian Christians like Schmitt; these Jewish liberals miss the fact that the medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophers operated within the horizon of Platonic political philosophy, because the modern Jewish interpreters operate within the horizon of Kantian philosophy and Protestant theology. As Strauss puts it most pointedly, participants in the German-Jewish Enlightenment perpetrate “the betrayal of the Biblical heritage for the sake of an alien ‘piety.’” (PL, 54).Footnote 18 Strauss endeavors to provide the proper hermeneutic frame for ascertaining how the medieval rationalists understood theological-political phenomena; Strauss identifies their self-understood framework to be “the horizon of Platonic politics” (PL, 128). He begins to elucidate the character of this Platonic horizon in the following way:
The relation of the Falasifa and Maimonides to Plato is characterized in the first place by the fact that the former proceed from an un-Platonic premise. For them the fact of the revelation is certain; for them therefore it is also certain that a simply binding law, a divine law, a law proclaimed by a prophet with the force of law, is actual. This law authorizes them to philosophize. In philosophizing, they inquire into the possibility of the actual law; they answer this inquiry within the horizon of Platonic politics; they understand the revelation in the light of Platonic politics. They derive Platonic politics from an un-Platonic premise—the premise of the revelation. (PL 128, second and third emphases added)
Plato is a philosopher seeking a revelation to undergird his political philosophy; Farabi, Avicenna and Maimonides are theologians seeking to inquire philosophically into an already existing revelation and law. The medievals retroactively provide Plato with the commands of a prophet-lawgiver; Plato provides them with the tools to understand the political work of their own respective prophet-lawgivers. As Strauss continues
The attempt to understand the actual revelation within the horizon of Platonic politics compels modifications of the Platonic framework in the light of the actual revelation. It suffices to recall the significance of the prophet’s knowledge of the future (and miracle-working) for Maimonides and the Falasifa. In this way the Platonic framework is only modified, stretched as it were, but not exploded; it remains the spiritual bond that unites philosophy and politics. The modification in question implies, as such, a critique of Plato. This critique gets its whole weight from being able to appeal to the fact of the revelation. From the factual answering of the Platonic inquiry into the true state there follows a modification of the Platonic sketch, that is, a critique of the Platonic answer. (PL, 128, first emphasis added)
Plato provides the “spiritual bond” uniting philosophy and politics for the medieval rationalists. The latter correct Plato by demonstrating that circumstances beyond simply the chance occurrence of philosophers becoming kings makes possible the founding of the “true” or “ideal state”; only a prophet who knows the future and works miracles can be the philosopher-king who founds such a “perfect community.”
Nevertheless, Strauss insists, the medievals understand this “perfect community” philosophically from the perspective of “Platonic politics”:
If the founder of the perfect community can only be a prophet, this implies that the founding of the perfect community is not possible for the man who is only a philosopher. It is not the case that, as Plato holds, the coincidence of philosophy and political power suffices for the realization of the true state; the ruler-philosopher must be more than a philosopher. (PL, 128)
What are the ramifications of this simultaneously un- and arch-Platonic character of the medieval rationalists’ thinking for Strauss’s own efforts to transcend the horizon of Enlightenment rationality and politics?
We must explore more closely the confrontation that Strauss poses between, on one hand, Maimonides and the Falasifa and, on the other, Plato. This then better positions us to investigate the nature of the ideal state that Strauss seeks to revive in the mid-thirties as a theoretical cum practicable alternative to liberalism and authoritarianism, the “true” state definitively elaborated by philosophers of Islamic and Jewish theocracy operating within the horizon of Platonic philosophy.
