1. The Failure of Strauss's Critique of Historicism in the First Chapter of NRH

The first chapter of NRH, “Natural Right and the Historical Approach,” provides a historical account of the “genesis” of historicism, from its “infancy” in the conservative reaction to the French Revolution up to its most radical expression, the “radical historicism” of Heidegger.Footnote ¹⁹ In giving this account, Strauss clarifies what historicism is, explains why it lies at the basis of the “present-day rejection of natural right,”Footnote ²⁰ and critiques it in order to defend natural right.

According to Strauss, the conservative reaction to the French Revolution gave rise to the “historical school” of natural right. Taking issue with the revolutionary potential of the invocation of universally held individual rights, the historical school “denied … the significance of universal norms,” and instead proposed that all “objective” norms are those which derive from a particular people's history, or are “local and temporal”: “rights of Englishmen, for example, in contradistinction to the rights of man.”Footnote ²¹ Historicism, Strauss contends, grew out of the specifically historical reflection on the historical source of these historical rights. This source is the “historical process,”

Whereas, for the historical school, the quaestio facti of historical inheritance grounds the objectivity of norms, for historicism, the same inheritance implies that knowledge of objective norms is impossible. Two points should be emphasized here. First, historicism denies, specifically, the possibility of knowledge of objective norms; it is a “critique of human thought as such” and is comparable to the skepticism that resulted from Hume and Kant.Footnote ²³ Second, while this denial applies to both universal and “local and temporal” norms, Strauss focuses on the former: historicism claims to reveal “the unheard-of experience of the true situation of man as man—of a situation which earlier man had concealed from himself by believing in universal and unchangeable principles.”Footnote ²⁴ In this respect, historicism is a “rejection” of natural right in the sense that it rejects the possibility of knowledge of “universal and unchangeable principles” of right.

Following this characterization of historicism, Strauss turns to his critique of it. This critique comprises three separate arguments; I will look at each in turn.

Strauss's first argument is that since, by virtue of historicism, “no objective criterion henceforth allowed the distinction between good and bad choices,” historicism “culminated in nihilism” or carried a “nihilistic consequence.”Footnote ²⁵ Strauss anticipates this argument in the introduction to NRH, in which he attacks the contemporary consciousness generated by historicism:

According to Liisi Keedus, this argument is Strauss's “reductio ad nihilismus” against historicism: historicism is false because it leads to nihilism. Keedus observes that this reductio is “the hallmark of Strauss's critique of both historicism and positivism.”Footnote ²⁷

Curiously, however, Strauss suggests—albeit indirectly—that his reductio is baseless. In a footnote at the beginning of the first chapter, Strauss notes a distinction between two arguments made by the legal philosopher Karl Bergbohm against natural right: “Bergbohm's strict argument against the possibility of natural right … [is] distinguished from the argument that is merely meant to show the disastrous consequences of natural right for the positive legal order.”Footnote ²⁸ In light of this distinction, Strauss's reductio—which appeals to the “disastrous consequences” of historicism's denial of natural right—does not qualify as a “strict argument” against it. Even more, in the second chapter of NRH, after explaining Max Weber's thesis that there is no “knowledge” of “the true value system,” Strauss states: “I contend that Weber's thesis necessarily leads to nihilism” and even Hitler (“in following this movement [started by Weber] towards its end we shall inevitably reach a point beyond which the scene is darkened by the shadow of Hitler”).Footnote ²⁹ Strauss then adds, however: “Unfortunately, it does not go without saying that in our examination we must avoid the fallacy that in the last decades has frequently been used as a substitute for the reductio ad absurdum: the reductio ad Hitlerum. A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler.”Footnote ³⁰ Strauss's reductio ad nihilismus is as much a “substitute” for the reductio ad absurdum as is the reductio ad Hitlerum: rather than pointing to an absurd consequence, it points to a bad one. Indeed, Keedus is aware of this fallacy, but does not recognize that Strauss draws attention to it himself: Strauss, she writes, “was occasionally subject to the temptation known as reductio ad hitlerum”—without noting that this formula is Strauss's own.Footnote ³¹

Strauss's second argument begins by distinguishing between what he calls “fundamental problems” (such as whether the world is eternal or not and what justice is) and “solutions” to those problems (that the world is eternal, or that justice is giving each his due). Even if historicism is true, Strauss then argues, it only undermines the possibility of the knowledge of solutions, not fundamental problems: “If the fundamental problems persist in all historical change, human thought is capable of transcending its historical limitation or of grasping something trans-historical. This would be the case even if it were true that all attempts to solve these problems are doomed to fail and that they are doomed to fail on account of the ‘historicity’ of ‘all’ human thought.”Footnote ³² Commentators generally regard this argument as Strauss's “zetetic” response to historicism and, indeed, his strongest one. Philosophy is “zetetic” in the sense that it merely tries to articulate, and better understand, “fundamental problems,” but does not thereby presume to answer them; in this way, philosophy remains untouched by historicism's denial of that presumption, that is, that “universal and unchangeable principles” can be known in respect of questions of justice or even nature.Footnote ³³

