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The European Legacy

Toward New Paradigms

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Exile and the Demos: Leo Strauss in America


Tracy B. Strong
To cite this article: Tracy B. Strong (2013) Exile and the Demos: Leo Strauss in America, The
European Legacy, 18:6, 715-726, DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2013.825092
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2013.825092

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The European Legacy, 2013


Vol. 18, No. 6, 715726, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2013.825092

Exile and the Demos: Leo Strauss in America


TRACY B. STRONG

ABSTRACT This article explores the political, as opposed to the philosophical, impact of Leo Strausss
exile in America on his thought. After a consideration of anti-Semitism and the importance Strauss
attached to being a Jew, I argue that the fact that in America he no longer wrote in his Muttersprache
but in English was central to his becoming a political theorist rather than a philosopher. Whereas as a
philosopher he was unable to speak to the demos, as a political theorist what he needed was a group of
rhetors who would carry a particular message to the demos.

The philosopher has no country.


Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
When the French begin to think they speak German.
Martin Heidegger, Interview in Der Spiegel, 1966
I am one of those who refuse to go through open doors when one can enter just as well through
a keyhole.
Leo Strauss (from New York) to Alexandre Koje`ve, 22 August 1948
On 19 May 1933, Leo Strauss wrote a letter to Karl Lowith from Paris, where he
was on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, obtained with the help of Carl Schmitt.
It was his first letter to Lowith after Hitlers assumption of power and a response to a
letter received a few days earlier in which Lowith inquired about his further plans.
Strauss answered that As a self-conscious Jew, you are really in another situation
than myself, although the general problem is the same for you as it is for me and is
bound up in the joining of two words: German Jewry. Most desirable, Strauss continued, would be for him to return to Germany, given that in Paris there is a strong
competition from the entire German-Jewish intellectual proletariat. The snag
howeverStrauss used the word Haken with its obvious resonancewas that while
he cannot wish to live in another land, for one cannot choose a Muttersprache, and
in any case he cannot write other than in German, and also cannot live under the
Hakenkreuz, that is, under a symbol that says nothing else to me other than that you
and your kind are (by nature) Untermenschen and thus rightfully pariahs. Strauss goes
on to ask how they as men of Wissenschaft could oppose what was happening in
Germany. They could and should, he avers, only protest against this dreadful
mean-minded state-of-affairs (meskine Unwesen), on correct principles, on fascist,
authoritarian and imperial principles without the laughable and whining appeal to
the droits imprescriptibles de lhomme.1
Department of Political Science, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA, University of
Southampton. Email: tstrong@ucsd.edu
2013 International Society for the Study of European Ideas

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TRACY B. STRONG

What happened was that Strauss remained in Paris,2 eventually moved to


England in early 1934 (where he wrote his book on Hobbes), and then in 1938 to
the United States. The letter to Lowith marks the beginning of Strausss exile from
the Muttersprache. But what difference, if any, does it make to his thought that as a
Jew he was unable to live in Germany after 1933, and that he came first to England
and then to the United States, remaining for the rest of his life an exile?3 To be an
exile is always to retain some sense that one is a stranger in a strange land.4 I note
here that someone like the Harvard professor Judith Shklar, herself a German-speaking refugee from Nazi Europe, always insisted on the exilic quality of her life, once
proclaiming Dreyfus, who despite all had insisted on his Frenchness, to have been
an idiot.5 If America was the land of Strausss exile, it was also the case that those
born in this country cannot fully be exiles here, though they may take upon themselves the stance of exile as, I believe, the late Allan Bloom did.
Yet how do exiles write honestly in and from a land and language that is not
their own? One way is to find a form of mediation in texts written in ones own
mother tongue that are worthy of interpretation. This is what Shklar did, and what
George Kateb wrote about her attitude to texts applies to Strauss as well: When
Shklar interprets a text, she does not simply report on its contents She is determined to carry lessons out of a text even though there is no theoretical system to
be made of them.6 Here, the manner in which the text is made available to readers
who often cannot read it in the original becomes a way of doing political theory.
Similarly, Strausss much discussed and often maligned doctrine of esotericism appears
to have been the consequence of precisely this: a serious reading of texts. This is not
to deny the existence of exclusive cliques, as attested by Anne Norton,7 yet regardless
of whether or not there is an elite of readers, esotericism is in all cases also a form
of political education. It recognizes that, although not all readers can approach a text
with the same sophistication, there is something to be gained by approaching it in a
some manner while recognizing that it may be approached in a more complex
manner at a later stage. We have all had the experience of rereading a text later in life
and finding in it something that we simply could not have seen the first time.
Strausss readings of texts are always thought-consuming and thought-provoking;
however, since my theme is Strausss political allegiances and how they were shaped
by his exile, I shall forego a discussion of why I have always found his textual
interpretations to be both brilliant and instructive.
Did Strauss change his mind his political views on coming to America?
According to Steven Smith, being an exile in Anglo-Saxon countries afforded Strauss
something that late Wilhelmian and Weimar Germany had denied himthe spectacle
of an operating, more or less responsible, parliamentary system.8 This allowed him,
claims Smith, to moderate his conservative and authoritarian views, such as he
expressed in his letter to Lowith. Some caution is needed here: whatever it may have
meant to think of oneself as a fascist in Germany in 1933 was certainly not the
same as to think of oneself as a fascist in Europe in 1946. What is clear, though, is
that Strauss associated himself with a strong executive position and was rather suspicious of the capacity of a parliamentary government to deal with the problems of
order and stability. (For example, Harvey Mansfield, a Straussian converso as all his
degrees are from Harvard, published a defense a few years ago of the strong

