dianoesis
Vol 12 (2022)
Issue 12 – Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy, Natural Right, History
The logical status of history and the paradoxes of
historicism
Kyriakos Demetriou
doi: 10.12681/dia.37800
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Dia-noesis: A Journal of Philosophy
2022 (12)
The logical status of history
and the paradoxes of historicism
Kyriakos Demetriou,
Professor, University of Cyprus
k.demetriou@ucy.ac.cy
Abstract: Much of the philosophical project of Leo Strauss involved an
attempt to restore pre-modern philosophy, yet the impetus for the
reconsideration of the interpretative textual methodologies was undeniably
of a modern complexion. Strauss not only took historicism as a threat to
philosophy, as it replaced philosophic questions with historical questions,
but also as a source for the intellectual crisis of the West. Over and above
20th-century political crisis there was an intellectual crisis, not unrelated to
the belief in the mutability of values, in moral relativism resulting in a kind
of nihilism. In a nutshell, historicism, in assuming that all human thought
is historical, rejected the idea of philosophy as the attempt to grasp
fundamental problems coeval with human thought – a rejection that
ultimately amounts to a full critique of human thought as such. In his
massive work, in both his historical and his strictly philosophical writings,
Strauss pursued the restoration of political philosophy as a meaningful and
urgent enterprise.
Keywords: Historicism, Contextualism, Decontextualism, Relativism,
Critique of Historicism, moral universalism, political philosophy
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KYRIAKOS DEMETRIOU
Modernity’s flight from scientific reason
Strauss’ argued that the Western world was facing an
intellectual crisis essentially connected with moral relativist
theories brought about through social science positivism in the
universities and historicism or the historical approach in
philosophy. The political crises of the twentieth century
culminating in Nazism and the Holocaust, Soviet
totalitarianism, the Cold War, the threat of nuclear
annihilation, were paralleled by a perceived crisis in
philosophy. Crisis in the political can be seen as a profound
intellectual crisis, reflected in (a) the positivist claim that the
only knowledge achievable is scientific knowledge and that
there is a fundamental difference between facts and values –
only factual judgments are within the sphere of rational
inquiry. Positivists in effect announced the death of political
philosophy “for political philosophy is the attempt truly to
know both the nature of political things and the right, or the
good, political order”; In rendering political philosophy
incredible, Positivism represented a political threat, in that it
undermined the confidence of the West in itself and ignited a
fatal flight from rationalism; and (b) in historicist rejection of
the possibility of political philosophy, “because of the
essentially historical character of society and of human
thought”.1 So, to the extent everything originates from
historical exigencies, constraints and accidentalities, historicism
like positivism lead to a kind of relativism. There can be no
knowledge of a truly good society, or of right and wrong in
ethics and politics (the so-called value relativism). It was
largely a mental and spiritual crisis as it was a crisis of the
Western world. The supreme goal of scholarship is the pursuit
of truth, but modern scholarship has been submerged in a
project of unveiling social causes the goodness of which it
confessedly cannot judge. This intellectual crisis mirrored by
political nihilism undermined faith in humanity and
endangered humanity’s own survival in the long run. Today,
1
Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies, Glencoe, IL:
The Free Press, 1959, pp. 6 and 23.
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THE LOGICAL STATUS OF HISTORY & THE PARADOXES OF HISTORICISM
in the aftermath of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, where
the dark face of militarist totalitarianism unveils, spreading
darkness and the fear of a totally disastrous nuclear war,
Strauss’ recovery of the potential of political philosophy, his
political epistemology, along with his political studies and
commentaries, are just as relevant as they were in his times.
