AFTER-ACTION REPORTS

Will the Real Leo

Strauss Please Stand Up?
NATHAN TARCOV

ournalists, academics and even the occasional playwright and filmmaker have
claimed that Leo Strauss (1899-1973), the
exiled German-Jewish political philosopher long
resident at the University of Chicago, has acted
from beyond the grave to inspire key decisions
in recent American foreign policy, especially
those reflecting unrealistic hopes for the spread
of liberal democracy through military conquest.'
These claims have been based either on policies
advocated by a few ofhis students (or students of
his students), or on a few passages taken out of
context from his writings, most of them interpretations of the thought of other thinkers. Strauss'
controversial claim that many ofthe great writers
of the past hid their dissenting views from government and ecclesiastical censors, for example,
has been turned upside down into a supposed
justification for governments to lie to their peoples and even to squelch dissent.
In his published writings Strauss rarely discussed any specific foreign policy. Nor did he
often address in his own name the more general
question of the practical Implications of the political philosophy he studied, taught and wrote
about.

There are, however, a few texts w4iere Strauss

did discuss specific foreign policies or that more
general question. The three most illuminating 1
know of are an unpublished lecture delivered at
the New School's General Seminar in July 1942
on the political bearing of political philosophy, another unpublished lecture on the re-education of
Germany delivered on November 7, 1943, at the
annual meeting ofthe Conference on Jewish Relations at the New School, and the introduction to
The City and Man (1964). It turns out not only
that Strauss' vievi^ do not seem to have inspired recent U.S. foreign policy, but that they might have
served as warnings against some of the missteps
that have plagued U.S. policy in recent years.
'For early examples, see Tim B. Muller, "Partei des
Zeus", SuddeutscheZeitung, March 5,2003; Alain
Fraichon and Daniel Vernet, "Le stratege et le
philosophe", Le Monde, April 15,2003; Jeet Heer,
"The Philosopher", Boston Globe, May 11, 2003;
the play Embedded, written and directed by Tim
Robbins, and the film The Power of Nightmares,
written and directed by Adam Curtis (Independent Feature Project, 2005). For much more sober accounts, see Steven 8. Smith, Reading Leo
Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, fudaism (University

Nathan Tarcov is professor in the Committee on

Social Thought, the Department of Political Science, and the College at the University of Chicago.

120

THE AMERICAN INTEREST

of Chicago Press, 2006); and Thomas G. West,

"Leo Strauss and American Foreign Policy", CLiremont Review of Books (Summer 2004).

The Practical Bearing of Political

Philosophy

he title of Strauss' 1942 New School lecture, "What Can We Learn from Political
Theory?", was not ofhis choosing. He preferred
to speak of "political philosophy" because "political theory" implicitly denies the traditional
division of the sciences according to which
political science is practical, not theoretical.
"Political theory" implies that the basis and
safest guide for reasonable political practice is
pure theory, a view that Strauss rejected. This
terminological preference points precisely to
the question of the practical bearing of political philosophy: For Strauss took the question
"What Can We Learn from Political Philosophy?" to mean what can we learn from it to
guide po\inc3\ practice.
Strauss first presents the negative casethat
"we can learn nothing from political philosophy"on three grounds: 1) Political philosophy is at best clear knowledge ofthe problems,
not of the solutions, and so cannot be a safe
guide to action; 2) not political philosophy
but practical wisdom is needed for reasonable
political action; and 3) political philosophy is
ineffectual, merely reflecting rather than guiding political practice, since all significant political ideas come from statesmen, lawyers and
prophets rather than political philosophers. "I
have not the slightest doubt as to the possibility
of devising an intelligent international policy",
Strauss declares,
without having any recourse to political philosophy: that this war has to be won, that the
only guarantee for a somewhat longer peaceperiod after the war is won, is a sincere Anglosaxon-Russian entente, that the Anglosaxon
nations and the other nations interested in,
or dependent on, Anglosaxon preponderance
must not disarm nor relax in their armed
vigilance, that you cannot throw power out
of the window without facing the danger of
the first gangster coming along taking it up,
that the existence of civil liberties all over the
world depends on Anglosaxon preponderanceto know these broad essentials of the
situation, one does not need a single lesson in
political philosophy. In fact, people adhering

to fundamentally different political philosophies have reached these same conclusions.

