Mary P. Nichols: Socrates and the Political Community: An Ancient Debate. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Vol.ume 17, Number 2, Winter 1989-90.

 

If the name ‘Socrates’ means ‘rule of wisdom,’ small wonder Athenians finally put him to death. That he survived so long attests to his failure to put anything in writing. That his memory survives, however, attests to the writing of others, who portrayed him as the archetypal philosopher, the one whose way of life raised the question of philosophy’s relation to the polis. Theories may or may not directly affect political life, but theorizing does. If you make people think, they will not act while they are thinking; after they finish (if they do) they may act differently than before. Good citizens have known to find this infuriating.

Nichols’ book has three main parts: on Aristophanes’ Clouds, on Plato’s Republic, and on the second book of Aristotle’s Politics. Although many might believe these books thoroughly discussed by others, Nichols has other ideas. Fortunately, she is right, and the conflicts between some of her interpretations and those of Allan Bloom, Leo Strauss, and Paul Friedlander may do her readers the favor of returning them to the original text with renewed eyes.

Nichols’ careful reading of the Clouds does not entirely diverge from Strauss’ account in Socrates and Aristophanes. Their emphases differ. She is more down-to-earth about clouds: “Whereas Strauss’ Aristophanes considers “the old-fashioned… no less laughable, no less unreasonable, than the newfangled,” Nichols more measuredly calls Aristophanes “a conservative who sees the limitations of what he is trying to conserve.” She never suggests that Aristophanes wants to be a god. She regards the Just Speech hypocritical but not mistaken in his words. Rather, she describes the Unjust Speech, Socrates, and Phidippides (Strepsiades’ son)as erroneously imagining nature to be “composed of absolutes, unrelated to [other] things in nature, and uninfluenced by time.” The attempt to bring convention into line with this misconceived nature yields young men fit for no action except father-beating. Nor are they fit for thought, and here she comes close to Strauss:

“Seeking the universal or the unlimited [she writes], Socrates turns to nonhuman nature and to man only insofar as he resembles nonhuman nature. Socrates loses sight of the human, aware only of the movements of matter…. Socrates, seeking freedom in universality, discovers only that man is a slave to his own body. Caught in contradiction, Socrates is laughable.”

Nichols finds Aristophanes convincing up to a point, but she sees the limitations of his conservatism. A clever defense of ordinary life, of normalcy, cannot account for the fact that “it is in ordinary life that the desire for completeness,” including philosophic eros, “arises.” “How long can laughter check desire and prevent tears?” With this question she turns to the Republic.

This interpretation forms the bulk and the core of the book. Here Nichols takes issue with Strauss and especially with Bloom on the significance of the philosopher-kings. She argues that they represent the culmination of a profoundly un-Socratic argument led by Socrates but energized by Glaucon’s desire for perfection,” a desire that is not so much erotic as spirited. Whereas Bloom contends that the spirited man endangers himself and others because his love of his own closes his mind to reason, Nichols contends that both love of one’s own and philosophy can bring the illusion of independence from the city, if they are ill-mixed. The philosopher-kings exemplify this. They are finally creatures of the city—orthodox, un-Socratic, unquestioning. They attract Glaucon, who “does not pursue knowledge so much as the certainty knowledge affords.” “Ultimately, the city offers knowledge of simple and eternal ideas as a substitute for the uncertain understanding necessary in a world of complex and changing objects.” Philosophy does not lead men to the unnatural unity of communism; politics does, in its anti-erotic quest for changeless order and control. Reason is reduced to a merely disciplinary force that serves the ‘ideally’ self-sufficient ‘manly’ man. Instead of “Socratic political philosophers,” the city in speech is ruled by a “mathematical philosophy” that prepares the brightest youths “for tyranny over the city,” an enforced homogeneity within each of the three classes.

“In contrast to these philosophers, for whom the city is a cave they escape, Socrates gains clarity within the city…transcend[ing] his own political community in ways the philosophers of the cave image do not.” The erotic Socrates does not need to be dragged from the cave. Nor does he need to be dragged back to it. “What is needed is not the ridicule of philosophy that Aristophanes offers but a philosophic understanding of the city’s legitimate needs, as well as of its dangerous tendencies. Philosophy must be political in order to avoid being politicized.” The truly just man is “the lover of learning” who lives in the “dialogic community.”

