Leo Strauss Gives a Cheer for Right-Wing Principles: Fascist, Authoritarian, Imperial

Over at Balkinization, Scott Horton translates a letter from Leo Strauss to Karl Loewith:

Balkinization: Paris, May 19, 1933

Dear Mr. Löwith,

On your behalf I have in the meantime made the necessary overture to Groethuysen, who is in London. Besides this I had occasion to speak with Van Sickle, the head of the Rockefeller Foundation, and informed him about you, your situation, your work and your interests. He made a note of your name, so I am sure he will remember it when he comes across it in Fehling’s letter.

As concerns me, I will receive the second year. Berlin recommended me, and that was decisive. I will also spend my second year in Paris, and I will attempt in this time to undertake something that will make my further work possible. Clearly I have major “competition”: the entire German-Jewish intellectual proletariat is assembled here. It’s terrible - I’d rather just run back to Germany.

But here’s the catch. Of course I can’t opt for just any other country - one doesn’t choose a homeland and, above all, a mother tongue, and in any event I will never be able to write other than in German, even if I must write in another language. On the other hand, I see no acceptable possibility of living under the swastika, i.e., under a symbol that says nothing more to me than: you and your ilk, you are physei subhumans and therefore justly pariahs. There is in this case just one solution. We must repeat: we, “men of science,” - as our predecessors in the Arab Middle Ages called themselves - non habemus locum manentem, sed quaerimus... And, what concerns this matter: the fact that the new right-wing Germany does not tolerate us says nothing against the principles of the right. To the contrary: only from the principles of the right, that is from fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles, is it possible with seemliness, that is, without resort to the ludicrous and despicable appeal to the droits imprescriptibles de l’homme to protest against the shabby abomination. I am reading Caesar’s Commentaries with deep understanding, and I think of Virgil’s Tu regere imperio... parcere subjectis et debellare superbos. There is no reason to crawl to the cross, neither to the cross of liberalism, as long as somewhere in the world there is a glimmer of the spark of the Roman thought. And even then: rather than any cross, I’ll take the ghetto.

I do not therefore fear the fate of the émigré - at most secundum carnem:(8) the hunger or similar deprivations. - In a sense our sort are always “emigrants”; and what concerns the rest, the fear of bitterness, which is certainly very great, and in this sense I think of Klein, who in every sense has always been an emigrant, living proof for the fact that it is not unconquerable.

Dixi, et animam meam salvavi.

Live well! My heartiest greetings to you and your wife

Leo Strauss

My wife sends her thanks for your greetings, and reciprocates heartily.

Published Source: Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 3: Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften, Briefe (Heinrich Meier, ed.), Metzler Verlag 2001, pp. 624-25.

---

Horton writes:

In the last several months, the New York Times has run four pieces defending Leo Strauss from his critics. By comparison, the Times has run no pieces in which Strauss is actually criticized, which suggests an odd editorial posture. Indeed, the Times seems to have mounted a veritable campaign for the defense of the beleaguered Leo Strauss, which seems strange considering that he has been dead for over thirty years. These pieces are remarkably consistent. For one, each turns the very serious criticism of Strauss and his relationship with the American Neoconservative movement into a point of ridicule. The criticism is grossly distorted and key elements are misstated. For another, they present Strauss as a “liberal democrat,” not in a domestic political context, but rather as a defender of the tradition of liberal democracy we associate with Locke, Hume and J.S. Mill...

Put simply, Strauss takes firm target at the core values of liberal democracy, and particularly the American variant. Before his arrival in America, Strauss was blunt in these criticisms. After his arrival, he adopted a far more circumspect approach. After all, he was in America and writing in English, and his own philosophy would demand that he flatter or indulge national prejudices and write as if he believed in them. Like his mentor, Ernst Cassirer, Strauss had concluded by the mid-thirties that Europe, and even Britain, was simply unsafe. Only America, with its formidable resources and protected by expansive oceans from its potential adversaries, offered the prospect of safe haven...

Both the Rothstein review and the Smith book attempt to present Strauss as a person right at home with the land to which he emigrated and its Enlightenment tradition. This is extremely doubtful. But it is an act of serious deception to present Strauss as “democracy’s best friend” (to quote the last, a review essay by Edward Rothstein published on July 10, in turn quoting Steven Smith’s new book, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism) without at least making clear the deep-boring criticism that Strauss directs at American democracy...