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Law as understood by the Falasifa and Maimonides, Strauss emphasizes, aims at “the specific perfection of man,” which entails the existence of a community (PL, 73). Following Plato, this community must be the “ideal state”; unlike Plato, for them the founder of such a state must be a prophet:
The classic model of the ideal state is the Platonic state. In fact, and even expressly and programmatically, the Islamic Aristotelians understand the ideal state founded by the prophet under Plato’s instruction… . Plato’s idea of the philosopher-king, set up the outline whose completion in the light of the actual revelation produces the concept of the prophet held by the Islamic Aristotelians and their Jewish pupils. (PL, 73–74)
Strauss’s invocation of “Islamic Aristotelians” is crucial here. Strauss struggles throughout the book against German-Jewish philosophers, who misunderstand the deep Platonism of the medieval rationalists, because the latter—like Aristotle—devote most of their writings to metaphysics (e.g., PL, 131). But this is only so, Strauss argues, because the medievals already agree with Plato on the most fundamental matters. They should not be interpreted as thinking that metaphysics, and, especially, ethics, are more important than politics, as Mendelssohn and Guttmann tend to do when they attribute an unqualified Aristotelianism to Maimonides and the Falasifa. In this sense, Strauss places implied quotation marks around the term “Islamic Aristotelians” throughout the book, because they and their medieval “Jewish pupils”—no matter how much space they may have devoted to Aristotelian concerns—were more fundamentally Platonists:
In the foundation of philosophizing itself, they are guided by Plato to answer a Platonic question within a framework laid out by Plato. Ultimately they differ from Plato only in this, though decisively in this: for them the founder of the ideal state is not a possible philosopher-king to be awaited in the future, but an actual prophet who existed in the past. That is, they modify Plato’s answer in the light of the revelation that has now actually occurred. (PL, 75)
These “differences,” although sufficiently “decisive” to warrant modifications of the Platonic framework, ought not obscure, Strauss insists, the fact that the medieval rationalists remained more fundamentally Platonic than they ever became substantively Aristotelian—however much space their writings devoted to Aristotelian concerns. While a quantitative reading, as it were, of the Falasifa’s and Maimonides’ works, which Strauss attributes to German-Jewish interpreters, may suggest that the medievals were Aristotelians, a more qualitative reading focused on the centrality of “the ideal law” affirms that they were much more fundamentally Platonists. Therefore, readers must more seriously address “the central difficulty” in interpreting the medieval rationalists, that is, the question
why the philosophic foundation of the law, which is in fact the philosophic discussion of the presupposition of philosophizing itself, is for these medieval philosophers only one theme among others, and even the last theme of their philosophy. This specific disproportion arises from the fact that the ideal law, since it is given through revelation, no longer needs to be sought by them, as by Plato, but needs only to be understood from the principles of the disciplines (metaphysics and psychology) that precede it. (PL, 75)
Strauss’s emphasis on the Platonism of the medieval rationalists thereby allows him to accentuate what eludes previous, modern interpreters: the centrality of revelation, law, the ideal state, and the prophet for these authors—that is, the very elements of their thought that had been dismissed or ignored by Mendelssohn and Guttmann. For Maimonides and the Falasifa, political rule takes precedence over metaphysics and ethics; conversely, Strauss argues, when such Jewish liberals prioritize these elements over politics they elevate the debased sphere of “culture” over the venerated “total regimen of human life.” For the medieval rationalists, Strauss writes,
the primary kind of government is legislation. Now legislation can have as its end either the bodily or the spiritual perfection of man… . Spiritual perfection—more precisely, the perfection of the intellect—is the specific perfection of man. The law directed to the specific perfection of man is a divine law, and its proclaimer is a prophet… . The law [also] aims at making it possible to live together. Hence the prophet is the founder of a community directed to the specific perfection of man. (PL, 121)
The essence of medieval philosophy cannot be reduced to ethics or metaphysics (which liberal Jewish philosophers sought to reconcile with Kantian precepts); medieval rationalism is fundamentally political, Strauss insists, and quite coercively so. The spiritual perfection commanded by revelation can only be realized in a political community rigorously legislated by a prophet.
