Leo Strauss, the Straussians and American foreign policy

Recent discussions of the influence of philosopher Leo Strauss and his students, especially on the current US administration and its policy on Iraq, have generated an exceptional degree of fog and misinformation. Shadia Drury’s openDemocracy interview with Danny Postel on the political influence of Leo Strauss’s ideas, for example, may indeed have created (as a recent email update proclaims) “activity, debate and critique across cyberspace”, but its intellectual content does not match its central claims.

My aim here is to clarify matters. I begin by considering Shadia Drury’s contribution to openDemocracy, continue by discussing the general orientation to foreign affairs of Strauss and his students, and conclude by examining what, more fundamentally, Strauss was trying to achieve.

Shadia Drury’s claims

Despite (or because of) Shadia Drury’s bluster, she gives no coherent reason why Strauss’s students in the Bush administration support the war in Iraq. She ascribes to Strauss himself the realism of a Thrasymachus or a Machiavelli combined with the fear that American culture might spread globally. (Her evidence for this fear is non-existent; she relies on guilt by association by invoking Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger and Alexander Kojève).

Why, then, do the “Straussians” in and near the Bush administration support the “idealistic” effort to spread American-style liberal democracy in Iraq and elsewhere? Drury waves her arms about gentlemen vs. philosophers. But it is unclear what the allegedly illiberal philosophers or initiates are supposed to be gaining from the liberal policies pursued by the gentlemen they are said to be duping. Drury talks at length about their favouring permanent war, but why would spreading liberal democracy achieve that?

Could it be true, rather, that the Straussians and neo-conservatives in and around the Bush administration (as well as its president and secretary of defense) pursue and defend policies they believe serve the common good? This straightforward likelihood lacks the whiff of brainy conspiracy that simultaneously flatters intellectuals and explains away their irrelevance (tomorrow it will be my turn, but today other magicians are in charge). The obvious, however, is no less true because it is obvious.

At times, moreover, even Shadia Drury concedes that Straussians or neo-conservatives do genuinely desire the spread of liberal democracy. She says, for example: “I think that the neo-conservatives are for the most part genuine in wanting to spread the American commercial model of liberal democracy around the globe. They are convinced that it is the best thing, not just for America, but for the world.”

Drury’s story about why Straussians in the administration supported the war in Iraq is, thus, unpersuasive and contradictory. Equally unpersuasive is her view that the allies lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). She gives no reason why the administration would have told a lie that would prove so easy to expose.

Administration officials, after all, already had reasons for their decision over Iraq – changing the Middle East so it would be less favourable to terrorists and more favourable to liberal democratic institutions (and not only to Israel, as Drury says) and deposing an especially savage and brutal tyrant (a reason she shamefully ignores); if they merely desired to add concern about WMD, they could have pointed to past actions and raised future concerns without stressing present stockpiles. This combination of reasons would have garnered the level of support they garnered in any event. One must conclude that the administration believed the weapons to exist; they may still be proved correct.

In any event, Drury’s main interest seems not to be in the actual policies the Bush administration is pursuing in Iraq (where, to repeat, she has given no good reason to think that the goal of liberalising Iraq is not exactly what it seems), but rather in using the occasion to rehash old debates about Leo Strauss and his students.

Because it must be obvious even to Drury that she does not mean everything she says, it will not be useful to consider her remarks more fully. They do, however provide an opportunity to discuss less intemperately the current political standpoint that is coherent with Strauss’ intellectual programme. I will begin such a discussion now, drawing on previous efforts.

Leo Strauss and foreign affairs

The first element of this political standpoint is the opposition to tyranny. The communist threat was the dominant fact of political life for fifty years, and Strauss’s students defended liberal democracy vigorously from that danger. Their argument opposed Alexander Kojève’s. They did not see the march to communism as inevitable nor a movement toward socialism as desirable. They questioned in every way the life that communists promoted. The Soviet Union was a tyranny, and the Soviet goal was an expanded tyranny. The uncompromising and unchanging understanding among Strauss’ students that communism is tyranny belongs to a clear-sighted and spirited opposition to tyranny in every guise. The connection to current policy is obvious.

Related to this view of the communists is doubt about the United Nations and other attempts at world federalism or a world state. The doubts are based not on nationalism but on the fear that such encompassing institutions might become steps on the way to the universal homogenisation of human beings. Moreover, they cannot be the base from which to assert and defend confidently and effectively the justice of liberal democracy.