One thing consistent among these defenses of Strauss is either a remarkable ignorance of Strauss, the intellectual milieu from which he came, his life and his thinking, or conscious dissembling about them. Strauss is a fascinating figure, well worth reading today. His scholarship had a strong focus on a handful of texts from classical antiquity – principally Greeks such as Plato, Xenophon and Thucydides. This approach seems quaint to Americans, but for those who emerged from the academic milieu of the German-speaking world in the first decades of the twentieth century (think of novels such as Heinrich Mann’s Professor Unrat [The Blue Angel] or Hermann Hesse’s Unterm Rad [Beneath the Wheel]) it is actually typical. Strauss contemporaries like Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt had a focus on many of the same texts, though they do not adopt Strauss’ at times quite eccentric interpretations...

I am convinced that this is a very candid statement of Strauss’ politics at the time he wrote it, a reading signaled by his confessional closing. Indeed, anyone who carefully reads Strauss’ book on Hobbes (Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft in ihrer Genesis, 1936, but largely complete in 1933; translated in English as The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis) or his dissertation, written on the anti-Enlightenment writer Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, would suspect these sentiments...

It seems almost impossible to imagine a German-Jewish refugee in France, a man who describes his religious upbringing as “Conservative, if not Orthodox” actually embracing the political philosophy of his persecutors. On the other hand, we should be cautious about projecting postwar sensibilities back into the thirties. Strauss was a Middle European intellectual living in a period where liberalism looked exhausted and unable to function, and many of his contemporaries, and indeed many of Strauss’ mentors, were engaging with fascist thought. Specifically, we should consider that the two contemporary thinkers who appear to have exerted the greatest influence on Strauss at this time – Heidegger and Schmitt – were each entering into a dalliance with fascism. In their respective Faustian pacts, one emerged as the rector magnificus of one of Germany’s most famous universities, while the other (indeed, the week of this letter) became a Prussian State Councillor and key legal advisor to the Reich-Chancellor. This situation no doubt contributed to Strauss’ inability to make a clean break...

Nevertheless, the Löwith letter is profoundly revealing of the nature of Leo Strauss’ conservatism. It places his conservatism outside of the Anglo-American tradition that links to figures like Locke, Hume and Burke. Instead, it springs from a traditional Continental European variant which is deeply rooted in religion and in the notion of a benevolent (though sometimes not particularly benevolent) authoritarian leader legitimized by religion. I note that Andrew Sullivan, in his forthcoming book, The Conservative Soul, takes a different view, putting Strauss in the tradition of conservatism of doubt. Andrew’s book is a significant accomplishment, and his dissection of trends in conservative thought in the last generation is little short of dazzling. However, I disagree with him about Strauss, and am particularly confident of my conclusions as to the young Strauss...

Steven B. Smith's book, and Edward Rothstein's and Jonathan Alter's New York Times reviews of it, are either extraordinary examples of failure to do intllectual due diligence, or are Straussian intellectual moves: of course Leo Strauss was not a thinker in the Lockeian tradition, but it is good to say that he was such, for it is good for the "gentlemen" to believe that he was such.

The New York Times has recently published one snarky take on Leo Strauss. Jason de Parle's:

An A-to-Z Book Of Conservatism Now Weighs In - The Archive - The New York Times: The longest entry belongs to ''Straussianism,'' a school of political theory founded by a professor at the University of Chicago, Leo Strauss, that emphasizes classical texts. Embraced by some leading proponents of the Iraq war, Straussianism is often regarded by those beyond its fold as opaque mumbo jumbo, a reputation that five pages of explanation may not dispel...

Comments

[anne]

Berkeley's exceptional Robert Alter and Yale's exceptional Harold Bloom, both recently wrote on Leo Strauss, and whether they are reading Strauss properly or not both literary critics found much to be sympathetic with for different reasons. I would suggest that when Robert Alter and Harold Bloom find a philosopher worth reading, we might do well to at least consider whether there is a sympathetic reading of the philosopher. I have been fortunate enough to be able to argue with Bloom, who I always take seriously, and could not have enjoyed the argument more. As for Alter, argue away but you will seldom find a more incisive reader. Respect for interpretations with which we may not agree, because the interpretations are so carefully considered and shaped and benignly intended is called for. As for Edward Rothstein, we have a truly distinguished New York Times literary critic.