Exile and the Demos: Leo Strauss in America

717

executivein reaction to calls for a weak executivein the Wall Street Journal.9) But
to return to Strauss: it is certainly the case that the experience of parliament in
Germany in the first third of the twentieth century afforded little promise to anyone
concerned with stable government. Max Webers magisterial analysis in Parliament and
Governance in a Reconstructed Germany, as well as Allen Mitchells and Peter Caldwells
accounts are ample testimony to this.10 Let us say for the meantime that Smith is
right. But what does that claim amount to?
First let us note that Smith and others proclaim Strauss to be a friend of liberal
democracy, indeed, says Smith, perhaps the best friend that democracy has had.
Mansfield, likewise, writes The Spirit of Liberalism to defend liberalism because, as he
says, its supporters are not doing so (and there is evidence of this in todays
Democratic Party). It appears from this that one may defend liberalism without supporting it. Any close reading will show that to be a friend of liberal democracy is not the
same as being a liberal democrat. So this does not get us any closer to discovering
what difference the move to an Anglo-Saxon milieu might have made for Strauss.
Nor is it clear how Strauss understood the term liberalism. Let me interject a caveat. If
by liberalism or liberal democracy Strauss meant something like Allan Blooms
characterization in The Closing of the American Mindwhere he says that John Rawls
writes hundreds of pages to persuade men, and [to propose] a system of government
that would force them not to despise anyone11what can one say when faced with
such a clear case of bad reading. If anything is or should be clear about Rawls, it is
the following: the fact that one despises someone cannot ever be a reason for
dominating that person or for depriving him or her of liberty. Thus, if this is not
what Strauss (and Mansfield and Smith) have in mind when they speak of liberalism, it
would mean that they do not know what they are talking about (I shall return to this
point).
I want to dwell on a few salient points. First, if one reads Strausss correspondence of the early 1930s, especially with Klein and Lowith, one is struckI am
struckby their repeated insistence on the importance of living where they could
speak and write in German.12 Leaving Germany was thus not a matter of simply
saving ones skin; it was also a question of finding oneself in a place where one was
compelled to speak, to some degree, as a stranger to oneself. If, as Heidegger remarks,
human beings are brought into their own by language,13 it was the task of the
writer, the thinker, the philosopher, to make available the language that brings people
into their own both as historical creatures and as human beings, seeing that all
languages (langues) are historical even if language (language) itself is not.
Second, reading through this correspondence, one is also struck by the fact that
for Strauss (and for Klein, Lowith and others) that which was most problematic about
National Socialism (as opposed to fascism, perhaps), which they saw slowly triumph
all around them, was its anti-Semitism. As Klein wrote to Strauss: National Socialism
has basically only one principle: its anti-Semitism.14 And, of course, he had good
reason to write it. Here an anticipatory anecdote: Most readers will have heard the
name of Ernst Kantorowicz and think immediately of The Kings Two Bodies. Fewer
may know that Kantorowicz was also the author of a book on Frederick II of Sicily,
Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, which he ends with the hope for the rebirth of the secret
Germany. Kantorowicz was affiliated with the Georgekreis, a group that believed in

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TRACY B. STRONG

mystical nationalism; he was a member of a right-wing militia that was involved in


