do a bit of both, but it is primarily thematically structured. This is not an intellectual biography, but in chapters 1 and 2, I will consider Strauss’s intellectual development in the context of the Weimar Republic, and especially the significance and meaning of what he calls his “change of orientation.” We will also follow him to the United States, where he taught for over thirty years and published the books that established him as one of the leading figures in political philosophy and the history of political philosophy in the mid-twentieth century. We will conclude the book by looking at his influence especially upon American conservative thought and American politics.
While there is a general biographical trajectory through the course of the book, its more basic structure is thematic – and, in order to explore these themes across the range of Strauss’s thought, we will often look at writings from different decades in his life. The primary justification for this is that, once Strauss underwent his “change of orientation” sometime around 1930, his thought retained a basic stability of outlook. This is not to deny some important developments and even corrections within his thought, and certainly we will note them when they arise. Nonetheless, the essence of Strauss’s philosophical orientation and vision remained remarkably consistent.
Let me turn, then, to the themes that will organize this book and help orient us in making sense of Strauss’s thought. This list is by no means exhaustive, but I want to suggest that these five themes do form something like the most fundamental aspects of Strauss’s thinking:
1 the return to natural right and the recovery of classical rationalism;
2 the theological-political problem;
3 the recovery of the exoteric/esoteric distinction;
4 classical political philosophy; and
5 the critique of modern political philosophy.
The first three themes will form our first three chapters, and we will explore the development of Strauss’s thought in the context of the Weimar Republic in Germany, and in his first few years of exile from Germany in France, England, and the United States. Chapters 4 and 5 will consider the two crucial components of his mature thought, which find expression particularly in work Strauss published while he was at the University of Chicago, and, above all, in his most comprehensive book, Natural Right and History (1953). But it is important to remember that the key earlier themes remain active right through his work: Strauss himself explicitly states that the theological-political problem was the theme of his investigations throughout his scholarly career. In chapter 6, we will consider Strauss’s legacy and specifically his influence on American politics.
It is a basic claim of this book that Strauss’s work as a whole cannot be understood or properly assessed except by seeing it as a response to the crisis of politics, thought, and culture that belonged to the Weimar Republic. Strauss’s intellectual project clearly emerged from this context, and understood that crisis as indicative of a deeper and more fundamental crisis in western civilization: the crisis of the West, or nihilism. Our first three chapters will be an effort to understand and explain Strauss’s standpoint as a response to the crisis of nihilism. Of course, many of the most significant thinkers of the twentieth century were engaged in responding to similar circumstances. We need to see Strauss’s as one such response, but an importantly distinct and compelling one.
Before considering these themes, it will be useful briefly to introduce three thinkers who are especially important in understanding and locating Strauss’s position. Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger were crucial figures in articulating the intellectual world in which Strauss came to his own standpoint.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), while he lived in the nineteenth century, only came to cultural and intellectual prominence in the first decades of the twentieth century and was, by Strauss’s own account, the dominating intellectual presence of the Weimar Republic (1918–33), where Strauss came to intellectual maturity. Nietzsche is famous for his account of European civilization as having been subject to the claim “God is dead.” Nietzsche provided the most radical consideration of the implications of this insight into modern culture: the death of God implied the loss not only of religious belief but of the whole framework of morality and science that depended on the claim of an otherworldly foundation. Nietzsche therefore saw his own time as one that was experiencing nihilism. In the face of the abysmal experience of the death of God, Nietzsche saw as illusionary and unsustainable the claims that the end of religion issued in a new egalitarian humanism and new scientific understanding of the world. Nietzsche proposed an alternative way to live in the face of nihilism through three “teachings”: the world as “will to power”; the proclamation of the Übermensch, the “Overman”; and the doctrine of the Eternal Return of the Same. Nietzsche explores these thoughts in a number of works, but especially central is Thus Spoke Zarathustra. As we shall see, Strauss understood himself as trying to face the demands of Nietzsche’s thought.
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) was important to Strauss in pointing to a way of philosophizing that might allow for a standpoint that could escape Nietzsche’s devastating critique of the western tradition of philosophy as implicated in the nihilism western culture found itself possessed by. Husserl developed “phenomenology” as a way to engage in a philosophic reflection on the experienced world that avoids the kind of causal or metaphysical approaches to philosophy that dominated western philosophy, and were especially at work in modern philosophy’s turn to questions of knowledge of the external world. Husserl’s phenomenology sought to pre-empt the turn to this kind of knowledge by engaging in a philosophy of the description of things as they appeared to the self, bracketing, or excluding, questions of causality or metaphysics. Strauss was deeply impressed by Husserl and took up his turn to the “natural understanding” – the way things appear to us naturally – as a beginning point for a philosophy that might point a way out of the nihilism of the age.
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was an assistant to Husserl and developed and radicalized Husserl’s standpoint. Strauss encountered Heidegger as a young academic in the circle of Husserl and was deeply impressed by the power of Heidegger’s philosophical inquiry both as a philosopher and as an interpreter of classical philosophy. Heidegger recognized that Husserl’s phenomenology could be transformed by situating its inquiry in time and history: the self or ego that engages in phenomenological description could and should be seen not as a timeless, situationless being, but as one necessarily confronting a finite, historical situation in which time fundamentally informs that finitude. Heidegger is the intellectual source of existentialism. He agrees with Nietzsche that the modern era is one of nihilism. He finds in his radicalized phenomenology a way both to understand and confront this historical situation more deeply, and to seek to find a way of thinking that might open a stance beyond nihilism. Heidegger’s most important book, Being and Time, was published in 1927. In 1933, he joined the Nazi Party. In many ways Heidegger’s mentor, Husserl came to be deeply disturbed by, and felt betrayed by, the radical tendencies of his student’s thinking. Husserl sought in his own last writings to contest Heidegger’s claim that his work drew out the proper implication of Husserl’s own phenomenology.
Having briefly outlined the standpoints of these three major figures in Strauss’s intellectual background, we can turn to sketch five key themes in Strauss’s own thought.
The Return to Natural Right
As a young man, Strauss was deeply struck by Nietzsche’s characterization of the contemporary western world