No less than with his first argument against historicism, however, Strauss undermines this one. To begin with, as Robert Pippin points out,Footnote ³⁴ after proposing it, Strauss explains that while it might defend philosophy in respect of the possibility of understanding fundamental problems, it does not do so in respect of the possibility for whose sake it was appealed to in the first place—knowledge of natural right: “To leave it at this [the zetetic response] would amount to regarding the cause of natural right as hopeless. There cannot be natural right if all that man could know about right were the problem of right, or if the question of the principles of justice would admit of a variety of mutually exclusive answers, none of which could be proved to be superior to the others.”Footnote ³⁵ More radically, however, Strauss suggests that his zetetic response fails to defend the first possibility mentioned. As he presents it, this response depends on a major assumption: “If the fundamental problems persist in all historical change,” then “human thought is capable of transcending its historical limitation,” even if historicism is true. Strauss, however, nowhere justifies this assumption; given its importance, this appears less a mistake that Strauss is making than one that he is exposing. Even more, Strauss later asserts that historicism rejects the assumption in question, implying that his argument, which is made ex concessis or is dialectical,Footnote ³⁶ collapses. Discussing Weber's historicism in the second chapter, Strauss formulates it as follows: “Every conceptual scheme used by social science articulates the basic problems, and these problems change with the change of the social and cultural situation,” in other words, the (apparently) “fundamental problems” are as historical as their solutions.Footnote ³⁷

Strauss's third argument recalls the classical argument against skeptical and relativist positions: “The historicist thesis,” Strauss claims, “is self-contradictory or absurd.” Specifically, by denying the possibility of knowledge of the eternal (whether of “universal and unchangeable principles” of right or “fundamental problems”), historicism actually affirms that possibility, for historicism itself claims to possess knowledge of the eternal—knowledge of the eternal impossibility of knowledge of the eternal.Footnote ³⁸

After stating this argument, Strauss turns abruptly to Heidegger's “radical historicism.” This turn, however, is not a non sequitur, for, according to Strauss, Heidegger's radical historicism is designed precisely to save historicism from the charge of self-contradictoriness or absurdity. According to that radical historicism, “All human thought depends on fate, on something that thought cannot master and whose workings it cannot anticipate”; the “fate” in question is history.Footnote ³⁹ Despite this dependence on fate, however, the principles of thought must ultimately be chosen by the individual: “the support of the horizon produced by fate is ultimately the choice of the individual, since that fate has to be accepted by the individual.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Strauss here captures Heidegger's view of “Dasein,” the human being, as “historical” (geschichtlich) or a “thrown project” (geworfener Entwurf): Dasein is “thrown,” from its past, that is, without having chosen, into a way of projecting, that is, a future-directed way of making sense of itself and its world; however, it must then choose that way of projecting and thereby make its own “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) its project.Footnote ⁴¹ So understood, Heidegger's radical historicism merely expands historicism's view of norms into a view of thought in general; as Strauss explained, for historicism, norms arise from the “unmitigated chance” that is history and have “no other support than the free choice of the individual.” But what, against this background, distinguishes Heidegger's radical historicism is that it views its own knowledge—that thought is a choice of fate—according to its own model of thought, that is, as a choice of fate: “radical historicism asserts that the basic insight into the essential limitation of human thought is … an unforeseeable gift of unfathomable fate. It is due to fate that the essential dependence of thought on fate is realized now. … HistoricismFootnote ⁴² has this in common with all other thought, that it depends on fate. It differs from all other thought in this, that, thanks to fate, it has been given to realize the radical dependence of thought on fate.”Footnote ⁴³ Owing to this self-understanding, Heidegger's radical historicism escapes the charge of self-contradictoriness or absurdity: what it claims of knowledge in general, it claims of its own knowledge (of knowledge) as well.

Strauss does not offer any argument against Heidegger's radical historicism.Footnote ⁴⁴ After explaining how it escapes the charge of self-contradictoriness or absurdity, Strauss states that it carries a number of implications that call into question “the most elementary premises whose validity is presupposed by philosophy”: that the “whole … can never be grasped”; that “human thought essentially depends on something … that can never be mastered by the subject”; that “‘to be’ in the highest sense cannot mean—or, at any rate, it does not necessarily mean—‘to be always.’”Footnote ⁴⁵ Strauss then remarks, however: “We cannot even attempt to discuss these theses.” Certainly, this nonattempt at discussion is due to the fact that the theses in question transcend Strauss's immediate topic, natural right. But it is also due to the more radical circumstance that, as Strauss has just explained, Heidegger's radical historicism would refuse any such discussion: for it, the truth of the theses in question could only be decided by a choice of fate, not any rational discussion. Indeed, this may be why, in “What Is Political Philosophy?,” Strauss calls historicism “the serious antagonist of political philosophy”: the serious antagonist, not interlocutor, for, between it and political philosophy or philosophy generally, no discussion is possible.Footnote ⁴⁶

I conclude that, in the first chapter of NRH, Strauss's critique of historicism in defense of natural right fails and that Strauss shows that it fails. This conclusion, however, is perplexing: Why, then, does Strauss offer this critique? And does Strauss's demonstration of its failure not imply that, against the historicist attack, natural right is defenseless, that is, that Strauss himself “regard[s] the cause of natural right as hopeless”?

2. The Critique of Historicism in the Section on Burke

The first chapter of NRH is not, however, the only place in the text in which Strauss critiques historicism. In a well-known essay about NRH, Richard Kennington remarks that the last chapter, “The Crisis of Modern Natural Right,” and specifically the last section of that chapter, which concerns Edmund Burke, “turns back upon—forms a pair with—the first” chapter.Footnote ⁴⁷ Indeed, in the section on Burke, Strauss comments that “Burke paves the way for the ‘historical school’”—that school which, in the first chapter, he calls the “infancy of historicism”;Footnote ⁴⁸ and, in accordance with this comment, Strauss explains how Burke lays the conceptual foundations for the historicism that he treats in the first chapter. As I will try to show, a critique of historicism—different from that provided in the first chapter—emerges from this explanation.