putting down the Spartacist uprising. As a Jew, he was forced to resign in 1934 as
professor of history at the University of Frankfurt. He emigrated to England and then
to the United States, where he took a position at the University of Berkeley in 1939.
Then, in the 1950s, by one of those unexpected historical ironies, he was forced to
resign from his academic post because he refused to sign the loyalty oath. Clearly, for
men like himand like Strauss and Kleinthe defining characteristic of National
Socialism was its anti-Semitism. Norman Cantor, in Inventing the Middle Ages,
suggested that in his orientation Kantorowicz was a Nazi, except, of course, that he
was Jewish.15 Similarly, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl notes Hannah Arendts remark on
the irony of the fact that a political party advocating views Strauss appreciated could
have no place for a Jew like him.16 Thus, what most clearly separated Strauss from
German fascism was its anti-Semitism, not its politics, assuming that the two are separable. The question then is whether anti-Semitism is the only essential quality of
National Socialism. Strauss noted in a letter to Krueger in 1933 that he couldnt stay
in Paris because they consider [me] a Nazi here. The same question pursued him
in America, albeit in a different form. On 1 January 1938, he wrote to Jacob Klein
that he had apparently been denied a position at Oberlin College because he was a
Jew.17
The primacy accorded to anti-Semitism warrants closer scrutiny. None of the
definitions of fascism from fifteen different authors in Wikipedia see anti-Semitism as
a necessary component of fascism, indeed only one even mentions it. Strauss looked
favorably on certain aspects of the National Socialist project, while recognizing that
he could not be part of it. It is important to note that when Hannah Arendt sought
to explore totalitarianism she found its origins in anti-Semitism and in a particular
reading of modern Imperialism. Though this may seem unfair, I think it likely, at
least at this point in his life, that Strauss would have agreed with Heideggers statement of a few years later: A decisive question for me today is, how can a political
system accommodate itself to the technological age and which political system will
this be? I have no answer to this question. I am not convinced that it is
democracy.18
Third, I am struck by the insistenceparticularly strong in Strauss from his earliest work onthat the fundamental problem of the age was the political-theological
problem. Carl Schmitt, of course, thought the same.19 What then is the problem of
political theology? Put simply it is that in the contemporary world the transcendental
criteria for justifying the social order are rejected by more and more people. One
must therefore find an immanent source of authority to replace the function served
by the transcendental argument of the past. Such an authority would be in St Pauls
words a katechonthe one who holds back the end. In Die geistige Lage der Gegenwart
(The Spiritual Condition of the Present), Strauss writes that the old traditions
have lost their power. Our freedom, he continues, is the freedom of radical
ignorance. The spiritual condition of the present is characterized by the fact that we
no longer know any more that we know nothing.20 If the Socratic has left us or is
occluded, then the West is in crisisStrauss expressed this in his earliest writingsso
that to prevent disaster and make recovery possible the end needs to be delayed. But
who is to do this and how?

Exile and the Demos: Leo Strauss in America

719

To answer this I will discuss three questions. First, what are the consequences of
having to leave ones Heimatthe place where a philosopher could be, as Nietzsche
remarked, at home, and not a chance random wanderer or conspiring against his
fatherland.21 But in order not to be a comet, a philosopher needs a whole culture.
In exile, Strauss was no longer in German; only those who fled with him (and there
were several of them) lived in German; for disciples, no matter how well they learn
the tongue, it is not native.
In the latter 1920s, as Michael Friedman argues in his wonderful study of
Heidegger, Carnap, and Cassirer, philosophy could follow one of two diverging
paths.22 If you wanted a philosophy that was independent of time, place, and
language, and was founded on the universal rules of logicif you had to take your
philosophy with you because, say, you happened to be a Jew in Europe in the late
1920syour situation would have been like Rudolf Carnaps; if , on the other hand,
you wanted a philosophy that could only be done in your native tongue, with your
boots in your native soil, not to say your native mud, your situation would have been
like Martin Heideggers. (What Carnap and Heidegger shared was that neither had
anything favorable to say of metaphysics.) What is striking about Strauss is that he
took neither of these two paths. We know from his account in Studies in Classical
Political Rationalism of the profound effect Heidegger had on him, a revolution in
thought he found to be as great as that of Hegel. But if he took neither of these paths
in coming to America, in writing from and in America, he was not a philosopher by
the standards of the timewhich explains why he defined himself as a political
theorist. I do not see this as a case of modesty, as Allan Bloom once wrote. It is a
simple matter of fact. Once in America, Strauss became a political theorist and no
longer wrote as a philosopher.
The second question is his view of National Socialism as primarily anti-Semitic
which, in the context of the Strauss-Lowith letter, seeks to ask what would have been
wrong with the Nazis had they not been anti-Semitic. I cannot here engage in an
extended analysis of National Socialism in its various aspectsanti-Semitism was clearly
a lesser factor in Italian fascism, for instance. To answer this one must also explore what
being Jewish meant to Strauss.23 It provided at least this: the claims of philosophy are
always mitigated by the actuality of revelation. Revelationthe transcendentalmanifests itself either as Law (for Jews and Moslems) or as individual experience (for
Christians).24 George Anastaplo argues that Judaism makes Strauss receptive to a
premodern understanding of philosophy (certainly the work on Maimonides and Spinoza confirms this).25 I think Judaism provided Strauss with a response to Heideggers
understanding of death.26 This is a complex and difficult topic. In the tension between
Athens and Jerusalem, Jerusalem is for Strauss a Jewish city and not the place where
Christ was crucified. Much more though needs to be done on Strausss relative neglect
of Christianity, in particular of the Gospels.
The third question on political theology has to do with the nature of sovereign authority in the modern age. I propose to consider this question here not in
relation to Strausss Auseinandersetzung with Carl Schmitt (despite the magisterial work
of Heinrich Meier), but in relation to what Strauss thought about politics in America.
I take Natural Right and History to be his book that most directly addressed the
country of his exile.27 The lectures that comprise it were given under the auspices of