Socrates’ regime typology is not the kernel of a political science, as Bloom contends; there is no room for choice, deliberation—for statesmanship. Regimes decline inevitably, here. “Plato describes no decent politics in the Republic to which men can give their attention and loyalty…. Because the Republic offers knowledge of the perils of political action rather than knowledge useful in guiding politics, Aristophanes would find it unsatisfactory. As long as knowledge yields no more fruit than this”—the knowledge that one does not know and a consequent moderation in all things, including politics—”he might ask, why is knowledge better for men than the forgetting that comedy is intended to encourage?” Nichols now turns not, as one might expect, to Plato’s trilogy on knowledge and statesmanship, the Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Statesman, nor to the other philosopher who wrote Socratic dialogues, Xenophon, but to Aristotle. This surprising turn more than suggests that Nichols has intends her book not merely as a scholarly investigation but a philosophic one.

“Whereas Socrates founded political philosophy by undertaking a philosophic examination of human affairs, Aristotle founded political science by directing philosophy to political action”—”constitut[ing] an implicit defense of philosophy against Aristophanes’ criticism and of politics against Plato’s.” Against Aristophanes, Aristotle teaches that politics can and must “incorporate diversity.” Thus “thought and action correct each other,” with statesmen, and particularly lawgivers, providing “the bridge between thought and actual regimes.” Unlike Socrates, Aristotle does not direct his political teachings to the young. He is “the philosophic teacher of statesmen.” “Far from constituting a threat to the city’s unity, the philosopher can share in political life.” For Aristotle, politics is not based on a lie.

There may be some problems with Nichols’ discussion of the philosopher-kings. For one thing, Socrates says so little about them as philosophers. their mathematical education does not make them un-Platonic (as distinguished from un-Socratic); the Academy itself is said to have warned away unmathematical souls. Moreover, Nichols believes that Socrates’ account of love as indiscriminate is obviously and deliberately wrong: A wine-lover does not love every kind of wine, as Socrates claims, as no one loves a bad wine. “The city’s communism could be successful, only if Socrates’ account of love were true: only if the guardians love all the members of a class” and therefore no individuals within it. But Nichols confuses kinds with intensity, here. A true wine lover loves all kinds of wine, but not poor specimens of those kinds; nor need he love all kinds equally. Socrates may be more kingly than Nichols says. Plato also teaches that a tyrannical soul may have been a potentially philosophic soul, now spoiled; tyrants and philosophers are opposites, but in another sense twins.

The extent to which such reservations refute Nichols’ overall argument may be questioned. Only an exceptionally dogmatic soul could fail to learn from her book, and such souls are not the intended readership.

 

Catherine H. Zuckert, ed.: Understanding the Political Spirit: Philosophical Investigations from Socrates to Nietzsche. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

This is a combination of two reviews, originally published in the New York City Tribune, January 30, 1989 and in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 17, Number 1, Winter 1989-90.

 

Rhetoric, election campaigns, even coups d’état and wars: Anger and ambition feed political life, sometimes intoxicating it. Catherine Zuckert reminds us that the Greek philosopher saw spiritedness or thumos as “the psychic origin of distinctively political action.” Political men seek justice, especially justice for themselves and ‘their own’family, friends, country. Politics often first comes to sight as self-defense, “the need people experience to defend their lives, lands, and liberty from the dominating desires of others.” The classical political philosophers understand the necessity, the benefits, the charms, and the dangers of politics.

In association with reason, spiritedness makes man a political animal. Classical political thought asks, What shall we do with the wrath of Achilles? Without spiritedness or thumos, you have a city of pigs; with too much of it, you have civil war or tyranny—the self-destruction of the city. The destruction of Rome marked the end of the classical efforts to moderate thumos; neither Christianity nor modern political philosophy have ‘managed’ it in an entirely satisfactory way. Perhaps the most troublesome part of the human soul, thumos seeks not to be managed but to rule.

Catherine H. Zuckert introduces this instructive collection of essays by observing that moderns “tend to take an economizing view of politics,” aiming at securing private rights and desires, emphasizing our individuality. Christianity contributed to this emphasis on the individual by replacing thumos with will; in Christianity punishment is a function o God, or of God’s instrument, the pagan magistrate. The old use of politics to form character declined, with character formation now centering in a different kind of political community, the Church; eventually, the very notion of character came to seem overly stern. Blocked from disciplining the desires, spiritedness rules the intellect, producing ideology—the use of ideas as weapons, instruments of conquest. The desire for a mental conquest of human beings drives totalitarian politics.

