Leo Strauss’s role in the undermining of Christian natural law in America
This is part four in a five-part exploration of natural law. Links to all five parts will be at the beginning of part one.
Leo Strauss advances my narrative on natural law in two distinct ways. First, Strauss was a witness on the ground during the 20th century usurpation of Christian natural law and called attention to it as it was happening. 11 years after Voegelin arrived in the US, Leo Strauss gave the 1949 Walgreen Lecture. Strauss noted that just in the last generation the situation had moved on from the Christian common sense that Voegelin had soaked up. Continental philosophy and postmodernism had by now taken over secularized academia. The first influences were already felt in the law, and the more complete judicial overhaul of the 1960s was soon to follow. Here is Strauss at the opening of his Walgreen Lecture which became Natural Right and History (apologies for the long excerpt):
“It is proper for more reasons than the most obvious one that I should open this series of Charles R. Walgreen Lectures by quoting a passage from the Declaration of Independence. … ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ The nation dedicated to this proposition has now become, no doubt partly as a consequence of this dedication, the most powerful and prosperous of the nations of the earth. Does this nation in its maturity still cherish the faith in which it was conceived and raised? Does it still hold those ‘truths to be self-evident’? About a generation ago, an American diplomat could still say that ‘the natural and the divine foundation of the rights of man… is self-evident to all Americans.’ At about the same time a German scholar could still describe the difference between German thought and that of Western Europe and the United States by saying that the West still attached decisive importance to natural right, while in Germany the very terms ‘natural right’ and ‘humanity’ ‘have now become almost incomprehensible . . . and have lost altogether their original life and color.’ While abandoning the idea of natural right and through abandoning it, he continued, German thought has ‘created the historical sense,’ and thus was led eventually to unqualified relativism. What was a tolerably accurate description of German thought twenty-seven years ago would now appear to be true of Western thought in general. … Whatever might be true of the thought of the American people, certainly American social science has adopted the very attitude toward natural right which, a generation ago, could still be described, with some plausibility, as characteristic of German thought.”
The “historical sense” refers to historicism, the idea that there can be no objective and universal truth or morality, but that all understanding and morality are dependent on the historical conditions in which they were contemplated. This relativism is incompatible with traditional (aspirational) natural law theory, which presupposes an objective truth, morality, and purpose that can be discerned, though imperfectly, and worked toward. It is very interesting to note that Strauss opens his lecture series with a nostalgic appeal to natural right and even faith, contrasted against “German thought” and historicism, given that as one reads further into Natural Right and History it becomes clear that Strauss’s own views and aims are fully secular and in fact largely aligned with “German thought” and historicism.
But before I get further into my second thought on Leo Strauss, let me first introduce Strauss better by indulging in a comparison with Eric Voegelin, who seems to me a mirror-world versions of Leo Strauss. Both were born in Germany around the turn of the century and were educated in Germany, though Voegelin then went to the University of Vienna. Both studied political philosophy. Both read and were influenced by Martin Heidegger, though Strauss also took classes from Heidegger and the influence was more foundational and lasting. Both fled the Nazis and came to America (Voegelin in 1938, Strauss in 1937). Both spent the rest of their careers in American universities as philosophers with a heavy emphasis on classics. In fact they both spent their careers trying separately to create a new foundation for philosophy rooted in the classics.
The mirror world flip happened with their exposure to the American Christian natural law way of life. Voegelin was converted to the American way, and cast off his Heideggerian influence. Voegelin emphatically rejected secularism. His version of philosophy combined religious ideas and reason freely (as does John Locke, though in a very different style). Strauss, on the other hand, retained his Heideggerian orientation and sought to convert America to this more continental way of thinking. Strauss was a secularist who believed that revelation and reason are wholly different and immiscible categories of thought.
Leo Strauss was also famously interested in esoteric writing, the idea that one can write a message that will be read in one way that will be acceptable to mainstream outsiders who don’t dig too deeply (the exoteric reading), but with a completely different message for insiders (the esoteric reading) that would likely be considered subversive to the mainstream. I see Strauss’s opening appeal to nostalgia for a Christian natural right as the exoteric message of Natural Right and History, while those who read deeper find Strauss’s aim to be very much the opposite, in fact to replace Christian natural law with a secular and relativistic alternative.
Unlike Voegelin who lost his taste for “German thought,” Leo Strauss was overtly influenced by Heidegger, whose philosophical project was to roll back the West to a time before Christianity and before introspective philosophy, a time supposedly of “Dasein” or authentic pure being. Strauss’s project was similarly to roll back the West and Christianity with the deviation that his telos was a secular version of classical Greek rationalism, rather than a pre-Socratic way of being.