The section on Burke is not straightforward. According to Steven Lenzner, Strauss presents three different “Burkes,” that is, three contrasting political-philosophical perspectives that Burke himself held: a Burke who takes an Aristotelian approach to “practice”; a Burke who partially breaks from Aristotle in respect of the relation between “practice” and “theory”; and a Burke who entirely severs his tie to Aristotle and lays the foundation for historicism.Footnote ⁴⁹ Lenzner suggests that Strauss critiques Burke through this differentiation; he shows that the thought of one Burke is “healthy” whereas that of the others is “unhealthy.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Partially following Lenzner, I will look at two Burkes that Strauss identifies; these two Burkes correspond to Lenzner's first and third, and, indeed, he acknowledges that the “real difference” between his three Burkes is between the latter two.Footnote ⁵¹ Strauss's critique of historicism emerges from the way in which he plays these two Burkes off against one another.

According to Strauss, Burke's central theme is “the old quarrel between speculation and practice.”Footnote ⁵² Strauss's first Burke takes the side of practice over speculation, or, more precisely, supports a “political” approach to practice over a “speculatist” approach. At first, Strauss distinguishes these two approaches by reference to their subject: whereas the speculatist approach is concerned with the “end of government,” the political approach is concerned with the “means” to that end. Referring to the speculatist approach as “theory,” and quoting Burke,Footnote ⁵³ Strauss writes: “Theory, ‘which regards man and the affairs of men,’ is primarily concerned with the principles of morality as well as with ‘the principles of true politics [which] are those of morality enlarged’ or with ‘the proper ends of government.’ Knowing the proper ends of government, one does not know anything of how and to what extent those ends can be realized here and now, under the particular circumstances both fixed and transitory.”Footnote ⁵⁴

No sooner has he made this distinction, however, than Strauss revises it. In fact, like the political approach, the speculatist approach focuses on means; the genuine difference between the two is that, whereas the latter chooses means according to moral rules, the former does so by virtue of the “suspension” of such rules: “Theory … deals not merely with the proper ends of government but also with the means to those ends. But there is hardly any rule regarding those means which is universally valid. Sometimes one is confronted even ‘with the dreadful exigence in which morality submits to the suspension of its own rules in favour of its own principles.’ Since there are many rules of this kind which are sound in most cases, they have a plausibility that is positively misleading in regard to the rare cases in which their application would be fatal.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The first Burke's preference for the political over the speculatist approach is due to the way in which each handles “rare cases.” In such cases, the choice of means according to moral rules “would be fatal,” whereas only a choice that involves the “suspension” of such rules would be successful. It is important to emphasize that, in this respect, the problem with the speculatist approach is less that it chooses means according to moral rules, than that it chooses them according to rules: its manner of choice “would be fatal” because, while it is “sound in most cases,” it is not sound in “rare” ones. Indeed, Strauss explains that “new situations sometime arise in reaction to the very rules which uncontradicted previous experience pronounced to be universally valid: man is inventive in good and in evil.”Footnote ⁵⁶ “Rare cases” are deliberate attempts—products of man's being “inventive”—in which an enemy attempts to take advantage of one's reliance on universally valid rules (or, more precisely, apparently universally valid rules, for their “suspension” is necessary); therefore, in a rare case, to choose means according to such rules would, precisely, be “fatal.” In accordance with this view of the speculatist approach, Strauss calls it “legalistic” or the “legal approach”: it “act[s] on the assumption that political questions proper, which, as such, concern the here and now, can be fully answered by recourse to law, which, as such, is concerned with universals.”Footnote ⁵⁷ By contrast, the political approach, eschewing such “recourse to law,” is “the prudential, which alone can guide men ‘when a new and troubled scene is opened.’”Footnote ⁵⁸

Immediately following this account of the first Burke's approach to “rare cases,” Strauss introduces his second Burke. Like the first Burke, the second Burke is concerned with “rare cases.” But the kind of rare case in which the second Burke is interested is different from that of concern to the first Burke: whereas the first Burke is concerned with rare cases in which an existing constitution is threatened and needs to be preserved (his political approach issues in “temporary solutions of continuity”Footnote ⁵⁹), the second Burke is interested in that particular rare case in which a new and, specifically, the best constitution is to be actualized. In respect of this kind of rare case, the second Burke “rejects the view that constitutions can be ‘made’ in favor of the view that they must ‘grow’; he therefore rejects in particular the view that the best social order can be or ought to be the work of an individual, of a wise ‘legislator’ or ‘founder.’”Footnote ⁶⁰ The view that the second Burke rejects, Strauss continues, is that of the “classics,” where