Zuckert harbors no nostalgia for ‘the ancients’; the Aristotelian triumvirate of honors (distributive justice), friendship, and family requires small communities, and these tend to fight among themselves. As soon as one community finally wins the fight, a military imperialism rises, declines, and falls.

The contributors to this volume discuss three ‘ancients’—Homer, Plato, Aristotle—and five ‘moderns’—Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, and Nietzsche. The book’s one essay on non-philosophers considers the American Founders.

Arlene Saxonhouse recounts Achilles’ discovery of the limits imposed on spiritedness by death, which he had hoped to overcome by achieving everlasting fame, a share of the immortality reserved for the gods. But “under the principles of universal equality in which no distinctions are made according to worth”—each of us equally must die—”the spirit of Achilles is not only moderated, it is killed.” Achilles’ love of Briseis, his measured acts of public honor for his dead friend Patroclus, and his reconciliation with Priam all reestablish a middle place for human being between gods and beasts.

Mary P. Nichols writes that “Plato joins Homer in teaching the need for man to moderate his spiritedness,” although in a very different way. As does Homer, Plato sees that spiritedness rebels against death. In doing so, it defends but also threatens the city by its willingness to sacrifice and even life itself for the city’s sake—dealing out the very death it rebels against. Spiritedness also commits the soul entirely to the city, “against the truth that man needs something for his satisfaction that goes beyond the city, beyond what he can create and control.” Nichols recapitulates the argument of her book, Socrates and the Political Community, that the guardian-philosophers of the regime-in-speech of the Republic are more guardians than philosophers. Socrates, by contrast, “makes spiritedness gentle,” and takes account of the individuality of his interlocutors. This point should perhaps be qualified by noting that Socrates’ interlocutors for the most part represent human types, not individuals in the modern sense of the word, as a comparison of Plato’s characters with those of Dickens will show.

Ann P. Charney relates courage to prudence, as understood by Aristotle. “Spiritedness combined with intellect is needed to philosophize in the face of knowledge of one’s ignorance about the gods.” Spiritedness also helps the intellect to moderate the appetites and fortifies the intellect in its quest for the truth behind and above conventions and opinions. The discovery of natural right allows men of strong intellect and character to act for the sake of the noble, and not merely for the sake of pleasing public opinion, whether popular or oligarchic. Aristotle carefully substitutes natural right for divine justice. Statesmen, too, can benefit; while carefully taking account of public opinion, the classical statesman can also resist it, and the classical political philosopher teaches him why he ought sometimes to resist. Charney may overestimate the place of friendship in this enterprise. Friendship cannot be “the core of political justice”; Aristotle explicitly teaches that friends do not treat each other with strict justice, instead inclining to ‘cronyism.’ But she is surely right to say that Aristotle’s great-souled man “replaces the Homeric heroes” and thereby makes political life more stable than Achilles could.

Machiavelli is the first of the ‘moderns.’ In a witty and sobering essay, Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. calls Machiavelli “the first writer on politics to use the word ‘execute’ frequently and thematically in the modern sense”—or, as Mansfield soon notes, its two modern senses. Mansfield contrasts seven characteristics of the modern Machiavellian executive with the classic Aristotelian statesman. Machiavelli downplays the role of deliberation, practical reasoning, in politics, and praises the use of force and fraud. He replaces the Aristotelian concept of political friendship with the concept of political conspiracy. “Primal fear” becomes “the first mover of politics”—not natural right and most assuredly not divine providence. Spiritedness rules Machiavellian politics, albeit with cleverness; conquest is the aim.

Thomas Hobbes and John Locke progressively soften Machiavellian politics, without abandoning it. Hobbes shares Machiavelli’s cynicism about human nature but, as Timothy Fuller shows in a characteristically thoughtful essay, he finds the rule of law a better means to attain spirited ends. The very idea of the rule of law signifies to Hobbes “that mankind has been set free from divine tutelage and supposes that freedom and reason are mediated by human [not divine] will.” Spiritedness now inheres in law-abidingness; honor (spiritedness high-toned) and self-restraint combine to uphold law’s rule, and to preclude ‘personal’ rule. Civil liberty replaces natural liberty under the covenant or social contract. “The covenant is not, finally, a unique event but the paradigm of a lifetime of rational willing, the test of the enduring capacity for self-overcoming in civil association.” In this, Fuller offers the reader a more austere Hobbes than the cynical materialist of morals we normally view.