[Brad DeLong]

You can buy--or not--Strauss's view of political philosophy: that political philosophy has the (exoteric) purpose of strengthening the Gentlemen's self-confidence as they rule in their conservative, oligarchical way, and so creating a safe haven in which the (esoteric) purpose of allowing the Philosophers to contemplate the Forms can be carried out. You can buy--or not--Strauss's view that all great philosophers were writing in a kind of code, and when properly decoded their message turns out to be largely in accord with that of Leo Strauss. But I don't think you can buy Leo Strauss as anything other than a false friend of liberal democracy, or Leo Strauss as a successor to John Locke. He's another beast entirely.

Most critique of Strauss is really critique of Straussians--you see, since there is always the suspicion that consistent Straussians regard the rest of us as "Gentlemen" to be deceived and cajoled into opinions that are convenient but not true, it's hard to carry out a non-acrimonious discussion.

[anne]

Brad DeLong:

Most critique of Strauss is really critique of Straussians--you see, since there is always the suspicion that consistent Straussians regard the rest of us as "Gentlemen" to be deceived and cajoled into opinions that are convenient but not true, it's hard to carry out a non-acrimonious discussion.

Nicely done; then I have been reading Leo Strauss without looking to nuance, which I should have done especially in the doubtful criticism of Spinoza who I am completely sympathetic to. Thank you for persisting. After all, why should I have foolishly thought Strauss devotees were not understanding? I understand :)

[bellumregio]

I had not read Leo Strauss until the recent prominence of the political neocons. Anyone who spends time studying the Anglo-French tradition will find Strauss to be quite antithetical and alien. He is clearly offering a critique of modernity and is hostile to Enlightenment values. I have no idea how, given his values, how he could ever come to terms with the traditional values of the United States . I haven’t seriously thought about it, but Strauss always brings to mind Jacques Derrida.

[anne]

Bellumregio, just when Brad DeLong had won me over, as always is the case, you bring up Jacques Derrida. Now, I like Derrida and do try to spread the like to students, so be nice and explain why I should not like Derrida :) Oh dear.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/14/opinion/14taylor.html?ex=1255492800&en=6f805b298f0aa5e7&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

October 14, 2004

What Derrida Really Meant
By MARK C. TAYLOR

Along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, who died last week in Paris at the age of 74, will be remembered as one of the three most important philosophers of the 20th century. No thinker in the last 100 years had a greater impact than he did on people in more fields and different disciplines. Philosophers, theologians, literary and art critics, psychologists, historians, writers, artists, legal scholars and even architects have found in his writings resources for insights that have led to an extraordinary revival of the arts and humanities during the past four decades. And no thinker has been more deeply misunderstood.

To people addicted to sound bites and overnight polls, Mr. Derrida's works seem hopelessly obscure. It is undeniable that they cannot be easily summarized or reduced to one-liners. The obscurity of his writing, however, does not conceal a code that can be cracked, but reflects the density and complexity characteristic of all great works of philosophy, literature and art. Like good French wine, his works age well. The more one lingers with them, the more they reveal about our world and ourselves.

What makes Mr. Derrida's work so significant is the way he brought insights of major philosophers, writers, artists and theologians to bear on problems of urgent contemporary interest. Most of his infamously demanding texts consist of careful interpretations of canonical writers in the Western philosophical, literary and artistic traditions - from Plato to Joyce. By reading familiar works against the grain, he disclosed concealed meanings that created new possibilities for imaginative expression.

Mr. Derrida's name is most closely associated with the often cited but rarely understood term "deconstruction." Initially formulated to define a strategy for interpreting sophisticated written and visual works, deconstruction has entered everyday language. When responsibly understood, the implications of deconstruction are quite different from the misleading clichés often used to describe a process of dismantling or taking things apart. The guiding insight of deconstruction is that every structure - be it literary, psychological, social, economic, political or religious - that organizes our experience is constituted and maintained through acts of exclusion. In the process of creating something, something else inevitably gets left out.

These exclusive structures can become repressive - and that repression comes with consequences. In a manner reminiscent of Freud, Mr. Derrida insists that what is repressed does not disappear but always returns to unsettle every construction, no matter how secure it seems. As an Algerian Jew writing in France during the postwar years in the wake of totalitarianism on the right (fascism) as well as the left (Stalinism), Mr. Derrida understood all too well the danger of beliefs and ideologies that divide the world into diametrical opposites: right or left, red or blue, good or evil, for us or against us. He showed how these repressive structures, which grew directly out of the Western intellectual and cultural tradition, threatened to return with devastating consequences. By struggling to find ways to overcome patterns that exclude the differences that make life worth living, he developed a vision that is consistently ethical.