In respect of the rare case of the actualization of the best constitution, the second Burke rejects the political approach, that is, the prudence, which the first Burke endorses in respect of the rare case of the preservation of an existing constitution. I want to emphasize that, in the quotation provided above, it is specifically with regard to the actualization (the “production” or “com[ing] into being”) of the best constitution that the second Burke breaks with the “classics” and rejects the political approach; in respect of the identity of the best constitution, and in particular the view that it is “natural,” he agrees with the “classics” (“the best constitution is in accordance with nature or is natural also and primarily because…”).Footnote ⁶² In any case, it is not as clear that the approach that the second Burke supports is the speculatist. For him, the actualization of the best constitution is due to “the imitation of a natural process,” not any choice in accordance with moral rules; even more, one might think that the organic view that Strauss ascribes to the second Burke leaves room for prudence. According to Strauss, however, the second Burke's approach is precisely speculatist: insofar as the actualization in question is due to “the imitation of a natural process,” and therefore “not through planning” and “without guiding reflection,” it is due to “accidental causation,” that is, laws like those operative in nature, as it is understood by modern science. In other words, the second Burke's approach is “legalistic” or the “legal approach.”Footnote ⁶³ Indeed, Strauss later adds that, owing to the second Burke's approach, the actualization of the best constitution “become[s] a purely theoretical theme,” susceptible to the same kind of analysis that “was first applied to the planetary system and thereafter to ‘the system of wants,’ i.e., to economics.”Footnote ⁶⁴

While Strauss does not say so explicitly, this account of the second Burke, following as it does upon his account of the first Burke, implies a criticism: the second Burke falls prey to the very error diagnosed by the first Burke, albeit in respect of a kind of rare case that the latter did not consider. Specifically, by taking the speculatist approach to the rare case of the actualization of the best constitution, the second Burke rejects the political approach, that is, the prudence, which that rare case requires. More concretely, against the enemies of the actualization of the best constitution—people “inventive” “in evil”—the second Burke disregards the prudence necessary to deal with them—being “inventive in good.” As Strauss emphasizes, this necessity is one that the “classics” understood.

Following his account of the second Burke, Strauss turns to Burke's role in the development of historicism; as will become clear, it is specifically the second Burke who is relevant in this respect. Burke, Strauss explains, is responsible for “the two most important elements in the ‘discovery’ of History,” that is, the “historical school” out of which historicism develops.Footnote ⁶⁵ First, while Burke did not believe that “a sound political order must be the product of History,” it was the “application” of his “principle” that “the sound political order”—the best constitution—“is the unintended outcome of accidental causation,” which accounts for the historical school's view that “the genesis of the sound political order” is historical accidental causation.Footnote ⁶⁶ Second, the historical school applies the same principle to “humanity,” that is (as Strauss quotes Burke) “the mind of man”: for the historical school, “man's humanity was understood as acquired by virtue of accidental causation,” and, once again, that of history.Footnote ⁶⁷

In light of the two foregoing “elements,” the decisive influence of the second Burke is his—or, more precisely, the second Burke's—speculatism, which the historical school even expands: for it, not only the actualization of the “sound political order,” but also that of the “mind of man” is due to the accidental causation of history. Strauss therefore suggests that the historical school commits the same error as the second Burke does, and in this expanded way: taking the speculatist approach not only to the rare case of the actualization of the “sound political order,” but also to that of the “mind of man”—what can be called, in brief, the rare case of the actualization of rationality—it rejects the political approach, that is, the prudence, which that rare case requires. Indeed, Strauss earlier indicated that, for the “classics,” the actualization of the “mind of man” depends on that of the “sound political order”: for them, there is an “obvious dependence of the philosophic life on the city.”Footnote ⁶⁸

In the section on Burke, Strauss does not address historicism as distinct from the historical school (with one exception, which I will look at shortly). In his account of historicism in the first chapter, however, he attributes to it the same speculatism as he does to the historical school in the section on Burke (and this attribution becomes apparent, so to speak, only in hindsight): for historicism, the “standards” governing particular communities are “thrown up by” the “meaningless [historical] process,” that is, “unmitigated chance”; and—with reference to Heidegger—“the basic insight” is “an unforeseeable gift of unfathomable fate,” indeed, a “fateful dispensation.”Footnote ⁶⁹ To be sure, the rationality that is thus actualized for historicism is not objective, as it is for the historical school; for reasons that Strauss gives in the first chapter, historicism denies that a “sound political order” or sound “mind of man” can be actualized. In just this respect, however, historicism is actually closer to the speculatism of the second Burke than is the historical school: the second Burke, Strauss explains, “denies the possibility of an absolute moment,” that is, one “in which man, the product of blind fate, becomes the seeing master of his fate by understanding for the first time in an adequate manner what is right and wrong politically and morally.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Strauss thus suggests that historicism commits the same error as the historical school does, and which can ultimately be traced back to the second Burke. I want to emphasize that this error is no less worse for being committed in respect of a nonobjective rationality; after all, as Strauss himself suggests, the rationality that he sets against historicism—the search for “universal and unchangeable principles” and even his zetetic conception of philosophy—is not rationally justifiable against the historicist attack on it. Indeed, for just this reason, that rationality is the “serious antagonist” of historicism and therefore requires, for the sake of its actualization against the historicist attack, the political approach or prudence.