Having first sketched the negative case,
in good scholastic fashion, Strauss then introduces a positive argument "from authority": "Quite a few men of superior intelligence
[e.g., Plato] were convinced that political philosophy is the necessary condition ofthe right
order of civil society", or at least that it is of
some practical use in minimizing the harm
done by the lunatics who rule us. But Strauss'
positive argument for the practical utility of
classical political philosophy turns out to be
not a refutation but a modification of the
negative argument.
He concedes the force ofthe first two negative claims: that political philosophy is knowledge ofthe problems, not ofthe solutions; and
that common sense or practical wisdom, not
political philosophy, is the guide tor reasonable
political action. The positive argument for political philosophy is that we need it to defend
reasonable political action discovered by prudent statesmen when it is challenged by erroneous political teachings.
Strauss denies the third negative claim: that
ali significant political concepts are the work
of political men rather than philosophers. The
concept of natural law or natural right, after
all, is of philosophic origin. Classical political
philosophy judges all actual political orders by
the standard of natural rightthe natural or
perfect order whose realization is a matter of
chance, and in comparison to which all actual
orders are imperfect. He calls this the "legitimate utopianism" of philosophy.
Strauss then illustrates what he means by
political philosophy's defensive role. A new
modern utopianism. he says, has replaced the
legitimate utopianism of classical philosophy. This modern utopianism has lowered
the standards of conduct to guarantee their
realization by reducing virtue to enlightened self-interest. This modern utopianism,
Strauss argues, assumes that enlightenment
would gradually make the use of force superfluous and that social harmony would follow
if all people became primarily interested in
raising their standard of living. Strauss rejects
this modern utopianism on the grounds that

AUTUMN (SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER) 2006

121

ARER-AQION REPORTS

enlightened self-interest conflicts with the desires of at least some people for power, precedence and dominion. Enlightenment alone is
therefore not sufficient to overcome evil, just
as man does not necessarily become better by
becoming more powerful or more affluent.
Strauss therefore disparages the economism
that he regards as inseparable from modern
utopianism, whether in its liberal or its Marxist form, warning that the withering away of
the state will still be "a matter of pious or impious hope" long after "the withering away of
Marxism."
After making his positive argument Strauss
speaks of what a reasonable policy would be:
Now. a reasonable policy, I take it. would
be along these lines: human relations cannot become good if the human beings themselves do not become good first, and hence
it would be a great achievement indeed if
foundations for a peace lasting two generations could be laid, and hence the choice is
not, as between imperialism and abolition
of imperialism, but as between the tolerably
decent imperialism of the Anglosaxon brand
and the intolerably indecent imperialism of
the Axis brand.
Even to discuss hopefiil postwar policy took
foresight and some courage. When Strauss
delivered this lecture in the summer of 1942.
victory was by no means assured. Axis armies
were still advancing into the Soviet Union and
through North Africa, and Japanese gains in
Asia still overshadowed the recent American
victory at Midway.
Strauss thus advocated both victory in the
war and postwar peace, but he emphatically denied the promise of perpetual peace: "The task
before the present generation is to lay the foundations for a long peace period: it is not, and it
cannot be, to abolish war for all times."
Far from claiming that classical political
philosophy could provide the guidelines for
American foreign policy, Strauss says that this
reasonable foreign policy could be arrived at
without any recourse to political philosophy.
But again, such policy might need political
philosophy to (S^f^wi^ itself against Utopian or
other erroneous political doctrines:

122

THE AMERICAN INTEREST

Leo Strauss
Such a policy, as we all know, is by no means
generally accepted; it is attacked not only by
those who dislike the burden, and the responsibility, which go with a decent hegemony,
but above all by a group of infmitely more
generous political thinkers who deny the assumptions, implied in that reasonable policy,
concerning human nature. If for no other
purpose, at least in order to defend a reasonable policy against overgenerous or Utopian
thought, we would need a genuine political
philosophy reminding us ofthe limits set to
all human hopes and wishes.
Strauss argues that reasonable policy needs
to be protected in particular from the modern
utopianism which forgets that "forces of evil"
exist and cannot be fought successfully by enlightenment alone. It would be as unreasonable
to expect to abolish hegemony as to abolish war.
Strauss' reminder that forces of evil exist and
that war sometimes needs to be waged against
them or deterred by a preponderance on the
part of decent forces recalls the combination of
moral clarity and prudent realism characteristic
of American foreign policy at its best.
Political philosophy, Strauss then argues, is
needed to protect us against "the smugness of

