Helpful Agnostic
The Truth About Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy
by
Catherine and Michael Zuckert
University of Chicago Press, 2006
(320 pages, $32.50, hardcover)
reviewed by Michael P. Foley
Leo Strauss is not a household name among Christians, nor is it likely to be anytime soon. A professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago who died in 1973, Strauss was a quiet and agnostic German Jewish émigré who was not well known during his lifetime or shortly thereafter.
This changed somewhat in 2003 due to a rash of much-publicized and, as it turns out, spurious claims that Strauss was the “godfather” of neoconservatism and the posthumous mastermind behind the Bush administration’s foreign policy, but this flash of pseudo-notoriety did little to advance his position with the theologically minded. If anything, his work is now saddled with the double disadvantage of obscurity and suspicion.
This is a pity, for while by no means a believer, Strauss shared one crucial goal with the great Christian writers of the twentieth-century such as Chesterton and Lewis: to understand what he called the “crisis of our times” and to seek an intelligent alternative. With that end in mind, for example, Strauss was one of the first scholars of our age to defend biblical religion on rational grounds from the attacks of the Enlightenment. With enemies like this, who needs friends?
Fortunately, a number of articles and books about Strauss—written mostly by former students rallying to his defense in the wake of the 2003 attacks—have begun to make his thought more widely accessible. Among these generally cogent apologias, it would be difficult to find one more painstakingly even-handed and informative than Michael and Catherine Zuckert’s The Truth About Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy.
Meaning Blotted Out
In Part I, the Zuckerts, both Nancy R. Dreux Professors of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, explicate Strauss’s ambitious and multiform project. Strauss above all aimed to resuscitate classical political philosophy as a way of understanding and remedying our current malaise.
It became obvious after World War I that Western man had lost faith in the tenets of his own civilization, that the entire horizon of meaning in Western culture, as Nietzsche had put it, had been blotted out with a sponge. As Strauss saw it, this collapse primarily had to do with the philosophical principles animating contemporary Western thought.
He thus set out to uncover the nature of these principles and the cause of their implosion. His research led to three cardinal insights: that the secret of the West’s intellectual vitality lies in an irresolvable yet fruitful tension between “Athens and Jerusalem,” between philosophical reason on the one hand and divine revelation on the other; that this vitality was undercut by Niccolo Machiavelli’s creation of modern philosophy, which is as opposed to the classical rationalism of Socrates as it is to the biblical faith of Abraham and Jesus; and that modern philosophy metamorphosed into three increasingly ominous “waves,” the last of which, begun by Nietzsche, now goes by the general name of postmodernity.
The Zuckerts unfold all of this lucidly, as well as the fresh perspective that Strauss brings to bear upon classical, or Socratic, philosophy. But the more central focus of their study is Strauss’s complicated attitude towards America, which can be summarized in a single tension-ridden syllogism: (1) America is modern; (2) modernity is bad; (3) therefore, America is good.
Michael P. Foley is an associate professor of Patristics in the Great Texts Program at Baylor University and the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Christianity (Regnery, 2017).
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