Sphinx Without a Secret
M.F. Burnyeat
May 30, 1985 issue


Reviewed:

Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy

by Leo Strauss, with an introduction by Thomas L. Pangle
University of Chicago Press, 260 pp., $8.95 (paper)
Leo Strauss
Leo Strauss; drawing by David Levine
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1.
“Wishing neither to be destroyed nor to bring destruction among the multitude, the considerate few have imperturbably conveyed to their readers an eloquence of articulate silences and pregnant indications.”

This extraordinary sentence was written not by Leo Strauss but to introduce a book honoring him. It perfectly expresses the substance, and the style, of his teaching. Accordingly, it does not explain to outsiders what that teaching is, or by what powers the teaching has raised Strauss to his present eminence as a guru of American conservatism. For initiates of his ideas, on the other hand, those who are in touch with “the considerate few,” the sentence will be like poetry in the way it condenses into one pregnant utterance the entire thought-world of the master.

Leo Strauss was born in Germany in 1899 and died in Chicago in 1973. He studied philosophy at several German universities and worked as an assistant at the Academy of Jewish Research in Berlin, where he “concentrated on biblical criticism and the thought of Spinoza.” He came to New York in 1938 and taught political theory at the University of Chicago between 1948 and 1969, when he retired. By this time he was arguably one of the most influential thinkers in the US.

There are two ways to approach Strauss’s thinking. Some fourteen books and a multitude of learned papers are listed in the bibliography of Strauss’s writings appended to the volume under review. Alternatively, one may sign up for initiation with a Straussian teacher—at Harvard, at the University of Chicago, or the many other universities and colleges to which Strauss’s pupils and the pupils of his pupils have now penetrated.

It is the second method that produces the sense of belonging and believing. The books and papers are freely available on the side of the Atlantic from which I write, but Strauss has no discernible influence in Britain at all. No one writing in the London Review of Books would worry—as Stephen Toulmin worried recently in these pages about the State Department’s policy-planning staff—that Mrs. Thatcher’s civil servants know more about the ideas of Leo Strauss than about the realities of the day. Strauss has no following in the universities where her civil servants are educated. Somehow, the interchange between teacher and pupil gives his ideas a potency that they lack on the printed page.

There is no doubt that Strauss was an inspiring teacher. Lewis Coser’s recent study of refugee scholars in America singles him out: “He alone among eminent refugee intellectuals succeeded in attracting a brilliant galaxy of disciples who created an academic cult around his teaching.” And many stories testify that the disciples too are as impressive in their teaching as in their scholarly productions. But for an outsider this only doubles the enigma. How do Strauss’s ideas attract such devotion? And why do they need it? Why do they rely for their persuasiveness on the mediation of an inspiring teacher?

It is true that Strauss’s writings are remote and rebarbative. They deal, largely, with what Strauss liked to call “old books.” He studies, and would have us study with him, Plato and Xenophon, Aristotle and Cicero, Farabi and Maimonides, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke—these are “the considerate few.” The range of his learning is indeed formidable; his command of ancient and medieval languages cannot fail to impress; his minute scrutiny of each text establishes an aura of reverence for its author. According to Strauss, these old books “owe their existence to the love of the mature philosopher for the puppies of his race, by whom he wants to be loved in turn.” And one can understand that today’s puppies need assistance if they are to respond with love to Strauss’s manner of commenting on these classic texts; for he deliberately makes the hard ones harder and the easier ones (e.g., Plato and Xenophon) the most difficult of all. Even more do the young need assistance if they are to be inspired to found their understanding of the contemporary world on Strauss’s interpretation of the history of political thought.

But the Straussian teacher is not just the honey that sweetens the taste of wormwood. Here is an account of the first meeting of Strauss’s seminar on Hobbes at the University of Chicago in the fall term of 1956:

He exposed our opinions as mere opinions; he caused us to realize that we were the prisoners of our opinions by showing us the larger horizons behind and beyond them. Thus we all believed in watered-down teachings derived from Marx, Freud, and others; but buttressing our views was modern thought as such, and one of its towering giants was Hobbes. To understand the true nature of our beliefs, it was necessary to undertake an arduous journey back in time, a journey that would not even end with Hobbes, for modern thought at its best was a rebellion by giants like Hobbes against men perhaps even more gigantic—Plato and Aristotle.

But the conversion, the turning to light he tried to effect in us, did not necessarily terminate in Platonism. Not the least remarkable of a number of remarkable suggestions—or commands—which Leo Strauss produced that day was that we simply must begin with the assumption that Hobbes’s teaching was true—not relatively true, not true for Hobbes, not true for its time, but simply true. That was why we had to read him with all the care we could muster, and that was why (I was to hear him say this again and again) one ought not even to begin to criticize an author before one had done all one could do to understand him correctly, to understand him as he understood himself. 

When other teachers invite their students to explore the origins of modern thought, they encourage criticism as the road to active understanding. Understanding grows through a dialectical interaction between the students and the author they are studying. Strauss asks—or commands—his students to start by accepting that any inclination they may have to disagree with Hobbes (Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides), any opinion contrary to his, is mistaken. They must suspend their own judgment, suspend even “modern thought as such,” until they understand their author “as he understood himself.” It is all too clear that this illusory goal will not be achieved by the end of the term. Abandon self all ye who enter here. The question is, to whom is the surrender made: to the text or to the teacher?

The injunction to understand one’s author “as he understood himself” is fundamental to Straussian interpretation, but he never explains what that means—only that it is directed against his chief bugbear, “historicism,” or the belief that old books should be understood according to their historical context. Thus “I have not tried to relate his [Xenophon’s] thought to his ‘historical situation’ because this is not the natural way of reading the work of a wise man and, in addition, Xenophon never indicated that he wanted to be understood that way.” Evidently it would be presumptuous for students to criticize “a wise man” on the basis of their own watered-down twentieth-century thoughts. Let them first acquire the wise man’s own understanding of his wisdom.

I submit in all seriousness that surrender of the critical intellect is the price of initiation into the world of Leo Strauss’s ideas. As to why, in recent decades, increasingly many puppies should have opted for the joys of surrender, and how the muting of one’s own power of judgment fits into the psychology of conservatism—these are questions for the social scientists whom Strauss despised and abused. My task here is to tell readers who are interested in the past, but who do not wish simply to retreat from the present, what happens in the thought-world that Strauss’s writings fashion from his favorite old books.

2.
“One must be swayed by a sincere longing for the past.”

“…today the truth may be accessible only through certain old books.”

The leading characters in Strauss’s writing are “the gentlemen” and “the philosopher.” “The gentlemen” come, preferably, from patrician urban backgrounds and have money without having to work too hard for it: they are not the wealthy as such, then, but those who have “had an opportunity to be brought up in the proper manner.” Strauss is scornful of mass education. “Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.” Such “gentlemen” are idealistic, devoted to virtuous ends, and sympathetic to philosophy. They are thus ready to be taken in hand by “the philosopher,” who will teach them the great lesson they need to learn before they join the governing elite.

The name of this lesson is “the limits of politics.” Its content is that a just society is so improbable that one can do nothing to bring it about. In the 1960s this became: a just society is impossible. In either case the moral is that “the gentlemen” should rule conservatively, knowing that “the apparently just alternative to aristocracy open or disguised will be permanent revolution, i.e., permanent chaos in which life will be not only poor and short but brutish as well.”

So who is “the philosopher,” and how does he know that this is the right lesson for “the gentlemen”? He is a wise man, who does not want to rule because his sights are set on higher things. His interests, being lofty, are essentially at variance with the interests of society—in both senses of the word “interests.” Teaching “the gentlemen” their lesson is the one service to society by which he can justify his remaining aloof from political affairs and protect himself from destruction by the multitude. We are assured, however, that “the philosopher” is not likely to be found in a university philosophy department.