WILL THE REAL LEO STRAUSS PLEASE STAND UP?

the philistine" as well as against "the dreams of

the visionary." He warns both against smugly
thinking that our own society is perfect and
against recklessly dreaming that we are achieving a future perfect society. Strauss did not
identify the American political order with "the
best regime according to nature" ofthe classical
political philosophers. Far from encouraging
his listeners to adopt an uncritical stance toward the American or any other actually existing political order, he warns,
As long as philosophy was living up to its innate standard, philosophers as such, by their
merely being philosophers, prevented those
who were willing to listen to them from identifying any actual order, however satisfactory
in many respects, with the perfect order: political philosophy is the eternal challenge to
the philistine.
But the more urgent danger, he thought, came
from modern utopianism. which
is bound to lead to disaster because it makes
us underestimate the dangers to which the
cause of decency and humanity is exposed
and always ivill be exposed. The foremost
duty of political philosophy to-day seems to
be to counteract this modern utopianism.
Political philosophy bears on political practice in one more crucial way. Strauss says: "We
do not need lessons from that tradition [of
political philosophy] in order to discern the
soundness of Churchill's approach e.g. but the
cause which Churchill's policy is meant to defend would not exist but for the influence of
this tradition." In other words, the liberal democratic polities that protect civil liberties were
unthinkable without the Western tradition of
political philosophy.

The Re-Education of Germany

n accord with the relation between political

philosophy and political practice sketched
in his July 1942 lecture, Strauss' 1943 lecture
on the re-education of Germany recommends
particular courses of political action based

not on his interpretations of classical political

philosophy but on his own observations and
judgmentsjudgments not necessarily different from those of other observers who had not
studied classical political philosophy. Strauss'
judgments may have been protected from certain illusions by his philosophical studies, but
they were not, as we shall see, protected from
being proven wrong by subsequent events. Just
as Strauss noted in the 1942 lecture that persons adhering to different political philosophies
could come to the same conclusions about
policy, so persons with the same understanding of political philosophy can come to different conclusions about policy, depending on the
extent and reliability of the information they
possess and their judgments ofthe Hkely course
of events.
Strauss' title in 1943, "The Re-education of
Axis Countries Concerning the Jews", was also
not ofhis choosing. So he narrowed the topic to
Germany as the only Axis country of which he
had firsthand knowledge, and also broadened
it to include the re-education of Germany not
only concerning the Jews but first and foremost
concerning Nazism and liberal democracy. He
introduced the lecture by saying that the topic
was not very important compared with reparations, relief and emigration, and he added that
it was also "an iffy question" because answers
depended on the war being won, on the survival of Anglo-American-Russian cooperation,
and on the bulk of Germany not being occupied by the Red Army. (By November 1943 victory was more easily foreseen than in July 1942:
German forces at Stalingrad had surrendered in
February, Italy had surrendered in September,
and Allied forces were advancing in the South
Pacific and the Aleutians.)
After making these important qualifications, Strauss went on to argue that the mass
ofthe Germans had been moved not by Nazi
doctrines but by the prospect ofa solution to
all of Germany's problems by a short and decisive warin short by the conviction "that
large scale and efficiently prepared and perpetrated crime pays." He concludes therefore
that "the re-education of Germany will not
take place in classrooms: it is taking place
right now in the open air on the banks of
the Dnjepr and among the ruins of the Ger-

AUTUMN

(SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER)

2006

123

AFTER-AaiON REPORTS

man cities." Allied victory, followed by a just,

stern and stable peace, culminating in trials
ofthe war criminals, would be the refutation
of the Nazi doctrine and would uproot Nazi
education.
Strauss then argues that the re-education of
Germany concerning the Jews was only a particularly difficult part of the general question
ofthe re-education of Germany, the purpose of
which was for the Germans not only to reject
Nazi doctrine but to discover the true doctrine:
liberal democracy. Strauss asks whether liberal
democracy would appeal to the Germans, and
answers in a gloomy afterthought penned at the
bottom ofthe page: "A German form of collectivism perhapsan authoritarian regime ofthe
bureaucracy based on a resuscitated authoritar-