And yet, supporters on the left and critics on the right have misunderstood this vision....

[bellumregio]

“explain why I should not like Derrida”

anne, now that challenge is not for the faint of heart.

I didn’t mean to imply that there was some side to be on. It is the critique of the “whole Kantian edifice” that I was thinking about. They come to different conclusions and certainly have different perspectives (I don’t think that M. Derrida was a friend of authoritarianism) but they both are concerned with the nature of truth and power, the primacy of texts and tradition, hidden knowledge and ciphers, and they both adopted opaque writing styles that were in many ways seminal to their work and, perhaps, contributed to their cultish followings. I am not sure of any of this, as I said it is a kind of family resemblance that I will have to delve into upon my retirement.

[John Emerson]

Derrida and Strauss both focus on contradiction in the authors they study.

For Strauss, if an author usually says one thing but rarely says the opposite, the rarer one is the real esoteric meaning. (Whitehead used this method too; he claimed that while Locke's most often stated theory of perception was incoherent, that a few exceptional statements that looked like slips of the tongue showed the way to a better theory, which is Whiteheads of course).

In Derrida contradictions are the aporias showing the metaphysical and self-refuting nature of whatever was said. Or something like that, don't quote me.

[andres]

I haven't read Strauss, but I tend to lump him in with the crowd of whom Friedrich Nietzsche tends to epitomize: a near-worshipful fetizhization of the Roman imperial image and a thinly veiled contempt for both christianity and the self-doubt that's institutionalized in any sort of parliamentary democracy.

Notice that I lay the stress on self-doubt: I don't think either Strauss or Nietsche had any criticism of the Roman senate given that this was at first the instrument and then the abjectly loyal servant of Roman power. What galls them about liberal democracy ("the counting of noses", as Nietzsche is reported to have said) is that it embodies an element of both pacifism and conservatism that abhors the march to empire.

So yes, I find it ghastly that there are people in the Pentagon and elsewhere in DC who view Strauss as their intellectual model.

[anne]

Fine points to think thorugh from John Emerson and the unretired but unrepentant Bellumregio :)

[andres]

Correction: I haven't read Strauss other than the letter that Brad provides in his post. If there are other parts of his work where Strauss contradicts what he writes in the letter, someone please provide it: there's always room for debate.

[anne]

http://www.newyorker.com/printables/shouts/060703sh_shouts

June 26, 2006

Thus Ate Zarathustra
By WOODY ALLEN

There's nothing like the discovery of an unknown work by a great thinker to set the intellectual community atwitter and cause academics to dart about like those things one sees when looking at a drop of water under a microscope. On a recent trip to Heidelberg to procure some rare nineteenth-century duelling scars, I happened upon just such a treasure. Who would have thought that "Friedrich Nietzsche's Diet Book" existed? While its authenticity might appear to be a soupçon dicey to the niggling, most who have studied the work agree that no other Western thinker has come so close to reconciling Plato with Pritikin....

Fat itself is a substance or essence of a substance or mode of that essence. The big problem sets in when it accumulates on your hips. Among the pre-Socratics, it was Zeno who held that weight was an illusion and that no matter how much a man ate he would always be only half as fat as the man who never does push-ups. The quest for an ideal body obsessed the Athenians, and in a lost play by Aeschylus Clytemnestra breaks her vow never to snack between meals and tears out her eyes when she realizes she no longer fits into her bathing suit.

It took the mind of Aristotle to put the weight problem in scientific terms, and in an early fragment of the Ethics he states that the circumference of any man is equal to his girth multiplied by pi. This sufficed until the Middle Ages, when Aquinas translated a number of menus into Latin and the first really good oyster bars opened. Dining out was still frowned upon by the Church, and valet parking was a venal sin.

As we know, for centuries Rome regarded the Open Hot Turkey Sandwich as the height of licentiousness; many sandwiches were forced to stay closed and only reopened after the Reformation. Fourteenth-century religious paintings first depicted scenes of damnation in which the overweight wandered Hell, condemned to salads and yogurt. The Spaniards were particularly cruel, and during the Inquisition a man could be put to death for stuffing an avocado with crabmeat.

