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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.

Reviewed by Peter Murphy


Victoria University of Wellington
peter.murphy@vuw.ac.nz

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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134 Thesis Eleven (Number 74 2003)

Strauss’ prudent story of the political thought of modernity kept our


eyes for the most part averted from the 19th and 20th centuries. The good
doctor prescribed doses of early modern social contract in liberal propor-
tions, but much larger ones of classical political thinking. This gave him (and
his followers) the reputation of being weird; like military historians in the US
history profession, the ‘Straussians’ appear as an excluded clique in the liberal
and ‘state/social constructionist’ dominated professional world of American
political science. Most obsessive perhaps is Strauss’ insistence on taking
Alfred Whitehead’s canard about Plato literally. Strauss, to repeat with
emphasis, was the great Platonic political philosopher of his era. Though
Strauss doesn’t make it into the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought
(while George Lukács receives triple the words granted John Rawls), he is,
along with that aforementioned Harvard liberal, and Hannah Arendt, one of
the most influential political thinkers of the 20th century. Indeed, let us
demote Isaiah Berlin, the mere intellectual essayist of historical figures, and
settle on Arendt, Rawls and Strauss as the three stars.
Of our three stars, of course, one (Arendt) is often called an ‘Aristotelian’
and is disputably of the left. Another is perhaps more indisputably of the
right, and a self-styled Platonic. The third, Rawls, is the definitive liberal.
Rawls lectured comfortably through the latter part of the 20th century; before
this point he is as biographically as interesting as is his prose. Even he
described his war service in the US infantry in New Guinea, the Philippines
and Japan in 1943–45 as ‘singularly undistinguished’. Arendt and Strauss,
however, had old world lives before becoming new world thinkers. As
German Jews of intellectual promise, they both lived through the 20th century
at its most radical.
Imagine for a moment, a political and expressive but post-Raphaelite
‘School of (Rathenauian) Berlin’ in the style of Max Beckman’s triptychs.
Would it not necessarily include the unholy trinity of 20th-century conserva-
tive German thinkers: Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt and Ernst Jünger?
Perhaps Max Weber would be reclining alone on the floor, delirious but ven-
erable and grand in his Wilhelmine officer’s uniform as the fresco’s ‘Michelan-
gelo’. The other Kantian schoolmen might be found in a boring crowd scene,
with a more interesting smaller crowd around Karl Barth, the Epicureans of
the Vienna school out of the picture, and Walter Benjamin alone, sprawled
in a morose and baroque position on the attic floorboards like ‘Diogenes’?
Jünger would occupy some influential but drug-induced margin, and
Heidegger (the magician of Messkirch) would have to be placed out of the
centre, like ‘Socrates’, with a ‘Xenophon’ and ‘Alcibiades’-like figure about
him. Would we not have to place that figure of 20th-century Roman jurispru-
dence, Schmitt, draped in a Jesuit black, diabolically near the Platonic-
Aristotelian centre? In such a picture, Strauss is likely to end up as a Spartan-
exiled ‘Xenophon’ next to – given enough poetic license – a Rommelesque
‘Alcibiades’. But this placement is problematic, since Strauss is perhaps the
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Reviews 135