John Locke tames spiritedness still further. David Lowenthal observes that for Locke, “conquest is never justified.” Locke’s state of nature is not so much a state of war, as in Hobbes, but a state of scarcity. In Locke, ‘economic man’ begins to come into his own. “With this sweeping contradiction of Hobbes, Locke lays the basis for thought on war that became the common sense of twentieth-century liberal societies,” with their “concepts of aggressor nations, reparations, wars of national liberation and national self-determination….” Lowenthal cautions that this project can endanger itself in two ways. If a liberal regime becomes too narrowly commercial and forgets to defend itself, it will perish by attack from other regimes that have not forgotten the martial spirit. And if a regime embraces the Lockean concept of national self-determination without Locke’s constitutional safeguards—a commercial economy, representative government—it will become a worse tranny than the traditional, ‘authoritarian’ regime it overthrew. Spiritlessness and excessive spiritedness both threaten the liberal regimes.

Contemporary intellectuals decry the undramatic, ‘bourgeois’ virtues and vices of commercial republics. In this they imitate some of the late-modern political philosophers, the greatest of these being G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche. Michael Gillespie contributes a substantial essay on Hegel’s remedy for ’embourgeoisement.’ “Hegel doubts… that homo economicus can ever free himself from his desires and truly rule.” Left alone, bourgeois man will only sink deeper into decadence. If ‘History’ is not to grind to a halt before reaching its proper end or purpose, bourgeois man must be overcome, dialectically. Hegel proposes a serious, modern version of Socrates’ playfully constructed ‘republic.’ The bourgeoisie replaces the artisan class, soldiers replace the guardians, and bureaucrats replace the philosopher-kings. Not commerce but war “is the only viable restraint upon bourgeoisification and political degeneration,” strengthening “the rationality of the state by evoking the latent general will and community spirit of the citizenry.” War overcomes bourgeois individualism without returning to the tiny, now defenseless polis of antiquity. In the Hegelian dialectic, right makes might because that modern state which is the most autonomous and rational will prove stronger than its less advanced antagonists. Gillespie quite prudently judges Hegel over-optimistic about modern war and modern philosophic rationality.

Nietzsche does not marry war and reason at shotgun-point. He celebrates “wild wisdom”—thought set free from logic, even from that most ambitious logic of Hegel. He dismisses moderation. Werner Dannhauser writes that Nietzsche exalts spiritedness over the other dimensions of the souls because only the most extreme spiritedness can affirm life even while embracing Nietzschean nihilism. “Courage is the quality of mind most needed by the mind as it faces the utter and comprehensive meaninglessness of life. That meaninglessness must be affirmed, lest the spirit of revenge corrode us and we face a hostile”—perhaps the better word is indifferent—”world with bitterness and resentment.” Dannhauser judges Nietzsche’s project humanly impossible, and rejects Nietzsche’s claim that man may overcome his own humanity.

The deficiencies of late-modern political philosophy may prompt a reexamination of modernity’s most successful regime. Nathan Tarcov brings to this task a profound understanding of the Lockean political philosophy that influenced the American Founders more than any other. Locke, he observes, is not so ‘bourgeois’ as his critics contend. To assert rights, one makes “a spirited claim that there are duties both to respect others’ rights and to vindicate one’s own rights.” Some Thoughts Concerning Education “leaves room for properly educated spiritedness.” Pride in this combination of liberty and rationality forms the basis of morality; at the same time, love of dominion, that part of pride that spurs tyrants’ immorality, must be corrected and rechanneled. “Locke attempts to control the proud desire for mastery over others by satisfying the proud desire for liberty and mastery over oneself,” a mastery that wins the esteem of one’s fellow men and women.

Tarcov compares the moral principles of the Declaration of Independence with Lockean morality. There is a major similarity: Both teach that the spirited by rational assertion of liberty “alone secures political happiness.” There is also a difference. To the Signers, spiritedness is “part of what entitles one to liberty,” and relates to honor—that  is, “gratitude to ancestors and responsibility to future generations.” This is why the Declaration culminates in a pledge of sacred honor among the people’s representatives, not among the people themselves; this is how would-be rulers show the virtue that will enable them to rule well. As for the people, consent is the key concept. Lack of popular spiritedness yields mere acquiescence; excess spiritedness fuels fanaticism. Consent—moderately spirited and reasonable—hits the mean between the extremes and provides a solid foundation for that rare thing, a politics of moderation in modernity.