He is not likely to be found in a political science department either. A follower may speak of Strauss as a philosopher, meaning one of those who “bring back reports from regions most of us are not privileged to enter,” but Strauss surely included himself when he wrote, “We cannot be philosophers, but we can love philosophy; we can try to philosophize.” He continues: “This philosophizing consists at any rate primarily and in a way chiefly in listening to the conversation between the great philosophers. . . and therefore in studying the great books.” Certainly, neither Strauss nor Straussians engage in the active discussion of central questions of philosophy which is characteristic of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and modern philosophy departments. They confine themselves to the exposition of texts, mainly texts of political philosophy—not, for example, Aristotle’s Physics or Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. (It would be difficult to start from the assumption that the Aristotelian cosmology is “simply true.”)

When Strauss comes near an abstract argument—for example, the twenty-six-premise demonstration of the existence, incorporeality, and unity of God in Maimonides’ The Guide of the Perplexed—he passes by without stopping to examine its logic. When he confronts Plato’s most famous metaphysical doctrine, the Theory of Forms, he rapidly pronounces it “utterly incredible,” refusing to accept that it must be the basis for any adequate interpretation of the Republic. (So much for starting from the assumption that what one’s author says is true—or could Strauss be so extravagant as to wish to imply that Plato disbelieved his own Theory?) There is much talk in Straussian writings about the nature of “the philosopher” but no sign of any knowledge, from the inside, of what it is to be actively involved in philosophy. “The philosopher,” in fact, is a construct out of old books: he wrote some of them or, like Socrates, he appears as a character in them.

Thus the answer to the question “How does ‘the philosopher’ know what to teach ‘the gentlemen’?” is very simple. Either he wrote or he has read Plato’s Republic, and Plato’s Republic shows Socrates teaching two “gentlemen,” Glaucon and Adeimantus, to moderate their idealistic ambition to achieve justice on earth. “Certain it is that the Republic supplies the most magnificent cure ever devised for every form of political ambition.”

It would be a misunderstanding at this point to ask for reasons why we should believe that Plato’s teaching is true. Strauss could not give reasons without appealing to our modern opinions. Instead of giving reasons, he would have us transpose ourselves right back into the ancient world in order to appreciate that we are “the prisoners of our opinions.” First we obey the command to assume that Plato’s teaching is “the truth” and then, from that standpoint, we see the degeneracy of today’s world. We look at modern thought through Plato’s eyes and, not surprisingly, we are dismayed. If this is what it means to understand Plato “as he understood himself,” it follows inevitably that the only reasons Strauss can give for believing that Plato’s teaching is true are Plato’s reasons—as Strauss construes them. Exegesis is Strauss’s substitute for argument.

What Strauss can do, and does, is give reasons why we should believe that Plato taught what Strauss says he taught. He undertakes the difficult task of showing that the Republic means the opposite of what it says; that Aristotle read it as Strauss does, and agreed; and finally that the Platonic view of “the political things” was maintained, in essentials, by the entire tradition of classical political philosophy (not excluding Aristophanes and Xenophon) through the Stoics and beyond. The rot first sets in with Machiavelli, followed by Hobbes. They rebel against “the classical natural right doctrine” of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Christian thinkers, and they start setting the debased goals that modern society has accepted: universal education and the use of science for the relief of man’s estate. “We shall have to consider whether that Enlightenment deserves its name or whether its true name is Obfuscation.”

This picture of the history of political thought explains why so many of the texts that Strauss examines turn out to contain the same story: what “the philosopher” told “the gentlemen.” Straussian history is written to record the unanimous antiegalitarian conservatism of “the classics” and, when he expounds more recent texts, to bemoan the story’s unhappy ending. Not that Strauss ever gives the whole story in one place; much labor is required to disentangle its several elements from his denunciations of modernity and the exegesis of dozens of texts. But by the principles of Straussian pedagogy this is as it should be. “The wisdom of the ancients reveals itself only to those who have the proper dispositions.”

If we now ask whether Strauss’s exegesis achieves the historical exactness at which it avowedly aims, we meet a problem. Straussians know that the considered judgment of the scholarly nonStraussian world is that, while Strauss’s interpretation of the history of political thought contains some valuable insights, much of it is a tale full of sound and fury and extraordinary inaccuracies.  But Strauss and his followers disdain the canons of ordinary historical scholarship. “For even the philology which we use as a tool for the interpretation of ancient thought is based on modern philosophy.” Let us therefore ask a different question. What does one have to believe in order to believe that Strauss’s account of “the wisdom of the ancients” is correct?

What one has to believe is that “the considerate few have imperturbably conveyed to their readers an eloquence of articulate silences and pregnant indications.”

3.
“From an outsider’s perspective, a Straussian. . . is someone who reads secular books religiously, Talmudically, cabalistically, but above all perversely.”

It was Maimonides who started it. It was from him that Strauss drew his idea of “esoteric literature.” In the introduction to the first part of The Guide of the Perplexed Maimonides states, “It is not the purpose of this Treatise to make its totality understandable to the vulgar,” and he goes on to instruct the learned reader how to gather his meaning from hints, indications, and deliberate contradictions. Outsiders need not be incredulous when Strauss asserts that there has existed in the past “a peculiar type of literature, in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines,” for fear of the intolerance of revealed religion.  Save your disbelief for the next claim, that all “the considerate few” practiced the art of writing through hints, indications, and deliberate contradictions. Strauss’s fantastical supposition is that, whether we are dealing with the allusiveness of Machiavelli and other Renaissance writers, or with such literary precautions as we may find in Descartes, Hobbes, or Locke, or with the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon, in each case Maimonides’ instructions to his twelfth-century readers will unlock a secret teaching.

Strauss came to Maimonides in search of a solution to the conflict between reason and religion. As a Jewish thinker in the modern world he experienced the conflict within himself. He had worked on Spinoza and his higher (i.e., historical) criticism of the Bible. Could Maimonides show him that philosophy and the Jewish tradition were after all compatible? Having, as he thought, discovered that Maimonides said they were but meant they were not, Strauss wrote an introduction to The Guide of the Perplexed which spoke of its secret teaching without fully revealing what it was. For he agreed with what he supposed to be Maimonides’ unobvious meaning, that no philosopher can believe in religion but it is most necessary that nonphilosophers do so. Strauss then proceeded, under Maimonides’ guidance, to project the medieval tension between reason and revelation back into antiquity so as to make Plato and Xenophon suffer a “persecution” that no ordinary historian has ever heard of. He went on to find all and sundry “writing between the lines,” so as to convey a secret teaching. He developed for himself a style of writing about the secret teaching of others which would conceal “all crucial things” from any but the most dedicated disciple. The ultimate perfection of this style of writing, the climax of the genre, is the volume under review: Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy.

The outsider will think it a nonbook, a mere miscellany of previously published pieces. Despite the title, only two chapters discuss Plato. Thucydides, Xenophon, and Nietzsche are discussed in three others. There are three short notes on Maimonides, two brief reviews, encyclopedia articles on “Natural Law” and “Machiavelli,” and an introduction by Thomas L. Pangle which opens with the statement, “I am certain that I do not have a completely clear understanding of the fundamental intention which guided Strauss in this and all his mature works.”

Initiates will know, of course, that, as Strauss himself put it, “the superficial understanding is not simply wrong, since it grasps the obvious meaning which is as much intended by the author as is the deeper meaning.” Initiates should also know how Maimonides would direct them to discover the unobvious meaning.

You start, always, by taking note of the arrangement of the work. (The editor tells us that Strauss gave the book its title and devised the order of pieces a year or two before he died.) You count the chapters: there are sixteen, if you include the essay on Plato’s Gorgias which Strauss did not live to write. At the halfway point you find Chapter 8, significantly entitled “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil” and containing its own count of Nietzsche’s chapters. You know that Strauss regards Nietzsche as the source of radical historicism. For this and other reasons Nietzsche is Respected Enemy Number One. Further clues to the plan of Strauss’s book are waiting in the first and last chapters, which I have not yet mentioned.