As Strauss elaborates on this theme in the political philosophies of Avicenna and Maimonides,
Man can live properly as man only if he lives in community; the existence and the welfare of the human race depends on men’s living in community; community presupposes reciprocal intercourse; this intercourse is not possible without regimen and justice; regimen is not possible without a lawgiver; the lawgiver must be able to address men and to bind them to the regimen given by him [der Gesetzgeber muß imstande sein, die Menschen anzureden und sie zu der von ihm gegebenen Lebensordnung zu verpflichten]; he must therefore be a man. (PL, 123, emphases added)
To accentuate the distinctly “political” quality of Strauss’s logic here: For humans to reach their natural perfection, they require community, which to be just requires a regimen, which, to be followed, must be imposed by a man superior to other men, a man provided by divine providence, the prophet:
[The prophet] must not let men abide in their opinions about justice and injustice; for each considers just what is advantageous to himself and unjust what is disadvantageous to himself; consequently the human race is dependent for its existence on such a man, [who] is a prophet. It is therefore impossible that divine providence should not exercise care for this necessity. It is therefore necessary that there actually is (or was) a prophet. He must have characteristics that are lacking in other men, so that these may surmise his superiority and he may be distinguished from them. (PL, 123, emphases added)
“The reciprocal intercourse” occurring within this community constituted by a regimen is not and must not be left freely to men’s “opinions about justice and injustice,” which are philosophically arbitrary and politically disruptive; rather, they must be imposed on those men by a superior man, the prophet. Only his laws can cultivate within such men the perfection appropriate to their particular souls or intellects; they can achieve that perfection neither by acting in concert among themselves nor by following the dictates of an ordinary statesman.
The medievals, Strauss argues, understand this prophet and the regimen that he establishes in Platonic terms. Even though the prophet’s attributes ultimately transcend those of the Platonic lawgiver, the medievals interpret the prophet’s community, oriented toward spiritual or intellectual perfection, in light of Plato’s regimes, the Kallipolis and, especially, the more intensely regulated Magnesia:
According to Maimonides’s teaching, the prophet as philosopher/statesman/seer/ (miracle-worker) in one is the founder of the perfect community. Avicenna calls the perfect community “the excellent city” or “the city of beautiful conduct”; we may say rather “the ideal state.” … The classic model of the ideal state is the Platonic state. Avicenna refers to Plato’s works on the state, the Republic and the Laws, as the classic presentations of politics … the Laws is for him the authoritative presentation of the philosophic teaching on prophecy. (PL, 124–25)
Maimonides and Avicenna interpret the “beautiful” or “ideal” state established by the Prophet in terms of the ideal cities of Plato, who managed to proffer a teaching concerning prophecy but not concerning the prophet. Strauss argues further that the regimen imposed by the lawgiver-prophet on the community of Jews or Muslims, aimed toward the perfection of men’s intellects, is constituted by strict social hierarchy among classes, also understood in explicitly Platonic terms:
Avicenna’s greater Metaphysics shows [the decisive orientation] towards the Platonic state: “The first purpose of the legislator in legislating must be the articulation of the city into three parts: the rulers, the craftsmen, and the guardians.” Thus the prophet must divide the state according to the division prescribed by Plato in the Republic. The prophet is the founder of the Platonic state; the prophet carries out what Plato called for. (PL, 125)
Alfarabi, Strauss argues, fully agrees with Avicenna and Maimonides on the prophet’s superior qualities that separate him from other men. Moreover, Strauss again insists, prophetology cannot be deposed from its primary place within Alfarabi’s thought as an exoteric ploy to dupe the vulgar: Alfarabi, Strauss writes, reminds us that “prophecy proper differs from vulgar mantics of all ranks” (PL, 125–26).