This highly instructive collection of essays would have been improved by the inclusion of a more thorough discussion of thumos as a psychological concept—this, perhaps, in the introduction or in an essay immediately following it. A comparison and contrast of the Platonic view of the soul with the Christian view would have added a needed dimension to the study, as well. The writers do an excellent job in showing how modern political philosophers have come full circle since Machiavelli liberated spiritedness from the intellectual apprehension of, and the ethical respect for, nature—how first they tamed spiritedness, then tamed it again. The moderns denied reason’s capacity to rule, yet insisted on overturning traditional customs and opinions. The results have not been encouraging. These studies clarify the reasons for these results, and thus invite further consideration of a perennial political problem.

Kenneth L. Deutsch and Walter Soffer, eds.: The Crisis of Liberal Democracy: A Straussian Perspective. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 16, Number 3, Spring 1989. Republished with permission.

 

The editors write, “The crisis of liberal democracy is best understood as a crisis of moral foundations,” the moral neutrality of liberal democracy “concerning choices of ways of life.” Liberal democrats often believe “assertions about the good” to be “noncognitive, radically personal”; perhaps as often, they concede cognitive, ‘impersonal’ status to such assertions but call individual freedom the highest good. As a result, “Liberal democratic regimes have failed to develop standards of political morality by which to judge and influence actions that affect the character and preservation of the regime itself”; on a loftier plane, they offer no “public vision of the good.”

Against this tendency, Leo Strauss defended natural right. Liberal democrats ‘need’ natural right if they will not succumb to some form of nihilism more or less artfully concealed—and in a liberal democracy, public artfulness is too poor to conceal anything for long. Although liberal democracy, a modern regime, rests on modern natural right, which turns on itself and finally issues in nihilism, Strauss nonetheless sees non-modern reasons to support the liberal regimes in contemporary circumstances. He would re-establish them in classical natural right.

The editors divide their book into three parts, with four, eight, and two essays respectively—a total of fifteen if the introduction is included. The first part contains essays discussing Strauss’s views on “the question of natural right.” The second part contains essays discussing liberalism and its relation to liberality, freedom and equality, consent, and nihilism. The essays in the third part concern liberalism in the United States.

In “Leo Strauss: Three Quarrels, Three Questions, One Life,” Michael Platt provides an overview in which the details never blur. In politics, the contradictions between ancients and moderns, reason and revelation, philosophy and poetry, cause quarrels; among philosophers, they raise questions. But a true life is unitary, and a philosophic life proceeds with the knowledge that some questions should be ranked higher than any contentious set of answers. Platt writes two marvelous sentences on Machiavelli, who raises all of these questions in an especially quarrelsome way: “…Machiavelli allows anger at God to become anger at the good. In this want of discrimination Strauss saw a failure of philosophy to be philosophic.” But by the same token, Strauss’s subordination of politics to philosophy never reduces politics to the status of mere rhetoric. Like Socrates, Strauss attends to human things in order to become more philosophic, not merely to defend himself or even to give liberally in a spirit “more charitable than true.” “The ancient Socrates is superior to Nietzsche and to his Socrates in both practical wisdom and solitude because he has found the least unsatisfactory reconciliation of philosophy and the city.” Perhaps glancing at those today who call Strauss a Platonist, a Nietzschean, an Epicurean, or some other thing, Platt calls Socrates the one “Strauss loved most”—Socrates, the philosopher most free of doctrines, the most full of questions, the example of the philosophic life.

Victor Gourevich reads Strauss’s Natural Right and History to ask if Strauss unqualifiedly endorses classical natural right. He carefully suggests that Strauss to an extent partakes of the historicism Strauss apparently attacks. Historicists claim that the Whole is unknowable even in principle because “where there are no human beings there can be no being,” and human beings come into existence only at a certain point in time; in saying that Socratic philosophy concerns itself with an “unchanging framework” of “fundamental problems and alternatives” that is “coeval with human thought” (emphasis added), Strauss gives at least part of the point to Heidegger. Strauss “refuses to speak of philosophy as a potentiality”; it is “no more than a possibility, and he refuses to subscribe to the classics’ understanding of it as a permanent possibility.” But if a historicist, Strauss eschews the thumotic dogmatism of some moderns; unlike Platt, Gourevich believes Strauss to be somewhat of an Epicurean with respect to politics. To Gourevich, natural right and politics generally appear more as noble lies than as paths to philosophy.

