Burns on Strauss’s Liberating Liberal Education

Abstract

Leo Strauss on Democracy, Technology, and Liberal Education is an invaluable source of historical learning and philosophic guidance. Timothy W. Burns provides us with an in-depth and careful study of four important writings by Leo Strauss that examine the challenges faced by modern democracy and the ways in which liberal education can supply a modest remedy. According to Burns, Strauss understands the problems facing modern democracy to be rooted in the ascendancy of technology as the ultimate political aim, which prioritizes acquiring the means to pursue whatever ends we happen to desire rather than the good life itself (9). Subsequent developments in the service of this goal have led to our present situation, which Strauss characterizes as “hardly more than the interplay of mass taste with high grade but strictly speaking unprincipled efficiency” (13; see also 35, 69, 75–78). Burns sharpens his analysis of Strauss by comparing Strauss’s understanding of technology with that of Heidegger. In contrast to Heidegger’s argument for a “new thinking” to address modernity’s ills, Strauss looks to an older thinking from which he gleans an argument for liberal education, which he describes as the cultivation of “an aristocracy within democracy,” i.e., a class within society whose thinking is informed by both serious education in tradition and the study of the Great Books (15; see also 21, 84, 166). Although Burns’s book addresses many aspects of Strauss’s account of the way in which technology came to dominate politics and shape our modern world, I will focus on the thread throughout these essays that explains what Strauss means by liberal education and why it is needed today. Burns begins with Strauss’s essay, “What is Liberal Education?” to explain why an “aristocracy within a democracy” should be the aim of liberal education. Strauss’s goal, according to Burns, is not to establish a ruling class or elite within democracy but to found an aristocracy within the “sub-political ‘cultural’ sphere of democracy” with a view to “cultivating habits of mind and heart needed by democracy, which cannot ... sustain itself on the thin, commercial gruel of mass culture” (22). Strauss here confines himself to arguing that this means “reminding” members of mass democracy “of human greatness.” Burns draws out this suggestion more fully by discussing Strauss’s comments elsewhere about Churchill’s greatness which provides an antidote to the moral distortions created by “positivist, value-free” social science (23). But having pointed to one element of liberal education needed by modern democracies, Strauss then raises a complication with its practice today when he considers the way the Greek political philosophers understood the education of the “perfect gentleman.” The education of the gentleman was different from that of the philosopher and rooted in “authoritative traditions.” Still, since those traditions also formed a part of a pre-philosophic study (32), ancient philosophers were sympathetic to them, seeing in them not only important preparation for philosophy but also necessary support for the gentleman’s life (35). Their attitude to religion, however, is in marked contrast to modern philosophy which was “actively destructive of traditions and above all biblical traditions” (33). Even as Strauss indicates the importance of a “reminder of greatness” to awaken in liberal society an awareness of excellence, he seems to question whether that is sufficient to counter the withering away of a rich tradition, that provides the matrix out of which the serious moral and political reasoning of this aristocracy can emerge. In “Liberal Education and Responsibility,” Burns finds a fuller account of the original meaning of liberal education, but also, through a discussion of the implications of the “modern, philosophic-scientific project,” clarifies its goal in our time. Burns first develops Strauss’s discussion of the difference, according to the ancients, between the aim of philosophy and that of political life. While philosophers seeks knowledge of the whole, which is accompanied by the recognition