Historicism, shifting from hermeneutic and deductive
interpretative schemes, claims that any given political thought
is historically constituted, i.e., intensely particularized and
fragmented responses shaped by problems that have been
posed for theoretical inspection during a certain era. The
historian of ideas must be ready to acknowledge that historicalsocial-empirical
contexts
are
isolated
compartments,
encapsulated in historical episodes, and by now evaporated
into thin dust. Thus, the historian of ideas in the age of
modernity is effectively an antiquarian, an archaeologist of unit
ideas, confronted with an indefinite variety of relativist notions
of right or justice rather than universal standards. There are
no recurrent questions and issues presented to a theorist, no
perennial, transtemporal, timeless philosophical or moral
questions to be investigated, because the political assumptions,
e.g., which unite Marsiglio and Bodin are totally different from
Rousseau who was writing in the context of the rise of modern
national states. Historical development, or the idea of progress,
defined the limits of a historian’s perspective in encountering
the past. Historicism, in its more extreme version, of the kind
Quentin Skinner originally deployed, even denies microscopic
“continuities”, in the form of the residue of the past in the
present.2 There is no self-illuminating text, i.e. detached from
the social, economic, linguistic, and political conditions and
conventions out of which it evolved. As a result, the history of
political theory must be written essentially as a history of
ideologies – “ideology” being the primary object of study for
the historian of political thought. Under this ultra-reductionist
light, it is the context of a text that determines it meaning, the
2
See Wood Neal, “The Social History of Political Theory”, Political
Theory, 6, 1978, pp. 345-67.; Cary J. Nederman, Quentin Skinner’s State:
Historical Method and Traditions of Discourse, Canadian Journal of Political
Science, 18, 1985, pp. 339-52.
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KYRIAKOS DEMETRIOU
conditions that supposedly brought the text into being. What
a historian of political ideas can attain, is, at best, primarily an
understanding of the historicized-contextualised meaning of a
given text, nothing more, nothing less. And that’s the highest
purpose a theorist can credibly accomplish: to grasp the
allegedly embodied meaning in a given text, reducible to its
immediate determinative or originative circumstances, never
wavering as to the causal connection between ideas and
contexts. Such a purpose can be achieved only by
reconstructing contexts rather than assume any constancy or
continuity between past and contemporary ideas and ways of
thinking.
A theoretical rationale for the “rapprochement between
philosophy and history” –reinforcing the historicist apparatus
that immediately preceded Strauss, albeit oscillating between
early idealism and the paradoxes raised by Michael Oakeshott
(1901-1990) in his Experience and Its Modes (1933) –, is
provided by Robin Collingwood (19889-1943), who is his
Autobiography rigorously denied the “permanence of
philosophical problems”. Collingwood encountered the hurdles
of Oakeshott’s sweeping analysis of history as a way or ‘mode’
of seizing experience. History, said Oakeshott, as a mode of
understanding is defective; is neither the beginning nor the
end of knowledge because any assumptions are
epistemologically revealed to be arbitrary and conditional.
Oakeshott denied the credibility of any method designed to
facilitate the recovery of the intentions of past authors –
temporal discontinuity imposes unsurpassed cognitive
obstacles. The historian just infers events and circumstances
derived from individual present awareness and from present
evidence of a past which no longer exists, out of one’s
immediate experience. Oakeshott proclaimed that the historical
past is dead, not “living in the present”, and that any attempt
to revive it would be not history but “a piece of obscene
necromancy”.3 For Collingwood, however, history is “a living
3
Oakeshott Michael, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, London:
Methuen, 1962, p. 166. Experience and its Modes, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1933, 102. See also, Lectures in the History of Political
Thought, ed. Nardin Terry, and O’Sullivan Luke, Exeter, 2006.
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THE LOGICAL STATUS OF HISTORY & THE PARADOXES OF HISTORICISM
past, a past which, because it was thought and not mere natural
event, can be re-enacted in the present and in that reenactment known as past”.4 In effect, what Collingwood asked
is: how is it possible to understand the thoughts of any
historical actor, thinker or agent, who lived in a distant past?
