Leo Strauss Between Weimar and America

Adi Armon, Michelle Bubis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030243890
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This is the first book-length examination of the impact Leo Strauss' immigration to the United States had on this thinking. Adi Armon weaves together a close reading of unpublished seminars Strauss taught at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s with an interpretation of his later works, all of which were of course written against the backdrop of the Cold War. First, the book describes the intellectual environment that shaped the young Strauss' worldview in the Weimar Republic, tracing those aspects of his thought that changed and others that remained consistent up until his immigration to America. Armon then goes on to explore the centrality of Karl Marx to Strauss's intellectual biography. By analyzing an unpublished seminar Strauss taught with Joseph Cropsey at the University of Chicago in 1960, Armon shows how Strauss' fragmentary, partial engagement with Marx in writing obscured the important role that Marxism actually played as an intellectual challenge to his later political thinking. Finally, the book explores the manifestations of Straussian doctrine in postwar America through reading Strauss' The City and Man (1964) as a representative of his political teaching.

© The Author(s) 2019

A. ArmonLeo Strauss Between Weimar and Americahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24389-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Adi Armon¹

(1)

University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA

Adi Armon

End Abstract

As Karl Rossmann, a poor boy of sixteen who had been packed off to America by his parents because a servant girl had seduced him and got herself child by him, stood on the liner slowly entering the harbour of New York, a sudden burst of sunshine seemed to illuminate the Statue of Liberty, so that he saw it in a new light, although he had sighted it long before. The arm with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft, and round the figure blew the free winds of heaven . (Franz Kafka, Amerika) ¹

The political philosophy that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century was not above and beyond history. It was very much of its time, informed by the massive violence, the Holocaust, the ideologies that dominated the political landscape, and the rapid technological advances. History was seared into the flesh of various European thinkers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, such as Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), Eric Voegelin (1901–1985), Max Horkeimer (1895–1973), Theodor Adorno (1903–1969), and Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979).

Many of them had to abandon their homes and seek refuge in other countries, mostly in the United States . Some did not make it across the Atlantic: Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), for instance, ended his life before he managed to flee Europe, and his ideas were adopted and disseminated by others—primarily Arendt , Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), and Adorno . Others, such as Adorno and Horkheimer, chose to leave the United States and return to Germany several years after the end of World War II, having never felt part of American culture and politics. Arendt , Marcuse and others elected to stay in the United States and utterly transformed its political and social thought. ²

Among these émigré intellectuals was Leo Strauss (1899–1973). One of the most complex and fascinating figures of his time, Strauss has become a highly contested scholar in American discourse in recent years. He is a striking example of a German-Jewish intellectual whose thinking developed as he transitioned from Europe to America—from the Germany of the fallen Weimar Republic and Adolf Hitler’s (1889–1945) rise to power to the United States during the Cold War .

History left its mark on Strauss’ thought, which first budded in the modern, post-assimilatory world of German Jewry and matured into a coherent political philosophy in the United States . Born in Wilhelmine Germany at the turn of the century, Strauss carried the complicated burden of his German-Jewish identity and philosophical beginnings in the Weimar era into America , where he died in 1973 at the age of 74.

Safe in his new shelter, Strauss looked on as death and destruction spread throughout his homeland on the other side of the Atlantic. With Europe in ruins and the Soviet Union the new threat, Strauss’ adopted home became the leader of the Western world. In the United States , Strauss paved his way among the intelligentsia of European émigrés, growing interested in American society and politics and especially in the ideas underlying the giant democracy that was now an economic, cultural, and military superpower.

Strauss’ transition into American life would have been easier had he been a staunch supporter of democracy . However, in his formative years, he had spurned the weakness of the Weimar Republic and the values of liberalism , Enlightenment , and democracy. This continued in exile and developed into a political philosophy that encapsulated both a defense of the regime that had taken him in and a rejection of its basic elements.

This new worldview was deeply ambivalent at its core, combining a strong distaste for democracy with a desire to protect it. Although drawn to blatantly anti-liberal and counter-Enlightenment positions, Strauss also acknowledged—at times explicitly, at other times in more subtle, obscure ways—the problematic implications of this line of thinking for politics and violence in the twentieth century. As a result, he developed an anti-modern approach that despaired over the decline of the West while seeking to cure Western philosophy of its intellectual poverty. The land that gave Strauss shelter became a site of philosophical innovation: a political entity that offered safety yet needed massive improvement. Strauss’ worldview found its final form in his unique political teaching , which reached its zenith in the 1950s and 1960s.