The title of Chapter 15, “Introductory Essay for Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism,” contains another title within itself, and one that indicates Respected Enemy Number Two. For initiates know that religion and reason can never marry, that “Jerusalem and Athens” (Strauss’s title for Chapter 7) is the name of a tension that can never be resolved. Chapter 1, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” contains observations on Husserl and Heidegger, with whom Strauss studied during a postdoctoral year at the University of Freiburg. They stand, in Strauss’s eyes, for modern philosophy: Respected Enemy Number Three. Strauss’s respect for Heidegger is particularly magnanimous, given the intimate connection he discerns between Heidegger’s historicism and his welcoming Hitler’s revolution in 1933. It is here, on the second page of Chapter 1 and with reference to Heidegger, that Strauss says, foreshadowing Pangle’s words about himself, that no “outstanding” thinker is adequately understood by his followers or by his critics.

It is now obvious why Chapter 2 is entitled “On Plato’s Apology of Socrates and Crito.” Socrates is the “outstanding” thinker whom both Nietzsche and Heidegger attacked, and whose trial and execution would be unnecessary in a world where, as Hermann Cohen dreamed, religion and philosophy were reconciled. The book is to be Strauss’s apology for the Platonic Socrates against “modern thought as such.”

The one true philosopher, as uncompromising in his death as in his thought, will serve as the exemplar by which to condemn the many aspects of modern thought that Strauss dislikes. It is by deliberate plan that thirteen chapters of Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy do not deal with works by Plato. Initiates know that the history of political thought is the history of Platonic political philosophy. They will perceive the exact place in the master’s plan of Chapter 4, “Preliminary Observations on the Gods in Thucydides’ Work,” and of the résumé of Strauss’s teaching on natural law in Chapter 6. They will relish the juxtaposition in Chapters 12–13 of the article “Niccolo Machiavelli” with a two-page review of C.B. Macpherson’s The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Even the two-page “Note on Maimonides’ Treatise on the Art of Logic” (Chapter 11) is pregnant in its silence about, for instance, logic.

This should be enough to indicate, without fully revealing, the unobvious meaning of Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy. As Pangle says, “Surely it is not unreasonable to expect that in this, the book he likely knew would be his last, he meant to help us discern more sharply the guiding themes that had come to seem most significant to him.” We could read it as Strauss’s epitaph to his life work. The title, the style, the arrangement combine to whisper, to “those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear,” of the “outstanding” contemporary thinker who recovered Plato’s secret teaching and vanquished modern thought.

4.
“Professor Strauss has singlehandedly revived the serious study of ancient political thought and shown that it is not merely an object for historical curiosity but is relevant to our most vital present interests.”

“We admire the ease with which Farabi invented Platonic speeches.”

Let us be clear that if Strauss’s interpretation of Plato is wrong, the entire edifice falls to dust. If Plato is the radical Utopian that ordinary scholarship believes him to be, there is no such thing as the unanimous conservatism of “the classics”; no such disaster as the loss of ancient wisdom through Machiavelli and Hobbes; no such person as “the philosopher” to tell “the gentlemen” to observe “the limits of politics.” Instead, the “larger horizons behind and beyond” modern thought open onto a debate about the nature and practicability of a just society. Those of us who take philosophy seriously will think that this clash of reasoned views among the ancient philosophers is more relevant to our present interests than the anti-Utopian “teaching” that Strauss has single-handedly invented. So let me try to show that Strauss’s interpretation of Plato is wrong from beginning to end.

His beginning is an inference from literary form. Plato wrote dialogues, dramas in prose. Therefore, the utterances of Socrates or any other character in a Platonic dialogue are like the utterances of Macbeth: they do not necessarily express the thought of the author. Like Shakespeare, “Plato conceals his opinions.”

The comparison is, of course, woefully inadequate. There are dramas and dramas, and Plato’s distancing of himself from his characters is quite different from Shakespeare’s. It is not through literary insensitivity that readers of the Platonic dialogues, from Aristotle onward, have taken Socrates to be Plato’s spokesman; nor is it, as Strauss imagines, through failure to appreciate that a drama comprises the “deeds” as well as the “speeches” of the characters.

The dramatic action of the Republic, for example, is a sustained exhibition of the power of persuasion. Socrates persuades Glaucon and Adeimantus that justice is essential for the happiness of both city and man. He persuades them that justice can be realized in human society provided three great changes are made in the life of the ruling class. First, the family and private property must be abolished; second, women must be brought out of seclusion and educated to take part in government alongside the men; third, both men and women must have a lengthy training in advanced mathematics and active philosophical discussion (not the reading of old books). He persuades them, moreover, that these changes can be brought about without violence, by the kind of persuasive argument he is using with them.

The proof of the power of persuasion is that in the course of the discussion—this is one of the “deeds” that Plato leaves the observant reader to notice for himself—Glaucon and Adeimantus undertake to participate in the task of persuasion themselves, should the day of Utopia come. A significant event, this undertaking, for Glaucon and Adeimantus belong to the aristocratic elite. In Straussian language, they are “gentlemen”: the very people Socrates’ persuasion must be able to win over if he means what he so often says, that a just society is both desirable and practicable.

Thus the “deeds” of the Republic, so far from undercutting Socrates’ utopian speeches, reinforce them. Plato uses the distance between himself and the character of Socrates not to conceal his opinions, but to show their efficacy in action. Any “gentlemen” who read the Republic and identify with Glaucon or Adeimantus should find themselves fired with the ambition to help achieve justice on earth, and convinced that it can be done.

Strauss, of course, wants his “gentlemen” readers to form the opposite conviction, about the Republic and about politics in general. What persuasions can he muster? There is the frail comparison with Shakespeare. There is the consideration that Socrates is a master of irony and “irony is a kind of dissimulation, or of untruthfulness.” But to show in detail that Plato means the opposite of what Socrates says, Strauss resorts to a peculiar mode of paraphrase which he evidently learned from the tenth-century Islamic philosopher, Farabi.

The technique is as follows. You paraphrase the text in tedious detail—or so it appears to the uninitiated reader. Occasionally you remark that a certain statement is not clear; you note that the text is silent about a certain matter; you wonder whether such and such can really be the case. With a series of scarcely perceptible nudges you gradually insinuate that the text is insinuating something quite different from what the words say. Strauss’s description of Farabi describes himself: “There is a great divergence between what Farabi explicitly says and what Plato explicitly says; it is frequently impossible to say where Farabi’s alleged report of Plato’s views ends and his own exposition begins.”

The drawback with this mode of commenting on a Platonic dialogue is that it presupposes what it seeks to prove, that the dialogue form is designed to convey different meanings to different kinds of readers.  If there is a secret meaning, one might concede that Maimonides’ instructions show us how to find it and that Farabi’s mode of commentary is the properly cautious way to pass it on to a new generation of initiates. But Strauss has not yet shown that Plato does conceal his opinions, let alone that they are the opposite of what Socrates explicitly says. Hence his use of techniques adapted from Maimonides and Farabi is a vicious circularity.

It would be tedious to follow up all the perversities, both literary and philosophical, of Strauss’s reading of the Republic. I shall pick on one central statement Strauss makes about the Republic: “The philosophers cannot be persuaded, they can only be compelled to rule the cities.”

The first half of this sentence is sheer invention on Strauss’s part, as is the word “only” in the second half. The passages that Strauss is paraphrasing speak of compelling the philosophers to rule—by persuasive argument. They do not contrast persuasion with compulsion. Nor do they contain Strauss’s next point, that the philosophers will only be compelled if the nonphilosophers are persuaded—by the philosophers—to compel them. So they lend no support to Strauss’s concluding insinuation that “the just city is not possible because of the philosophers’ unwillingness to rule.”