Collingwood indeed never achieved a coherent synthesis as to
the question of the logical status of history (as his thought
alternates between the identity and the distinctiveness of
historical and philosophical thinking), yet his account of reenactment paved the way for the radical conversion of the
historicist approach subsequently developed by the Cambridge
School led by Quentin Skinner, John Dunn, Keith Thomas, and
John Pocock amongst others, who took inspiration from a prior
generation of Cambridge historians, such as Herbert Butterflied
and Peter Laslett. History proper, is the history of mind as
distinguished from ‘natural history’ and the subject-matter of
history is understood as a science of the mind, i.e., its subject
matter is actions understood as doings of human beings in so
far as they are rational (embedded in rational thinking). Hence,
all history is the history of thought. An action’s meaning is to
be discovered in a re-enactable syllogism, and through it we
may reach a point where the meaning of a text is not different
for each generation of interpreters because we are able to see
the world entirely from a past philosopher’s point of view.
Intergenerational consensus about ‘the meaning’ requires that
we temporarily suspend our own epistemic and motivational
premises to fully understand the inferential processes that
guide thinkers with radically different mindsets and beliefs.
Historians require active critical thinking, and that means “rethinking past thoughts” by means of a “re-enactment in the
historian’s own mind” or “the re-enactment of past reflective
thought”, and that in turn requires an active and autonomous
historical imagination based on scrutiny of source-evidence.5
4
Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History, Oxford University Press
[1946], 1994, 158.
5
Strauss, “On Collingwood’s Philosophy of History”, The Review of
Metaphysics, 4, 1952, pp. 559-586.
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KYRIAKOS DEMETRIOU
Encountering historicism
In the early 1950s Strauss tried to expose the logical
weaknesses of historicism, which he understood as an
existential threat to liberal democracy and a potentially massive
disruption of human civilization. Over a span of several
decades Strauss demonstrated in huge works the vigour of an
interpretative approach that sought to revitalize, if not to
regenerate, political philosophy. Space limitations granted,
what follows is just a synopsis of his major arguments that
exposed the logical, ontological, and broadly theoretical
weaknesses of historicism.
First and foremost, Strauss argued that political philosophy
is not a historical discipline. A sense of history is not an
integral part of philosophy itself. Philosophical questions visà-vis historical ones are fundamentally different, because the
latter always concern individuals, i.e., distinct groups, persons,
achievements, or even single civilizations. Consequently,
“political philosophy is fundamentally different from the
history of political philosophy itself”. Past thought is somehow
always present, and therefore the “questions raised by the
political philosophers of the past are alive in our own society”.
6 What is the usefulness of studying history then? A history
of philosophy is useful only in that it may make one familiar
with the way in which certain philosophical views have come
to be developed and formed. Yet there always remained the
distinction between how those views evolved and whether they
could prove valid. Historical knowledge is at best only
auxiliary and preliminary to political philosophy and by no
means an integral part of it. It is exactly value relativism, which
Strauss identified as the intellectual crisis of the time, that led
to the “crisis of political philosophy” – the loss of continuation
of the tradition of classical political philosophy, the loss of the
meaning of studying the ancients who represented the quest
for universally valid standards. In this way, Strauss’ legacy
6
“Political Philosophy and History”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 10,
1949, pp. 30-50, at p. 213 and 215, reprinted in King Preston, ed., The
History of Ideas, London: Croom Helm, 1983, pp. 213-232. All references
are to this book.
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THE LOGICAL STATUS OF HISTORY & THE PARADOXES OF HISTORICISM
consists of reopening the fundamental questions of political
philosophy. In other words, Strauss believed that there are
historical problems and philosophical truths which are
transhistorical, enduring and fundamental. His exercise in the
history of ideas involved understanding the past, but his
ultimate goal was to attain a genuine philosophical
understanding per se, independent of historical accident and
not subject to change.
Thus Strauss sets out to confront the relativistic outlook in
the history of philosophy, and in doing so he provides an
assault upon the crucial logical weaknesses of historicism. His
major counterarguments or critique against historicism are
already present in both his early “Political Philosophy and
History” (1949) and in the first chapter of Natural Right and
History (1953).
(a) In the pyramid of the paradoxes of historicism (came to
be known as contextualism) lies a fundamental incoherence for
if historicism is projected as a method or an interpretational
principle or a doctrine it should necessarily be self-tested. To
wit, if historicism could be legitimately elevated to the status
of the true or appropriate method of reading and interpreting
past ideas (i.e., to a methodological universal), then, to be
consistent with itself, it should apply the same principle to
itself, to its major conceptual and epistemological components.