Indeed, liberal internationalism seems to express a bias against politics itself, a hope that universal agreement will replace political controversy and debate. Strauss and his students appreciate the magnificence of statesmanship, however, and worry about the conditions that make it possible. Defending the political independence of American liberal democracy derives not from a wish for perpetual war, as Drury suggests, but rather from the view that politics is a field for human excellence and not only a means to other ends.

Strauss and his students also emphasise the seriousness of America’s founding and constitution. Drury severely underestimates the connection between the natural right that Strauss rediscovers and the equal natural rights outlined and defended in the Declaration of Independence. Precisely because natural rights are objects of reason and not historical artifacts, they provide a sound basis for liberal democracy.

Strauss’s students become known not for denigrating America but, rather, for emphasising the nobility of its founders, the intellectual cogency of its principles and the profound practical intelligence of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration, George Washington’s Constitution, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist and Abraham Lincoln’s speeches and actions.

As these examples make clear, moreover, Strauss and his students highlight virtue as well as liberty. Indeed, liberty does not properly mean satisfying any desire one wishes, in any way, place, and time. Rather, it is vitally connected to good character. Good character is not the preserve of some special few, however, and liberal democratic governments bear at least some responsibility for helping to secure it.

Leo Strauss’s intention

The rehabilitation of virtue and natural rights is connected to the general scepticism of Strauss and his students toward the orthodoxy of moral relativism. Here we begin to enter more clearly the intellectual paths that most characterise Strauss himself. Doubting moral relativism goes hand in hand with taking virtue and natural rights seriously. “Nature” is not primarily the earth and sky that surround our body, but the name from Plato through our founders for the permanent and self-sufficient things that order and attract our mind.

Strauss’s works open up the prospect that one can discover true and natural standards that are valid everywhere and always. The “application” of these standards, however, is neither mechanically absolute nor devilishly subtle. It involves, rather, the practical judgment visibly on display in Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics.

To dispute relativism and to take virtue and natural rights seriously means that Strauss and his students question intellectual as well as political conventions. They did and do not ignore Jean-Paul Sartre’s link with radical Marxists, Martin Heidegger’s with the Nazis, or the casual nihilism of postmodern academics. They do not shrink from considering religions in their own terms.

Despite Drury’s confident ascription of atheism to Strauss what is evident, on the contrary, is that throughout his life he devoted himself to the most serious and painstaking studies of the Bible and of the challenge of revelation to the claims of philosophy. These are not the actions of someone who airily dismisses religion as useful for gentlemen but beneath the dignity of some initiated few.

My reference to classic thinkers should remind us of Strauss’ emphasis on the west’s great texts and authors. Leo Strauss and his students study these books as if they might be true. It is not age or tradition but their natural power that makes them worthwhile. The idea is to learn what is fundamental about nature and human affairs, and to learn for the sake of learning, not to adjust one’s sight because of political presuppositions.

Similarly, America’s founding documents are not merely our long-standing parchments. They are revolutionary, and speak from a natural right that vaults beyond any tradition. What one learns from Plato and Aristotle proves to deepen but not to replace one’s grasp of what is naturally good about liberal democracy. Drury is wrong to suggest that Strauss simply favours the ancients over the moderns. His intention is not to advocate one time or another but to understand what is fundamental and unchanging.

Concern with great books belongs together with the view that the philosophic quest is the most important quest, and the philosophic life, or at least the life of genuine teaching, the most just life. To see this is to admit that all desires are not equal. Combined with an appreciation of virtue and statesmanship, this view of the dignity of philosophy means that Strauss and his students are not simple egalitarians.

In the context of current American and world politics it seems to some intellectuals dangerously heterodox to challenge even the remotest region of egalitarian dogma. There are, however, outstanding qualities of mind and character that we should all admire and defend politically. In the United States these qualities are secured by and in the service of the natural equality of rights.

Strauss and his students’ exploration of philosophy leads to the view that although philosophers support just and prudent politics, politics and philosophy stand in inherent tension. This is a political teaching of Plato’s Republic and Apology. This understanding fits together with Strauss’s discovery of the literary practice of exotericism, that is, of the truth that some philosophers did not always say ostensibly what they meant in fact.

Shadia Drury and others seem to think that this discovery is the heart of “elitism” among “Straussians”. But the grounds of disaffection with extreme egalitarianism, and of support for a more subtle and complex natural standard, including a natural standard of equality, are the ones I discussed above.

Exotericism is a consequence of the tension between philosophy and politics, not the cause of it. Philosophic exotericism, moreover, is in no way mystical, open only to those initiated into arcane and irrational rites. It simply means that one must use one’s reason rigorously in order to discover what truly is being said. In this sense, there is nothing that is closed to anyone who would use our common intelligence with sufficient honesty.