Such is the manner in which Strauss turns upside down the meaning of the Republic. Socrates is in fact arguing that the just city is possible because of the philosophers’ unwillingness to rule. Willing rulers want to rule because of something they will get out of it, for themselves or for their country. Not so the philosophers of the ideal city: their complete dedication to the higher world of mathematics and active philosophical discussion guarantees that ruling can give them nothing that they value. In place of the partialities that corrupt the rulers we are familiar with, they will put the requirements of impartial justice. Just so, it is the requirements of impartial justice that persuade them to govern in the first place. Nobody else could be so compelled, but these devotees of pure reason are compelled to rule by the force of the reasoned argument which is put to them—not by the nonphilosophers but by the founding fathers of the city, Socrates and his interlocutors. This argument is that the philosophers owe a debt to the ideal city for providing the liberal education in mathematics and philosophy that teaches them to know and love justice. They will rule for justice’s sake and that alone, to requite a debt rather than because they think it a great good to be in charge of the city.

All of this, and much more, Strauss paraphrases away in the manner I have illustrated. The crowning insult to the critical intellect is the insinuation that Plato teaches that “the just city is against nature because the equality of the sexes and absolute communism are against nature.” This is of course completely opposed to what Plato wrote and Aristotle criticized. It is also the point at which Strauss sums up the relevance of the Republic to the politics of today: “The Republic conveys the broadest and deepest analysis of political idealism ever made.”

5.
“Carnes Lord has taught political science at the University of Virginia and has served in the United States government, most recently on the senior staff of the National Security Council. He is the author of Education and Culture in the Political Thought of Aristotle.”

This profile of a pupil of a pupil brings us back to the political dimension of Strauss’s dealings with old books. Strauss believed that civil society must, of necessity, foster warlike habits and make its citizens apply different rules of conduct to one another and to foreigners. The impossibility of international justice was a considerable part of what persuaded him that “the justice which is possible within the city, can only be imperfect or cannot be unquestionably good.” But Strauss spent his life extolling what he believed to be “the truth” on the grounds that it is the unanimous “wisdom of the ancients.” Hence something more than an academic quarrel is taking place when Strauss defends his eccentric view that Plato’s Socrates agrees with Xenophon’s in teaching that the just citizen is one who helps his friends and harms his enemies.

Plato’s Socrates attacks this very notion early in the Republic. No matter: Strauss will demonstrate that it is the only definition of justice from Book I which is “entirely preserved” in the remainder of the Republic. Plato’s Socrates argues passionately in the Gorgias for a revolutionary morality founded on the thesis that one should not return wrong for wrong. Strauss’s unwritten essay on Plato’s Gorgias would have summoned all his Maimonidean skills to show that Socrates does not mean what he says. Much more is at stake here than the correctness or otherwise of the common scholarly opinion that Xenophon, a military man, was incompetent at philosophy and did not understand Socrates. The real issue is Strauss’s ruthless determination to use these old books to “moderate” that idealistic longing for justice, at home and abroad, which grew in the puppies of America during the years when Strauss was teaching and writing.

The Studies of Leo Strauss: An Exchange
Joseph Cropsey, Harry V. Jaffa, Allan Bloom, Ernest J. Weinrib, Thomas L. Pangle, et al.
October 10, 1985 issue

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In response to:
Sphinx Without a Secret from the May 30, 1985 issue

To the Editors:

M.F. Burnyeat’s review of Leo Strauss’s Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy [NYR, May 30] bears the same relation to Mr. Strauss’s thought that the accompanying caricature bears to Strauss’s person. Whoever knows or knew the original must be offended by a travesty generated apparently between levity and a gift for deforming the normal. By his deed Mr. Burnyeat vindicates what in words he denounces, namely, Strauss’s view that a serious thought needs to be veiled against ill-natured levity, and Strauss’s insistence that the student (a fortiori the critic) take the trouble to grasp the author’s meaning, i.e. to understand him as he understood himself, before undertaking to discuss that author’s work. By the method of parading elaborated reflections as adages jejune and assertoric, Mr. Burnyeat holds them up to ridicule, as he does Mr. Strauss’s references to gentlemen and philosophers, unworthily lampooning those words by putting them in quotation marks as if they cannot be used without the apology implicit in that tendentious punctuation.

The advice that a reader of a worthy (indeed of any) writing start by clearing his mind of resistance to the author’s purpose is generally reasonable and fair, is obviously repugnant to the principles that guide Mr. Burnyeat’s critical activity, and certainly has nothing to do with the abandoning of self into which Mr. Burnyeat translates it. That objection can safely be left to collapse by itself.

Mr. Burnyeat deduces Mr. Strauss’s influence from the physical presence of the latter before his students in the classroom—a tacit appeal to the hypothesis of charisma voiced some time ago. One knows that Strauss’s books have little influence because “Strauss has no discernible influence in Britain at all.” But books and articles by Strauss have appeared in Polish, Serbo-Croat, Italian, French, Spanish and of course German, both before and since his death. Report used to be made of the British headline: “Storm in Channel: Continent Isolated.” Mr. Burnyeat does nothing to dispel a presumption that the report is apocryphal. In any case, however correct he may be in assessing Strauss’s influence in Britain, nothing may be concluded about Strauss or Britain in the absence of another premise for the syllogism.

Mr. Burnyeat weakens his depreciation of Strauss by providing a quite remarkable demonstration, albeit offered as a mockery, of what Burnyeat might be capable of were he to restrain his ill-will from hindering his judgment. In the last half dozen paragraphs of his section 3, he affects to expose the mechanical simplicity of the Straussian hermeneutic: “You start, always, by taking note of the arrangement of the work.” Mr. Burnyeat is out to show what a simple thing it is to anatomize the organization of a book, and incidentally how useless is the product. Instead, he shows how difficult it is, how well he was himself compelled to think about the contents in their relation to the author’s intention, and how helpful to his—and our—understanding of Strauss’s purpose is the fruit of his derisive effort. Without having been exposed to Mr. Strauss’s charisma, Mr. Burnyeat has been induced to afford his own evidence of the plausibility of a Straussian advice—try to understand a book as the author meant it. (Would Mr. Burnyeat’s intended satire have been amusing, to say nothing of useful, if someone hadn’t let him know that the order of chapters originated with Strauss and not with some editor?)

This would be a thoughtless and in one more respect an incomplete response to Burnyeat’s regrettable article if it failed to try to understand Burnyeat as he might understand himself. Without a great deal to go on—and I know how much that confession subtracts—I surmise that he is uncritically devoted to the intellectually received and the academically authenticated, perhaps because there must indeed be something valid in what has earned the cachet of professionals, and perhaps because there is safety in numbers. His objections to Strauss are not new, as he admits, and in fact are the tediously familiar budget of recriminations coming from a conventional establishment, which is as precisian in scrutinizing the orthodoxy of “rebarbatives” as any coven of philistines sniffing out a bohemian.

It can never do Straussians any harm to look within under the stimulation of such a rebuke as Mr. Burnyeat’s. One could wish that the critics would treat themselves occasionally to the same purification.

Joseph Cropsey
University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois

To the Editors:

I would like, if I may, to comment on M.F. Burnyeat’s review of Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, by Leo Strauss. Burnyeat’s opinion of Strauss was sufficiently indicated by the cartoonist, who gave Strauss two right hands—neither of which, one presumes, knew what the other was doing.

Burnyeat declares that “There is no doubt that Strauss was an inspiring teacher.” But Burnyeat can find nothing in Strauss’s writings—which he calls “remote and rebarbative”—to explain Strauss’s extraordinary influence on nearly everyone who came into contact with him. What went on in Strauss’s classes was remarkable and powerful, but as far as Burnyeat is concerned, it remains utterly mysterious.