For Alfarabi, Strauss argues, the prophet’s superiority resides in actual, divinely imparted knowledge of human perfection that is inaccessible to other men, who have not, as has the prophet, communicated with God: “The sovereign of the ideal state, according to Alfarabi, must be a man of perfect intellect and a perfect imaginative faculty; he must be a man to whom God imparts revelation through the medium of the active intellect. In other words, the sovereign of the ideal state must be a prophet, a philosopher and seer in one” (PL, 125–26). Radical understanding of prophecy, Strauss argues, is made possible in Alfarabi’s philosophy through a substantive comprehension of its political manifestation; one through which, on one hand, the state oriented toward the perfection of man is established, and, on the other, the prophet’s divinely activated intellect and imagination become apparent. The kind of philosopher that the prophet embodies for the medievals coincides with Plato’s understanding, even if for them the prophet’s understanding of the upper world is imparted to him by the creator God rather than by the Platonic demiurge.
As Strauss repeats emphatically, the prophet must be the perfect sovereign or statesman, a kind of superman, who has already existed in fact; and who, furthermore, because of his access to revelation, is even more superior to ordinary men than Plato’s hypothetical legislator of the possible future:
The prophetology of Maimonides and the Falasifa refers to Plato not only in assuming the union of philosophy and politics as a condition of the perfect state, whose founder can only be a prophet; also of Platonic origin is the way in which the prophet’s being-a-philosopher is understood. The prophet is a man who, after receiving the revelation (wachj), is capable of bringing to men the message (risala), which leads to the welfare of the sensible world by means of political government… . The revelation is an emanation from God [that] bestows upon the prophet, through the medium of the active intellect, direct knowledge of the upper world. Only direct knowledge of the upper world, it appears, makes the prophet capable of the government of men that is proper to him, namely, politics and science united in one. (PL, 126)
From this, one can easily see how Platonic theocracy differs from state authoritarianism. First, the ideal state is “leaderless”; its sovereign is a legislator-prophet-philosopher from the distant past, not a Führer or il Duce exercising “power” in the present. The prophet possesses divinely communicated knowledge of the good; the leader expresses a Will—either his own, that of the nation, or the Volk. Laws established by a prophet are directed to the moral perfection of members of a just community; statist laws merely reverse the liberal conception of individuals and the state—rendering the former completely at the service of the latter—a state whose existence or greatness and not justice is the ultimate priority. The justice of the ideal state is constantly reexamined through philosophical reflection, while the greatness of the authoritarian state is merely asserted beyond rational demonstration (or demonstrated, in a might-makes-right fashion, on the field of battle). Modern authoritarianism is rife with idolatry—of the leader, state, nation, movement, people—where the idol’s “goodness” is both immanent and assumed. In Platonic theocracy, the good is transcendent, and the laws, although divinely sanctioned, are consistently interrogated philosophically. For these reasons, the authoritarian state, like the liberal state, cannot effect the “beautiful” union of philosophy and politics that is the platonically theocratic state’s raison d’être.
To be sure, Platonic theocracy is hardly an undifferentiated whole. The Falasifa and Maimonides, Strauss consistently reminds his readers, undoubtedly depart from Plato in an important sense—that is, they enjoyed a certainty concerning “the ideal state” that necessarily eluded Plato: “In sketching the true state, Plato predicted the revelation; but just as, in general, it is only the fulfillment that teaches a full understanding of the prediction, so the Platonic sketch must be modified on the basis of the actual revelation, the actual ideal state” (PL, 128–299, emphasis added). Consequently, this modification in light of actuality allows the medievals to be more political—that is, more concerned with actual legislating and concrete founding, than was Plato:
The precedence of the prophet over the philosopher lies partly, to be sure, in the superiority of prophetic, direct knowledge over philosophic, indirect knowledge, but also, at the same time, in the capacity for governing that distinguishes him from the philosopher: the prophet, in contradistinction to the philosopher who merely knows, is teacher and governor in one… . Maimonides and the Falasifa assert the precedence of prophecy over philosophy, and in such a way that they see the end of prophecy in the founding of the ideal state. (PL, 131)
Apparently, for the medievals, a philosopher-king cannot actually govern unless he is a prophet, with access to a higher form of knowledge, and, consequently—although Strauss is hesitant to explain the causal logic here—the ability to persuade (and coerce?) men regarding the minute legislation necessary for the realization of their particular perfections within a community.