Strauss's one comment about Heidegger—and, indeed, about historicism as distinct from the historical school—in the section on Burke reflects the critique just outlined. This comment is particularly noteworthy given Strauss's refusal, in the first chapter, to discuss Heidegger's radical historicism. Remarking that Hegel inherited the speculatism of the historical school, and that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche's backlash against him targeted this speculatism, Strauss writes that “‘doctrinairism’ and ‘existentialism’ appear to us as the two faulty extremes. While being opposed to each other, they agree with each other in the decisive respect—they agree in ignoring prudence, ‘the god of this lower world.’”Footnote ⁷¹ “Doctrinairism” is another word that Strauss uses for “speculatism,”Footnote ⁷² and refers, in this context, to that of Hegel or the historical school; and Strauss earlier identified “existentialism” with Heidegger's radical historicism.Footnote ⁷³ Now, Heidegger is “opposed” to the speculatism of Hegel or the historical school insofar as he—like historicism generally—denies that objective rationality can be actualized. As Strauss immediately notes, however, what is “decisive” is not this opposition—a point that reflects his abandonment, in the first chapter, of the critique of the denial just mentioned. Rather, what is “decisive” is the respect in which Heidegger agrees with the speculatism of Hegel or the historical school: in “ignoring prudence,” “the god of this lower world” according to (the first) Burke.Footnote ⁷⁴

But if the foregoing critique of historicism emerges from the section on Burke, this does not solve, but rather intensifies, the perplexities to which the first chapter gives rise. For why does Strauss offer the critique that he does in the first chapter, not only if he shows that it fails, but also proceeds to give a different critique? Even more, does not the critique of historicism in the section on Burke contradict and even undermine Strauss's critique in the first chapter, insofar as it points to the necessity of the “suspension” of “universally valid rules of morality,” the very kind of rules that the latter critique defends? In this light, it not only seems that Strauss “regard[s] the cause of natural right as hopeless,” but also wishes to do so.

3. The Critique of Historicism and Natural Right

Just as, however, the first chapter of NRH is not the only place in the text in which Strauss discusses historicism, so too the first chapter is not the only place in which he discusses natural right. To be sure, in view of Strauss's project in NRH, this is the most obvious observation possible: the whole text is devoted to the historical development of the conception of natural right. Nevertheless, in light of the particular conception that he presents in the first chapter, as well as his critique of historicism in the section on Burke, one such discussion stands out: Strauss's discussion in the fourth chapter, “Classic Natural Right,” of Aristotle's thesis that natural right is “changeable.”Footnote ⁷⁵

This discussion actually concerns three interpretations of Aristotle's thesis: the “Thomistic,” the “Averroistic,” and Strauss's own. Strauss's stated reason for this approach is Aristotle's reticence regarding his thesis: “Aristotle's own view covers barely one page of the Nicomachean Ethics. … The passage is singularly elusive; it is not illumined by a single example of what is by nature right.”Footnote ⁷⁶ As I will try to show, Strauss's own interpretation shares in Aristotle's elusiveness, though not to the same degree, and even tries to establish its necessity.

Strauss begins with the Thomistic interpretation, according to which Aristotle actually means that natural right is unchangeable, but adds a “qualification”: while the “principles” of natural right are unchangeable (“universally valid and immutable”), the “specific rules” which, in light of particular circumstances, must be “derived” from those principles are changeable.Footnote ⁷⁷ This derivation is required by the “conscience,” for which Strauss also provides Aquinas's word for the habitus of practical principles, “synderesis.” Strauss rejects this interpretation: it is “alien to Aristotle” and “is of Patristic origin.”Footnote ⁷⁸ The problem is not only that, by allowing natural right to be fundamentally unchangeable, it betrays Aristotle's meaning; additionally, since the conscience requires that “specific rules” be “derived” from unchangeable “principles,” even those rules are not really changeable. At the very least, they cannot contradict the principles from which they are derived.Footnote ⁷⁹ Indeed, Strauss refers to the principles in question as “axioms.”Footnote ⁸⁰

The Averroistic interpretation seems, at first glance, to fare better in capturing Aristotle's meaning. On this interpretation, Aristotle identifies natural right with “legal natural right,” which means that natural right is “conventional.”Footnote ⁸¹ This conventionality, however, is less a matter of agreement, than it is the fact that while “normally” the “requirements” of natural right should be obeyed, in “rare exceptions” it is necessary to “disregard” them, that is, change them: “In spite of the fact that they [the ‘requirements’ of natural right] seem to be evidently necessary and are universally recognized, they are conventional for this reason: Civil society is incompatible with any immutable rules, however basic; for in certain conditions the disregard of these rules may be needed for the preservation of society. … Since the rules in question obtain normally, all social teachings proclaim these rules and not the rare exceptions.”Footnote ⁸² As Strauss indicates, the Averroistic interpretation has an esoteric dimension, and I will return to this. Relevant here is that Strauss rejects this interpretation just as he does the Thomistic: it “differs from Aristotle's view in so far as it implies the denial of natural right proper.”Footnote ⁸³ The Averroistic interpretation “denies natural right proper,” however, not because it denies that natural right consists in “immutable rules,” for it “agrees with Aristotle in so far as it admits the mutability of all rules of justice.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Rather, the reason is that the laws (or conventions) with which the Averroistic interpretation identifies natural right are not genuinely natural: they “are not natural right but conventional right.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Strauss then turns to his own interpretation. “When speaking of natural right,” he begins, “Aristotle does not primarily think of any general propositions but rather of concrete decisions.”Footnote ⁸⁶ To be sure, Aristotle does discuss “general propositions,” namely, the “principles” of distributive and commutative justice. However, “there is a meaning of justice which is not exhausted by” these principles, namely, “the common good.” And while “normally” the “common good” consists in the aforementioned principles,