In this way, it logically follows that radical historicism is
fundamentally a product of its own context and if projected as
a universal interpretative method must yield an intrinsic
incoherence. Historicism is “true” in its own context and that
implies that it cannot always be truly true.
“Historicism is not a cab which one can stop at his
convenience: historicism must be applied to itself. It will thus
reveal itself as relative to modern man; and this will imply that
it will be replaced, in due time, by a position which is no longer
historicist. Some historicists would consider such a
development a manifest decline. But in so doing they would
ascribe to the historical situation favourable to historicism an
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KYRIAKOS DEMETRIOU
absoluteness which, as a matter of principle, they refuse to
ascribe to any historical situation.”7
(b) The “historicist thesis is self-contradictory or absurd”,
since one cannot assert “the historical character of ‘all’ thought
– that is, of all thought with the exception of the historicist
insight and its implications – without transcending history,
without grasping something trans-historical”. To put is simply,
any historicist claim involves history and any attempt to
understand past history is by implication trans-historical.
Temporality does not exist in a historical vacuum; the concept
itself presupposes transtemporality – they are almost causally
related; individualized segmentation of the temporal is
logically impossible. Further, if all human thought is radically
historical, then historicism itself is a historical human thought
and as such is destined to be of only temporary validity; it
does not convey the weight of “a truth valid for all thought”.
It would be a paradox if historicism “exempts itself from its
own verdict about [the finality of] all human thought”: that is,
as a historical product ‘thought’ is destined to perish along
with the conditions that nourished it. Thus, the historicist
thesis essentially “means to doubt it and thus to transcend it”.8
But in this case the historicist claim is apparently self-defeating
and cannot stand any logical critique.
(c) Historicists claim that non-historical political philosophy
is merely a chimera since all political philosophers who have
attempted to answer the question of the best political order
ended up with a disarray of systems, a huge variety of
“philosophies”. Therefore, non-historical or a-historical
political philosophy cannot stand the test in as much as there
are many irreconcilable political philosophies that refute each
other. Strauss, however, dismissed the idea that political
philosophies of the past refute each other; one can argue that
they contradict each other, which raises the question as to
which of given contradictory theses concerning political
fundamentals is true. Far from disproving the validity of
universal and transtemporal principles, historicists’ argument
7
“Political Philosophy and History”, p. 227.
Strauss, Natural Right and History, The University of Chicago Press,
1953, p. 25, emphasis added.
8
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THE LOGICAL STATUS OF HISTORY & THE PARADOXES OF HISTORICISM
concerning the plurality and “anarchy of systems” simply
shows that non-historical political philosophy has hitherto
failed, it proves our ignorance concerning the fundamentals of
philosophy – of which ignorance we are aware without any
historicist instruments – and accordingly demonstrates the
necessity of philosophy. In his Natural Right and History,
Strauss similarly points out that the existence of different
notions of justice at different times was not a modern
discovery. This knowledge was very well known and accepted
among ancient philosophers. If the moderns have discovered
an even greater number of notions of justice or natural right
simply strengthens the contention that behind the realization
of the variety of notions of justice or right lies the eternal nonhistorical incentive for the quest for natural right.