But how much this distinction separates Maimonides and the Falasifa from Plato is not entirely clear, since Strauss claims that they all understand political philosophy to be an inquiry into the good, and hence an inquiry into the nature of the soul: “The Platonic inquiry into the ideal state, into the good, compels one to make a detour … along which one must ask, inter alia, what the soul is, what its parts are” (PL, 131). Under guidance from the prophet, however, Maimonides and the Falasifa, Strauss insists, enjoy greater confidence than does Plato over specifying the political means necessary to achieve the perfection of the soul for the various, hierarchical levels of human being comprising the community. Nevertheless, Strauss eventually moves from the hesitant contrast between the medieval rationalists and Plato to the more decisive one between the medievals and Plato, on one hand, and Aristotle, on the other—a contrast that demonstrates decisively why, again, the medievals were only apparently “Aristotelians.”
The fundamental concern with the human soul, and its perfectibility within a hierarchically ordered and minutely regimented ideal state, is, for Strauss, what ultimately places the Falasifa and Maimonides on the side of Plato rather than that of Aristotle. The former much more than the latter insisted that philosophy and the philosopher must serve the ideal state in pursuit of the perfectibility of man within a decidedly nonliberal, hierarchically organized, and rigorously regulated political community. As Strauss notes, “Plato teaches no less decisively than Aristotle that happiness and the specific perfection of man consists in pure contemplation and understanding. The essential difference between Plato and Aristotle is revealed only in the way in which they conduct themselves towards theory as the highest perfection of man” (PL, 132, emphasis added). This difference in conduct pertaining to the highest perfection of man through contemplation manifests itself in the respective extents to which Aristotle and Plato prescribe philosophizing to be regulated by the law. As Strauss continues,
Aristotle sets [philosophy] completely free; or rather, he leaves it in its natural freedom. Plato, on the other hand, [in The Republic] does not permit the philosophers “what is now permitted them,” namely the life of philosophizing as an abiding in the contemplation of the truth. He “compels” them to care for the others and to guard them, in order that the state may really be a state, a true state … . The philosopher, who has raised himself above the sensible world in the contemplation of the beautiful, the just and the good as such, and who lives in that contemplation and wants to live in it, is called back to the state … by the command of the founder of the state, a command which considers first the ordering of the whole and not the happiness of the part. Even the philosopher as such stands under the state, is answerable for himself before the state; he is not simply sovereign. (PL, 132, emphases added)
Aristotle, who prioritizes (and practices) the natural freedom of philosophy and the happiness of the individual philosopher over the perfection of the city to which he belongs and to whom he is indebted, is, in Strauss’s rendering, a proto-liberal. The Aristotelian philosopher stands as a forerunner of the philosophy of culture who theorizes freely on multiple, semi-independent aspects of human life and not primarily on the good of the political whole that supersedes any and all discrete parts. The more fundamentally political Platonists, Maimonides and the Falasifa, favor the less natural—that is, prophetically imposed—bondage of philosophy and the philosopher to the community—the subordination of the philosopher’s happiness to that of all the members of the ideal state, understood as a whole.