Roger D. Masters discusses the preface to Natural Right and History as a path to better understanding the contrast between Aristotelian biology and modern physics. Masters ‘corrects’ Strauss, whose “formulation of the modern predicament seems to be derived substantially from Nietzsche.” Nietzsche shares the modern-physics view of nature as a human construct. Against this, Masters defends Aristotelian biology, including the Aristotelian definition of man as a political animal. He blames monotheism and creationism for the exaggerations of modern physics, obsessed with problems of origin and making, problems now dangerously secularized. Masters errs, I think, in failing to mention Strauss’s considerable interest in Hans Jonas’ book The Phenomenon of Life, a statement of neo-Aristotelian biology. Strauss by no means believed modern physics to have refuted Aristotle on the level of biological science.

John G. Gunnell makes an important contribution to the volume by bringing Strauss before the bar of sincere moral indignation. Calling Strauss’s work “rhetorical” in the pejorative sense, he describes the Straussian account of liberal democracy as “abstract,” “intellectualized,” and “ideational.” Strauss’s description of “the modern project” is a “tale,” albeit not one told by an idiot. On the contrary, Strauss exhibits great cunning in the deliberate use of self-contradiction and academicist myth; Gunnell decries the thought that “dissembling is an acceptable form of education and scholarly exchange.” He does not consider that Strauss may thereby repel the thoughtless and cause the thoughtful to think harder. Gunnell charges Strauss with knowing that philosophy cannot emerge from the cave, that “no philosophic solution to philosophical relativism and historicism exists. He does not prove this assertion. Further, Strauss’s “claim” that “value relativism” contradicts itself “is far from a compelling basis for embracing absolutism”; Gunnell does not produce any evidence that Strauss commended any such embrace.

The volume’s second part begins with an exchange between Hilail Gildin and Victor Gourevich, an exchange that begins but does not end with a consideration of liberal democracy. Gildin observes that for Strauss, Nietzsche’s critique of modern rationalism precludes a return to early modern political philosophy as a solution to the crisis of liberal democracy. But liberal democracy “derives powerful support” from pre-modern political philosophy—although very indirectly, as that philosophy was not democratic. Liberal democracies defend philosophy; through the rule of law, they also provide political stability based upon a certain kind of moderation. Both liberal democrats and Aristotle agree that in a political economy of abundance, constitutional democracy is the best regime one can reasonably hope for. “The essential difference between liberal democracy” and its principal contemporary rivals, communist oligarchies and tyrannies, “is that liberal democracy regards some things as more sacred than itself,” and thus tries to leave them alone. In an era of vast technological power, this is no trivial good. “Liberal democracy gives the effort to preserve the western tradition, in a manner worthy of that tradition, a fighting chance.”

Gourevich finds Gildin’s reading of Strauss unduly ‘optimistic.’ Moderation is a virtue of conduct but not a virtue of thought, and Strauss distinguishes sharply between political men and philosophic ones: Political men crave the love of people but philosophers do not. The sharpness of this contrast ought to be maintained. If it is not, philosophic doubt will infect politics, and political dogmatism will pollute philosophy. In modernity, this could result in the Straussian  promotion of “technology and material plenty and, hence, unleashing the passions that most contribute to them,” thus overturning the very classical natural right Strauss intends publicly to uphold.

Gildin’s reply occupies the central position in the volume. He finds it implausible to read Aristotle’s Politics as a mere ‘public’ exercise. That is, political life exhibits rationally defensible virtues or an order of natural right not valuable only as a ‘support system’ for the philosophic life, and far from merely involving an attachment to ‘us’ and a hostility to ‘them.’ Further, one need not regard the moral virtues “as ends in themselves”—as gentlemen do—in order to have “the right to strong, principled, and perfectly genuine political preferences and convictions. As examples, Gildin cites Machiavelli and Alexander Kojève, prudently omitting the word “principled” from his description of them. Purdence is indeed the mediating virtue between philosophic and political virtue. This suggests a hierarchy of virtues, the lower approximating or imitating the higher. To Aristotle, “true piety consists in making oneself as like as possible to God, the exemplar of theoretical wisdom.” The pious gentleman may be brought to sympathize with philosophers, if philosophers educate gentlemen prudently. Statesmanship, “the highest practical knowledge,” is both “essentially different” but inseparable from the highest theoretical knowledge.