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TRACY B. STRONG

the Walgreen Foundation, which endowed the series in June 1937 in order to foster
greater appreciation of American life and values among University of Chicago
students. Strausss aim was to save America from the infection of German
historicism.28 It is no accident that the background of the books original red-whiteand-blue dust cover consists of lines from the American Declaration of Independence,
or more precisely, a column from that text which starts in the fourth line of the
Declaration with the word Rights and ends in the second with Law of Nature a
(the rest of the word is cut off). The title of the book appears in the middle of a large
blue circle, along with the name of the author, blotting out many of the enumerated
crimes of George III.
What then was Strausss attitude to America? One thing is clear: Strauss did not
think the role of the philosopher was to instruct or approach the multitude. He
writes to Koje`ve on 22 April 1957: I do not believe in the possibility of a conversation of Socrates with the people : the relation of the philosopher to the people is
mediated by a certain kind of rhetoricians who arouse the fear of punishment after
death; the philosopher can guide these rhetors but cannot do their work. So whatever the impact of philosophy on the populace is, it will have to be mediated by a
group of rhetors. Koje`ve thought it was also pointless for the philosopher to try to
influence the tyrant, as he wrote to Strauss: The philosophers every attempt at
directly influencing the tyrant is necessarily ineffectual.29 The rhetors are those who
will transmit what is necessary to the populace, which Strauss holds incapable of
being educated by philosophy or even political theory. My suspicion is that political
theory is also the dynamic impetus for the rhetors: Strauss always insisted on what
Michael and Catherine Zuckert call the zetetic quality of philosophy and what
Thomas Pangle, drawing upon Heidegger, sees as a path.30 I agree with them that
for Strauss philosophy was about questions, not about answers. But it is clear from
this letter that this understanding does not apply to the kind of instruction that the
demos should or can receive. Thus, part of the worry that bedevils Bloom in The
Closing of the American Mind is that the youth of America will swallow half-digested
and misunderstood German philosophical doctrines such as those of Nietzsche and
Heidegger.
Strausss attitude to American politics can be seen in the two epigraphs in
Natural Right and History. He does not give the reference or even state their source.
Tracking them down or remembering them, it turns out that the first is from 2
Samuel 12. Strauss decontextualizes the passage by truncating it and omitting verse
numbers:
There were two men in one city; the one rich, and the other poor. The rich man had
exceeding many flocks and herds: But the poor man had nothing, save one little ewe
lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and
with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his
bosom, and was unto him as a daughter. And there came a traveler unto the rich man,
and he spared to take of his own flock and of his own herd, to dress for the wayfaring
man that was come unto him; but took the poor mans lamb, and dressed it for the
man that was come to him.31

If one goes to the context one finds that it concerns the time when God sent the
prophet Nathan to King David. Nathan tells David this story. David responds with

Exile and the Demos: Leo Strauss in America

721

outrage and orders that the man be killed and that the lambs be restored four-fold to
the poor man. Nathan then says to him: Thou are the man. The rich man is
David, who has just made off with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, a soldier
in his army. What can one learn from this parable? For Strauss, writing under the
looming presence of socialist and communist regimes, one learns that America should
not yield to such governmental interference or any kind for risk of becoming like
Stalinist Russia or Maos China where rich peasants were expropriated (and sometimes killed) by the state. One learns also that America may be doing so while not
recognizing that it is doing so. As Strauss remarked in his Epilogue to the Storing
volume: They fiddle while Rome burns. [They are] excused by the fact that [they]
do not know [they] fiddle and [they] do not know that Rome burns.32
The second epigraph is from1 Kings 21. Strauss again truncates the quote:
Naboth the Jezreelite had a vineyard, which was in Jezreel,33 hard by the palace of
Ahab king of Samaria. And Ahab spake unto Naboth, saying, Give me thy vineyard,
that I may have it for a garden of herbs, because it is near unto my house; and I will
give thee for it a better vineyard than it: or, if it seem good to thee, I will give thee
the worth of it in money. And Naboth said to Ahab, Jehovah forbid it me, that I
should give the inheritance of my fathers unto thee.

