The name of Leo Strauss has been used over the years for narrow ideological purposes. Defending the reputation of the political philosopher against this ideological abuse by his neo-conservative followers is rare. In light of the bellicose reputation the neo-conservative Straussians have gained as the result of their intellectual influence during the Reagan and both Bush presidencies, the title of Robert Howse’s book is surprising. Even more surprising is the fact that Howse himself is not a Straussian but attacks them throughout the book as members of a “sect” who have distorted the legacy of the philosophical master thinker by employing his texts for their narrow ideological goals. But he doesn’t only go after the Straussians. He is equally critical of non-Straussians like Anne Norton, whose book Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (2004) he frequently singles out in order to prove how misleading her, and the interpretations of others, really are.
Robert Howse is a professor for International Law at the NYU Law School and serves on its advisory board for the Center of Law and Philosophy. He doesn’t say whether he became interested in political philosophy and the work of Strauss in this capacity or whether there were other reasons that motivated him to engage in a hermeneutic exercise that can only be called a declaration of love for the texts of Strauss. Yet there is another strange companion in this close reading of the books and lectures by Strauss, namely the French-Russian philosopher Alexandre Kojève. Kojève did not only introduce members of the French intellectual elite to Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit in the 1930s and 1940s, but also taught Straussians Allan Bloom and Francis Fukuyama in Paris how to read Hegel. The Hegelian notion of the ‘end of history’ that Fukuyama sensationalized in an article in 1989 and a follow-up book played a major role in the discussion between Strauss and Kojève because for Strauss history had no meaning but created only enclaves of wisdom, whereas for Kojève the end of history meant the end of all meaning.
Howse uses Kojève throughout the book as his witness of prosecution against a fellow jurist, namely Carl Schmitt. He knows that Kojève, who got his Ph.D. together with Hannah Arendt in 1932 under the supervision of Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg, was a Marxist and a specialist for European affairs in the French foreign office. But he obviously doesn’t know what Jacob Taubes, the son of a Swiss rabbi and professor of Jewish Studies at West-Berlin’s Free University, wrote in 1987 (Ad Carl Schmitt. Gegenstrebige Fügung) about Kojève’s frequent visits in Plettenberg, Schmitt’s hometown: “Where else in Germany should one go? Carl Schmitt is the only one with whom it’s worthwhile talking.” Taubes added that Kojève made the Plettenberg stopovers on his regular journeys to and from Beijing. Taubes was also a close friend of the Swiss writer Armin Mohler, who had been a secretary of Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt before becoming the secretary of the Carl-Friedrich-von-Siemens-Stiftung in Munich. His dissertation in Basel (1949) on the conservative revolution (Die Konservative Revolution, 1918–1932) was mentored, strangely enough, by Karl Jaspers who had moved after the war to Switzerland. Mohler who died in 2003 has become today the intellectual god-father of the rightwing anti-Merkel movement. Howse calls him a neo-fascist. Though he was a reactionary, right-wing conservative who had applied for admission to the Waffen-SS in the 1940s but they did not trust him and he was rejected. He was succeeded at the Siemens-Stiftung by Heinrich Meier whom Howse pursues with a strange vengeance because he has written books on Schmitt and Strauss and their relationship, books Howse disagrees with. He asserts that Meier had “youthful roots in the extreme right, who has made a career of extolling his own (admiring) version of Strauss’s virtues as a warlike thinker” (p. 26).