According to Strauss, these Platonic political philosophers are deprived of the happiness of freely philosophizing “naturally”; but they are granted the legitimation and protection of the community whose founding and law they serve through the divine command that they practice philosophy. In their bondage, therefore, resides a greater freedom. As Strauss writes,
What Plato called for—that philosophy stand under a higher court, under the state, under the law—is fulfilled in the age of belief in revelation. With all their freedom in the pursuit of knowledge, the philosophers of this era are conscious at every moment of their answerability for the law and before the law: they justify their philosophizing before the bar of the law; they derive from the law their authorization to philosophize as a legal duty to philosophize. The Platonism of these philosophers is given with their situation, with their standing in fact under the law. Since they stand in fact under the law, they admittedly no longer need, like Plato, to seek the law, the state, to inquire into it: the binding and absolutely perfect regimen of human life is given to them by a prophet. (PL, 132, emphasis added)
Through bondage to the law and the state, the medieval rationalists practice a superior form of philosophy and facilitate the happiness of members of the perfect state: they never forget that reason is not subjectively self-generating but rather is logically conditioned by the Divinity that obtains prior to, and external to, the human intellect; and they attend to the laws that, in their fine calibration to human needs, maintain and preserve the regimen that makes possible human coexistence and indeed perfection. Again, Strauss provocatively intimates that Aristotle, in comparison with the enlightened authoritarianism of Islamic and Jewish Platonists, is the ancient philosophical forerunner of liberalism. Strauss, however, proceeds to identify among the medieval rationalists a similar proto-liberal heretic, Gersonides, whose naturally free philosophizing threatened to destroy the beautiful world of the ideal state.
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With this in mind, I turn to a portion of PL that foregrounds the problems of radical evil, raised earlier, and of premodern proto-liberalism, just mentioned. Strauss identifies in the philosophy of Maimonides’ successor, Gersonides, a quasi-liberalism, an incipient deism, and a fatal underestimation of evil, each of which, he believes, anticipate the philosophical immoderation and political insufficiencies of the Enlightenment. By de-Platonizing the efforts of Maimonides, Strauss charges, Gersonides betrays the political-philosophical achievements of medieval rationalism; due to a certain kind of radical idealism, Gersonides’ writings represent, more precisely, “the decay of Platonism” in Islamic and Jewish philosophy (PL, 77):
Gersonides explicitly argues that human provision for the stability of the human associations, which Plato considered necessary, is essentially dispensable, because this stability is adequately guaranteed by Providence. Plato’s ideal state does not need to be established by men, not to say prophets—[for Gersonides,] the Providentially ruled world, including the human world, is already the ideal state. (PL, 77–78)
A certain reading of Providence, of God’s will, in which the world as naturally given is already properly ordered for man’s happiness, deprives Revelation and the Law of their political imperative; that is, Gersonides’s teaching concerning Providence deprives humanity of the command that man obey revelation and realize the law through the active founding and perpetuating of the political community. As Strauss further explains,
While Providence is, according to the teaching of the Islamic Aristotelians and Maimonides, the condition for the fact that the desideratum of prophetic legislation and state-founding is necessarily fulfilled, in Gersonides’ view it does not even admit of this desideratum… . [F]or Plato the question of the law, and particularly the need of human provision for human beings, results from the absence of divine provision (Politicus 274d), and accordingly the realization of the ideal state depends on chance (Rep. 499b and Laws 710c-d); while for the medieval predecessors of Gersonides the ideal state, as a result of the foundation of the belief in revelation on the belief in Providence, loses “only” its questionableness; as a consequence of Gersonides’ “radicalizing” of the idea of Providence, the ideal state loses its meaning altogether. (PL, 77–78)
By attributing to Providence such pronounced authority, Gersonides, in Strauss’s estimation, makes the political endeavor of the prophet (and the theocratic authorities who insure that The Law is observed) irrelevant and renders the purpose of the ideal state moot. Providence, on the understanding of Maimonides and the Falasifa, required “human provision”—the political intervention of that special human being, the prophet—to establish the ideal state as regimen under which members of the community are oriented toward their particular perfections. On the contrary, Gersonides concludes that, if God created the world and controls its workings, then human provision, including the vaguely superhuman interventions of the prophet, are unnecessary, as is the product of his divinely stimulated superior intellect and imagination, the ideal state. Why should the prophet, and by extension, the laws, Strauss’s Gersonides seems to ask, need to provide what God, with infinitely greater intellectual and imaginative capacities than the prophet, already provides?