What happens thereafter is that Jezebel (Ahabs wife) tempts Ahab into taking Naboths
lands; she forges letters and uses them to frame him as a traitor and have him stoned to
death. The Lord sends Elijah to reprove Ahab; he repents. God is impressed with Ahabs
repentance and defers punishment to Ahabs children; a terrible death is forecast for
Jezebel, which indeed happens after Ahabs death and a period of her ruling tyrannically
through Ahabs sons, all of whom meet a bad end.34 This is a warning to America about
the dangers of socialism and of government interference: it is a warning against the
temptations of the Jezebel of socialist state intervention.
For Strauss, the most important political question of the presentthe danger
confronting the West and the possibility of philosophywas the conflict between
liberal democracy and communism.35 Strauss is not advocating a private-liberties-andrights-keep-the-government-away vision, although at times he may have appeared to
do so in order to form alliances with the Anglophile conservative WASP establishment.
Nor is he opposed to a strong executive. What he is opposed to is a strong executive
that claims to act in the interests of the demos (here redistribution, the most severe
example of which might have been Stalin or Mao), rather than to bring about what is
just and right. Redistribution merely panders to the appetites of the mob. Philosophy,
he avers, rather requires radical detachment from human interests.36 He will thus
require of Koje`ve to show why the citizenry his friend images is in any significant way
different from Nietzsches last men,37 last men who, incidentally, appear on the last
pages of Webers The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Somewhat gnomically
he concludes his restatement to Koje`ve with this:
Both of us appear to turn our attention away from Being and toward tyranny because
we saw that those who lacked the courage to face the consequences of tyranny, who
therefore et humiliter serviebant et superbe dominabantur, were at the same time forced to
escape the consequences of Being precisely because they did nothing but speak about
Being.38

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TRACY B. STRONG

The Latin quote, a paraphrase of a line from Livys History of Rome, reads: themselves
obsequiously subservient while arrogantly lording it over others (describing a pair of
villains taking over from a tyrant and using power to their own advantage). The target
here is obviously Heidegger: Strauss implies that it is precisely because Heidegger did
not have the courage to face tyranny (and to be tyrannical) that he ended up the way he
did. And the point he is making here is that tyranny may be necessary.
What was striking about the members of the past administration who had some
descent from Strauss (again, as rhetors, not as thinkers) is precisely the degree to
which they sought a strong executive, unconstrained by law both statutory and
constitutional, to bring about what they understood as morally correct. Redistribution
or rather any form of government intervention in favor of the appetites of the populace gets you Jezebel and tyranny, for which one will surely be punished if only later.
Thus Strauss opens Natural Right and History by noting that America is the strongest
and richest of nations and that this is perhaps due to the principles of the Declaration,
of which he quotes the famous first lines. By page 3 we are warned of disastrous
consequences to the rejection of natural right, which he believes is occurring in
America under the influence of German historicist thought. As it cannot be the role
of the philosopher to engage in broad-scale political education (as in the citation
above), under present dangers there is reason to send out rhetorspersuadersto
lead the people onto appropriate paths so that they will not follow Jezebel. The political stance Strauss holds is, perhaps among other things, designed to hold at bay the
temptations of German historicism and give liberal democracyof whom he is, we
recall, a frienda chance to hold off communism, which he puts in lowercase c.
(Does what is called radical Islam qualify as a replacement for communism?
given his work on Arab thinkers I think Strauss might have had doubts about this.)
How is the katechon to do its work? As Strauss indicates, this will best be done
by using moral suasion, by appeal to moral values, to the fear of condemnation by
GodAmerica being one of the few remaining western nations that might respond
to such appeals. These are all what we have come to associate with conservatism: it is
one of the sins of the American Left that they have signed these doctrines over to the
Right. Appeal to American moral values cannot easily be done by exiles, however,
without the risk of persecution as a foreigner, as an outside agitatorStrauss was
quite conscious of McCarthyism in its various forms, even if he was soft on Joe
McCarthy. Persecution for writing certain things is always a danger for exiles and not
only in the Middle Ages.
It was thus important for Strauss that he start a school, one that would
produce both disciples and rhetors. In What is Political Philosophy, he treats his
readers to a long digression on the character of the Athenian in Platos Laws. Ronald
Beiner has argued, correctly I think, that this excursus is a meditation on the possibility of Athenizing the Cretan/Spartans, that is, of bringing German thought to
America. Americans are or appear to be an unphilosophical peopleTocqueville had
commented on it long ago. Perhaps it is the case that Strauss wanted to do for
America what he thought the Athenian was trying to do in the Laws. If one lives in
exile, perhaps one can change the country.39 The question, though, is why American
philosophy always has to appear, Tom Sawyer-like, in disguise. Strauss appears to
have been, like Bloom, tone-deaf to the philosophical strengths and creativity of