Like the Averroistic interpretation, Strauss's interpretation holds that, in “extreme situations,” the “suspension” of the “normally valid rules of natural right” is necessary. But this necessity is not the reason why, according to Strauss's interpretation, natural right is changeable, as it is for the Averroistic interpretation. Rather, the reason is that natural right is identical to the “concrete decisions” taken out of the necessity in question, and these decisions cannot be precisely defined: since their purpose is to deal with a “possibly unscrupulous and savage enemy,” who stands behind the very existence of “extreme situations,” “there are no limits which can be defined in advance, there are no assignable limits” to what these decisions can decide. Strauss elaborates: “Every dangerous external or internal enemy is inventive to the extent that he is capable of transforming what, on the basis of previous experience, could reasonably be regarded as a normal situation into an extreme situation. Natural right must be mutable in order to be able to cope with the inventiveness of wickedness.”Footnote ⁸⁸ As Lenzner notes,Footnote ⁸⁹ this passage directly recalls Strauss's statement in the section on Burke that “man is inventive in good and evil,” and I will return to this momentarily. Important here is that, for Strauss, natural right is changeable because of the “inventiveness of wickedness”: it must be able to match that “inventiveness” with its own “inventiveness.” Strauss's interpretation thus avoids the errors of both the Thomistic and the Averroistic interpretations: natural right is fundamentally changeable, yet not because it is identical to unnatural laws or conventions.

Now, the conception of natural right that emerges from Strauss's interpretation of Aristotle's thesis is identical to the “political approach,” that is, the prudence, that the first Burke supports. Like that prudence, this conception refers to “extreme situations” (“rare cases”); it is based on the necessity imposed by those extreme situations of the “suspension” of “normally valid rules of natural right” (the necessity of the “suspension” of “universally valid rules”); and the reason for this necessity is the “sad exigencies” that involve, above all, the “inventiveness of wickedness” (the “dreadful exigence” that “man is inventive in good and evil”). If this is the case, however, then Strauss's critique of historicism in the section on Burke does justify natural right, albeit implicitly (and I will return to this below): the prudence that historicism rejects, and which is necessary for the rare case of the actualization of rationality, is nothing else than natural right.

Strauss's critique of the Thomistic and Averroistic interpretations of Aristotle's thesis also illuminates what, specifically, the problem with historicism is. While the Averroistic interpretation fails to recognize either the naturalness or the rightness of “concrete decisions,” it at least recognizes their necessity (“in certain conditions the disregard of these rules [the ‘requirements’ of natural right] may be needed for the preservation of society”). By contrast, the Thomistic interpretation even fails to recognize this necessity. The reason for this failure is the Thomistic interpretation's conception of the “conscience”: the conscience requires that, in light of particular situations, “specific rules” be “derived” from unchangeable “principles,” like those of distributive and commutative justice;Footnote ⁹⁰ for this reason, however, it absolutely forbids the decisive “suspension” of these principles under such situations. To put this point simply (if crudely), the conscience requires a derivation, but therefore never a decision.Footnote ⁹¹ Indeed, this explains why, as Strauss notes at the end of “Classic Natural Right,” Montesquieu “tried to recover for statesmanship a latitude which had been considerably restricted by the Thomistic teaching”;Footnote ⁹² and, in Strauss's one nonexegetical discussion of “conscience” in NRH, he squarely places the blame for the above-mentioned restriction on its shoulders: “By virtue of his rationality, man has a latitude of alternatives such as no other earthly being has. The sense of this latitude, of this freedom, is accompanied by a sense that the full and unrestrained exercise of that freedom is not right. Man's freedom is accompanied by a sacred awe, by a kind of divination that not everything is permitted. We may call this awe-inspired fear ‘man's natural conscience.’”Footnote ⁹³ While Strauss does call “conscience” “natural,” it is specifically that part of nature that restricts the “rationality” of “man,” that characteristic “such as no other earthly being has,” and which therefore is no less natural and perhaps more so.Footnote ⁹⁴

Strauss's objection to the Thomistic interpretation prefigures his critique of historicism: the Thomistic conscience is speculatist. Even more, however, there is a conspicuous similarity between the Thomistic conscience and historicism. For while historicism certainly does not impose the same requirement as does the Thomistic conscience, it does require that, in light of particular situations, choices comply with—be “derived” from—“principles,” namely, those of historical accidental causation, that is, the “local and temporal” “norms” “thrown up by” the “historical process.” According to Strauss, historicism brings about “the supersession of the distinction between good and bad by the distinction between the progressive and the retrograde, or between what is and what is not in harmony with the historical process.”Footnote ⁹⁵ In this respect, historicism projects the function of the Thomistic conscience—the subordination of choice to principle—onto the “historical process” or “history,” and even thereby reifies that function into a “fact.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Indeed, Heidegger's radical historicism gives striking testimony of this projection and reification, for, in Being and Time, in opposing Kant's interpretation of “conscience” (Gewissen) as a “court of justice,” he attempts to ground his interpretation on Dasein's “historical” character: what the “call of conscience” (Ruf des Gewissens) calls Dasein “to,” is to choose the particular, “factical” projects into which it has been thrown; and “what” does this calling, that is, what the call of conscience is itself, is Dasein's own historical character—that it has been thrown into particular, factical projects.Footnote ⁹⁷

Finally, the conception of natural right that emerges from Strauss’s interpretation of Aristotle’s thesis helps to clear up the perplexities to which the first chapter of NRH gives rise. According to Strauss, this conception must be esoterically concealed: the “sad exigencies” that it reveals must be “covered with a veil with which they are justly covered.” In his account of the Averroistic interpretation, Strauss elaborates on this necessity of concealment, for this interpretation reveals “sad exigencies” similar to those revealed by his own:

