A Thinker's Progress.

Leo Strauss: The Early Writings, 1921-1932, translated and edited by Michael Zank (SUNY, 238 pp., $22.95)

The achievement of Leo Strauss has in recent years begun to be generally recognized even by those who did not have the privilege of studying with him or with his students. In 1959, Willmoore Kendall identified Strauss as "the great teacher of political philosophy, not of our time alone, but of any time since Machiavelli"; the rest of the world is starting to catch up with Kendall's assessment.

Over the past 15 years some 20 books have been written on Strauss. The most striking feature of this mini-explosion of scholarship is the sheer range of positions attributed to him. Given that Strauss has been portrayed as almost everything from a pious Jew to a closet Nietzschean, one could be forgiven for believing that all that can be said about him with confidence is that he was not a Communist, an advocate of German imperialism, or a Christian fundamentalist. Though much of this recent scholarship is of dubious value, the increased attention to Strauss has had the positive result of making accessible many hitherto uncollected Strauss writings, some unpublished ones, and his correspondence with such leading contemporaries as Gershom Scholem and Alexandre Kojeve. Much of the credit belongs to the monumental editorial labors of Heinrich Meier, who has been editing the German edition of Strauss's "collected writings" (three large volumes, so far).

Unfortunately, a project similar in scope to Meier's has not yet been undertaken in English; there have, however, been more modest efforts, to which Michael Zank's new translation of Strauss's early writings is a valuable addition. Zank's volume is "intended as a contribution to the study of the origins of the political philosophy of Leo Strauss," and it accomplishes that task. Zank places at the reader's disposal the young Strauss's passionate advocacy of political Zionism and his early confrontations with Spinoza, consideration of whom helped lead Strauss to formulate his teaching on "the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns."

Zank's lengthy introduction, however, does Strauss -- and the reader -- a disservice. He attempts to discover an essential continuity ththroughout Strauss's work, and in doing so he occasionally crosses the bounds of the plausible. To take the most important example: In 1932, Strauss wrote of a "change of orientation" that enabled him to overcome "the premise, sanctioned by powerful prejudices, that a return to pre-modern philosophy was impossible" and made him "ever more attentive to the manner in which heterodox thinkers of earlier ages wrote their books." Zank suggests that this famous change of orientation is more apparent than real: "While the phase of reorientation is characterized by a withdrawal from political participation for the sake of retrieving . . . the Platonic tradition, [Strauss's] earliest essays are permeated by the no less Platonic hope that Zionism might afford one of those rare moments when the philosopher might be king. To put it somewhat paradoxically, then: If there is a turn in the writings of the early Strauss, it is one from Plato to Plato."

But, in fact, one looks in vain in Strauss's writings of the 1920s for the name Plato. Furthermore, political Zionism was by its own account emphatically hard-headed; it sought not a perfectly just political order, but merely one in which the Jewish people could live in a state concretely no different from any other decent state. And as for the "Platonic hope" for the actualization of philosophic rule, it suffices to quote from Strauss's The City and Man: "The just city is not possible because of the philosophers' unwillingness to rule."

Zank's errors extend beyond this attempt at harmonizing Strauss's work. He asserts, for example, that "as a political philosopher" in the early 1930s, "Strauss cannot deny the right of the German 'national uprising'" then being led by the Nazis; but this assertion is simply untrue. In this respect there is no difference between the young Strauss and the one from the 1950s, who declared: "Passionate political action against [Nazism and fascism] is absolutely in order."

Finally, one must object to Zank's identification of Biblical revelation as what Strauss called the artificial cave, one that is beneath the original cave described by Plato from which men have to ascend to the light of the sun. In fact, for Strauss, that second, accidental cave was historicism -- the doctrine that considers all men and all thoughts to be, in essence, the products of their time. Strauss's greatest work, Thoughts on Machiavelli, indicates how misleading it is to equate that image of the second cave with revelation: "The Bible sets forth the demands of morality and religion in their purest and most intransigent form." From Strauss's point of view, revelation is not an unfortunate second cave but rather the perfection of the first cave and, as such, the most serious alternative to philosophy.

It was actually Strauss's attempt to liberate himself from historicism that culminated in his rediscovery of the premodern practice of exoteric writing. An exoteric writing conceals an author's genuine "esoteric" teaching beneath an external teaching that is acceptable to conventional authorities. Such writing is not, however, chiefly animated by a philosopher's desire to avoid the wrath of authority: This, according to Strauss, is only "the most obvious and the crudest reason" for its existence. Far more important, from the philosopher's point of view, are the broader purposes such writing serves: philosophic education and genuine freedom of thought. As Strauss wrote:

By making the discovered truth almost as inaccessible as it was before it had been discovered [the philosophic writers of the past] prevented -- to call a vulgar thing by a vulgar name -- the cheap sale of the foformulations of the truth: nobody should know even the formulations of the truth who had not rediscovered the truths by his own exertions, if aided by subtle suggestions from a superior teacher. It is in this way that the classical authors became the most efficient teachers of independent thinking.

To begin to understand the profound influence this discovery of exotericism had upon Strauss's thought and work, it is useful to contrast his earliest treatment of Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed -- "On the Bible Science of Spinoza and His Precursors," in The Early Writings -- with his great Maimonidean essay, "How To Begin To Study The Guide of the Perplexed." In the earlier essay, Strauss wrote that for Maimonides "all theoretical investigation moves in a horizon ruled and limited by authorities." Once he rediscovered exotericism, however, Strauss came to see that Maimonides's bow to authority was provisional, so much so that in the later essay he identified as the Guide's primary intention the liberation of its "typical addressee" from all authority in order to allow him to become "a genuine man of speculation." Reliance on authority is fatal to philosophy: It is of the essence of philosophy to take nothing for granted. In Natural Right and History, his most famous work, Strauss identifies "the distinction by which philosophy stands or falls" as "the distinction between reason and authority":

By submitting to authority, philosophy, in particular political philosophy, would lose its character; it would degenerate into ideology, i.e., apologetics for a given social or emerging social order, or it would undergo a transformation into theology or legal learning.

The first task of philosophic education must be the freeing of the student from this reliance. Strauss's emphasis on "the literary question" in his writings on Maimonides, as well as others, is dedicated to this end. By teaching students how they must read the great philosophic authors if they wish to understand them, Strauss facilitates the transition -- at least for a few -- from reliance upon authority to genuine freedom of thought. This is precisely the reason Kendall was moved to call Strauss "the great teacher"; and The Early Writings helps us to understand Strauss's development toward this philosophic greatness.