(d) Further, related to the above, is the epitome of the
historicist argument, namely that the plurality of previous
political philosophies incontestably shows that each political
philosophy is inextricably bound to (and contingent upon) the
historical situation in which it had emerged. The variety of
political philosophies is above all a function of the variety of
historical factors. For example, Plato’s political philosophy
historicists claim, is essentially related to the Greek polis as
John Locke’s is related to the Glorious Revolution, thus the two
philosophies are not only irreconcilable but also invalid beyond
their historical boundaries, worthless if disjointed by the
historical situations in which they were developed. However,
the ‘historically-conditioned’ political philosophies, Strauss
asserted, is a mere illusion and has a much-limited bearing
than assumed. Historicists, in their obsession with
contextualizing texts and thus treating ideas solely as a
meaningful embodiment of immediate circumstances, have
overlooked according to Strauss the ability of the human mind
to deliberately adapt itself to existing prejudices, aiming to
institutionalize or materialise what was considered desirable or
feasible under specific circumstances. Thinkers’ premeditated
adaptations, intelligibly communicated to the many on the
basis of generally received opinions, could be called “civil” and
not purely “philosophical”. Past philosophers did not limit
themselves to expounding what they considered the political
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KYRIAKOS DEMETRIOU
truth. At certain times, despite their unceasing effort to
discover the truth (which is exactly what classical philosophers
did), prompted by a sense of social responsibility, they
understood that to replace opinion with knowledge could have
endangered the existence of political communities, because
such communities largely rest on opinion. If one wants to fully
understand past philosophers one should try to uncover
aspects of their esoteric writings – a practice followed by many
because, first they wanted to assist their gifted readers with
hints that would allow them to discover the truth for
themselves and secondly, because philosophers in illiberal
societies constantly feared persecution.9 That means, Strauss
suggested, they have developed techniques to convey their true
ideas only to the few who could decipher them, while
conveying other, more conventional thoughts that would be
beneficial to the many. In challenging historicism Strauss
unleashed esotericism as a proof that great minds can liberate
themselves from the specific opinions which rule their
particular society; as a metaphor, philosophy amounts to
ascending from the Platonic cave or world of arbitrary
conventions to the light of truth and knowledge (convention
vs nature).
(e) Theoretically historicism results in a paradox, to the
effect that if each doctrine is linked to a particular historical
setting, then no doctrine can simply be true. In this way
political philosophy becomes obsolete and lifeless, an
intellectual experiment for academic recreation, because the
historical conditions that fostered certain propositions or
doctrines have ceased to exist. This argument amounts to the
de-politicization of political philosophy, which claims that
“every political situation contains elements which are essential
to all political situations: how else could one intelligibly call all
these different political situations ‘political situations’?”10 If we
consider classical political philosophy, which is firmly
associated by historicists with the city, now superseded by the
modern state, we cannot fail to observe that classical
9
In Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing , The University of
Chicago Press, 1952.
10
“Political Philosophy and History”, p. 220.
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THE LOGICAL STATUS OF HISTORY & THE PARADOXES OF HISTORICISM
philosophers were aware of other forms of political association
(the tribe and the Easter monarchy); if we dig further into the
depths of classical philosophy, we should realize that classical
political thinkers consciously preferred the polis to other forms
of political association in the light of the standards of freedom
and civilization. And their preferences were not associated with
the exigencies of historical experience. Up to the eighteenth
century outstanding political philosophers, like Rousseau,
preferred the city to the modern state on the grounds of its
merits judged by the standards of freedom and civilization.
And to the extent nineteenth-century philosophers favoured
the modern nation-state, it was simply because they could
plausibly claim that this form of political association provided
effective protection of freedom and civilization. In other words,
the genesis of an idea may defy the immediate context of time
and space.
(f) What blurred the vision of historicists was the cynical
idea of progress, the conviction of the moderns’ superiority to
all earlier ages, and the expectation that the future is moving
directly into the paths of further progress. Apart from being a
misconception, belief in linear progress raises an
insurmountable intellectual barrier to genuinely being engaged
in studying the past, that is, “if we know beforehand that the
present is in the most important respect superior to the past”.11
Historicists, as antiquarians, feel no need to explore the past in
itself, because they understood it only as a preparation for the
present.
“In studying a doctrine of the past, they did not ask
primarily, what was the conscious and deliberate intention of
its originator? They preferred to ask, what is the contribution
of the doctrine to our beliefs? What is the meaning, unknown
to the originator, of the doctrine from the point of view of the
present? What is its meaning in the light of later discoveries or
inventions? They took it for granted then that is possible and
even necessary to understand the thinkers of the past better
than those thinkers understood themselves.”12
11
12
“Political Philosophy and History”, p. 222.
Ibid.
