Natural Right and History (Walgreen Foundation Lectures) (Paperback)

Amid the recent Leo Strauss craze, perpetuated by a largely sensationalist media blindly driven towards the holy grail of conspiracy theory, I decided to pick up Natural Right and History. While, obviously, one cannot ascertain his entire political message by merely one book, reading Natural Right and History helps obviate the connection.

Natural Right is a "biography" of the idea of natural right. Strauss traces the idea of natural right, from antiquity to modernity to postmodernity. In classic "Straussian" form, to understand the political implications of this book, you have to read painstakingly between the lines.

Strauss starts the book with a rather standard critique of historicism (historical relativism) and conventionalism. His argument against value relativism is very straight forward; hardly any social scientist today makes the claims that Strauss refutes. The new relativism is a more sophisitcated one, couched behind postmodernist word-games.

However, social science is largely built upon the theories of Max Weber. Thus, Strauss uses a reduction proof. If he can reduce social science to Weber, and if he can reduce Weber to historicism, then he can effectively show that the methodologies social science are fallacious, since he shows that historicism is false. Consequently he can show that a historicist understanding of natural right is also bunk. To be sure, this is an extremely risky strategy since the argument relies on a lengthy chain of reasoning.

Having attacked postmodern notions of natural right, Strauss restarts at antiquity and works his way up to modernity. Strauss shows the evolution of the idea of natural right, from "Socrates" to Plato to Aristotle to Hobbes to Locke to Rousseau to Burke.

So which conception of natural rights does Strauss believe in - the classical or the modern (enlightenment)? In short, he subscribes to the classical. Why? Succinctly, Strauss contends that natural right became doomed the second that Hobbes injected his hedonism into natural right.

A different way approach is to look at Strauss's juxtaposition of (classical vs modern) as (republicanism vs. liberalism). By liberalism, I mean classical liberal, i.e. enlightenment liberal. Classical liberalism is the view that individuals are prior to society. By republicanism, I do not mean anything related to the republican party. Republicanism means that individuals are willing to sacrifice their private interests to the public good, i.e. civic virtue. Republicanism means, in extremely superficial terms, that civil society is prior to the individual.

With that said, I totally disagree with Strauss's analysis, for more reasons I can delve into here. I think that the rights of classical liberalism, as Locke conceived it, is largely correct. However, Strauss plays a vital role in the ongoing conversation of rights in political science and philosophy. For producing a very challenging, thought-provoking analysis, this book gets 5 stars. Beware: it's not a light read!

Although Strauss writes "compactly" (he doesn't waste words in getting to the point), his book is quite revealing about the rationales for certain ancient, medieval, and modern political ideas. For those of us who usually find these ideas outlandish or even perverse, this book is extremely rewarding (contrary to another reviewer's vague suggestion). If you have trouble comprehending everything, consume the book in smaller bites. Those interested in the American founding, for instance, should probably concentrate on the chapter entitled "Modern Natural Right"; others may want to explore what political thought looked like before the rise of "science"; for that look at the chapter entitled "The Origin of the Idea of Natural Right". Etc. Etc.

This book is essential for anybody interested in getting a picture of the whole of Western (and even non-Western) thought, but who finds himself disenchanted with glib postmodernist glosses of what is a very complicated subject.

Strauss gave these lectures to counter what then was called historicism, the position that, because conceptions of such things as freedom and right have been so varied throughout time, that because nobody has been able to agree on what right is, that right is relative to the time. The upshod of the arguement is then, since nothing can count as right definitively, there is no right. Strauss argues that historicism, by being another appearance in history, is subject to the same criticism (therefore interally inconsistent) and that even if nobody has been able to agree on "right" doesn't mean that there isn't any such thing, but because debate has been so heated on the subject, it is only all the more evident that there is such a thing such as right.

I may be a slightly biased source, but i've read my share of Levi-Strauss and Foucault. Sure, Strauss confines himself to political philosophy, but the larger issues are there. Postmodern thought is showing strains of its own now, and Strauss pointed them out before they realized they were postmodern. Essential reading for both camps.