Carl Schmitt represents for Howse the counter figure to Strauss; he personifies he tradition of “German nihilism” on which Strauss gave a lecture in 1941 at New York’s New School, charging Nietzsche—whom he called “the stepgrandfather of fascism”—and Schmitt and Heidegger as the seducers of German youth. Reading his repeated references to ‘German nihilism’ as the core of German philosophy since the late 18th century, one gets the impression there runs a straight line from Hegel and Fichte through Nietzsche, Max Weber, Heidegger and Schmitt to Hitler and the Holocaust. This cultural determinism, which purges the German Enlightenment that T. J. Reed recently uncovered in his Light in Germany (2015), becomes somewhat questionable when one reads Leo Strauss’ review of Schmitt’s Der Begriff des Politischen from 1932, a review that Schmitt himself considered to be one of the most sympathetic commentaries and convinced him to write recommendations for Strauss when he was planning to leave the country to pursue research projects in England. Strauss’s review certainly plays a role in Howse’s attempt to clear him of the suspicion of having been sympathetic to Schmitt’s critique of the Weimar Republic’s liberal constitutional framework and political dysfunction. Strauss doesn’t embrace Schmitt’s decionist reduction of politics to the level of an existential friend-enemy juxtaposition, yet the “Man of Peace,” whom Howse sees emerging from this review, is not at peace with Weimar politics himself.
Howse’s major accomplishment is the close reading of two books by Strauss, On Tyranny, first published in 1948, and Thoughts on Machiavelli which appeared in 1958. Both books helped to establish Strauss’s reputation as one of the foremost representatives of classical political philosophy in the U.S. Interestingly enough, Howse doesn’t refer to Eric Voegelin who shares that image and the German background with Strauss and engaged with him from 1934 to 1964, but especially after 1945, in an extensive correspondence about religion and philosophy (Faith and Political Philosophy. The Correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934–1964. Eds. P. Emberly/B. Cooper, 1993). He mentions Voegelin’s name a few times but always misspells it. If he would have checked an earlier edition of On Tyranny he would have found not only Kojève’s but also Voegelin’s critical response and Strauss’s answer to the critique of introducing after WWII Xenophon’s Hiero as the adequate intellectual approach to the understanding of the modern totalitarian regimes. Voegelin questioned his approach of returning to the ancients. He insisted that modern tyranny cannot be understood in terms of Greek categories and proposed the notion of Caesarism. He later dropped this concept but without considering a renaissance of the ancients.
Howse’s most creative move in his book is the way he reads Thoughts on Machiavelli against conventional interpretations that often begin with quoting Strauss’s radical formulations about Machiavelli: “He is notorious as the classic of the evil way of political thinking and acting.” And: “He says in his own name shocking things which ancient writers had said through the mouths of their characters. Machiavelli alone has dared to utter the evil doctrine in a book and in his own name.” Howse considers these formulations to be provocative invitations to the young to read Machiavelli and lure them out of their indifference about politics. It is not, as he again and again emphasizes, an invitation to commit acts of violence in the spirit of a “German nationalist/militarist tradition of thought” (p. 92), which is the negative foil for the entire book. Though Machiavelli’s endorsement of unethical conduct by rulers in certain situations is comparable to Schmitt’s siege exceptionalism, Howse emphasizes Strauss’s perspective on Machiavelli as a “revolutionary” thinker who was dissatisfied by the classical political philosophers, especially Plato and Aristotle, and “their apparent neglect of war and conflict in favor of the quest for the city at peace or rest, the perfect city (p. 82).” According to Howse, for Strauss Machiavelli is a Europeans thinker of Renaissance Italy for whom “the problem of violence and law is not primarily or fundamentally about raison d’etat—it is …about law-preserving and above all lawmaking (i.e., state-founding) violence” (p. 97). Machiavelli’s intent was to launch a “revolution in thinking about politics and society, the translation of which into political revolution on the ground would only come in the distant future, and thus in what circumstances and in what country and by what human beings impossible exactly to predict” (p. 105).
It has to be seen whether Howse’s hermeneutic rescue operation for Strauss will take him out of the ideological firing line. Mark Lilla’s new book, The Shipwrecked Mind (2016), illuminates the reasons why Strauss (and Eric Voegelin) plays (play) this role of authority for conservative intellectuals in the U.S. It appears that the philosophers’ German credentials provide the kind of credibility they themselves lack but are longing for.