This is neither the time nor the place for me to offer my own critique of Strauss’s work. It is a subject on which I have written with increasing frequency since Strauss’s death. (See for example “The Legacy of Leo Strauss,” Claremont Review of Books, Fall 1984, and “The Legacy of Leo Strauss’ Defended,” Ibid., Spring 1985.) I would like, however, to offer a few words of personal testimony as to how Strauss differed in my experience from other teachers, and why so many sat so spellbound in his classes.

I might mention that I took my first course with Strauss in the fall of 1944. For the next seven years, in both New York and Chicago, I attended virtually every class he taught, including those in summer sessions. During this period I believe I spent nearly as much time alone with him as in class. But whether in class or alone, every minute was a vital learning experience. Today, I return again and again to his writings. Contrary to Burnyeat, Strauss was a great writer, and his works abound with passages of eloquence and beauty. But he always warned us, when writing, not to sacrifice precision of meaning for mere effect.

My own books, particularly my writings on Lincoln, are often outgrowths of conversations I originally had with Strauss. In the Preface to the 1982 reprinting (by the University of Chicago Press) of Crisis of the House Divided, my book on the Lincoln–Douglas debates (first published in 1959), I wrote that the work had been born in my mind

When I discovered—at a time when I was studying the Republic with Leo Strauss—that the issue between Lincoln and Douglas was in substance, and very nearly in form, identical with the issue between Socrates and Thrasymachus. Douglas’s doctrine of “popular sovereignty” meant no more than that: in a democracy justice is the interest of the majority, which is “the stronger.” Lincoln, however, insisted that the case for popular government depended upon a standard of right and wrong independent of mere opinion and one which was not justified merely by the counting of heads.

Lincoln once described the central proposition of the Declaration of Independence—to which, at Gettysburg, he said the nation at its birth had been dedicated—as “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.” This is a perfect example of what Leo Strauss meant by natural right. And Strauss believed—as did Lincoln—that it was possible to have sufficient knowledge of natural right to guide our lives, in the decisive respects, both individually and politically.

Lincoln once declared that he had “never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” For Lincoln, the Declaration was a timeless source of political wisdom. It was a source of such wisdom for the American people as much as were the tablets of the law brought down by Moses from Sinai for the children of Israel. If we however turn to Carl Becker’s The Declaration of Independence, a book perfectly characteristic of non-Straussian scholarship in political philosophy, we find the following:

To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false is essentially a meaningless question.

What Becker meant—and he spoke for nearly every historian and social scientist of our time—was that to ask what is just or unjust, right or wrong, is a “value judgment,” and as such “subjective” and not susceptible to rational analysis, which can deal only with “facts.”

Before I met Strauss this is what I had been taught, and had never been given any reason to question. I had spent five years at Yale in the 1930s, as undergraduate and graduate student, where no one, so far as I knew, had ever doubted this orthodoxy. To study the Declaration of Independence—or Plato’s Republic—meant to study the “climate of opinion,” “the spirit of the times,” the “weltanschauung” out of which the work came. Strauss however declared that we must understand the great works of the human mind as their authors understood them, before we try to understand them differently or better (although—contrary to Burnyeat—Strauss never hesitated to make such judgments when he believed he had sufficient grounds for doing so). None of the great writers of the past had believed, either in the fact-value distinction, or in the historicist fallacy that the genesis of an idea was the key to the truth about it.

Lincoln’s reading of the Declaration—as embodying an eternal, and eternally applicable truth—was precisely the kind of reading that I had learned from Strauss. Thus Strauss taught me to read with ever growing wonder and gratitude, both Lincoln and the tradition of political philosophy within which Lincoln had his life and being.

It is difficult to convey to anyone who has not shared such an experience the excitement I felt—now nearly forty years ago—when I realized that I had been emancipated from the dungeon of historicism, from that dark place of the soul in which the great questions, the only questions that make life ultimately worth living, are treated as “essentially meaningless.” That excitement has however never left me, and I can have only pity for those—like Professor Burnyeat—who seem likely never to know it.

Harry V. Jaffa
Claremont McKenna College and
Claremont Graduate School
Claremont, California

To the Editors:

M.F. Burnyeat’s attempt to wake a sleeping America to the political threat posed to it by the late Leo Strauss is McCarthyite in the precise sense of the term. His calumny culminates in disgraceful innuendo about Carnes Lord, whose service on the National Security Council staff he takes as evidence of lack of scholarly integrity. With standard paranoid logic, Burnyeat concludes that this corrupt “pupil of a pupil” is proof that Strauss intentionally distorted classical texts as part of a political conspiracy. Contempt is the only appropriate response to such an ugly project of arousing political passion against the legacy of a serious thinker.

It is worthy of note that Burnyeat’s attack on Strauss follows hard on the heels of a similarly malicious one from the other extreme of the political spectrum (“Is Conservatism Un-American?” National Review, March 22, 1985). Its title indicates the kind of suspicion it casts on “Straussians.” This union of Far Right and Far Left in enmity to Strauss and his influence should encourage those who incline to think that truth and democracy reside somewhere near the center to have another look at the writings of Leo Strauss.

Allan Bloom
University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois

To the Editors:

In his polemic against Leo Strauss, Professor Myles Burnyeat inadvertently confirms the interpretive standpoint which he labors to discredit.

Strauss’ reading of Plato probed beyond the surface impression to a deeper meaning—an exercise which Burnyeat paradoxically dismisses as an “insult to the critical intelligence.” For instance, early in the Republic Socrates attacks the equation of justice with the helping of one’s friends and the harming of one’s enemies, and Burnyeat ridicules Strauss’ suggestion that the dialogue thereafter preserves this apparently refuted definition. Similarly, Strauss’ perplexity about the absence of any philosophic reason for the philosophers to rule draws from Burnyeat the response that they will wish to requite the debt they owe the ideal city for providing them with their education.

But under what definition of justice is public education to be repaid through public service? Surely this reciprocation of benefit for benefit falls under the principle of helping one’s friends, which thus remains decisive despite Socrates’ earlier criticism. What Burnyeat ridicules in one paragraph he requires in another.

Burnyeat’s observation that “Strauss turns upside down the meaning of the Republic” incorporates an innocently dogmatic assumption about “the meaning” of a Platonic text. The Phaedrus and the Seventh Letter indicate that Plato himself did not share this assumption. Of course, Burnyeat can point to what is explicit in Plato’s text. But the significance of the explicit is precisely what Strauss has put at issue.

A thoughtful assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Strauss’ work by a scholar of Burnyeat’s stature and acumen is an urgent desideratum. Evidently, the unpalatable conservative implications of Strauss’ position elicited Burnyeat’s disappointing effort. He especially seems to resent—again paradoxically given his account of the motivation of Plato’s philosophers—the willingness of Strauss’ pupils to serve their country under the present administration. Burnyeat’s dogmatic vilification, however, does liberalism no credit. He should have given readers the benefit of his thinking and left the vicious caricaturing to David Levine.

Ernest J. Weinrib
Yale Law School
New Haven, Connecticut

To the Editors:

Although one of us is the author of the introduction to the book by the late Leo Strauss which M.S. Burnyeat recently discussed in your pages, we do not wish to attempt in a brief letter a comprehensive reply to the review. In particular, we will refrain from responding to the various suggestions or innuendos concerning the character of Strauss’ appeal and its supposed political implications. We restrict ourselves to addressing what Burnyeat says about the substance of Strauss’ thought.

Mr. Burnyeat is to be commended for having read a number of Strauss’ writings, but in our judgment he has missed or misunderstood the fundamental theme of Strauss’ life-work: the painstaking analysis of the dialogue or debate between Reason and Revelation. Although Burnyeat alludes casually to this central issue, he never tries to explain what Strauss means by calling it “the theological–political problem” much less attempts to deal with Strauss’ treatment of the issue, expressed and understood in this unconventional or highly original way.