Although he was relatively unknown in his lifetime compared to contemporaries such as Arendt , Marcuse , Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), the tables turned posthumously. Following the rise of neoconservatism in the United States in the 1980s, which had its heyday under the 2000–2008 George W. Bush (b. 1946) administration, Strauss came to be perceived as the intellectual founder of the ideology guiding American foreign policy. ³ As a result, recent studies of Strauss have been steeped in the conflict between the American right and left, conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, Straussians and anti-Straussians. Academic literature about him, replete with both defenses and vilifications, has thrown the study of this influential thinker off course.

An abundance of studies has been published portraying Strauss as a secret mastermind, a proselytizer teaching anti-democratic principles to a select few. His teachings are presented as close to fascism , given their alleged emphasis on the importance of religion, myth, and legitimizing lies for creating national unity—a combination of sorts between Plato’s “noble lie” (a concept that Strauss respected and did not denounce), Nietzschean nihilism , and Machiavellian morality. In contrast, some of Strauss’ followers or sympathizers view him as a close “friend” and “ally” of liberal democracy , and some even see Strauss as integral to post-World War II liberal thought or as a “man of peace.” ⁴

The intra-American debate, in which almost every interpretation of Strauss is ideologically aligned, has made it even harder to interpret his work correctly. Scholem called Strauss “Adam Benaftulav”—“a convoluted person” in Hebrew. ⁵ Unfortunately, the study of this thinker has become no less convoluted. Strauss remains an enigma: his real political views are hard to ascertain, we know little of his private life, he rarely shared personal information in his texts, and a comprehensive biography is yet to be written. Research on Strauss appears, therefore, to have reached a certain saturation point. Countless articles and books on various aspects of his thinking have been published over the past two decades. Numerous scholars have attempted to trace his “intellectual biography,” articulate his “intellectual legacy”, and reveal “the truth about Leo Strauss.” ⁶

Several have explored the intellectual origins that shaped the young Strauss in the Weimar Republic , in an attempt to explain the influence that the tempestuous interwar period and major German philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) may have had on the Straussian worldview. ⁷ Others have examined his views on Judaism , the Jewish question, Zionism, and the political tension between religion and philosophy. ⁸ In an autobiographical preface written in 1962 to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (1965) , the English translation of his first book, Die religionskritik Spinozas als grundlage seiner Bibelwissenschaft (1930), Strauss described himself as someone “who found himself in the grip of the theologico-political predicament.” ⁹ Unraveling this predicament has become a major academic mission, the goal being to locate Strauss on the spectrum between “Jerusalem” (revelation) and “Athens” (reason) and to establish whether his thinking was aligned with either or oscillated between the two. ¹⁰ “He is a convinced orthodox atheist. Very odd. A truly gifted intellect. I don’t like him.” Hannah Arendt’s rather amusing response to Karl Jaspers ’ (1883–1969) query about Strauss exemplifies just how hard that mission is. ¹¹

Eugene R. Sheppard’s Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile (2006) ties Strauss’ writings with his biography, following the development of his political thought from Weimar to the United States . ¹² It is one of the most important studies to date of how Strauss’ political thinking took shape. However, Sheppard stops at the end of Strauss’ first decade in the United States (1948), prematurely ending the discussion of his philosophy and its encounter with America , which peaked in his later writings and political teaching in the 1950s and 1960s. The present study takes the further step needed to shed new light on Strauss’ political thought by closely following its development from the Weimar Republic to the United States , a process that culminated in the formulation of a political credo both in the classroom and in writing.

The word “teaching” has a double meaning. A teacher imparts knowledge in a classroom, guiding pupils and at times also educating them, in an attempt to hone skills and not merely inform them but also endow them with ways of thinking, habits, and behavior. In addition, the Hebrew word for teacher (moreh) is morphologically and semantically related to the word Torah: a fully-formed doctrine representing a clear worldview and the Hebrew name for the first five books of the Bible, or the Pentateuch. For example, Maimonides’ (1135–1204) Guide for the Perplexed is called Moreh Nevuchim in Hebrew.

Leo Strauss the teacher had an intricate and enigmatic doctrine of his own. He disseminated his political ideas through interpreting the history of political philosophy, both in class and in writing. Disentangling the web of his thought, therefore, requires an examination both of his classroom teaching and of his writings. Understanding “Strauss the teacher” can help understand “Strauss the thinker.” Examining his political teaching and his political philosophy in all forms can help elucidate the motivations that guided him in the 1950s and 1960s, and possibly discover whether Strauss wished to convey a particular message or moral to his pupils and, if so, what that message was.

Penetrating the Straussian “smokescreen” requires a combination of two interpretive approaches. On one hand, while Strauss’ voice was in many ways exceptional, he was firmly grounded within his respective intellectual environments, be it in the Weimar Republic , in exile in France or the United Kingdom, or later in the United Sta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Political Philosophy of Strauss—Its Basis and Its Genesis
• 3. Strauss’ Marx
• 4. Note on the Plan of Strauss’ The City and Man
• 5. Epilogue
• Back Matter