Exile and the Demos: Leo Strauss in America

723

America, concealed most often in literary texts and popular culture, like Thoreaus
philosophy in Walden.
The exiled political theorist thus needs disciples not only as thinkers but as rhetors,
for if, as he writes, a Socratic goal [cannot be pursued] with the means, and the temper
of Thrasymachus,40 the guiding of the demos can be. In On Classical Political Philosophy, Strauss remarks that The umpire par excellence is the political philosopher. He
tries to settle those political controversies that are of both paramount and permanent
importance.41 I am not sure this is because the umpire calls them as they are (Pangles
Strauss), or calls them as he sees them (Zuckertss Strauss), or that there is nothing until
he calls them (Shadia Drurys Strauss). In any case, the question here is about the consequence of introducing moral justifications as the basis of a foreign policy. I would feel
much better if I thought that William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitzthe rhetorsand the
others had actually been mainly after oil profits in Iraq (not that they are not after them,
this is Edmund Burkes profitable right).42 Not for Strauss, William Jennings Bryans
The people have the right to make their own mistakes.
And perhaps for good reason. We have a world where many if not most of us
avoid or refrain from making our own mistakes and our own judgments, a world
where there is little to help us to form our own tastes and opinions. What is missing
here in Strauss, though, is any sense of the changes institutions undergo (as the result
of the demise of political parties, the trivialization of local politics, or nationalization
of the media, etc.), which have made political education increasingly difficult, if not
impossible. Strauss pays no attention to thisto what used to be the stuff of truly
democratic politicsand sees the answer in his rhetors. In a sense, it appears that
Weimar continued to control Strausss political vision, as though to affirm that the
more we think that what we have is Weimar resartus, the more it will be true.

NOTES
1. These letters are to be found in Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften (Stuttgart: Metzler
Verlag, 2001), vol. 3, 62325. Translations are mine.
2. He writes to Gerhard Krueger on 3 December 1933: My head spins with a hundred
plans, of which none is likely to be realized: England, U.S., Palestine. France is out of the
questionin part because of the circumstance that they consider me a Nazi here.
3. See Eugene R. Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile (Waltham, MA: Brandeis
University Press, 2006). Perhaps Jews are always exiles (except in Israel?); in that case,
Strauss was doubly exiled.
4. The reference is to the meaning of the name of the first son of Moses, Gershom, born to
Moses after his flight from Egypt to Midian (Exodus 2.22).
5. In a handwritten note on a manuscript of hers on exile; in authors possession.
6. George Kateb, Foreword to Judith N. Shklar, Political Thought and Political Thinkers
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), xiv.
7. Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of the American Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2008).
8. Steven Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 2007).
9. Harvey Mansfield, The Case for the Strong Executive, Wall Street Journal, 2 May 2007.
10. See Max Weber, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Allen
Mitchell, Revolution in Bavaria, 19181919: The Eisner Regime and the Soviet Republic

724

11.
12.

13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.

20.
21.
22.
23.

24.
25.
26.
27.
28.

TRACY B. STRONG
(Princeton, CT: Princeton University Press, 1969); Peter Caldwell, Popular Sovereignty and
the Crisis of German Constitutional Law (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York. Simon and Shuster, 1987),
30.
Besides the letter mentioned at the beginning of this essay, see Klein to Strauss, June
1934, in Gesammelte Schriften, iii.512. Over twenty years later, Strauss apologized to
Koje`ve for writing in English as his handwriting has gotten so bad that he was forced to
dictate to a secretary. See Strauss to Koje`ve, 22 April 1957, in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny
(New York: Free Press, 1991), 274.
Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper,
1971), 208.
Klein to Strauss, 1920 June 1934, in Gesammelte Schriften, 3.512.
Norman F. Cantor, The Nazi Twins: Percy Ernst Schramm and Ernst Hartwig
Kantorowicz, in Inventing the Middle Ages (New York: Harper, 1991), 79117.
Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1971), 98.
Strauss to Klein, 1 January 1938, in Gesammelte Schriften, 3.544. Strausss judgment seems
wrong. The Oberlin department was chaired by Oscar Jaszi, an assimilated Hungarian
Jew, who was of a strong liberal social-democratic orientation.
Spiegel Interview, in Martin Heidegger, Philosophical and Political Writings (New York:
Continuum, 2003), 3536.
This relation between the two is complex. See Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo
Strauss (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006). For an attempt at a critique see
Robert Howse, The Use and Abuse of Leo Strauss in the Schmitt Revival on the
German Right: The Case of Heinrich Meier, available online at Howses website, NYU
Law School. See also Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Leo Strauss, Die geistige Lage der Gegenwart, Gesammelte Schriften (Stuttgart: Metzler
Verlag, 1997), vol. 2, 44647.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, in Werke Kritische
Gesammt Ausgabe (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1976), vol. 3, 2.303, 1.304.
Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Cassirer, Carnap and Heidegger (New York: Open
Court, 2000).
Smith has written well on this and the texts in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity,
ed. K. H. Green, are also illuminating (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1977). See Daniel
Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2007), esp. chap. 4, The Conflict between Jerusalem and Athens. Tanguay is also very
good on the political theological problem. See also Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics
of Exile, 1753. See Leo Strauss, Why We Remain Jews: Can Faith and History Still
Speak to Us? in Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker, ed. Kenneth Deutsch
and Walter Nicgorski (Lanham, CT: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994).
Cf. Saint Pauls hostility to the Law: II Corinthians iii; Romans viii; See Sarah Kofman, Le
mepris des juifs (Paris: Galilee, 1996), translated by Tracy B. Strong in New Nietzsche Studies
(The Nietzsche Society, 2008), 156187.
George Anastoplo, On Leo Strauss, University of Chicago Magazine (Winter 1974).
See Leo Strauss, Memorial Remarks for Jason Aronson, in Green, Jewish Philosophy and
the Crisis of Modernity.
Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1953).
Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind with the same intention. One of the
sources of his worry about the Nietzsche that America was incorporating (I got some of
the blame for this) was that it would infect Americans without, as it were, the patients
being aware of their illness, thus turning Americans into Nietzsches last men. Whatever its truth, this understanding overwhelms Blooms intelligence: he has neither ear nor
eye for the frantic creativity of American popular culture. For instance, he takes Zelig to