In order for (apparently) “immutable rules” to be effective, it is necessary that they appear to be “immutable,” that is, it is necessary to conceal that, in “rare exceptions,” they must be disregarded: “all social teachings proclaim these rules and not the rare exceptions.” A fortiori—since at issue is not merely the necessity, but also the naturalness and rightness of the “suspension” of the “normally valid rules of justice”—the conception of natural right according to which it consists in concrete decisions must be concealed.Footnote ⁹⁹ The reason for this concealment recalls what Arthur Melzer has called the “protective” purpose of esotericism, that is, the protection of society from the antinomian implications of a philosophical doctrine.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ However, whereas for Melzer the doctrine in question is theoretical—a metaphysical doctrine concerning God, providence, or immortality, for example, or even Strauss's zetetic conception of philosophy—for Strauss, it is political: that concrete decisions are naturally right.

There is a certain irony in Strauss's asserting the necessity of concealing the very conception of natural right that he is articulating. For example, when he writes above, “Let us leave these sad exigencies covered with the veil with which they are justly covered. It suffices to repeat that in extreme situations the normally valid rules of natural right are justly changed,” Strauss lifts the very veil that he has just drawn down. To be sure, the conception of natural right that Strauss here discloses justifies this very transgression; and, besides, he partly keeps the veil in place, for in writing that “it suffices” to repeat, Strauss suggests that he discloses only what is presently sufficient.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Indeed, there is a difference between Strauss's repetition and the passage it repeats; whereas the repetition states that, in extreme situations, the normally valid rules of natural right are “justly changed,” the passage it repeats states that “there are no assignable limits to what might become just reprisals,” in other words, natural right justifies changes that might not be just.

The latter considerations aside, Strauss's exposition in NRH conforms to his esoteric requirement concerning natural right. To begin with, that Strauss lifts the veil that he draws down can be explained by the fact that he does so at the very center of NRH, and, as he explains in Persecution and the Art of Writing, published one year before NRH, “serious views,” indeed “heterodox” ones, “are more likely to occur—according to a rule of forensic rhetoric—somewhere in the middle, i.e., in places least exposed to the curiosity of superficial readers.”Footnote ¹⁰² Likewise, that Strauss justifies the conception of natural right that emerges from his interpretation of Aristotle's thesis, only implicitly in the section on Burke, can be explained by the fact that this section occurs at the end of the book.Footnote ¹⁰³ Finally, that Strauss offers a critique of historicism in the first chapter that he shows fails, and subsequently provides a different critique, can be explained in the following way: on the one hand, the purpose of his critique in the first chapter is the defense of the view of natural right that “all social teachings proclaim”; and, on the other hand, Strauss means to prepare the reader, although cautiously, for a different critique of historicism and indeed a different conception of natural right. In this respect, Strauss's critique of historicism in the first chapter is exoteric, whereas his critique in the section on Burke is esoteric, and he explains the reason for this approach in the middle of the book, in his interpretation of Aristotle's thesis that natural right is changeable.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

4. Strauss and Schmitt

Richard Velkley has written that “taken as a whole [NRH] lays the basis for a full confrontation with the thinker whom Strauss regarded as the one great philosopher of the twentieth century,” Heidegger.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Based on the foregoing, this certainly seems to be true. But if it is true, the basis of that “confrontation” is Strauss's dependence on another thinker of the twentieth century, Carl Schmitt. As I noted above, this dependence has not been recognized in the scholarly literature on Strauss's relation to Schmitt.

Just as with Heidegger, Strauss never refers to Schmitt by name in NRH. There are, however, a number of small signs of intellectual affinity. The second footnote indicates that Strauss will disagree with one of Schmitt's primary intellectual antagonists, Hans Kelsen, who, according to Schmitt, left no room for “concrete decisions” in his conception of law.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Strauss later uses language that replicates Schmitt's; for example, in explaining the speculatism of the “historical school”—a view that, as I mentioned above, Burke “denies”—Strauss writes: “‘the historical process’ was thought to culminate in an absolute moment: the moment in which man, the product of blind fate, becomes the seeing master of his fate by understanding for the first time in an adequate manner what is right and wrong politically.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, in explaining “the way that Marx retains the concept of a dialectical development of human history” from Hegel, and yet “shifted this development into the area of economics and technology,” Schmitt suggests that Marx thereby attempted “to make human activity of the master of historical events, the master of the irrationality of human fate.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In the same text, Schmitt also refers to the view held among many nineteenth-century French thinkers that “the dispensation of providence [providentielle Fügung] appeared to have decided in favor of democracy,”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ which recalls Strauss's formulation that radical historicism views all thought as a “fateful dispensation” and his suggestion that, for Burke, it was “possible that the victory of the French revolution might have been decreed by Providence” and indeed could have been “a providential dispensation.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

