33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Getting to know Leo Strauss, November 25, 2007
This review is from: Leo Strauss: An Introduction to His Thought and Intellectual Legacy (The Johns Hopkins Series in Constitutional Thought) (Paperback)
I am somewhat acquainted with Leo Strauss. I have read Natural Rights and History and Persecution and the Art of Writing. I have read works by several Straussians including Paul Rahe, Michael Zuckert and Herbert Storing. I have found myself fascinated by the seeming demonization of Strauss by some of my fellow leftists as the portrait they paint of him is not the way I see him from his writings.
I chose Pangle as an introductory guide because I have read several of his books and I find him to be a superb scholar. I have no idea how this book compares with that of the Zuckerts, Tanquey, Smith, Meier, etc. I have no idea how fair the more critical books of Drury are. I have read none of the above and can offer no guidance as to the relative strengths
of the various attempts to interpret Strauss.
What I will do is attempt to tell you why you should read Pangle on Strauss. For Pangle offers a compelling vision of the Straussian project and the way it has grown since Strauss' death.
The first thing that struck me about Pangle's book was a methodological point. It has always struck me that (arguably) the most important methodological point ever expressed was Hamlet's admonition, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy". Strauss wants us to remain open to the possibility that not only are our answers wrong but that we may not even be asking the right, or most important, questions (Pangle, p.4). Even our hopes may be the wrong ones (p.29). In order to confront these possibilities, we must engage in a serious debate with our greatest thinkers.
Two things must be said about this. Strauss has a very large idea of the Western tradition. It encompasses Jewish and Islamic thought as well as Christian. The second point is that it is again necessary to state that ancient philosophies may be closer to the truth than our more modern ones.
I probably don't know as much about human nature as Aristotle did even with the accumulated wisdom of two thousand years. "One needs to come to understand a thinker as they understood themselves well before one tries to understand them better than they understood themselves."(p.61)
So the first and foremost Straussian methodological precept is to listen and to read with care and generosity. In this I see the Straussians as being similar to great liberal historians like Thomas Haskell and James Kloppenberg.
One of the lessons that Strauss took from his reading of Plato and Xenophon was that human nature is driven by a passionate longing for a "self-transcending union with the eternal or divine". This longing is expressed even in politics although it cannot be satisfied that way (p.49).
From Aristotle's Politics, Strauss took the idea of regime analysis. This is the idea that the central struggle within any polity is the contest for which human type will be "morally preponderant". This decision will shape the way of life within that polity more than any factor other then human nature itself(p.95) Paul Rahe book on republics provides brilliant examples of this sort of analysis. (And bears comparison with Reddy's The Navigation of Feeling).
Any one regime or mixture of regime can only manifest a partial version of truth, beauty and justice. (p.95) Modern politics tries to hide the partial nature of its vision. It tries to deny the need of the individual for transcendent union. It tries to homogenize and centralize.
In the end, Strauss feels that Western culture lost its way. It lost its belief in its own mission which was to found a polity on universal truth.
Strauss wants us to embrace that mission once again knowing that it may never work. We will not be able to eradicate human evil with democratic institutions, we must remain open to both the possibility of revelation and of atheism, we must recognize that for most people the traditions that count will remain those of their families, their communities, their nations and not some universal humanity. In spite of these probably inescapable limitations, we should continue to argue for and to actualize what is highest in the humanly possible.
I see no reason to disagree with any of this. It seems like a very worthy research program and political ideal. The methodological humility is a great corrective to many presumptions that seem to underlie much history. I do think the Straussians could do more engaging with other scholarly traditions. I kept thinking of the ways that some of the insights that Pangle was mentioning were similar to other thinkers I have read.
The Straussians have produced a ton of great books about the Founding of this country and about the enlightenment. The last chapter of Pangle is a superb guide to this literature. One weakness of this literature is that they tend to underestimate, in my opinion, the influence of other aspects of our culture than the intellectual aspect. Technology often drives our moral, political and religious thinking whether we like it or not. Can we imagine the Reformation without the printing press? Hiram Caton and Jonathan Israel offer great correctives to this flaw in their work. Israel in his first volume on the Enlightenment talks about how the possibility of the private reading of books was essential to the Enlightenment. There are few insights like this in most Straussians (Rahe is an exception).
In conclusion, Pangel has provided us with a fascinating and stimulating introduction to a seminal thinker. I plan to reread Natural Rights and History now and to go on to a few more of Struass' books. I definitely think that the Straussians belong in the conversation.
