Leo Strauss 101.

Reading Leo Strauss:

Politics, Philosophy, Judaism, by Steven B. Smith

(Chicago, 256 pp., $32.50)

AN enormous amount of nonsense has been written about Leo Strauss over the last several years. Liberal journalists who appear never to have read a word of the long-dead philosopher's work assure us that the war in Iraq is a practical application of his ideas. Tim Robbins's antiwar play Embedded portrays Strauss as a sinister ideologue who promoted deception of the masses as a means of fostering a militant nationalism. Nor has the nonsense all come from the political left. Conservative writer Daniel Flynn suggests, in his book Intellectual Morons, that Straussian methods of textual analysis may have led the Defense Department into a faulty reading of pre-war intelligence vis-a-vis Saddam's purported WMD stockpiles.

Yale professor Steven Smith's book is intended, in part, to dispel such myths, and provides a sober and lucid overview of Strauss's thinking about matters of philosophy, politics, and religion, albeit from Smith's interpretive point of view. His emphasis is on Strauss's defense of liberal democracy as a solution to what he called the "theologico-political problem"; in Smith's telling, Strauss's defense rests on a kind of philosophical skepticism. Smith is clearly sympathetic to Strauss's views as he understands them; he succeeds in his attempt to show that those views bear little resemblance to the caricatures now in circulation, and are worthy of the serious consideration of liberals and conservatives alike. Unfortunately, in his desire to distance Strauss from Bush-administration policy in particular and neoconservatism in general, he sometimes overstates his case. More significantly, he fails to consider some potential difficulties facing the Straussian worldview as he has interpreted it. Still, his take on Strauss is instructive, and if he doesn't answer all the important questions he at least raises them.

In this, Smith is very Straussian indeed. Strauss understood philosophy as concerned with the "permanent problems"--traditional questions about the nature and grounds of justice, the existence of God, and so forth--that are "permanent" because, it is alleged, no settled answers to these questions are possible. In Strauss's view, the thinker who decisively chooses one set of answers over the others has ceased to be a philosopher and become a "sectarian." But if philosophy is concerned with constant questioning and discussing, rather than with providing solutions or upholding hallowed dogmas, it poses a potential threat to traditional societies. Hence the "theologico-political problem," the inevitable conflict between philosophy and divine revelation, reason and faith, "Athens and Jerusalem."

On Smith's interpretation of Strauss, liberal democracy provides the best solution to this problem, or at least (as Churchill would have put it) the worst except for all the others. Its tendency to foster toleration and open-mindedness recommends it to the philosopher as the sort of regime most conducive to his way of life, and its allowance for private religious discrimination in exchange for neutrality between religions in the public sphere makes it possible for traditional believers to practice their ancient ways as they see fit without threatening the liberty of non-believers to choose to do otherwise.

And yet liberal democracies have dogmas of their own, especially egalitarian ones. They also tend to cater to the lowest tastes and impulses, so that while they value science and technology for the consumer goods they provide, democracies make high culture and higher moral sensibilities difficult to maintain. This in turn threatens the stability and longevity of the democratic regime itself. For these reasons Strauss believed that a true friend of democracy ought never to be its "flatterer." The philosopher ought, in his view, to uphold the older ideal of democracy as a "universal aristocracy," in the face of the vulgar "mass democracy" that has displaced it. This requires defending and practicing liberal education as a means of inculcating an understanding and respect for the permanent problems, and thereby producing an elite fit to govern on the basis of wisdom and merit rather than birth. It also requires a certain degree of caution, since--given the inherently elitist character of liberal education--the philosopher is bound to find himself at odds to some extent even with a democratic regime.

Here is where critics of Strauss and his followers often accuse them of advocating a resort to the "noble lie," and in particular of a false populism that cynically caters in public to fundamentalist religious believers whose faith Straussians privately reject, as a way of upholding public order and traditional morality. But, as Smith notes, this accusation is misconceived on two counts. First of all, while Strauss was not himself an orthodox believer, neither was he a convinced atheist. Since whether or not to accept a purported divine revelation is itself one of the "permanent" questions, orthodoxy must always remain an option equally as defensible as unbelief. Second, what Strauss was in favor of was neither lying nor the active promotion of any particular doctrine, but rather mere tact, silence, or--at worst--obfuscation where one's teaching might seem to threaten the unsophisticated but decent opinions of the people who make up the bulk of society.

This alleged predilection for the "noble lie" is something Strauss is supposed to have inherited from Plato, and, in general, Strauss regarded his political philosophy as Platonic in character. Here another controversial aspect of Strauss's work comes into play, namely his idiosyncratic interpretations of many of the great thinkers of the past. Plato is often regarded as having proposed, at least as an instructive ideal, a "utopian" society that can only be described as totalitarian, but, as Smith tells us, Strauss considered this merely an ironic warning against the dangers of utopian thinking.

Strauss also showed little interest in Plato's famous "Theory of Forms," the idea that there are timeless and objective essences of things, existing in a realm apart from either the human mind or the material world, and knowledge of which is the goal of philosophical inquiry. This view is typically regarded as the paradigm of a philosophy committed to the existence of objective truth, and it has had an enormous impact on the history of Western thought, and indeed Western civilization in general. Yet Strauss was dismissive of it, regarding it as a "fantastic" and "utterly incredible" doctrine. Plato's real concern, in Strauss's view, was similar to his own: not contemplation of the Forms but rather the activity of contemplation itself, the asking of the permanent questions rather than the answering of them.

Strauss's glib dismissal of the Forms was oddly reminiscent of the scientism or positivism whose stranglehold over modern intellectual life he was wont to criticize. Furthermore, Strauss's insistence that the genuine philosopher must be skeptical about the possibility of finding solutions to philosophical problems risks providing aid and comfort to the relativism he believed posed the greatest threat to modern liberal democracies. To be sure, to say that we cannot discover objective answers doesn't entail that they don't exist, but this is a distinction that is bound to be lost on the average non-philosopher, for whom the view that no answers are possible sounds little different from the view that every answer is as good as every other. These are issues Smith would have done well to explore.

Smith is also unconvincing, and occasionally unfair, when attempting to divorce Strauss's thought from recent neoconservative policy. He tells us that he does "not regard Strauss as a conservative (neo- or otherwise) but rather as a friend of liberal democracy"--as if being conservative (neo- or otherwise) excluded being in favor of liberal democracy, and indeed, as if neoconservatives were not frequently accused of being too eager to spread liberal democracy around the globe! He informs us that Strauss was a staunch Zionist, resisted internationalism of the sort enshrined in the U.N., and was critical of liberalism's lack of self-confidence in the face of Soviet Communism. Smith even finds echoes of this failure of self-confidence in the "self-doubt, if not self-contempt" evinced by many liberal intellectuals in response to the rise of Islamism. Yet after all this, he peremptorily asserts that Strauss's writings imply a critique of the war in Iraq.

Smith's justification for this claim is that Strauss would have been skeptical of the utopianism inherent in pro-war rhetoric about bringing an "end to evil"; for evil, Strauss would have insisted, cannot be entirely eliminated in this life. But surely such political boilerplate must be distinguished from actual policy. To my knowledge, the Bush administration hasn't proposed an invasion of Hell. And its willingness to ally the United States with the likes of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia surely proves that the idealism, however heartfelt, has indeed been tempered by an understanding of geopolitical reality. One would think a student of Strauss, of all people, would know how to read between the lines, and understand that stirring rhetoric is part of the job description of the statesman.

Mr. Feser's most recent book is The Philosophy of Mind: A Short Introduction.