Strauss ostensibly positioned himself as a proponent of natural right and the Founding philosophy. He astutely recognized “the requirements for wisdom on the one hand, and the requirements of consent or freedom on the other,” but at the same time he referred to natural law as a “contradiction in terms.” For me, if there is a true nature then law and right are two sides of the same coin. Perhaps the distinction for Strauss has to do with his different concept of nature, which is antithetical to the Lockean or Christian natural law upon which the US was founded. Natural rights arise for Strauss, absent law, out of a purely Hobbesian notion that man has a right to do what is required for self preservation, not from any inherent dignity in humanity. For Strauss, the “nature” of natural right is based not on searching for the divine nature and potential of man, but on Heidegger’s principle of authentic natural or primal desires untainted by religion, which he makes clear in Natural Right and History. Religion for Strauss means external control in contradiction to nature. Strauss’s nature is not Christian or classical but what I referred to as the “pop culture natural law.”
In fact, Strauss rejects not only Lockean natural law, but Lockean liberalism as well. For Strauss, the ideal was not freedom and equality of opportunity but a progressive philosopher king with a mandate to ensure social justice or equality of outcome. As Strauss put it in Natural Right and History, “there cannot be justice, i.e., giving to everyone what is by nature good for him, except in a society in which wise men are in absolute control.”
One of the means Strauss used to undermine Christian natural law was “discovering” an esoteric reading of Christian natural law in John Locke’s writings that erased the Christian foundation and made Locke into a secularist and Hobbesian like Strauss himself. This is quite astonishing given that Locke’s writings are filled with Christian references, themes, and foundational theological assumptions. For example, in his Essays on the Law of Nature he gives a straightforward explanation for the Christian teleology of his natural law philosophy:
“Since God shows Himself to us as present everywhere and, as it were, forces Himself upon the eyes of men as much in the fixed course of nature now as by the frequent evidence of miracles in time past, I assume there will be no one to deny the existence of God, provided he recognizes either the necessity for some rational account of life, or that there is a thing that deserves to be called virtue or vice. This then being taken for granted, and it would be wrong to doubt it, namely, that some divine being presides over the world…it seems just therefore to inquire whether man alone has come into the world altogether exempt from any law applicable to himself, without a plan, rule, or any pattern of his life. No one will easily believe this, who has reflected upon Almighty God, or the unvarying consensus of the whole of mankind at every time and in every place, or even upon himself or his conscience.”
Here Locke makes it explicit that man has a divine purpose, which purpose forms the basis of Locke’s natural law theory. He also describes his Christian assumptions as being in accordance with reason, because he believes in the reasonableness of Christianity (the title of another of his works). How does Strauss deal with this obvious contradiction to his secular Locke theory? In a 1958 lecture at the University of Chicago, Strauss focuses on the “provided” clause of the first sentence to suggest that Locke isn’t really assuming a belief in God. He calls out the last clause in the excerpt above to suggest that Locke thinks the natural law can be derived from reason alone and doesn’t depend on theological assumptions, concluding in the end that Locke is in fact pushing a secular and godless natural law. Strauss’s rhetorical trickery flips the whole clear meaning of Locke’s natural law theory on its head. His lectures continue the textual analysis in that style, turning upside down the clear meaning or extrapolating from a small phrase an idea that contradicts the entire thrust of his writing elsewhere.
It is possible that Locke could have opened his Essays on the Law of Nature with an appeal to theology as an exoteric message but then switched to an opposite esoteric message as one reads on, much as Strauss himself does in Natural Right and History. But first of all, Essays on the Law of Nature was written almost 30 years before Locke ever published anything, long before he achieved his fame. The essays were only to be found in his personal notebooks until first published in 1954. The idea that he would have composed these unpublished notes with esoteric and exoteric messages at that stage of his life is far-fetched. And more importantly, the switch to a private meaning never happens in Locke. Locke references theology as a constant theme and basic assumption throughout his writings. He never gives the inside scoop that turns it all upside down. Strauss’s esoteric reading relies entirely on supposed subtle clues, as in the example above, but never a clear statement from Locke (unlike Strauss himself, who makes his secularism, Heidegger influence, and relativism clear to the perseverant reader).
Strauss’s secular / “reason alone” / “Hobbesian” reading of Locke has had a high degree of cultural influence even today regardless of how little it was based on and how firmly it has been repudiated by more recent scholarship on Locke. It is now common for conservatives (and progressives) to blame (or congratulate) Locke and Lockean liberalism for the valuelessness and secularism of public life today, when in reality these developments in American political philosophy were a 20th century phenomenon.
Link to part five