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KYRIAKOS DEMETRIOU
But this is a fantasy and an invention, driven by an
imaginary sense of objectivity. Read the exegetical models: you
will be astounded by the large variety of interpretations of a
doctrine of the past, some of them solidly grounded on firm
theoretical premises and foundations. All these interpretations
were largely motivated by the conscious or unconscious effort
to understand an author better than he understood himself.
They are united under a common enterprise, and yet there is
a fact one cannot easily question: that the originator of a
doctrine understood it in one way only and therefore there is
only one way of understanding him as he understood himself.
(g) There is an intrinsic contradiction between the claims of
historicism and the actuality of the whole of past thought
which was radically ‘unhistorical’. Strauss means that by
historicizing thought by means of contextual determinism,
historicists contradict the non-historical nature of the
philosophy of the past. This is the (ironic) paradox of
historicist contextualism. On the one hand, historicists claim
that intellectual historians should try to establish the authorial
intent of a text by contextualizing it within the specific
circumstances that generated it; on the other hand, we discover
that in comparison past philosophers tried to transcend the
immediate context of their eras (or never thought their ideas
had validity only within the boundaries of the historical
situation in which they found themselves writing). Past
thinkers’ intentions would never coincide with the principles
of contextualism – how then we could seriously believe that
we can ascertain their true intentions and purposes by relating
their thoughts to contexts? The outcome is disheartening
because it is essentially contradictory. The philosophers of the
past claimed to have found universal truths unrelated to
historical exigencies. But the historicist clearly denies that
possibility and thus his/her project revolving around the
historicity of philosophy actually destroys the possibility of any
adequate understanding of the philosophies of the past. Thus,
by its very principles, historicism is constitutionally unable to
grasp historical exactness, if for example an intellectual
historian who could label himself a contextualist wants to
seriously understand the thought of a political thinker
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THE LOGICAL STATUS OF HISTORY & THE PARADOXES OF HISTORICISM
precisely as a certain thinker understood it. That’s merely a
logical impossibility.
(h) Historicism, in the interest of promoting the scientific
character of empirical knowledge, insisted that the only solid
knowledge of human beings qua human beings, of what is
genuinely human, should be derived from history as a study
of reality divorced from any abstract or metaphysical
assumptions. Thus universal principles were dismissed and
replaced by the belief that historical studies would reveal
concrete norms and standards. But standards or norms
revealed by historical studies cannot held unless authoritative;
and here lies the futility of the historicist enterprise: particular
or historical standards can become authoritative (and thus
useful to a particular society) only on the basis of a universal
principle which ordains that we are committed or somehow
obliged to embrace the standards suggested by tradition.13 But
that obligation becomes meaningless once an individual
realizes that all standards suggested by history (as historicism
claims) are fundamentally ambiguous, subjective, and variable
and thus unfit to be considered ‘truly standards’. To a certain
degree, historicism culminates in nihilism, as it defies the
possibility of an objective distinction between good and bad
choices and permanent and universal values against contingent
and unique to unmitigated chance.
The Revival of political philosophy and its meaning today
In insisting that “political philosophy is not a historical
discipline” and deploring modern historicist epistemology on
the grounds that it undermined our appreciation of the “nature
of political issues”, Leo Strauss revitalized the potential of
political philosophy against the currents of both positivism and
regnant historicism.14 Once scorned and bitterly criticized (as
13
Natural Right and History, pp. 17-8.
14
Strauss, “Political Philosophy and History”, in What is Political
Philosophy? And Other Studies (Chicago, 1959), 56-77, at p. 56-7. On his
legacy, see Behnegar Nasser, “The Intellectual Legacy of Leo Strauss (1899-
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KYRIAKOS DEMETRIOU
an illiberal, neo-conservative, Zionist, occultist, even an elitist
partisan),15 Strauss appears to be the forerunner of twentyfirst-century revival of “grand narratives” in the history of
thought, either in the form of David Armitage’s “serial
contextualism” project, or in even much deeper transhistorical
theoretical challenges.16 Any viable philosophical investigation
should start from classical thought,17 which was superior to
modern political scientific thought (succumbed to empirical
description, explanation, and prediction), not merely because
the ancients could have provided better answers but because
they were guided by better questions. “What is the best
political order?” But any axiological question such as “what is
good?” is one modern historicism cannot ask. Historicism, by
subordinating all questions to immanent self-referential social
and political actualities, subjectivizing and relativizing all
ethical problems within ever-changing socio-political material
1973”, Annual Review of Political Science , 1, 1998, pp. 95-116; Burns Tony,
Connelly James, eds., The Legacy of Leo Strauss, Imprint Academic, 2010.