Furthermore, he argues, "If the Germans were

to submit to re-education by foreigners, they
would lose their self-respect and therewith all
sense of responsibility. But everything depends
on making the Germans responsible."
While the re-education of Germany should
be exclusively the affair of Germany, Strauss
argues, "the security of the non-German nations against the repetition of German aggression, must be exclusively the affair ofthe nonGerman nations." The Allies could influence
the re-education of Germany after the war
only by showing the Germans "by vigilance
in arms that all prospects of German world
domination and even of German expansion
have^oKf, and have ^onc forever", thereby driving Germany back to the cultivation of its own
spiritual tradition.

"A form of government which

Only halfway through the lecture does

Strauss finally turn to his assigned topic, reeducation concerning the Jews. First he asks as
a Jew speaking to other Jews, "How can a Jew
who has some sense of honor be interested at all
in what Germans think about Jews?" And he
answers that until the Germans have purified
themselves by spontaneously giving satisfaction
for what they have doneand Strauss said this
before the worst ofthe Holocaust occurred and
thus before its scale could have been known
"no self-respecting Jew can, and no Jew ought
to, be interested in Germany."

is merely imposed by a victorious enemy will not last."

ian interpretation of Christianity perhapsbut
not liberalism."
He warns further that "a form of government which is merely imposed by a victorious
enemy, will not last." Instead, only Germans
who remained in Germany (not exiles or foreigners) could do the re-educating because of
German pride, differences between the German
and Anglo-American intellectual climates, and
German awareness of the differences between
Anglo-American doctrine and practice (he refers to racial segregation in the United States
and British policy in India), which led Germans to regard the Atlantic Charter as hypocrisy. (Since the Germans are not familiar with
the practice and spirit of compromise, they do
not know that a just law, even when not observed, acts as a humanizing influence.) More
generally, Strauss proclaims;
A nation may take another nation as its model:
but no nation can presume to educate another
nation which has a high tradition of its own.
Such a presumption creates resentment, and
you cannot educate people who resent your
being their educator.

124

THE AMERICAN INTEREST

I infer that Strauss later came to regard postwar Germany as having met this test given his
own willingness to teach there, but he did not
in 1943 see how Jews could return to Germany,
being "separated, for a long time to come, from
the Germans by rivers of blood." He was, however, willing to assume that "in some miraculous way" Jews would again live in Germany
as German citizens, in which case his audience
might be interested in the re-education of Germany concerning the Jews.
Again Strauss asks who is going to do the
re-educating. Not returning German Jews or
Jewish Americans {the Germans being well
informed about the strength of anti-Jewish
feelings in America), but "only Germans can
educate the Germans concerning the Jews."
But which Germans? He considered German
middle-class liberals too weak to do it. He notes
that Catholicism was much less anti-Jewish in

WILL THE REAL LEO STRAUSS PLEASE STAND UP?

Germany than in the United States, and suggests that the German Catholic clergy and a
part of the Catholic intelligentsia might become significant agents of German re-education concerning the Jews. By contrast, Strauss
notes, high school and college teachers, along
with the Protestant clergy, may have been the
most important carriers ofthe anti-Jewish virus.
He writes off the teachers, who, having been attracted by Nazi doctrines, unlike the masses,
would not be refuted by mere defeat. Although
the Lutheran clergy had traditionally been antiJewish, they had learned that anti-Judaism is
apt to lead to anti-Christianism, and so many
of them stood up against the Nazis. Strauss concludes in an emphatically conditional sentence
that if the Protestant clergy realized that it must
abandon its hostility to Jews, and//^the war and
the defeat of the Nazis led to a reawakening of
Christian faith and manners in Germany, "it
is not impossible, I believe, that the leaders of
German Catholicism and Protestantism will
make some efforts towards the re-education oF
the Germans concerning the Jews."
Strauss brings the lecture to a close on a
hopeful though still skeptical note:
But I would be unfair to those Germans who
did not waver in their decent attitudes, if I
did not report to you a remark a German
made to me: that the mass ofthe Germans
are simply ashamed of what has been done in
the name of Germany; and after the war Germany will be the most pro-Jewish country in
the world. If I were a German, if I had ever
heen a German, I might he perhaps in duty
bound to have these hopes. If these hopes are
not unfounded, the re-education ofthe Germans concerning the Jews will be even superfluous, /shall not believe before I have seen.
In retrospect, we are bound to think that
the hopeful German whose remark Strauss reported was for closer to the truth about postwar Germany than was Strauss himself Strauss
seems not to have appreciated that the experience of defeat might not only dispel the delusions of National Socialism but impel Germans
to imitate the liberal democracies that liberated
and occupied the western parts of Germany.
Strauss' skepticism about the ability ofthe Brit-