Strauss argues that, besides anticipating “modern deism” by putting God or his revelation at distant remove from human endeavors (PL, 78), Gersonides’s drastic overestimation of divine providence results in a severe underestimation of the force of evil in the world. Strauss suggests that Gersonides’s nonchalance regarding human evil makes possible the modern—essentially liberal—state, as it was eventually realized in the philosophic endeavors of Hobbes and Mendelssohn (despite the latter’s aspiration to revive the medieval-platonic notion of law). As Strauss writes,
Gersonides … approaches, remarkably, that kind of modern politics which believes, first explicitly and later implicitly, on the basis of an apparently radicalized but actually abstract belief in Providence that ignores the power of evil, that it can limit the operation of the state within the narrowest boundaries. From this point, finally, Mendelssohn’s teaching on revelation can be illuminated in all its questionableness, attempting as it does, despite the “radicalizing” of the belief in Providence and despite even the surrender of the traditional natural right of duty in favor of the modern natural right of claim, to restore the Platonic/medieval ideas of law. (PL, 78, emphases added)
Mendelssohn’s good intentions regarding revelation and the law notwithstanding, he had inherited from Gersonides fundamental presuppositions that make both entities unintelligible and superfluous. After all, Gersonides disqualifies both justifications for the total regimen of human life provided by the ideal state: the desideratum of facilitating human perfection and the necessity of suppressing human evil. Strauss argues that Gersonides, like later Kantian idealists, thinks that he has radicalized belief in providence for salutary ends, when in reality he has only rendered providence inapprehensibly abstract and far too distantly removed from human potentialities and necessities. If God himself, or (as Strauss will argue in subsequent writings) reason or history, imparts the notion that man is not radically evil—furthermore, if God (or reason or history) opens the possibility that men are perfectible of their own volition and activity—then the establishment and continued maintenance of the ideal state, a theocratic state, comes to be seen as unnecessary, even unreasonably burdensome. What purpose would a Lebensordnung and the total regimen of human life serve? Once the human propensity for evil and capacity for perfection are minimized, the operation of government and law may be limited “within the narrowest of boundaries,” as it is by a certain “kind of modern politics.” On Strauss’s understanding, the idea of providence underlying the ideal state of Maimonides and the Falasifa need not have been “radicalized” by the belief in progress that motivated the establishment of the modern Rechtsstaat; the understanding of human evil and human perfectibility, conveyed by Revelation, undergirding Jewish and Islamic theocracy, was already radical enough—indeed, perfectly so.
As Strauss’s comments on Mendelssohn above make plain, the medieval belief in Revelation necessitates the priority of objective duty over subjective right, and hence the objective necessity of law, elaborated in the philosophical investigation of the ideal state and manifested in the latter’s total regimen of human life. The individual—whether philosopher, citizen, or subject—enjoys no claim of right against it. The radical idealization of providence, from Gersonides to Mendelssohn—which Strauss derides as an endeavor in irrational abstraction rather than in genuine philosophic idealization—renders “the power of evil” unproblematic or at least manageable, such that a state akin to the subjectively legitimated Rechtsstaat seems more just and efficacious than the objectively just and true Platonic-theocratic state—in fact, this “ideal state,” increasingly seen as an obstacle or threat to the realization of individual, subjective rights claims, comes to be called its opposite: tyranny. If liberals confuse the beautiful state with tyranny due to a subjectivism tending toward anarchism, statist authoritarians confuse tyranny with the beautiful state because they are blind to the fact that the authoritarian state, as Strauss had warned Schmitt, is directed neither against radical evil nor toward human perfection but rather merely toward national aggrandizement.
Within the horizon of Gersonides’s philosophy, Strauss argues, modern liberalism proceeds to severely limit the extent and quality of legislation within the Hobbesian-Mendelssohnian state (PL, 141 n. 28); because the Rechtsstaat legislates exclusively “within the narrowest boundaries,” modern law neither cultivates observance of duty among subjects nor contains, suppresses, or crushes human evil. As a result, on Strauss’s view, the subjects of the liberal state fail to achieve their full human perfections, and such a state encourages human evil, legitimated by “natural rights” claims, to strike back against it—as in the Weimar Republic—in order to thoroughly destroy it.