No philosopher came close to solving the problem of guilt and weight until Descartes divided mind and body in two, so that the body could gorge itself while the mind thought, Who cares, it's not me. The great question of philosophy remains: If life is meaningless, what can be done about alphabet soup? It was Leibniz who first said that fat consisted of monads. Leibniz dieted and exercised but never did get rid of his monads—at least, not the ones that adhered to his thighs. Spinoza, on the other hand, dined sparingly because he believed that God existed in everything and it's intimidating to wolf down a knish if you think you're ladling mustard onto the First Cause of All Things.

Is there a relationship between a healthy regimen and creative genius? We need only look at the composer Richard Wagner and see what he puts away. French fries, grilled cheese, nachos—Christ, there's no limit to the man's appetite, and yet his music is sublime. Cosima, his wife, goes pretty good, too, but at least she runs every day. In a scene cut from the "Ring" cycle, Siegfried decides to dine out with the Rhine maidens and in heroic fashion consumes an ox, two dozen fowl, several wheels of cheese, and fifteen kegs of beer. Then the check comes and he's short. The point here is that in life one is entitled to a side dish of either coleslaw or potato salad, and the choice must be made in terror, with the knowledge that not only is our time on earth limited but most kitchens close at ten.

The existential catastrophe for Schopenhauer was not so much eating as munching. Schopenhauer railed against the aimless nibbling of peanuts and potato chips while one engaged in other activities. Once munching has begun, Schopenhauer held, the human will cannot resist further munching, and the result is a universe with crumbs over everything. No less misguided was Kant, who proposed that we order lunch in such a manner that if everybody ordered the same thing the world would function in a moral way. The problem Kant didn't foresee is that if everyone orders the same dish there will be squabbling in the kitchen over who gets the last branzino. "Order like you are ordering for every human being on earth," Kant advises, but what if the man next to you doesn't eat guacamole? In the end, of course, there are no moral foods—unless we count soft-boiled eggs....

[dale]

I wonder if we really might use Kant as a guide for questions about eating and energy use? Eat in such a way as every person on earth could eat. Use energy in such a way as every person on earth could use energy.
That sort of thing. It might lead to a universalistic guide to sustainability and distributive justice.

[John Emerson]

Nietzsche actually was a diet cultist who ate apples by the basket. During one of his phases he believes that thought was metabolic and physiological in origin. Some of the things he said on this line look like metaphors, but may well have been intended literally.

[Esq.]

This reminds me of the controversy created by Norman Cantor’s description of the Jewish Ernst Kantorowicz as one of the "the Nazi Twins." Read the reviewers reply to “Defending Kantorowicz”, NY Review of Books, Vol. 39, Number 14, August 13, 1992, available at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2828

Impossible as it appears in retrospective, there seems to have been German Jewish academics in the twenties and thirties who were very sympathetic to fascist authoritarianism but barred from participating by their Jewishness. Although, I imagine that left wing academics were in short supply in that time and place.

It reminds me of a friend’s mother’s unpublished autobiography’s description of patriotic Jewish friends fighting in the German Army, even as their families were sent to the camps.

[JR]

First of all, it is not surprising that some Jews were attracted to fascism. Jews in Italy and Germany were assimilated and nationalistic, and were at least as susceptible as their Christian neighbors to nationalist ideologies. More so, perhaps, because nationalism was a way to assimilate that did not require conversion. Nazism was virulently anti-Semitic from the start. But in Italy, where fascism did not become overtly anti-Semitic until the mid-1930's, there were many prominent Jewish fascists as well as anti-fascists.

Second of all, there is nothing odd about being an anti-fascist from the right. Fascism and Nazism were radical movements that subverted the old order, supplanted the old ruling class with new men, replaced the hierarchical stability of traditional values and beliefs with a new philosophy of violence and collective will. Hitler and Mussolini were coarse and uneducated, without breeding, without respect for universities, the church, the military, or any of the traditional values. It is not all surprising that a classical philosopher like Strauss would have loathed the boors and ignoramuses who populated the Nazi party, quite apart from their anti-Semitism.

[andres]

Thanks anne. Woody Allen's article is hilarious, but the sad part is that many if not most Americans won't get the philosophical references and name-dropping. Sigh.