15
Such unrelentless animus against Strauss is pervasive in accounts like
Ryn Claes G., “Leo Strauss and History: The Philosopher as Conspirator”,
Humanitas, 18, 2005, pp. 31-58. In certain academic circles in the US
“Straussian” still conveys something of sinister character. See also Matthews
Fred, “The Attach in ‘Historicism’: Allan Bloom’s Indictment of
Contemporary American Historical Scholarship”, The American Historical
Review, 95, 1990, pp. 429-447.
16
Armitage David, “What’s the Big Idea? Intellectual History and
Longue Durée”, History of European Ideas, 38, 2012, 493-507. Armitage
proposes “a model of transtemporal history, proceeding via serial
contextualism to create a history of ideas spanning centuries, even
millennia”.
17
Strauss’ attack on historicism was inextricably linked to his perception
of the virtues of classical philosophy. Modern scholars have been unable to
interpret classical philosophers since they are prevented by the constraints
imposed by the modern historicist outlook that eroded any belief in the
possibility of re-discovering of “The Good” or, that this ultimate good even
exists. The superiority of the ancients is based on at least three
interconnected factors: (a) they were guided by better questions and thus
were able to render better answers, (b) their philosophical edifice was
unmolestedly constructed and led by pure “natural consciousness”, (c), it
was the unbiased pre-philosophic mind and pre-modern rationalism that
raised questions unaffected by circumstances clearly tied (solely or
predominantly) to epochal concerns.
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THE LOGICAL STATUS OF HISTORY & THE PARADOXES OF HISTORICISM
conditions, ended up defying the achievability of philosophy,
which is intrinsically an attempt to replace opinion with
knowledge: philosophy is thus not only unable to reach its
goal; it’s simply absurd. Strauss’s understanding of philosophy
is associated with a desire for searching “Knowledge of the
eternal order” as a quest for knowledge of the “whole”, or the
eternal cause or causes of the whole. Consequently, “The
highest subject of political philosophy is the philosophic life:
philosophy – not as teaching or body of knowledge, but as a
way of life – offers, as it were, the solution to the problem that
keeps political life in motion”.18
Strauss’ critique of the waves of modernist historicism was
ironically a historic failure— indeed, a number of scholars at
Chicago were fascinated by his interpretative assumptions and
the grand design of his philosophical edifice, but he was
rebutted with profound indignation and acid rebukes by the
vast majority of intellectual historians. Historicism, under the
auspices of Skinner and the Cambridge School dominated the
history of political thought for decades.19 But Strauss’ legacy
proved solid and enduring as all true legacies are.20 Skinner
was examined in his own terrain because his contextualist
method had to be contextualized and thus subjected to the test
of his own methodological premises.21 Today historians of
political thought are much less inclined to commit themselves
to historical contextualism and its major claims, and attracted
criticism from several quarters and on several grounds, the
most profound of which is that this approach reduces the
authors to their situational settings and ignores permanent or
18
Quoted, in Steven B. Smith Steven B., “Philosophy as a Way of Life:
The Case of Leo Strauss, The Review of Politics 71, 2009, p. 37 (37-53).
19
See Major Rafael, “The Cambridge School and Leo Strauss: Texts and
Context of American Political Science”, Political Research Quarterly, 58,
2005, 477-85.
20
Recent literature on Leo Strauss is vast and interest in his philosophy
has continued to grow. See the “Introduction: Straussian Voices”, in Tony
Burns, James Connelly, The Legacy of Leo Strauss, pp. 1-27, with the
bibliographical sources attached.
21
See Perreau-Saussine Emile, “Quentin Skinner in Context”, The
Review of Politics, 69, 2007, pp. 106-122.