Instead, Burnyeat contends that it is on the interpretation of a single major text, Plato’s Republic, that everything Strauss taught stands or falls. But the purported refutation of Strauss’ interpretation, a refutation which Burnyeat hinges on the elucidation of a single crucial passage (Republic 520), is not only manifestly inadequate, it depends upon a logical blunder.

The question at issue between Strauss and Burnyeat is whether, as conventional interpreters like Burnyeat claim, Socrates seriously teaches the possibility of philosopher-kings coming into being. Against the conventional view, Strauss points out that the philosophers, who would have to persuade or compel the non-philosophers to let them take over a city and rule, are themselves described by Socrates as being so far from wishing to rule that they would have to be compelled to do so.

Burnyeat does not deny that according to Socrates philosophers are deeply unwilling to rule for of course Socrates emphasizes that it is just this disinclination that would assure their reliability as rulers. Burnyeat argues, however, that philosophers would agree to begin to rule in obedience to “the requirements of impartial justice” expressed by “the force of reasoned argument.” What argument?

“The argument is” (Burnyeat claims) “that the philosophers owe a debt to the ideal city for providing the liberal education in mathematics and philosophy that teaches them to know and love justice.” This is Burnyeat’s extraordinarily loose paraphrase of the argument Socrates says he would use for the following purpose: to try to reconcile philosophers nurtured in a city already ruled by philosophers to their having to take their turn at ruling rather than pursue philosophy. Socrates indicates emphatically that this argument, from indebtedness, can be made only to philosphers who are indebted—i.e., who have been nurtured by a city already dedicated to philosophy. What is more, Socrates explicitly declares that a philosopher in any other city (e.g., himself, in Athens) would rightly, according to impartial justice, refuse to participate in ruling:

…when such men come to be in the other cities they quite reasonably do not participate in the labors in those cities. For they grow up spontaneously against the will of the regime in each city; and a nature that grows by itself and doesn’t owe its rearing to anyone has justice on its side when it is not eager to pay off the price of rearing to anyone.

(Republic 520a9–b4)

This declaration accords perfectly with the whole of Socrates’ own life as depicted by Plato. Socrates consistently fled involvement in political life (Apology 31c–33b) and never made the slightest effort to erect in deed the city explored in speech in the Republic. According to the Republic, the philosopher is under no obligation to rule, in the sense of founding the best city; and he would have no inclination to do so, preferring to devote all his time to philosophy—as may be possible in certain defective cities like Athens. For the philosopher, giving up time spent in philosophy and entering politics—even in the best city—is like descending from the sunlight into a caveprison, or like descending from the Isles of the Blessed into Hades. The Socrates whom we encounter in the drama of the Republic is not someone who aspires to rule, but a philosophic teacher, using the themes of politics to introduce his young companions to philosophy. As he explicitly says near the end of the work, with regard to the city that has been under discussion, “it makes no difference whether it exists or will ever exist somewhere” (Republic 592b).

Burnyeat’s position is logically absurd, because if it is true, as he concedes, that the rule of philosophers depends upon their agreement and if they would agree to rule only out of indebtedness for their philosophic education to a city already ruled by philosophers (in Burnyeat’s words, “they will rule for justice’s sake and that alone, to requite a debt”), then such a city, or the rule of philosopher-kings, could never come into being for the first time. On the basis of this passage selected by Burnyeat, for Plato’s Socrates the coming into being of the philosopher-king is, as Strauss maintained, a kind of ironic impossibility.

Thomas L. Pangle
Clifford Orwin
University of Toronto
Toronto, Canada

To the Editors:

In his review-essay, “Sphinx Without a Secret.” M.F. Burnyeat has written a penetrating analysis of the sources and the techniques employed by Leo Strauss. He points out that the Chicago political thinker believed that the great “ancient books” are the repositories of “the truth,” and that their authors consciously obfuscated their meaning, primarily to avoid persecution, and wrote the opposite of what they really believed.

In the course of his skillful dissection of Leo Strauss, Professor Burnyeat has, inadvertently, I believe, done a grave injustice to Maimonides. Relying on Strauss’s reading of Maimonides, Burnyeat writes: “It was Maimonides who started it. It was from him that Strauss drew his idea of ‘esoteric literature.’ In the introduction to the first part of The Guide of the Perplexed Maimonides states. ‘It is not the purpose of this Treatise to make its totality understandable to the vulgar,’ and he goes on to instruct the learned reader how to gather his meaning from hints, indications, and deliberate contradictions.”

Burnyeat has truncated the passage in Maimonides and in the process, his meaning. Maimonides is outstanding for his clarity and does not indulge in “double-talk.” He is writing for “the perplexed” of his day, who were deeply committed to traditional religion and who found it in conflict with the ideas derived from their study of science and philosophy.

The passage is too lengthy to quote here, but Maimonides makes it clear that he is writing neither for simple-minded believers nor for those who have surrendered their religious faith. He believes there is no necessary conflict between faith and reason and seeks to prove their compatibility in his philosophical masterpiece.

Maimonides’s solution is to demonstrate that the classical texts of biblical and rabbinical Judaism seem to contradict philosophy and science only because they make use of the limited vocabulary available to human beings for the expression of transcendent truths. Hence, these sacred sources use metaphors and other concrete idioms that untutored and simple-minded believers take literally. Maimonides devotes the bulk of The Guide to expounding the true, deeper meaning behind such biblical metaphors as God’s face, eyes or hands, or such locutions as God’s speaking, repenting or being angry.

Though Maimonides believes that the Bible properly understood, is in harmony with philosophic truth as exemplified for him primarily by Aristotle, he is not over-awed by the great Stagirite. Thus, in one crucial instance he maintains the biblical view of creation in time as philosophically more tenable than the Greek conception of pre-existent, eternal matter.

To understand Maimonides aright, it must be kept in mind that The Guide of the Perplexed was one of his two great masterpieces; the other, far greater in extent, was his massive Code of Jewish Law, his Mishneh Torah, a magisterial presentation and reorganization of fourteen books of the vast expanse of rabbinic law.

There have been some medieval pietists who believed that Maimonides was really a heretic masquerading as a pious and observant Jew and denounced his writings to the Dominican Fathers, who obligingly burned The Guide at the stake in Paris with other Jewish classics. In more recent times, some have ventured to suggest that The Guide was the “real” Maimonides, and the Mishneh Torah is either an aberration or a cover to shield him against the fanatics, a position apparently close to that of Strauss. In view of the sheer size of the Mishneh Torah, the complexity of the material, the brilliance of the presentation, the encyclopedic knowledge, and above all, the independence of views he manifested throughout the work, the latter view can hardly commend itself to anyone who examines his great Code.

The final proof of the view that the “real” Maimonides speaks to us, not either in The Guide or in the Code, but in both, is to be found in “The Book of Knowledge,” the first of the fourteen books of the Mishneh Torah. Here he presents his philosophical and theological system as the indispensable introduction to the detailed presentation of Jewish law in the following thirteen books.

As Burnyeat notes, Strauss undoubtedly experienced a conflict between reason and religion himself. Failing to find a solution, Strauss evidently projected his frustration upon Maimonides by “discovering that Maimonides said that they—philosophy and the Jewish religion—were compatible, but meant that they were not.” (Italics mine.) Strauss may have thought them irreconcilable; Maimonides did not.

Robert Gordis
New York City

M.F Burnyeat replies:
Glad as I am to have helped Professor Cropsey understand the book he edited, I beg to remind him that not everything written in code deserves the effort, be it large or small, of deciphering the author’s meaning. The intention of being profound is not the same as a profound intention.

Likewise, while the effort which has been devoted to translating Strauss into various languages is evident from the (incomplete) listing in the bibliography to Studies in Platonic Philosophy, this effort has not been rewarded by the emergence of a following, let alone a cult like that which Strauss and Straussian teachers have managed to create in the US. For example, Strauss in Italian has been received with sustained and often hostile criticism, which is documented by P. Taboni in Studi Urbinati 48 (1974), pp. 191–220, and G. Giorgini in Il Mulino 33 (1984), pp. 396–416. In fact, the hypothesis of “Mr. Strauss’s charisma” (a phrase to be appreciated by initiates who have read Strauss on Weber) seems to be amply confirmed by Professor Jaffa’s letter.

