Pocock, 1975.

It is incumbent on me, first, to show that is possible to criticize Strausss

procedures and conclusions while agreeing with them sometimes, learning from

them often and enjoying them nearly all the time; second, to consider what

flaws there may be in them, and in the interpretation of them by his disciples,

which account for Strausss teaching having become what it pretty clearly is, in

Mansfields paper and elsewhere namely, a closed ideology. (POCOCK,

1975, p.386)

That Machiavelli wrote many things that were morally subversive is not the

question. () the trouble here is that the phrase a teacher of evil is unspecific.

(POCOCK, 1975, p. 387)

In Mansfields commentary, the charge typically takes the form that, however

shocking Machiavellis meaning may appear on the surface, there is always

another, more shocking, meaning beneath it, concealed from us by

Machiavellis use of an elaborate technique of conveying his meaning indirectly,

which nobody but Strauss and his pupils knows how to decipher. We are, in

short, in the presence of Strausss discovery of esoteric writing, and it is on the

validity of this method of exegesis that subsequent discussion or the

impossibility of discussion must turn. (POCOCK, 1975, p. 387)

Strauss first encountered esoteric writing in the works of Maimonides and the

Jewish and Muslim falasifa of medieval Islam, where it arose from the need to
give often by indirection philosophical interpretations of revealed

statements. (POCOCK, 1975, p. 388)

With the advent of modernity, however, the character of esoteric writing must

be changed. (POCOCK, 1975, p. 388)

Where the falasifa inform us that there is an elite who communicate in an

esoteric language, we, can proceed by methods of historical reconstruction

not confined to cryptographic exegesis to locate that elite and learn its

language. (POCOCK, 1975, p. 388)

We are therefore compelled to rely on Strausss capacity for cryptographic

exegesis to establish the existence of the hidden language; and for all that

Strauss or Mansfield has to tell us, nobody before Strauss has ever succeeded

in deciphering it. (POCOCK, 1975, p. 388)

Anyone to whom Strauss can apply his exegesis may turn out to have

belonged to that elite; and there undeniably are moments at which Strauss

speaks of the succession of modern philosophers, especially from Machiavelli

to the French Revolution, as of a conspiracy of illuminati. The fact that some of

them notably in the period 1700-1750 were engaged in semi-open

conspiracy against revealed religion renders it even more important to have as

many means as possible of knowing when there were conspiracies and when

not; we know to what an unchecked means of alleging conspiracy can lead.

This becomes yet more urgent when the alleged target of conspiracy is not

revealed religion, which was a social institutions visible to everyone, but

Strausss great tradition, which is visible only to yet another esoteric elite.

(POCOCK, 1975, p. 389)

The clear and present danger is that the unchecked exegesis which claims to

detect the existence of an esoteric language may become an esoteric language

itself, the detector of conspiracy themselves a conspiracy; the witch-finders may

come to rule in the place of the witches. Mansfield already look on himself as an

adept of the true gnosis, and on Thoughts on Machiavelli as a body of esoteric

wisdom closed to the unenlightened and corrupt. (POCOCK, 1975, p. 389)

But in order to prove that it can be treated with critical respect, it is necessary

to show what there is about it which has raised up these adept who accord it

sibylline status. The answer seems to lie in the relations between the exegetical

method which claims to uncover the esoteric writing, and Strausss general

interpretation of Machiavelli. It needs to be stressed to begin with that there is

nothing wrong with the preposition that an authors meaning may be sought by

studying his implications, or that he may have desired to convey his meaning by

concealed hints. Historians of thought regularly employ there assumptions; they

seek, by studying the language patterns available in the authors time, to

discover implications which may have been apparent to him and his readers,

and to discover any means of conveying or revealing esoteric meanings which

may than have existed and been recognized. (POCOCK, 1975, p. 390)

Everything he finds in Machiavelli must have been intended by Machiavelli; the

whole book is a guide to Machiavellis true intentions; and he seems utterly

indifferent to the question whether anyone has ever detected them before. The

history of Machiavelli interpretation does indeed render this question a

peculiarly knotty one; but Strausss indifference to it both deprives us of critical

checks on his interpretations and carries him much closer to the role of

magician. The gorgeous landscape he reveals to us may never before have

been seen by human eye not even Machiavellis. (POCOCK, 1975, p. 391)

Part of the trouble here is that the Straussian persuasion have become

immoderately contemptuous of all historical exegesis. () all historians are

historicists and all historicists are moral relativists; all historical information is

therefore irrelevant to the intention of the morally serious philosopher, even the

teacher of evil on the grandly diabolical scale of Machiavelli. (POCOCK, 1975,

p. 391)

The book seeks to interpret Machiavelli by discovering his hidden meaning.