ish and Americans to re-educate the Germans

may have been right, but not his skepticism
about the willingness of the Germans to take
British and American liberal democracies as
models. Strauss was wrong to think that the
German tendency to regard those democracies'
principles as hypocritical would prevent the
Germans from adopting those principles themselves. In this he may have been too skeptical
about the spread of democracy.

The Lessons of Communism

trauss discussed communism in the introduction to The City and Man, written when
the West still felt endangered by the East and
a consensus of liberals and conservatives supported an anti-communist foreign policy. This
discussion is part of his overall argument that
the crisis of the West makes a tentative return
to classical political philosophy both necessary
and possible. "For some time it appeared to
many teachable Westerners", he wrote, "to say
nothing of the unteachable onesthat Communism was only a parallel movement to the
Western movement^as if it were its somewhat
impatient, wild, wayward twin who was bound
to become mature, patient, gentle." In this
view, communism shared the Western purpose,
"stated originally by the most successful form
of modern political philosophy" (by which
Strauss referred to the modern liberalism of Bacon, Hobbes and Locke): to achieve continual
progress toward greater prosperity through the
conquest of nature, the actualization of the
universal right to develop ones faculties, and
"a universal league of free and equal nations,
each nation consisting of free and equal men
and women."
Strauss presents this Western purpwse as
having become global:
It had come to be believed that the prosperous, free, and just society in a single country
or in only a few countries is not possible in
the long run: to make the world safe for the
Western democracies, one must make the
whole globe democratic, each country in itself as well as the society of nations. . . . The
movement toward the universal society or

AUTUMN (SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER) 2006

125

ARER-AQION REPORTS

the universal state was thought to be guaranteed not oniy hy the rationality, the universal validity, of the goal but also because
the movement towards the goal seemed to be
the movement of the large majority of men
on behalf of the large majority of men: only
small groups of men who, however, hold in
thrall many millions of their fellow human
beings and who defend their own antiquated
interests, resist that movement.
Strauss' explication of the global character of
the Western political purpose has been quoted in connection with recent American foreign policy. For example, James Atlas, writing
in the May 4, 2003 New York Times, claimed
of Strauss: "He believed, as he once wrote,
that 'to make the world safe for the Western

James Atlas simply

misreads Strauss' view
of foreign policy.
democracies, one must make the whole globe
democratic, each country in itself as well as
the society of nations.' There's a reason that
some Bush strategists continue to invoke
Strauss' name."
Now, in the first place, I am not aware
that any "Bush strategists" have ever invoked
Strauss' name in support of their foreign policy.
Moreover, Atlas simply misreads Strauss. Far
from representing Strauss' own view, this explication approximates the view of Alexandre
Koj^e that Strauss had critiqued in his "Restatement" in On Tyranny. Strauss presents that
view in the introduction to The City and Man
only to immediately call it into question precisely because he rejected the apparent participation of communism in the Western purpose
as radically misleading. He proclaims instead:
"We see that the victory of Communism would
mean indeed the victory of originally Western
natural science but surely at the same time of
the most extreme form of Eastern despotism."
Instead of being the wayward immature twin
of Western liberalism, Strauss saw communism
as its all too capable evil twin.