one really important thinker of the 20th century to be strongly influenced by


Heidegger as well as by Schmitt. He might thus belong nearer the centre
rather than an approximation of Raphael’s ‘Xenophon’.
Certainly Strauss’ texts in the volume under review, all of which are
political or political-philosophical, suggest something of the sort. Their
central body contains a record of Strauss’ politicized old world existence as
a Zionist – albeit packaged in several Alexandrine layers of protective intel-
lectual historical notes, editorial introductory chapters and indexes, by an evi-
dently able translator and religion professor at Boston University named
Michael Zank. To an extent, they provide a rare image of an intelligent person
thinking politically in Heideggerian vocabulary. Zank has meticulously
marked this for even the most unobservant reader through bracketed inser-
tions of the expression Dasein, as for example in the opposition of the
expressions Galuth-Dasein and Staatsburger-Dasein.
So far as their location within the German Zionist movement is con-
cerned, Strauss’ political writings take up a national-conservative position
against the Frankfurt left (Erich Fromm, Friz Gothein, Leo Lowenthal and
Ernst Simon). But, as an ‘Ecclesia Militans’, they also oppose Jewish ortho-
doxy. To this end Strauss applies what Schmitt’s critics have called a ‘deci-
sionist’ vocabulary that is unesoteric and even bare. He does this in support
of a political outlook just this side of ‘blue-white’ Zionist fascism (as for
instance on pp. 77 and 108ff). It is, Strauss writes in a 1926 screed against
the Frankfurt mystic-humanitarian left of the Gustav-Landauerites and their
‘anarchy of standpoints and positions’, the ‘modern’ and not ‘the ancient
sense’ of ‘the political’ that is ‘relevant to us’ (pp. 66, 65). Or, as he puts it
elsewhere, we must understand the political standpoint of the Jews in
Germany as not about springing tigers or any other kinds of ‘leaps’, but as
‘a playing off of power against power, as is the case in all politics’ (p. 129).
Given that Strauss applied repeatedly for help from Schmitt, one might inter-
pret his rejection of the post-Protestant world view of German nationalism
such as that of Paul de Lagarde as part of an attempt to find a European
respublica Christiania in the old world. Strauss’s view rejects the outlook that
sprang from a Protestant-rooted German national militancy, and thus within
a regime inspired by what Schmitt’s understanding of the Roman Church and
its realms as a complexio oppositorum.
The latter portion of Strauss’ early writings deal largely with Baruch
Spinoza, and not with Zionism. They might be interpreted as the manner in
which, via the philosophy of this classical Dutch republican, Strauss backed
himself into the new world. (I say ‘backed’ because the further west Strauss
moved geographically en route to Chicago, the further ‘behind’ Spinoza
towards Athens he moved mentally.) This marks a move from a religious-
centred world view of cultural nations orbiting around the Catholic-imperial
sort of German politique of the time to the universal doctrine of natural right
– a slide from old world to new world. Or, as Zank succinctly puts it, Strauss
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136 Thesis Eleven (Number 74 2003)

turned ‘from practical involvement in a political movement to the theoretical


examination of premodern political philosophy and its implications for
modern man’ (p. 202).
The centrepiece of the second portion of Strauss’s early work is a metic-
ulous assessment of the manner in which neo-Kantian historicist critique (in
the form of Hermann Cohen’s essay on Spinoza) obscured Spinoza’s political
views, his critique of religion, and his philosophy. We can call Strauss a wise
‘civic republican’, if only on the basis of the brilliant title of his The City and
Man (1964). For reasons of politique, Strauss never denied an allegiance to
‘democracy’ even if he may have suspected that the American variant of
democracy had more to do with Woodrow Wilson’s religious convictions than
any ancient understanding of constitutional excellence. Compared with the
rambling national prejudices of English territoriality, Strauss came to the new
world with some of the better aspects of the Germanic township in his Zionist
satchel. His Spinoza counter-reading allows us to imagine the philosopher
set among pretty Dutch towns and portrait paintings.
The most politically influential of Strauss’ opponents from his Zionist
period might be Erich Fromm, called by the editor a ‘psychologist and later
Trotskyite’ (p. 9). Unlike the other members of the Frankfurt School, Fromm
ably reached ‘behind’ academism to write To Have and to Be? (1976). This
small book on political virtue was strikingly influential in the founding of the
German green alternative movements and their party lists. If we think of
‘socialists’ and ‘socialism’ as tied etymologically to ‘baptists’ and ‘baptism’ (the
first ‘ist’ movements), then perhaps we could say that Fromm moved ‘behind’
his ‘Trotskyite’ period to become a kindly new lefty Buddhistical civic
democrat. In the Germany that Strauss left, though, postwar neo-Kantian
critical thinking continued to corrode a proper, indeed any kind of, under-
standing of ‘pre-Kantian’ political and philosophical thinking, not to mention
prudence. In result, we have ended up with a Federal Republic shorn of its
Greek and Latin educational system and poorly equipped to grasp or relate
to either new world military hegemony or its neoclassical foundations.

Reviewed by John Ely


Email: johndely@yahoo.com

Christopher Houston, Islam, Kurds and the Nation-State (Berg, 2001)

Christopher Houston’s book is that rare thing, a scholarly and sym-


pathetic book about an Asian country that both opens a window onto the
life of the country and subjects its culture and institutions to uncomforting
critique. This book will reward the interest of readers curious about the non-
metropolitan outposts of the global political order. One reason for its

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