Exile and the Demos: Leo Strauss in America

29.

30.

31.

32.
33.
34.

725

be about German philosophy, whereas it is actually a confrontation and an engagement


with Emersons strictures on conformity and self-reliance, and he has no grasp of the
deeply appreciative ironies of Louis Armstrongs version of Mack the Knife (I am
assisted here by a response that Stanley Cavell made to a talk by Bloom).
From an exchange between Strauss and Koje`ve, in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny: Including the
Strauss-Koje`ve Debate, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael Roth (New York: Free Press,
1991), 16566. See also my Dimensions of the New Debate around Carl Schmitt, in
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996),
and The Sovereign and the Exception, introduction to Carl Schmitt, Political Theology
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005). See Alan Gilberts essay on whether or
not Strauss thought influencing the tyrant was a pointless enterprise (Constellations
[forthcoming]).
Michael Zuckert and Catherine Zuckert, The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy
and American Democracy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Thomas L.
Pangle, Leo Strauss: An Introduction to His Thought and Intellectual Legacy (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 29.
The Biblical text is as follows (excised parts and context in italics): 1. And the Lord sent
Nathan unto David. And he came unto him, and said unto him, There were two men in one
city; the one rich, and the other poor. 2. The rich man had exceeding many flocks and
herds: 3. But the poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought
and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of
his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a
daughter. 4. And there came a traveler unto the rich man, and he spared to take of his
own flock and of his own herd, to dress for the wayfaring man that was come unto him;
but took the poor mans lamb, and dressed it for the man that was come to him. 5. And
Davids anger was greatly kindled against the man; and he said to Nathan, As the Lord liveth, the
man that hath done this thing shall surely die: 6. And he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he
did this thing, and because he had no pity. 7. And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man.
Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, I anointed thee king over Israel, and I delivered thee out of the
hand of Saul; 8. And I gave thee thy masters house, and thy masters wives into thy bosom, and
gave thee the house of Israel and of Judah; and if that had been too little, I would moreover have
given unto thee such and such things. 9. Wherefore hast thou despised the commandment of the
Lord, to do evil in his sight? thou hast killed Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and hast taken his
wife to be thy wife, and hast slain him with the sword of the children of Ammon. 10. Now therefore the sword shall never depart from thine house; because thou hast despised me, and hast taken
the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be thy wife. 11. Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will raise up evil
against thee out of thine own house, and I will take thy wives before thine eyes, and give them unto
thy neighbour, and he shall lie with thy wives in the sight of this sun. 12. For thou didst it secretly:
but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun. 13. And David said unto Nathan, I
have sinned against the Lord. And Nathan said unto David, The Lord also hath put away thy
sin; thou shalt not die.
Leo Strauss, Epilogue, in Essays in the Scientific Study of Politics, ed. Herbert Storing
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 327.
Jezreel was the fertile valley between Galilee and Samaria which was the easiest route
from the Jordan to the sea, the Romans naming it Via Maris. It was the site of numerous
battles in Biblical times and Ahab ruled from his palace there.
1 Kings 21 (again with the excised parts and context in italics): 1. And it came to pass after
these things, that Naboth the Jezreelite had a vineyard, which was in Jezreel, hard by the
palace of Ahab king of Samaria. 2. And Ahab spake unto Naboth, saying, Give me thy
vineyard, that I may have it for a garden of herbs, because it is near unto my house; and
I will give thee for it a better vineyard than it: or, if it seem good to thee, I will give thee
the worth of it in money. 3. And Naboth said to Ahab, Jehovah forbid it me, that I
should give the inheritance of my fathers unto thee. 4. And Ahab came into his house heavy
and displeased because of the word which Naboth the Jezreelite had spoken to him; for he had said,

726

35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.