As for those of you that want to blame Struass for the neocons, you might as well blame Jesus for all the nonsense that Christians have done throughout history. Besides, when you get right down to it, the only people responsible for the Bush administration is ourselves. We always get the government we deserve. Pangle and Strauss offer us one vision of how we might deserve better. My thanks to them.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Coherent, Judicious, Rational, November 14, 2008
This review is from: Leo Strauss: An Introduction to His Thought and Intellectual Legacy (The Johns Hopkins Series in Constitutional Thought) (Paperback)
Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was one of the first (along with Frenchman, Raymond Aron), and perhaps most articulate tutors concerning civilization's latest worldwide movement (Postmodernism); an articulate examiner of America's Founding principles including their Enlightenment source, strengths and weaknesses; and lover of Socratic philosophic thought. Pangle (the author, UT Austin) was one of Strauss's students, as was Allan Bloom (U of Chicago, as was Strauss), Henry V. Jaffa and others just now beginning to be heard on various topics of the Founding, Supreme Court, de Tocqueville, community and tradition. Some on the Left, infuriated by Strauss's analysis of what he called "the crisis of the West", have set out to associate Strauss with Neo-Conservatism, i.e. linking Strauss to abuse and corruption of the Bush/Cheney administration. The "smoking gun" seems to be that Paul Wolfowitz took a class from Strauss, despite Wolfowitz claims not to be a Straussian. Some (Shadia Drury, University of Regina) link Strauss to "imperialist militarism and Christian fundamentalism", (Strauss was Jewish), claiming Straussian's make up a "cult". Thus reacting to what Pangle notes as "the powerful undertow that can be quietly exercised by authentic philosophic reflection." Pangle writes, a "febrile flurry of conspiracy theories" littered the academic Left just in time as Strauss's "malignant and demonic influence reached out from the grave through mesmerized disciples." Like Tertullian's and Irenaeus's insults leading to a two millennia search for the Gnostic Gospels, such attacks have done a great service to reveal what Strauss is truly about to a much wider audience. Naturally, Pangle rides this wave by opening his book with this topic. "Strauss exemplifies Nietzsche's observation that genuinely independent thinkers are never children of their times, they are subversive and rebellious. Their reflections are more than merely disturbing or thought provoking." Strauss left fifteen books, while those who actually knew him wrote dozens more and continue to do so.
Pangle attempts to summarize Strauss - occasionally, brevity and shorter sentences would help. Strauss, like Aristotle (as Pangle puts it) had a habit of seeking a fight. Not because he liked a fight, but because he loved the truth. We in the late modern West have lost our bearings, insists Strauss, and to such an abysmal extent that we are in the process of becoming bereft of even a capacity to pursue a quest for answers. While quite obvious today, it was an original realization in the time of Strauss. "Under the influence of our prestigious intellectual authorities we no longer confidentially believe in rationally demonstrable, universal and permanent truth of principles we share and defend." "Worse, we doubt the very possibility of any such principles... Our Western values are held only as a matter of historical accident... As a consequence we are a culture slipping into spiritual disintegration and bewilderment." Our modern tyranny, notes Strauss, is an ideological one, "understanding itself as guided by comprehensive, normative-scientific, quasi-philosophical analysis of the human condition." The struggle now is merely over orthodox interpretations of this ideology while we busy ourselves with specialties learning "more and more about less and less". Morality is now scorned through an easy going belief that all points of view are equal (except traditional ones), coupled with a strident belief that arguments for superior or distinctive morality, way of life or human type is elitist, bigoted, antidemocratic and immoral. This is what Strauss means by our "contemporary crisis of the West", where he asks if any fundamental concept can be adhered to or, in terms of Constitutional law, enforced in a climate of historical and cultural relativism?
Pangle may seem a bit muddled when it comes to Strauss's position on science in the study of man. But the reader should be mindful that Pangle and his sort cast a jaundiced view on science as it has been adopted by the "social studies". Admittedly there is a measure of smugness even from authentic scientists when it comes to beliefs, traditions, etc. (See the balanced treatment of Michael Polanyi.) However, to physical scientists it's abundantly clear that "science" employed in sociology, cultural studies, feminist theory, etc. are far from anything we could distinguish. When commandeered by non-scientists in the humanities, science becomes a dangerous thing completely unrecognizable as anything other than agenda. But science proper can appear indicted by Pangle as though it willingly finds itself in such fields.
Pangle excels in areas frequented by his Constitutional expertise when he reports his Straussian emphasis on means over ends, as means expresses a moral choice to ends and are reflective of what is seen as central to humanity. If ends are all that matter, there's no need for checks and balance or limits to power, one may get there any way they choose. (Such is the source of ire from Conservatives over legislation from the Court, and violating the Constitution by yet another undeclared war outraging Liberals - who prefer to be known as Progressives again.) All-in-all a splendid, brief, but meaty introduction to a national asset.
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