More substantively, however, the conception of natural right that Strauss articulates in his interpretation of Aristotle's thesis is identical to Schmitt's concept of the “decision” (Entscheidung), and, indeed, Strauss uses Schmitt's own language. According to Schmitt, in an “extreme situation,” that is, a situation in which an existing constitution is threatened or a new one is to be actualized,Footnote ¹¹¹ a “concrete decision” is necessary in order to create a “normal situation,” that is, a situation of “tranquility, security, and order,” and which is the “prerequisite for legal norms to be valid.”Footnote ¹¹² But while the decision thus guarantees the validity of legal norms, it does so only insofar as it “suspends” them, for “the precise details of an emergency cannot be anticipated, nor can one spell out what may take place in such a case, especially when it is truly a matter of an extreme emergency and how it is to be eliminated.”Footnote ¹¹³ Owing to this legal imprescriptibility, the decision “is a decision in the true sense of the word,” as opposed to “a decision in the legal sense,” which “must be derived [abgeleitet] from the content of a norm.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ The necessity to suspend legal norms also reveals those norms to be only “normally valid.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Ultimately, this whole situation—the existence of extreme situations, the necessity of the decision and the suspension of legal norms—reflects the fact that “all genuine political theories,” of which Schmitt's purports to be one, “presuppose man to be evil, i.e., by no means an unproblematic but a dangerous and dynamic being.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Schmitt also suggests that the decision issues from prudence: it is made “by clearly evaluating the concrete situation and thereby being able to distinguish correctly the real friend and the real enemy”; indeed, “only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ And Schmitt identifies the decision with natural right, specifically the jus belli: “To the state as an essentially political entity belongs the jus belli, i.e., the real possibility of deciding in a concrete situation upon the enemy and the ability to fight him with the power emanating from the entity.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

Apart from this substantive identity, Schmitt also critiques historicism for ignoring the necessity of the decision. He does this in Political Romanticism—a book in which, it is worth noting, Schmitt states Strauss's view regarding Burke's influence on the historical school:

Political Romanticism is devoted to a critique of the romantic development of the metaphysical doctrine of “occasionalism,” the view that all events are “occasions” for the activity of the will of God;Footnote ¹²⁰ this development leads to an “extreme passivity” and “the inability to decide.”Footnote ¹²¹ The view that history is “the superhuman creator” is a stage of the development in question. Reacting to the French Revolution, conservative romantics replaced the omnipotent God of occasionalism with what Schmitt calls one of the “modern demiurges,” “history” (the other “demiurge” is “humanity”):Footnote ¹²²

Schmitt continues:

It is worth noting that, in the section on Burke, Strauss claims that the “idea of History” is “an adaptation of traditional theology to the intellectual climate produced by modern philosophy or science both natural and political,” and, specifically, a “modification of the traditional belief in Providence.”Footnote ¹²⁵

Despite this dependence on Schmitt, however, Strauss does seem to break from and even critique him in NRH. This becomes especially clear in a distinction Strauss draws, immediately following his interpretation of Aristotle's thesis, between the conception of natural right that emerges from that interpretation and Machiavelli's conception:

Machiavelli fails to pay due respect to the requirements of “normal situations,” preferring rather the “enjoyment from contemplating [the] deviations” from them. The same criticism can be made of Schmitt, and, perhaps, Strauss's Machiavelli is Schmitt in effigie, for, in concluding the first chapter of Political Theology, Schmitt writes: “Precisely a philosophy of concrete life must not withdraw from the exception and the extreme case, but must be interested in it to the highest degree. The exception can be more important to it than the rule, not because of a romantic irony for the paradox, but because the seriousness of an insight goes deeper than the clear generalizations inferred from what ordinarily repeats itself. The exception is more interesting than the rule.”Footnote ¹²⁷ Indeed, in his section on Hobbes in NRH, Strauss comments that Machiavelli “believes that the extreme case is more revealing of the roots of civil society and therefore of its true character than is the normal case.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Viewed in this light, Strauss's requirement concerning the esoteric teaching of natural right, and his own approach in accordance with that requirement, can be understood as his theoretical and practical rebuke to Schmitt (and Machiavelli).

On the other hand, in his passage on Machiavelli, Strauss does not question the view that what is “normally right” is, precisely, only “normally” so. Even more, Strauss not only criticizes Machiavelli for failing to pay due respect to normal cases, but also for lacking scrupulousness in respect of “extreme” ones: Machiavelli “is not concerned with the punctilious investigation of whether any particular deviation is really necessary or not.” In other words, Strauss criticizes Machiavelli—and therefore, perhaps, Schmitt—for imprudence, that is, a deficiency in respect of the very virtue that he claims to be necessary. Indeed, this imprudence is the genuine problem with Machiavelli's “enjoyment from contemplating [the] deviations” from what is normally right. Strauss even suggests that this latter criticism is more fundamental than the former. For if “no legal expression of this difference”—between what is normally right and what is a deviation—“can be found,” then prudence must decide not only on the latter but also on the former, that is, must decide what is a normal case or what is normally right.Footnote ¹²⁹ Strauss here directly recalls Schmitt's definition and justification of the sovereign, who not only decides what to do in an “extreme emergency” but also “decides whether there is an extreme emergency,” since such an emergency “cannot be circumscribed factually and made to conform to a preformed law.”Footnote ¹³⁰ However, unlike Schmitt—who, in this respect, perhaps finds the sovereign too “interesting”—Strauss emphasizes the prudence that the sovereign requires.Footnote ¹³¹

The same emphasis on prudence underlies Strauss's critique of historicism, which is not, as has generally been believed, based on his support of “universal and unchangeable principles” of right. Indeed, as I have argued, the prudence that Strauss recommends requires the “suspension” of such “principles.” This requirement follows from Schmitt's concept of the “decision,” which, as he suggests, in contrast to a decision that “must be derived from the content of a norm,” is a decision “in the true sense of the word.”