The five remaining essays in the second part apply Straussian interpretive principles to the study of political philosophers who address issues now confronting liberal democracies. Richard H. Cox contrasts Aristotle and Machiavelli on liberality. cox finds educated people today largely unable to “judge thoughtfully concerning the nature and purpose of private property,” a basis of liberty and of liberality. Aristotelian liberality, “a highly disciplined moral activity” guided by prudence, consisting of privately giving to the right people, at the right time, in the right way, overcomes the inordinate desire to protect one’s body by accumulating “external possessions.” Liberality contrasts with magnificence, the virtue associated with public giving. Machiavellian liberality consists of giving or appearing to give ultimately in order to take. All Machiavellian virtù is “a mode of acquisition of dominion,” and that includes both the courage of the lion and the prudence of the fox. Men give the name of liberal not to those who give virtuously but to those who give sumptuously. To avoid taking from one of his subjects in order to give to others—a dangerous practice—the liberal prince will plunder other cities. This is ‘frugality.’ The basis of ‘giving’ is getting.

Laurence Berns contrasts Aristotle with modern political philosophers on the themes of freedom and equality. To moderns, freedom means autonomy, self-legislation. Neither God nor nature ‘legislates’ for man, in the modern conception; rather, the nonhuman is to be conquered. Although the American Founders partake “in large part” of the “new science of politics,” much of their task requires an Aristotelian understanding of prudence and of liberal education. Their regime, although not identical to an Aristotelian polity or mixed regime, nonetheless imitates many of that regime’s best procedures and effects. Berns emphasizes the contemporary need to strengthen the aristocratic component of the regime: “Who is to educate the educators?”

Judith A. Best examines John Locke’s teaching on consent. Locke is no simple celebrant of modern autonomy. While agreeing with Hobbes “that consent is the sole condition of legitimate government,” he rejects Hobbesian absolutism because tyranny is even worse than the State of Nature. It is worse because it is even more unreasonable. “Consent is more than agreement; it is more than an act of will. It is an act of determinate will, an agreement to a specific thing: the protection of natural rights.” But this “collapse of the distinction between reason and consent” causes a problem best exemplified in the American regime in the figure of Stephen A. Douglas. Popular sovereignty attempts to replace constitutional government; democracy would overthrow republicanism. It might be added that Abraham Lincoln refutes Douglas’s amoral version of popular sovereignty precisely by re-associating consent with natural rights, and the discovery and defense of natural rights with theoretical and practical reasoning, respectively.

In “Nihilism and Modern Democracy in the Thought of Nietzsche,” Thomas L. Pangle provides a brilliant introduction to Nietzsche’s political thought. This thought begins, so to speak, with a critique of modern “decadence,” the exposure of the “nihilism” or nothingness of the deepest convictions of both Jerusalem and Athens. All standards of significance and coherence “are in the last analysis arbitrary,” a fact perceived only by philosophers who have “the historical sense” and therefor engage in “historical philosophizing.” Because man is or has been “the esteeming animal,” historical relativism threatens the death of man as well as the death of God, b giving man nothing to esteem. Pangle traces Nietzsche’s historicist philosophizing about history, his attempt to show that Athenian reason and Jerusalemite conscience turn on themselves or self-destruct. Both finally yield either fully conscious nihilism or a sort of reverse Hegelianism in which history ends not at the summit of wisdom but in the exhaustion and self-contempt of the ‘Last Man.’ Nietzsche would avoid this whimpering apocalypse not so much by simply re-inspiriting man but by attempting to overcome ‘man.’ As Pangle need not remark, this attempt is neither liberal nor democratic.

Robert Eden’s characteristically insightful essay, “Why Wasn’t Weber a Nihilist?” illuminates the sort of concerns raised by Professor Gunnell. “Weber’s perspective is a defense of politics, and as Strauss attempts to demonstrate, any defense of politics that abstracts from ranking the causes for which we fight is necessarily a defense of politics against philosophy; its root dogma must be the impossibility of political philosophy. My suggestion is that indignation in defense of politics is the basic problem of the social sciences, which Weber ultimately personified.” Weber opposes egalitarian liberalism, natural right, vulgar nihilism, and Nietzschean nihilism, but he lacks the classical prudence needed to sustain these rejections. As a result, he falls into a milder version of Nietzscheism. Weber is to Nietzsche what Locke is to Hobbes, but perhaps without Locke’s self-knowledge, and almost entirely without Locke’s considerable prudence. Modernity finally jettisons the via contemplativa. All choices are restricted to the horizon of the via activa, politics.

