Response to Frost, MacFarlane, Rabieh, and Stoner

Abstract

I am grateful to all four commentators on my book for their very thoughtful comments, to Bryan-Paul Frost for organizing this symposium, and to Daniel Mahoney, Editor of Perspectives on Political Science, for generously agreeing to publish it. Frost finds it disappointing that Strauss cites only Churchill as evidence of greatness within liberal democracy, and puzzling that I would contrast his doing so with Tocqueville, who presents greatness as belonging to the past; he notes that Strauss praises, after all, Churchill’s book on his illustrious ancestor Malborough. As to the first of these: Strauss presents the example of Churchill’s greatness as capable of beginning an ascent out of the historicist reasoning that plagued German youth. He does the same, 23 years later, for Americans raised on the fact-value distinction, whom he encouraged to begin to be directed by their natural political reasoning. As to the second: Churchill’s book on Malborough is on a statesman who had already confronted modernity’s changed circumstances and thereby shown the way to the required political reasoning in those circumstances. Yet Frost wonders if Churchill could have offered such an example to German youth, since he was “the very person against whom post-World War I German nihilists raged and loathed.” Frost conflates Nazi leaders and their attacks on Churchill after 1939 with the German nihilistic youth and their teachers. Strauss, though, distinguishes them: “the defeat of National Socialism will not necessarily mean the end of German nihilism. For that nihilism has deeper roots than the preachings of Hitler, Germany’s defeat in the World War and all that.” Strauss aims to understand “the singular success, not of Hitler, but of those writers” who “knowingly or ignorantly paved the way for Hitler (Spengler, Moeller van den Bruck, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, Heidegger).”1 Turning to the question of technology, Frost claims that “there was one area where Strauss (following Machiavelli) agreed that science was absolutely needed and could not be ignored: the military (6–7).... But how,” he continues, “can you have the salutary effects of the one (a modern military) without the dire effects of the other (rampant technology)? Interestingly, Strauss says that you can.” These objections are based on a simple misreading of Strauss’s texts. Strauss does not agree that “science was absolutely needed and could not be ignored” in “the military.” He distinguishes mere military innovation from “the deployment of theoretical science in the conquest of nature” in such innovation, as I quote him saying on page 8 of my book. Citing this deployment as crucial, Strauss rejects the claim that mere military innovation made all modern technology “fated.” Nor does Strauss imply that one can have advanced military technology without technology being used in every other area of life. Frost also complains about “a relative paucity of classical sources to demonstrate” that “the ancients understood the deleterious effects of the conquest of nature,” as Strauss claims they did. He appears to express some doubt about the reliability of Strauss’s claim that the ancients consciously rejected technology. Some of those references appear in On Tyranny.2 Strauss also notes, in his explication of Books V and VI of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, that while Lucretius recognizes the importance of the development of the arts for the emergence of philosophy, he counsels against their further development, or opposes technology, in light of the natural term of true pleasure and the diversions that technology would induce away from awareness of mortality and hence from the right kind of pleasure.3 Perhaps most importantly, Strauss stresses the resignation to what is that accompanies the theoretical life and theoretical awareness, in Lucretius no