TRACY B. STRONG
I will not give thee the inheritance of my fathers. And he laid him down upon his bed, and turned
away his face, and would eat no bread. 5. But Jezebel his wife came to him, and said unto him,
Why is thy spirit so sad, that thou eatest no bread? 6. And he said unto her, Because I spake unto
Naboth the Jezreelite, and said unto him, Give me thy vineyard for money; or else, if it please thee,
I will give thee another vineyard for it: and he answered, I will not give thee my vineyard. 7. And
Jezebel his wife said unto him, Dost thou now govern the kingdom of Israel? arise, and eat bread,
and let thy heart be merry: I will give thee the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite. 8. So she wrote
letters in Ahabs name, and sealed them with his seal, and sent the letters unto the elders and to
the nobles that were in his city, and that dwelt with Naboth. 9. And she wrote in the letters, saying, Proclaim a fast, and set Naboth on high among the people: 10. and set two men, base fellows,
before him, and let them bear witness against him, saying, Thou didst curse God and the king.
And then carry him out, and stone him to death. 11. And the men of his city, even the elders and
the nobles who dwelt in his city, did as Jezebel had sent unto them, according as it was written in
the letters which she had sent unto them. 12. They proclaimed a fast, and set Naboth on high
among the people. 13. And the two men, the base fellows, came in and sat before him: and the base
fellows bare witness against him, even against Naboth, in the presence of the people, saying, Naboth
did curse God and the king. Then they carried him forth out of the city, and stoned him to death
with stones. 14. Then they sent to Jezebel, saying, Naboth is stoned, and is dead. 15. And it
came to pass, when Jezebel heard that Naboth was stoned, and was dead, that Jezebel said to
Ahab, Arise, take possession of the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite, which he refused to give thee
for money; for Naboth is not alive, but dead. 16. And it came to pass, when Ahab heard that
Naboth was dead, that Ahab rose up to go down to the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite, to take
possession of it. 17. And the word of Jehovah came to Elijah the Tishbite, saying, 18. Arise, go
down to meet Ahab king of Israel, who dwelleth in Samaria: behold, he is in the vineyard of
Naboth, whither he is gone down to take possession of it. 19. And thou shalt speak unto him, saying, Thus saith Jehovah, Hast thou killed and also taken possession? And thou shalt speak unto
him, saying, Thus saith Jehovah, In the place where dogs licked the blood of Naboth shall dogs lick
thy blood, even thine. 20. And Ahab said to Elijah, Hast thou found me, O mine enemy? And
he answered, I have found thee, because thou hast sold thyself to do that which is evil in the sight
of Jehovah. 21. Behold, I will bring evil upon thee, and will utterly sweep thee away and will cut
off from Ahab every man-child, and him that is shut up and him that is left at large in Israel: 22.
and I will make thy house like the house of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, and like the house of
Baasha the son of Ahijah for the provocation wherewith thou hast provoked me to anger, and hast
made Israel to sin. 23. And of Jezebel also spake Jehovah, saying, The dogs shall eat Jezebel by
the rampart of Jezreel. 24. Him that dieth of Ahab in the city the dogs shall eat; and him that
dieth in the field shall the birds of the heavens eat. 25. (But there was none like unto Ahab, who
did sell himself to do that which was evil in the sight of Jehovah, whom Jezebel his wife stirred up.
26. And he did very abominably in following idols, according to all that the Amorites did, whom
Jehovah cast out before the children of Israel.) 27. And it came to pass, when Ahab heard those
words, that he rent his clothes, and put sackcloth upon his flesh, and fasted, and lay in sackcloth,
and went softly. 28. And the word of Jehovah came to Elijah the Tishbite, saying, 29. Seest thou
how Ahab humbleth himself before me? because he humbleth himself before me, I will not bring the
evil in his days; but in his sons days will I bring the evil upon his house.
Leo Strauss, Epilogue, in Essays in the Scientific Study of Politics, 318.
Strauss, Restatement, in On Tyranny, 212.
Strauss to Koje`ve, 22 August 1948, in On Tyranny, 208.
Strauss, Restatement, in On Tyranny, 212.
This paragraph draws directly on a letter to me from Professor Beiner.
Strauss, Natural Right and History, 6.
Leo Strauss, On Classical Political Philosophy, in What is Political Philosophy? (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 12.
As if on cue, William Kristol was for a while a regular op-ed contributor to the New York
Times.

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