Stephen Salkever begins the third part of the volume, on liberalism in the American regime, with a sensible question not yet asked: “What if there is no crisis of liberal democracy?” Guided by such unmelodramatic souls as Aristotle, Publius, and Tocqueville, he almost succeeds in showing that there is no crisis at all. Salkever objects to the way many “theorists” state the problem, namely, as a conflict between liberty and equality, individual rights and interests versus majority power. He insists that democracy is not simply majority rule but “rule by people who are primarily concerned with income and security.” Democracy becomes liberal “not when it aims at protecting individual rights, but when the members of the ruling people are marked by the characteristic virtues of liberality or generosity or [!] moderation.” One can only admire this subtle Aristotelianizing of the issue. To Aristotle, “the poor who love wealth present greater possibilities for education in virtue than do the wealthy who love honor.” Both Aristotle and Tocqueville consider aristocracy noble but dangerous, because the aristocratic love of honor (the desire-to-acquire as manifested among the few who are rich) can lead to the most spectacular crimes. But democracies lend themselves to the rule of law and custom—especially ‘middle-class’ democracies, where the many are too busy to rule directly. “The quality of any given democracy should be seen as adverbial, as it were—it depends on the attitude democrats take toward the pursuit of wealth, income, and security, a pursuit that is a necessary feature of our lives. This attitude in turn is primarily determined by the nature of customs or traditions that inform democratic life in particular places.” Democracies need education “in the light of [their] own best possibilities,” not some radical transformation. Pace Rousseau: We do not need citizens but good bourgeois. Tocqueville shows that America in its local politics and its jury system does have a ‘citizen’ basis for its liberal regime, but this is no more (and no less) than a basis. Certain kinds of religion contribute to “habit of even-tempered benevolence and liberality, which are the measure of the best democratic lives.”

Salkever nearly abstracts the United States from the world. “Perhaps the most significant difference” between Tocqueville’s America and ours, “is that it can no longer be said that we have no great wars to fear,” a Tocquevillian observation on America’s relative lack of the need to exercise the very non-democratic, non-egalitarian virtue of prudence in foreign policy. He does not say “no great wars to deter.” That would raise questions of discipline and foresight, problematic in any democracy whether liberal or illiberal; Tocqueville’s worry is still a real worry, even if it reappears in a different form. Nor does Salkever specifically mention Soviet Russia, which has fought a ‘Cold War’ against the American regime, a war “great” in its own way, one that requires of liberal democrats the old-fashioned citizenship, a willingness to fight and to sacrifice for ‘God and country.’ To see that is to see appreciate the crisis of liberal democracy. In light of that crisis, rightly understood, a prudent balance of liberty and equality within American territory alone will not suffice for the perpetuation of our political institutions. War efforts, ‘hot’ and ‘cold,’ require more than liberty and equality. This means that such a regime will need citizens, not only good bourgeois, after all.

In the volume’s concluding essay, William T. Bluhm asks, “Can individual preferences be the starting points for the construction of public order?” Surveying the writings of Jeremy Bentham, John Harsanyi, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and William Riker, he finds no solid answer. Rather like Weber, he concludes that “modern political science, to avoid cynicism and sterility, needs to address itself to questions about the nature of the good life, the character of trust and how it can be nurtured, the meaning and fostering of responsible leadership, community, and a vital and noble value consensus.” Without being as it sounds, one might reply, ‘Yes, but once you say “value” you’ve conceded defeat in advance.’ Perhaps some such word as ‘principles’ should replace ‘values’ in the writings of those who hold that ethics consists of more than convention and feelings.

The Crisis of Liberal Democracy testifies to the intricacy and depth of Leo Strauss’s political philosophy. The editors have selected essays illustrating two kinds of controversy about Strauss. One controversy consists of attacks on Strauss’s thought by non-Straussians and of defenses by Straussians. In this volume as elsewhere, a careful reader will come away impressed with Strauss’s ability to anticipate his critics’ arguments, enabling his students to respond to them simply by explicating some passages in his writings. The other controversy consists of disagreements among Straussians about Strauss’s teachings. This controversy takes a longer and more winding road, but the view are better.