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KYRIAKOS DEMETRIOU
long-lasting truths and insights.22 In this way, contextualism(s)
prevented the development of a more broad-based
philosophical history of political experience, such as those
presented in grand narratives, like those of George Sabine and
Isaiah Berlin. But why do we need transhistorical narratives
in intellectual history and in political philosophy? What is the
significance of Strauss’ effort toward the recovery of classical
political philosophy?
The answer is provided in his works, whereby he stated that
the recovery of political philosophy, or going back to the
fountain of the ancestral roots, is dictated by “the crisis of our
time, the crisis of the West” which is largely constituted by the
collapse of modern political philosophy into historicism, and
into the doctrine that there are no universal purposes or
timeless truths. Historicism was a of process of the “selfdestruction of reason”.23 Strauss believed that liberal
democracy was in crisis because it has become uncertain of its
purpose. Faced with the calamities of his era and the struggle
against totalitarian regimes Strauss came to believe that ‘the
crisis of our times’ was largely caused by value relativism
which resulted in disintegrating the liberal idea. Intellectual
and moral decay was equated with civil unhappiness. We
could easily draw some analogies between Strauss’ era and
ours. Indeed, twenty-first-century public intellectuals repeat
that liberal democracy is going through an existential crisis.
Further, outside the West, in vast regions, totalitarianism and
autocracy reign, either in China, the Middle East, or the
Russian Federation and its protectorates. Violence, terrorism,
religious intolerance, abuse of human rights and unrelentless
wars, plus the global warming and major economic anxiety
have the potential to lead to massive destructions. It might be
possible to identify the links between the intellectual crisis of
the mid-twentieth century and the crises of our own time, even
22
For a survey of the state of the field of political thought, see Danielle
Charette, Skjönsberg Max, “State of the Field: The History of Political
Thought”, History, 105, 2020, pp. 470-83.
23
Quoted in Bruell Christopher, “A Return to Classical Political
Philosophy and the Understanding of the American Founding”, The
Review of Politics 53, 1991, 173-186, at p. 174.
160
THE LOGICAL STATUS OF HISTORY & THE PARADOXES OF HISTORICISM
to consider that the crisis of Strauss’ ‘own times’ is almost
identical to the ‘crisis of our times’. The analogies are
terrifying. But what does intergenerational-transhistorical
similitude indicate other than the existence of recurring
questions within the realm of the ‘political’ that require raising
exactly the same questions to find fundamental answers?
Further, Strauss predicted that the modernist-historicist
“critique of knowledge” would also result in academic
compartmentalization and specialization – in his own words
“Specialization: knowing more and more about less and less”,
which fosters “universal philistinism and creeping
conformism”.24 And that is a firm indicator of intellectual
poverty in the age of artificial intelligence which threatens to
delimit critical thinking within the confinements of
technological automation. The idea of progress is, after all, an
elusive concept and the cyclical theory of history is not as
deceptive as once thought to be.
24
Pangle Thomas, An Introduction to His Thought and Intellectual
Legacy, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, pp. 79-80.
161
KYRIAKOS DEMETRIOU
Leo Strauss is known to many people as a thinker of the right, who
inspired hawkish views on national security and perhaps advocated war
without limits. Moving beyond gossip and innuendo about Strauss's
followers and the Bush administration, this book provides the first
comprehensive analysis of Strauss's writings on political violence,
considering also what he taught in the classroom on this subject. In stark
contrast to popular perception, Strauss emerges as a man of peace, favorably
disposed to international law and skeptical of imperialism - a critic of
radical ideologies who warns of the dangers to free thought and civil society
when intellectuals ally themselves with movements that advocate violence.
Robert Howse provides new readings of Strauss's confrontation with
fascist/Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, his debate with Alexandre Kojève about
philosophy and tyranny, and his works on Machiavelli and Thucydides
and examines Strauss's lectures on Kant's Perpetual Peace and Grotius's
Rights of War and Peace.
Robert Howse, Leo Strauss: Man of Peace, Cambridge University Press, 2014
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