126

THE AMERICAN INTEREST

Strauss insisted that communism had revealed itself as Stalinism or "actually existing
socialism" rather than Trotskyism, which is
"condemned or refuted by its own principle"
as an historical failure condemned by the principle of historical materialism. Strauss' adverting here to the opposition between Stalinism
and Trotskyism suggests the thought that the
Western impulse to make the whole globe
democratic rather than establish democracy in
a single country is the democratic equivalent
of Trotsky's "world revolution" as opposed to
Stalin's "socialism in one country."
The belief in guaranteed progress toward
universal freedom and equality, Strauss concedes, retained a certain plausibility "not in
spite of but because of Fascism." Fascism, unlike communism, presumably could be understood (however imperfectly) by adherents of
the Western movement "as merely a new version of that eternal reactionism against which
it had been fighting for centuries." Communism was neither simply pre-modern tyranny
nor Eastern despotism. Nor was it the antimodern reaction, in the name of "throne and
altar" or master race, to the modern aspiration
toward freedom and equality. Strauss declares
that in the face of communism the West "had
to admit that the Western project which had
provided in its way against all earlier forms of
evil could not provide against the new form in
speech or deed." This puzzling sentence seems
to mean that whereas the Western movement
had effectively opposed older forms of tyranny
in speech by enlightenment and by propagating the ideals of universal freedom and equality, and in deed by arming the large majority
against the small groups who held them in
thrall, these means were insufficient against
communism, which also laid claim to those
ideals and also had mobilized and armed the
masses.
The second stage ofthe Western understanding of communism, succeeding the illusion that
it was a parallel movement to the liberal West,
was, according to Strauss, the view that,
while the Western movement agrees with
Communism regarding the goalthe universal prosperous society of free and equal men
and womenit disagrees with it regarding the

WILL THE REAL LEO STRAUSS PLEASE STAND UP?

means:forCommunism, the end, the common

good cf the whole human race, being the most
sacred thing, justifies any means; whatever contributes to the achievement of the most sacred
end partakes of its sacredness and is therefore
itself sacred; whatever hinders the achievement
of that end is devilish.
His suggestion may be that this abandonment
of sacred moral restraints on the choice of means
is an inevitable temptation once the ends of political action have been inflated from a local and
temporary common good to the ultimate common good ofthe whole human race.
Strauss proceeds to describe a third stage
of Western understanding of communism, the
recognition that "there is not only a difference
of degree but of kind between the Western
movement and communism, and this difference was seen to concern morality, the choice
of means" (just as the Nazis convinced a stibstantial part ofthe German people "that large
scale and efficiently prepared and perpetrated
crime pays"). This recognition differed from
the previous view that the two agreed on the
goal while disagreeing regarding the means;
in this third view it was understood that "no
bloody or unbloody change of society can
eradicate the evil in man: as long as there will
be men, there will be malice, envy and hatred,
and hence there cannot be a society which does
not have to employ coercive restraint." Strauss
implies that this recognition not only requires
the maintenance of sacred restraints on the
choice of means, but profoundly moderates the
original Western aspiration toward a universal
society of freedom and equality. The ineradicable evil in man not only renders tyranny a
danger coeval with political life, but requires
every non-tyrannical regime to employ coercive restraint against the dangers posed by
forms of that evil at home and abroad.'^ The
hope for a perfectly free, non-coercive political
order is therefore an illusion.
Strauss distinguishes communism with
respect to moral and political, not social and
economic differences. He does not mention
private property or free enterprise or the godless
character of communism. In these respects he
differed from much ofthe anti-communism of
his time, in particular from conservative anti-

communism in contradistinction to liberal or

even social democratic forms.
Strauss concludes his discussion of commtinism by teaching that "the experience of Communism has provided the Western movement
with a twofold lesson: a political lesson, a lesson regarding what to expect and what to do in
the foreseeable future, and a lesson regarding
the principles of politics." The practical lesson
was that "for the foreseeable future there cannot be a universal state, unitary or federative."
The United Nations masked a fundamental
cleavage, and Strauss therefore warns against
taking it seriously "as a milestone on man's onward march toward the perfect and hence universal society." Strauss reasons that "even if one
would still contend that the Western purpose
is as universal as the communist, one must rest
satisfied for the foreseeable future with a practical particularism."
Strauss does not explicitly fiag the "lesson
regarding the principles of politics' taught by
the experience of communism, but it seems to
be that "for the foreseeable future, political society remains what it always has been: a partial
or particular society whose most urgent and
primary task is its self-preservation and whose
highest task is its self-improvement." Strauss
explained elsewhere that there is sometimes a
tension between the tasks of self-preservation
and of self-improvement.-^ He further suggests
that the experience of communism has made
the West "doubtful ofthe belief that affluence
is the sufficient and even necessary condition of
happiness and justice: affluence does not cure
the deepest evils."
Strauss suggests, too, that the experience
of communism teaches a moderation of the
universalist aspirations of Western modernity
to solve all human problems through modern
science, increasing affiuence and guarantees
of freedom and equality. The alternative to
tyranny is not a universal society of unlimited freedom and equality but a plurality of
particular societies concerned with self-preservation, self-restraint and self-improvement.
A moderation of the universalist aspirations
Tyranny, p. 22; Natural Right and History,