This alone tends to store up trouble for itself by leaving on one side all those

meanings which are not hidden. (POCOCK, 1975, p. 391)

Strausss procedure, throughout Thoughts on Machiavelli, was to impute

intentions wherever there was anomaly. Wherever there was inconsistency of

language, wherever there were contrary propositions, wherever the example

seemed not to prove what it was intended to prove, he argued that Machiavelli

was alerting us to his intention of saying something other than appeared on the

face of the text. There are, as a matter of fact, a great many anomalies of this

kind to be found in the text of the Prince and Discourses, and a great deal might

be learned by studying them; what is much more controversial is his insistence

that all anomalies were intentional and consistent, and that a continuity of
cryptic meaning ran through them all and was intended by Machiavelli to be

deciphered by the initiate reader, or possibly - since Strauss is not absolutely

specific about this - to condition and brutalise the subliminal consciousness of

the unwary reader. Nor was this all; Strauss also made an extraordinarily

extensive use of the argumentum ex silentio. Whenever Machiavelli did not say

something in which, on premises his own Strausss, he might have said

whenever he ignored a proposition on conventional morality, or failed to follow

uo an implication in subversive morality Strauss was ready with the argument

that by omitting to say something, he was drawing our attention to the possibly

of saying it, or of saying its opposite. (POCOCK, 1975, p. 392)

We enter a world in which nobody ever makes a mistake or says anything

which he does not intend to say. (POCOCK, 1975, p. 392)

If there are no anomalies in Machiavelli, then everything Strauss can impute to

him as an intention is as intention. The method must be non-falsifiable.

(POCOCK, 1975, p. 393)

But if there is no perfect speech, as the historian of language comes

vehemently to suspect? If it is in the nature of language itself that it contains all

those things which perfect speech excludes? We should then return to a world

in which it was possible for Machiavelli to say things which he did not intend,

which revealed contrary intentions or no intentions in particular even a world

of rhetorical culture, in which it was permissible for him to follow up the

implications of existing speech in directions which turned out to be anomalous

or contradictory. In such a world it would be possible for Strauss to be wrong

sometimes, but would also be possible for us to know when he was right and

when wrong; whereas the effect of presupposing the Prince and Discourses to

be perfect speech must be to render the exegesis perfect in the sense of

uncriticisable. I have to confess that I can only find Thoughts on Machiavelli

admirable by supposing it to be imperfect, whereas Mansfield destroys it for me

by rendering it uncriticisable; but in order to be admirable it must exist in a world

of imperfect speech, which Strauss clearly did not want to accept. There is what

may be a significant hint to look outside his works on Machiavelli for a

moment in Jerusalem and Athens. (POCOCK, 1975, p. 393)

I wonder if it could be argued that Strausss philosophical exegesis is anti-

kabbalistic? He does not seen to have accepted the ancient view that in the text

of Torah there was no possibility of language symbolical, verbal, alphabetical

or numerological that had not been or would not be perfectly worked out. But

he reserved for the book and from all we know of him, his must have been

the book of philosophy - the character of perfect speech, in which everything

was intended; not with the consequence that anything not intended was not

there but with the consequence that everything which might be there must have

been intended. And when he came to thought of the kind he called modern

which in his by no means untenable view argued against the co-existence of

philosophy with the transcendent, and so against philosophy itself, he may have

been led into diabolism: into imputing to Machiavelli a perfection anti-speech, an

esoteric writing in which everything which could be possibly be said against the

great tradition was being said, and the Prince and Discourses turned out to a

sort of Reversed Tetragramaton. This is speculation, but it may account for

Strausss readiness to find numerological symbolizations among Machiavellis

hidden messages, which Mansfield has followed up with an enthusiasm I

consider unfortunate. (POCOCK, 1975, p. 394)

If Strauss was not a believing Christian, why did he attach such importance to

Machiavellis lack of faith? (POCOCK, 1975, p. 397)

Machiavelli said, quite openly, e.g., in III, 1,and in ways which no esoteric

exegesis is needed to discover, that the ethos of civic or republican patriotism

was incompatible with the Christian ethos of meekness and forgiveness to

which it is quite legitimate to add, and to search in his writings for evidence that

he added, sin and redemption by grace and he made no secret of his own

preference for the ethos of patriotism. It is possible to interpret him as doing this

with his eyes open, as regarding the Christian ethos as valid but inaccessible to

men in a historical and political world, where only the Roman ethos of pagan

citizen warriors could operate to bring virtue and success; though one would

have to add that two ethical systems could not co-exist in the same world

without each becoming secularized, seen as contingent and unstable in the

secular world and its history. But Strauss who had little sympathy for skeptical

temper assigned such overmastering value to the great tradition, in which the

justice of the city forever debated with transcendent values which were

increasingly those of Judaic and Christian revelation, that he saw a philosophy

which diminished and secularized both; and he found it very easy to believe that

Machiavelli intended the destruction of both. (POCOCK, 1975, p. 397)

Since Machiavelli unequivocally prefers the republic to revealed religion, it is

perharps not surprising that Strauss seems to have enjoyed greater success in
discovering his anti-Biblical than his anti-republican implications. () I am not

sure they add up to a full-fledged paganism or atheism. () (POCOCK, 1975,

p. 398)

But he is a great deal less successful I think, in trying to explain away all that

Machiavelli has to say about the interactions of the senate and people, in such

a way that he emerges as an aristocrat training a ruling class of manipulative

princes. That could never have been more than half of the truth, as Strauss

implicitly recognized in the brilliant and beautifully written final chapter, where

the republican and patriotic ethos re-emerged as a valid, if limited and (he

would have said ) insufficient, moral alternative, and no more is left of the anti-

republican interpretation than Strausss assertion that Machiavellis people do

not rule but do share power. (POCOCK, 1975, p. 398)

Strausss treatment of Machiavelli is to be taken seriously and contains much

that is discussable, as well as much that is true. (POCOCK, 1975, p. 400)