Let me then assure Professor Jaffa that, whatever the historical genesis of his belief in the meaningfulness of the great questions, there are lots of non-Straussians who dispute the fact-value dichotomy and who have never even been tempted by the historicist fallacy as he describes it. What has Jaffa been reading for the past forty years? He illustrates non-Straussian political philosophy by quoting one statement from a book published in 1922 and inventing for it a positivistic meaning which, in its context (p. 277), it does not have. He surely has had time to catch up with the 1942 reprint of Becker’s book, whose preface states that the brutalities of Nazism have enabled men once more to believe that “liberty, equality, fraternity” and “inalienable rights of men” are phrases that denote realities.

Becker was interested in the conditions which make certain beliefs possible (a worthwhile and important inquiry, which need not lead to relativism). He meant that in 1942 it had become possible to return to a faith that the nineteenth century had lost. In his humane, gentlemanly way he would perhaps have wondered at the intellectual environment and educational influences which enabled Jaffa in 1959 to write that the differences between Lincoln and Aristotle on the justice of slavery are more apparent than real, on this basis commending to his twentieth-century readers the proposition that in circumstances of economic scarcity it could be just to sanction the ownership of slaves (Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided, Doubleday, 1959, pp. 342–346). So much for Jaffa on natural right as “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.”

The manner in which Jaffa commends his proposition about slavery can be compared to the manner in which Strauss commends to his readers the proposition that the just citizen is one who helps his friends and harms his enemies: by exegetical pleading rather than by independent argument. We are not given reasons why we should believe these propositions true, only reasons why Lincoln/Aristotle/Xenophon’s Socrates should be thought to have believed them true. Disturbing recommendations with far-reaching political consequences are to be accepted on the strength of nothing more than a systematic misreading of “old books” (Jaffa’s understanding of Aristotle is abysmal). No wonder Jaffa appeals to the tablets of law brought down by Moses from Sinai. But no wonder also that my review, when considering the enormous influence of Strauss and his ideas in the US, should call attention to the presence of a Straussian on the National Security Council, which directs the work of the CIA and advises the President on his dealings with “enemies.”

The point, as I expressed it, was that “something more than an academic quarrel is taking place” when Strauss defends his eccentric views. His misreadings of old books are not merely influential. They could have consequences in the real world of politics. If I had been writing a critique of monetarism, showing it to be an ill-conceived theory derived by special pleading from data inadequately grasped, it would not, I submit, be McCarthyite to note the presence of a leading monetarist among the President’s economic advisers.

We need not debate “the precise sense” of the term McCarthyite (that rhetorical flourish merely reveals the imprecision of the writer’s sense). For Professor Bloom’s letter is itself a prime example of Straussian hermeneutics. The idea of a Straussian political conspiracy was hatched in Bloom’s mind; it appears nowhere in the text of my review. Nor did I argue, “Carnes Lord served in the National Security Council, therefore he lacks scholarly integrity.” (For the record, Lord’s published work shows him to be a better scholar in the field of ancient political philosophy than either Strauss or Bloom.) Would it be McCarthyite to add that Bloom’s systematic misreading of my text is designed to have practical consequences?

The saddest feature of Bloom’s response is his apparent inability to distinguish between criticism and persecution, irony and malice. Rather than give a reasoned reply either to my essay or to Charles R. Kesler’s calmly argued critique in the National Review, he immediately divides the world into friends and enemies of the Straussian truth. The same “paranoid logic” (to borrow Bloom’s precise phrase) is evident in Professor Cropsey’s letter. Never mind that my review was gentleness itself compared to the scorn and derision with which Strauss reviewed Collingwood, for example, or Eric Havelock. The Master must be sacrosanct; he is too serious a thinker for reasoned discussion, not to mention David Levine’s cartoon.

It is all so unlike Strauss’s hero (and mine) Plato, who believed that the essence of philosophy is to be found in argument and discussion infused with irony and playful levity, and who surrounded himself, in the Academy he created, with men who disagreed with his ideas and did their best to refute them. That is why I put quotation marks round the word “philosopher” as it occurs in Straussian writings. Cropsey may be indignant but Strauss’s conception of what a philosopher is stands so far from Plato’s that it would be misleading to appear to accept that they are talking about the same thing. For the same reason I am happy to acknowledge that I belong to the “conventional establishment” consisting of readers of Plato since the fourth century BC who have found in the expressed meanings of Plato’s dialogues the paradigm of great philosophy.

This brings me to the arguments of Professors Weinrib, Pangle, and Orwin—and all honor to them for replying with arguments, at least on questions of interpretation—about the role of the philosopher in Plato’s Republic.

Weinrib’s argument supposes that one can derive or discern a general principle or definition of justice from a single example of just action. This is a mistake; a mistake, moreover, of a type which Plato’s Socrates is constantly correcting (e.g., at the beginning of the Euthyphro). The philosophers’ undertaking to rule the ideal city does fall under the principle of helping one’s friends and harming one’s enemies, but it also falls under thirty-one other principles, including Thrasymachus’s definition of justice as serving the interests of the stronger. Thus the nonphilosophical majority is the largest and so the strongest group in the city, and Socrates has already shown how their interests will be best looked after if they are governed by philosophers. By parity of reasoning Weinrib should conclude that Thrasymachus’s definition “remains decisive” despite being the main target of Socrates’ criticism both in Book I and in the remainder of the Republic.

The truth is that to discover what principle of justice motivates the philosophers to rule it is necessary to read Plato rather than Strauss. In the context we are considering Socrates does not simply say that it is just for the philosophers to undertake the tasks of government. He explains why it is just, as follows:

It’s not the concern of law that any one class in the city fare exceptionally well, but it contrives to bring this about in the entire city, harmonizing the citizens by persuasion and compulsion, making them share with one another the benefit which each person is able to bring to the community. And it produces such men in the city not in order to let them turn whichever way each wants, but in order that it may use them in binding the city together.

(Republic, 519e–520a; Bloom’s translation, with corrections)

This implies that the claim on the philosophers arises from the impartial justice of a set of social arrangements which requires everyone, without exception, to contribute what they are able to contribute to the good of everyone else. (If the philosophers are able to contribute more than other people; so be it: they will be the first to recognize that it is only just that they do so.) This principle of everyone doing what they are best suited to do to the benefit of everyone else is the principle established in Book IV of the Republic as constitutive of the justice of the ideal city. We have no alternative but to accept it as Plato’s answer to Weinrib’s question “Under what principle of justice is it just for the philosophers to rule?”

Besides, from Plato’s point of view Weinrib’s answer has the priorities the wrong way round. The citizens of the ideal city do not benefit each other because they are friends; rather, they are friends because they benefit each other (Republic 462a ff.)

So much for the question whether the philosophers can be induced to rule in the ideal city itself. Professors Pangle and Orwin are quite right that the passage under discussion presupposes the ideally just city already in existence. In a state which is not run for the benefit of all but only for the mutual advantage of some group of “friends,” there is no social justice to make claims on the philosopher to participate. Accordingly, I did not argue, as Pangle and Orwin imagine, that the passage shows that the ideal city can come into existence. I argued that, when correctly understood, the passage does not show, as Strauss imagined (The City and Man, p.124), that the ideal city cannot come into existence. I was rebutting Strauss’s contention that the ideal city is intrinsically impossible, because the philosophers could not be induced to rule. Pangle and Orwin appear to agree with me, against Strauss, that they could be induced to rule if the ideal city is already in existence. In which case we have to look elsewhere in the Republic to decide whether Plato means us to think that the ideal city could not come into being.

