moderns believed it was about self-preservation and self-interest.
Liberalism is an instantiation, par excellence, of the modern view. Its theory of the social contract posits a Hobbesian (or, somewhat more benignly, a Lockean) unsafe – if not dog-eat-dog – state of nature. It then theorizes a contractual agreement that brackets any questions concerning hotly disputed substantive ideals. On these the parties to the contract agree to disagree, and move forward. They create a government that preserves the individual’s right to follow his or her own understandings of what he or she believes those ideas entail and require (“liberal neutrality”).
Strauss mourned the transition of western societies from the ancient understandings to the modern ones as a falling off. It involved, in important ways, a civilizational decline, entailing the abandonment of the pursuit of the highest human ideals in favor of the more grubby and delimited. At the same time, however, Strauss seemed to suggest at various points that this movement toward modernity may have been inevitable. It may even have had some distinct advantages, though this was far from clear. One virtue liberal modernity did have, however, was that it was far from pristine. There were cracks in the pavement through which flowers could bloom. A commitment to the pursuit of the highest ideals in the modern world was retained, for instance, in classic education in the liberal arts (chiefly the “Great Books” of western thought). It was also retained in the teachings of what Straussians have called “revealed religion.” To the extent that we in the modern world were willing to study and construct our institutions to invite, to the extent possible, the salubrious influence of Athens (standing for reason) and Jerusalem (standing for revelation), we might be able to construct a morally and philosophically admirable and decent polity.
Most Straussians writing about American political thought adopted a self-consciously (and, some would say, unduly self-aggrandizing) patriotic stance toward the American polity, although they do not all think about it in the same way. Some, in implicit agreement with Louis Hartz, consider the United States an essentially modern, liberal (and, perhaps, bourgeois and commercial) polity. And they do not hesitate to pass judgment on the political regime. Straussians do not believe that one can separate positive from normative political analysis, in the way that most contemporary social scientists do. They either believe that it is good that the United States is liberal and modern, or they believe that, felicitously, in conjunction with its continuing commitment to normatively desirable non-liberal institutions inside the overarching liberal order (e.g. belief in God; loyalty to family and country; and commitment to traditional [natural] hierarchies), the US regime is worthy of full assent, and possibly even celebration, as the best possible political regime under modern conditions. These Straussians, however, are ever alert to the threats posed to these institutions by the country’s secular liberals, who, as they see it, have waged war against them. For their part, other Straussians either challenge the foundational liberalism of the American political regime, such as by emphasizing republican themes (though they rarely declare themselves as simply proponents of republicanism as against liberalism), or by promoting the religious commitments of the American people and the religious (often Christian) grounding of the American political experiment. Alternatively, some Straussians reimagine liberalism, in the United States, at least, along lines that reject the concepts of liberal neutrality and individual autonomy and posit in their place a commitment within liberalism to a set of substantive moral and philosophical ends. These Straussians will define the content of individual rights in the American liberal order by the lights of a substantive telos informed by a robust understanding of what is just, right, and good. If what is said to be a “right” does not square with that substantive requirement, the claim is held to be mistaken – it is, after due consideration, no right at all.
Straussians pursue their scholarly agendas in American political thought in a family of ways. Many undertake studies of key figures – often of those they hail as “great men,” like the nation’s founders, Abraham Lincoln, and Frederick Douglass – who, as ostensible exemplars of virtue and statesmanship, nobly arrived, in diverse ways in different times, at understandings of the rightful admixture of the ancient and the modern in striving to steer the American polity. In contrast, they will also – at times ominously – set their sights on the ways in which other figures in American politics – often the early twentieth-century Progressives, and their (ostensibly) secular liberal successors – have abandoned the unique blend of the ancient and modern that, from the Straussian perspective, constitutes the glory and nobility of the American polity. Following Strauss, these scholars will spy in these purportedly faithless Americans the moral and philosophical heresies of positivism, historicism, secularism, and relativism. Besides focusing on individual great men (and sometimes women), Straussians have studied a broad array of the country’s political institutions and creedal documents with an eye to the ways in which those, rightly read, square with their broader understandings of the distinctive nature of the American polity. Although they sometimes critique these documents or institutions, and detail the ways that they fall short, Straussians’ general predisposition – in part arising out of their sense of duty as teachers of the (it is hoped, virtuous) citizenry – is toward (informed) patriotism and celebration, to the inculcation, through an appropriate liberal arts education, of a philosophical grounding, historical knowledge, and national pride.
Theories Positing the Inadequacy of the Traditional Frameworks and Proposing Alternatives
There have long been scholars who, while still harboring conceptual ambitions, nevertheless rejected claims that Lockean-liberal political thought has been hegemonic in the United States or, alternatively, that it is subsumable under the aegis of the liberal–republican tension. As they saw it, there had always been multiple frameworks and perspectives that had vied for prominence and pre-eminence in the country’s aggressively contested public sphere.
Whoever is an avowed enemy to God, I scruple not to call him an enemy of his country.
John Witherspoon (1776)
Mingling religion with politics [must] be disavowed and reprobated by every inhabitant of America.
Thomas Paine (1776)
Many have long believed – and still do – that the United States is inherently a Christian nation: that it was founded upon Christian principles by Christian founders who both assumed and stipulated that the country’s political institutions “presuppose” a Christian epistemology, theology, and faith. As such, one does not venture far into American political thought without encountering Christian – and, more specifically, Protestant – assumptions, imagery, eschatology, and theology.
While Protestant theology has been a constant force in American life, political and otherwise, from the first settlements to the present, the degree to which the country’s core political institutions were founded on Christian principles is far from clear. Excepting its closing flourish announcing that the document had been done “in the Year of our Lord” 1787, the US Constitution neither claimed the authority or blessing of, nor referenced, God: it was designed as an entirely secular plan for government.5 Just a few years earlier, Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776) which declared that “all men … are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” – had stated firmly that “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.” An unorthodox Christian who denied the divinity of Christ, Jefferson explained his position by noting that “it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” While a number of state governments at the time of the founding had established churches, the trendline concerning establishments in the early republic was resolutely downward: Massachusetts rang down the curtain on the country’s last religious establishment in 1833.
In the founding era and subsequently, secular Enlightenment rationalism committed to the progress of human reason, as exemplified most prominently by the likes of Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, developed