pp. 132-3.
^Natural Right and History, pp. 152, 160-3.

AUTUMN (SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER)

2006

127

AFTER-AniON REPORTS

of the West is not the same as their abandonment, and should not be, warns Strauss, because "a society accustomed to understand
itself in terms of a universal purpose cannot
lose faith in that purpose without becoming
completely bewildered." The moderation of
Western universalism Strauss suggests differs both in theory and in practice from the
relativism he warned against, and that has become so widespread today.
Strauss argued elsewhere against universalist political projects not merely as a concession to temporary obstacles, but because
a universal state was likely to be a universal
tyranny. He presented the classic view that
political freedom
becomes actual only through the efforts of
many generations, and its preservation requires the highest degree of vigilance. The
probability that all human societies should be
capable of genuine freedom at the same time
is exceedingly small. For all precious things
are exceedingly rare. An open or all-comprehensive society would consist of many societies which are on vastly different levels of
political maturity and the chances are overwhelming that the lower societies would drag
down the higher ones. . . . The prospects for
the existence of a good society are therefore
greater if there is a multitude of independent
societies than if there is only one independent
society.
More simply, the classical view warned that "no
human being and no group of human beings
can rule the whole human race justly."^
Strauss did not rule out the transformation
of communism into something other than
tyranny, but his comparison of the confrontation between the West and communism to
that which existed "during the centuries in
which Christianity and Islam each raised its
universal claim but had to be satisfied with
uneasily coexisting with its antagonist" suggests he expected that confrontation to last
a great many years. He probably would have
been as surprised as were most other observers by the speed with which communism collapsed. But he would not have been surprised
to see the West confronted with new forms of

128

THE AMERICAN INTEREST

tyranny that may render expectations of universal freedom and equality premature and
even dangerous.

s can be clearly seen from these three texts,

Strauss believed that reasonable policy
was not derived from political philosophy, so it
makes little sense to expect to derive a reasonable American foreign policy today from his
explications of classical political philosophy.
His own statements about what reasonable foreign policies would have been in his time did
not claim to be so derived. The introduction to
The Gity and Man leads not to a specific policy
prescription but to a warning that "we cannot
reasonably expect that a fresh understanding
of classical political philosophy will supply us
with recipes for today's use. . . . Only we living
today can possibly find a solution to the problems of today."

What Strauss did say about foreign policy

hardly resembles the errors with which he has
recently been charged. First of all, he spoke
not of unilateral American foreign policy or
American hegemony or even American national interest, but in 1942 and 1943 of the
policy o f t h e United Nations" (the wartime
Allies, not the post-war organization), "the
liberal powers", "the Anglosaxon nations and
the other nations interested in, or dependent
on, Anglosaxon preponderance", and in 1963
of "the West." Furthermore, he stressed the
impossibility of imposing a lasting form of
government through conquest, the obstacles
to the democratic education of one people by
another posed by differences of political tradition and intellectual climate, and the need
for re-education toward liberal democracy to
be the work ofthe people involved rather than
of foreigners or exiles. And Strauss seems to
have erred in the direction of underestimating, not overestimating, the prospects for the
spread of liberal democracyexactly the opposite fault from that with which he has recenrly been charged. Strauss can remind us
of the permanent problems, but we have only
ourselves to blame for our faulty soltitions to
the problems of today. </
^On Tyranny, pp. 208-11; Natural Right and History, pp. 131-2, 149.