Socrates says emphatically at 499d that it is not impossible that somewhere, sometime, a divine inspiration should give those in power a passion for philosophy or that some necessity should constrain one or more philosophers to take charge of a city; perhaps it has already happened far away or in the distant past. As in the passage discussed above, Socrates insists that a philosopher will take part in politics only with reluctance and from necessity, i.e., because he sees compelling reasons to do so. The compelling argument will be different from the argument from social justice which constrains the philosophers who have been educated within the ideal city, but that difference provides no basis for impugning Socrates’ sincerity when he asserts here, as elsewhere, that it is possible for Utopia to get started. The ideal city will get started by one argument and continued by another: there is no logical absurdity in that, merely the difference between an argument about preserving justice and an argument about bringing it into being.

If Pangle and Orwin reply that the passage they quote implies that it would actually be unjust for philosophers who have not been educated in the ideal city to take part in the launching of Utopia, the answer is that the original Greek implies no such thing. There is a difference between the philosophers’ not having a duty to take part in politics and their having a duty not to take part. Bloom’s translation, used by Pangle and Orwin for the second sentence of their quotation, may suggest the latter, but the former would be more adequate to Plato’s Greek. This is not the place to discuss the nuances of a translation (where Bloom writes “has justice on its side,” Plato is not using his normal word for justice but a more archaic one, appropriate to the situation he is describing in which social justice does not yet exist), but the substance of the point I am making is confirmed at 496d, where Socrates gives as the reason why a philosopher will keep out of the present-day politics of actual cities the lack of “an ally with whose aid one could safely champion the cause of justice.” The consideration is conditional. It would lapse if an ally was found with enough power to help make justice real. (I wonder whether Weinrib believes that a Platonic philosopher would find many such allies in the present administration of the US.)

Weinrib, however, has a more general argument for supposing that Plato does not mean what Socrates explicitly says in the various passages we have now examined. He appeals to Plato’s Phaedrus and to the Seventh Letter as favoring Strauss’s approach to “the meaning” of a Platonic text rather than mine. Strauss had the same thought (The City and Man, pp. 52–54), though he wisely refrained from mentioning the Seventh Letter, which may be a forgery. But Strauss had to use Straussian hermeneutics on the Phaedrus to get that dialogue to justify using Straussian hermeneutics on other Platonic texts. An appeal to the Phaedrus does nothing to extricate the Straussian approach from the vicious circularity with which I charged it.

Platonic scholarship urgently needs a decent understanding of what the Phaedrus means to say about writing. But that understanding will require literary methods more sophisticated than any that Strauss purveyed. Nor can it be assumed in advance that the Phaedrus aims to tell us how to read the Republic. One of the many objectionable features of the Straussian approach is the blunderbuss way it treats all dialogues alike. In place of the scintillating variety which Plato’s artistry created, Strauss puts “the Platonic dialogue” and a uniform Maimonidean recipe for decoding its hidden meaning. And yet, if Professor Gordis is right, this whole saga of misreading began with a misreading of Maimonides.

In considering this, the last but certainly not the least important letter, we should distinguish two Straussian claims:

(1)The Guide of the Perplexed is an example of “esoteric literature,” whose message is “written between the lines.”

(2) The message between its lines is that philosophy and religion cannot be reconciled.

I did not endorse claim (2), but wrote of Strauss “having, as he thought, discovered” that Maimonides meant the opposite of what he said; Gordis truncates the relevant passage in my review, omitting “as he thought.” Nevertheless, Gordis’s confirmation of my skepticism about claim (2) is a sufficient answer to Pangle and Orwin’s complaint that I neglected Strauss’s treatment of “the theological-political problem.” There is a limit to the number of confusions one can tackle in a single review.

As regards claim (1), however, I plead guilty. I was impressed with the fact that Maimonides does—Gordis seems not to deny this—instruct the learned reader how to gather his meaning from hints, indications, and deliberate contradictions. For example, the seventh cause of contradiction is the following:

In speaking about very obscure matters it is necessary to conceal some parts and to disclose others. Sometimes in the case of certain dicta this necessity requires that the discussion proceed on the basis of a certain premise, whereas in another place necessity requires that the discussion proceed on the basis of another premise contradicting the first one. In such cases the vulgar must in no way be aware of the contradiction; the author accordingly uses some device to conceal it by all means.

(p. 18 in the Pines translation)

Two pages later Maimonides tells us that contradictions from this seventh cause are to be found in The Guide of the Perplexed. Strauss certainly has more to go on here than he has with Plato. But I should be only too happy to have a critic like Gordis take me through the Guide explaining in detail how and where Strauss has got it wrong.

Meanwhile, readers who have found much of this polemic distasteful can recover their good humor by reading a short story by Oscar Wilde entitled “The Sphinx Without a Secret.”

In response to:
Sphinx Without a Secret from the May 30, 1985 issue

To the Editors:

In his review of a book by Leo Strauss [NYR, May 30], M.F. Burnyeat quotes me several times on the subject of Strauss as a teacher. Permit me a few clarifications.

In the course I described, Strauss generated excitement for a text by Hobbes, along with the suspicion of its truth. Since Burnyeat goes on to “demonstrate” that Strauss thought Hobbes part of modern rot, that endeavour becomes unintelligible according to him. But what Burnyeat does not comprehend is not thereby incomprehensible.
Strauss did, indeed, teach us to begin by trying to understand a thinker the way he understood himself. I know of no better way to begin. A goal Burnyeat considers illusory does not thereby become an illusion, except, perhaps, for himself. Burnyeat has certainly failed to understand me the way I understand myself. It makes me wonder how he fares with great texts.
Since Strauss taught a number of different and differing texts, he did not ask us to surrender our critical intellect; he awakened it. I know of nothing more calculated to awaken one’s critical powers than to ponder with an open mind the disagreements between, say, Hobbes and Plato.

Similarly, we were not asked to abandon our selves, but to fulfill ourselves by contact with texts written by minds greater than ours.

Strauss did teach us to see certain problems inherent in political ambition. In the century of Stalin and Hitler, that does not seem especially problematic to me.

These remarks are aimed at readers of The New York Review, not Burnyeat. We inspiring teachers know a hopeless case when we see one.

Werner J. Dannhauser

Ithaca, New York

M.F Burnyeat replies:
If the English words “understand a thinker the way he understands himself” mean what they say, then for me to understand Professor Dannhauser the way he understands himself it would be necessary, for a start, that I should have read the books that Dannhauser has read and had the thoughts that Dannhauser has had, and necessary that I should not have read the books I have read and had the thoughts I have had. I conclude that, fortunately, “understanding a thinker the way he understands himself” describes an illusory, because impossible, goal.

I do not conclude that I do not understand Professor Dannhauser’s letter, nor that Dannhauser does understand what he himself has written. I doubt that any Straussian understands their magic formula “understanding a thinker the way he understood himself”; certainly, none of them has made any serious attempt to explain it. What is clear is that they use it to block criticism of, e.g., Hobbes from the standpoint of contemporary thought.

The students are asked to set aside their own opinions (those “watered-down teachings derived from Marx, Freud, and others” as Dannhauser described them in the article from which I quoted), and told that in order to understand Hobbes “as he understood himself” they must assume that his teaching is “simply true.” When they discover that modern rot sets in with Machiavelli and Hobbes, this is not because their own opinions have been brought back into play, but because they have been put through the same process in order to understand, e.g., Plato “as he understood himself.” Such criticism of Hobbes as Strauss permits is criticism of Hobbes from the standpoint of “ancient wisdom.” As I explained in my review, it is Plato (as misread by Strauss) who shows that Hobbes starts the modern rot, not the students themselves.

Strauss did not disguise the fact that on his picture of intellectual inquiry the students’ own opinions have no standing and deserve no respect. My phrases “surrender of the critical intellect” and “abandoning of self” are simply English words which describe the state of affairs.