Interpretation and Change

Timothy W. Burns’s Leo Strauss on Democracy, Technology, and Liberal Education is an extraordinary scholarly achievement. Burns offers a lucid and wide-ranging exploration of Strauss’s political philosophy based on an extensive and intimate knowledge not only of Strauss’s voluminous scholarly writing— which itself is difficult, because most of what Strauss wrote supposes extensive and intimate knowledge of the whole canon of political philosophy—but also of much of Strauss’s unpublished work, especially lectures whose typescripts remain among his papers, as well as transcripts of classes, letters, and other notes. Let me raise a preliminary question about this before turning to Burns’s interpretation itself. Recourse to unpublished works is a curious strategy, particularly reliance on unpublished versions of lectures that were later revised and published. Ordinarily one would think an author’s published works provided the most considered record of his thought, assuming he was not edited against his will. Is it that, because Strauss wrote about esoteric writing and was alert to the difference between speaking and writing, Burns believes his thought might be captured better in his lectures than in his publications, the latter of which were by definition exoteric? Would not the usual presumption be to give more authority to a published text—recognizing of course, as Strauss taught, the circumstances surrounding publication—than to a typescript that was never reworked or rewritten? If the lecture was rewritten, should not more authority be given to the finished version rather than the draft? As for his classes, Strauss surely knew they were being recorded, and while it is delightful to hear him teach, can we suppose his statements to a particular class instruct us better than his writings? Or is Burns’s point pedagogical rather than scientific, to help those of us who have read and reread Strauss’s published books and essays over a lifetime to think about him afresh? Turning from this question of methodology to Burns’s account of Strauss’s thought, he begins with a question of political science: How is it with our world today? What kind of politics do we observe and engage in? What is our regime, and is it good? The answer to the “what” question is “liberal democracy,” a regime founded by philosophers and so absent from Aristotle’s schema of natural forms. Would that Marx had been correct in that last thesis on Feuerbach, that philosophers had only interpreted the world, not tried to change it. Instead, since Machiavelli they have done the latter, and with great success, at least at first: transforming the face of the globe and focusing the attention of most men on worldly happiness. What Marx attributes to the bourgeoisie, Strauss attributes to their teachers. He does agree with Marx, it seems, that this has us hurtling toward catastrophe, and without Marx’s sanguine hope that all will be well after the revolution. Having observed the rise of Nazism— barbarism in the midst of the highest civilization, he says somewhere—he had seen worse than Marx, and in coming to explain it by his analysis of Heidegger and his fatal error (fatal to his people, not himself), brilliantly and painstakingly analyzed by Burns, Strauss then considers the alternative. If the error was in a misunderstanding of the philosopher’s task, the first thing to do was to recover that task, in other words, to make the case for understanding philosophy precisely as Socrates understood it, as learning in the utmost seriousness how to die, that is, learning how to achieve serenity in the face of man’s merely mortal place in the universe. Then and only then can we go about shoring up our politics, preserving our decent constitutionalism, reviving our tradition and the faith(s) incorporated with them all, and rediscovering the liberal education that will help form the sort of gentleman who will recognize (and perhaps on occasion will actually realize) human or political greatness.