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Reviews 133
soul. It does not matter whether this is the injustice of law or lawlessness,
norm or exception, deed or omission. Beauty is found in equal measure in
great artworks and great societies. Fairness is the intimation of good order
in human conduct and aesthetic arrangement.
Law, critique and beauty governed the Greek political mind. It is the
latter clause (beauty) that is too often missing in the Atlantic democracies.
Read de Tocqueville, where the word ‘beauty’ rarely occurs. Read Castori-
adis, the great Modern Greek philosopher, and you will find that the word
occurs often, and without embarrassment. However, even there, beauty rarely
appears in close connection with Castoriadis’ central philosophical concep-
tion ‘autonomy’. That is a pity. For, if human autonomy is the product of the
struggle between law and its exceptions, it is beauty that allows us to judge
what exceptions count and what don’t. Beauty – with its harmonic and
rhythmic proportions – guides us through the labyrinth of law and its excep-
tions. Beauty, or its absence, is a good guide to steer us clear of both the
failures of law and the follies of Persianism. Beauty abides neither sterile law
nor indulgent exception.
Michael Zank (ed.) Leo Strauss’ The Early Writings 1921–1932 (State
University of New York, 2002)
Leo Strauss matured in the new world. His early writings, however, are
from the old Central European world of Germany. Strauss published his first
book on Thomas Hobbes after writing it in England, and aged into public
view as a Platonic political philosopher at the University of Chicago. We
might imagine Strauss as the diminutive scribbler in a restricted physical in-
teriority, roaming world history politically through philosophy with an
extreme esoteric but nonetheless breathtaking scope, all the while transiting
on a new world visa. His career as a political philosopher, however, began
with a British book on Hobbes, written under the aegis of the Oxford don
Ernest Barker. The centrepiece of his career, in my view, is Strauss’ Natural
Right and History (1953). This book consisted of well-arranged and footnoted
lectures on the origin and establishment of classical political philosophy as
a doctrine of natural right and its successful modern revival. In it, Aristotle is
a longish footnote to Plato, and the modern story of natural right is that of
the brilliance of Hobbes, the necessary moderation of this philosophy by John
Locke, the revolt against this moderation by J. J. Rousseau, with the political
prudence of English orator and parliamentarian Edmund Burke acting as the
fire brigade for the continental flames ignited by Rousseau.
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