Conclusion
In Philosophy and Law, Strauss argues that the medieval rationalists, Maimonides and the Falasifa, understood God and the community to be the conditions of possibility for “true” philosophy and politics. God, structurally and substantively, accounts for the existence of reason itself, and the prophet, through divine guidance, establishes the ideal state, within which philosophic and human flourishing take place. Hence medieval rationalism always affirmed religion and the state (or, more precisely, Revelation and The Law). Modern philosophy is “dogmatic” in a less honest, more irrational way, on Strauss’s view, despite its pretensions to “pure reason”; moreover, it is thoroughly corrosive of both the necessary theological and political conditions of human life. The medieval rationalists insist on the practicability of the ideal state, which for Plato was only a remote possibility. Hence, they are, in a literal sense but also from a liberal perspective, more political—that is, more genuinely authoritarian. The ideal state that for the medieval rationalists conformed to justice, for liberals approximates nothing short of tyranny, and for modern authoritarians remains beyond comprehension.
For Strauss in the 1930s, can modern philosophy be alleviated of its “powerful prejudices” merely through honest engagement with the more rationally justified prejudices of medieval rationalism? Or now, after the destruction of modern reason definitively pronounced by Nietzsche and Heidegger, must modern philosophy necessarily embrace these more rationally justified prejudices? Has German existentialism actually made Jewish orthodoxy revivable? Moreover, Strauss asks, can the modern state’s manifest incapacity to properly address human evil and perfectibility be somewhat improved through a more generous and substantive appreciation of the Platonic theocracy set forth by the medieval rationalists? Or rather, must the state necessarily be thoroughly transformed into a Regime much more closely approximating the ideal state that imposes the total regimen of human life upon its subjects? Philosophy and Law provides no definitive answers.
It was certainly cheeky of Strauss to submit, as part of a job application to the Hebrew University, a book that accused its faculty—largely comprised of heirs to the German-Jewish Enlightenment—of being, effectively, conversos: that is, liberal Jews who sacrificed the treasures of Judaism upon the altar of an “alien piety” represented by some execrably vulgar amalgam of Kant and Schleiermacher. Moreover, injury was perhaps added to insult by Strauss’s placing of Nietzsche and Heidegger closer to the Hebrew Bible than professors at the Hebrew University. Nevertheless, Strauss’s ultimate agenda was likely to have been, as it always was, more philosophically ambitious rather than merely churlish.
In the 1920s, Strauss, despite associating himself with the most right-wing of Jewish organizations in Germany, resigned himself to the fact that a Jewish homeland would be founded as a liberal state. If the core of such a Rechtsstaat was anathema to Jewish piety, to Revelation and The Law, then this, in Strauss’s estimation, was the sadly necessary price to be paid for effectively securing the continued existence of the Jewish People. The rapidly changing political landscape in Europe—Mussolini’s consolidation of power in 1926, Salazar’s in Portugal in 1933, Weimar’s overthrow that same year, and growing anti-republican turmoil in Spain—may have prompted Strauss to rethink prospects for the realization of “the principles of the Right” for Jews. To be sure, for Strauss, Christian authoritarians— even those whom he explicitly admired like Mussolini and SalazarFootnote 19 —were destined, for reasons already explained, never to fully transcend, philosophically and politically, “the horizon of liberalism.” However, I have offered a reading of PL that raises an alternative possibility for others who, at the time of its writing, remained—however distantly—uniquely oriented to appreciate the allure of the true, beautiful, “ideal state.” On this reading, Strauss attempts to arouse a powerful prejudice in favor of the hypothetical practicability of Jewish theocracy, understood in light of Platonic philosophy—an alternative possibility that, to his mind, promised the Jewish people so much more than merely their continued existence and security.
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