Academic literature on the topic 'Strauss, Leo, – Political and social views'

An analysis of Leo Strauss's difficult and relatively neglected criticism of Max Weber in Natural Right and History reveals the fundamental difficulties that political science, and social science more generally, must overcome in order to be a genuine science. In Strauss's view, the inadequacy of the fact-value distinction, which is now widely acknowledged, compels a re-examination of Weber's denial of the possibility of valid knowledge of values. Strauss identifies the serious ground of this denial as Weber's insight that modern philosophy or science cannot refute religion. Believing that philosophy or science cannot ultimately give an account of itself that meets the challenge of religion, Weber maintained a “tragic” view of the human situation. Strauss also expresses profound doubt about the possibility of philosophy or science, but ultimately he suggests that a certain kind of study of the history of political philosophy might resolve the conflict between philosophy and divine revelation, and, therewith, the “value problem.”

The article examines the methodological and interpretive aspects of the historical significance of Machiavelli’s “The Prince” in the context of the development of the theory of absolutism. The author states that the analysis of “The Prince” at the methodological level should be carried out taking into account the complex political reality in Italy in the early modern period under the conditions of the political dependence of Italian rulers on foreign (European) states after 1494. When substantiating the key historical circumstances that determine the relationship between “The Prince” and the realities of the studied era, the concept of “hegemony” from the political theory of Antonio Gramsci, the assessments of the Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burkhardt, the philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce, and the British historian Nicholas Henschell are used. It is indicated that the critical view of the German-American political philosopher Leo Strauss deserves special attention. From the point of view of author, it is possible to assert that an appendix of general methodological principles of estimations Strauss of Маchiavelli’s is to productive in wide sense of development of social and political idea of early Moderne time. Criticism of Strauss of relatively key aspects of approach of Machiavell’s is not able to replace the fact of faithful estimation Strauss of essence of looks of флорентинского thinker. Machiavelli really accomplishes a break with classic tradition of political idea, in the light of what even the later interpretations of “Sovereign”, created already after Leo Strauss, are not able to shake loyalty of his estimations. So, interpretation of Quentin Skinner’s, one of founders of Cambridge “school of concepts”, is based on aspiration to step back from «textualization» interpretation of «The Prince» pushing off from the presence of “republican ideal”. The position of Quentin Skinner, wired for sound to them on the pages of his works, is not capable in turn, in our view, to undermine the basic moments of approach of Leo Strauss.

ABSTRACT: This study explores the philosophical and theoretical bases underlying U.S. tax and social policy for over 25 years in order to develop a comprehensive framework from which to evaluate the intended and actual effects on wealth distribution and social policy overall. The framework provides a basis for understanding the overarching social agenda of neoconservative leadership as it advocates what has become known as Starve the Beast (STB). The STB strategy focuses on altering taxation structures in order to facilitate desired reallocations in government budgets to effect change in social policy. This study explores the roots of STB beginning with the political philosophy of Leo Strauss, followed by the adaptation of Strauss's philosophy by Irving Kristol (the godfather of neoconservatism) in establishing the basic tenets of neoconservative political theory, and the marriage of neoconservatism with supply-side economics to increase popular support. Through this anthropological study, 11 propositions evolve during the development of a comprehensive view of a complex social policy underlying STB strategies designed to promote wealth retention, less progressive tax rate structures, less spending on social programs, and greater national focus on defense, security, and patriotism. The resulting framework has implications for future tax policy research, as well as enhancing our understanding of the influence of the neoconservative movement on the greater accounting environment.

Leo Strauss was one of the few political philosophers of the twentieth century to study the relation between faith and political philosophy. Yet Strauss's notoriously esoteric style has led scholars to wildly diverse interpretations of his views: his defenders believe that Strauss supports biblical religion as an instrument of truth and morality, while his critics contend that he opposes biblical religion for its biases while appreciating its political usefulness. I shall argue that Strauss is deeply opposed to the doctrines and political usage of biblical religion. For biblical doctrines clash with his theory of natural right, the latter being the basis of political stability, according to Strauss.

Leo Strauss, Max Weber, And The Scientific Study Of Politics, Nasser Behnegar, Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2003, pp, xiii, 221.Any serious student of Leo Strauss will be familiar with the fact that Strauss was a serious critic of modern political science. Strauss contended throughout his career that the modern social sciences are one of the driving forces currently driving modern liberalism into a state of crisis. In Leo Strauss, Max Weber and The Scientific Study of Politics, Nasser Behnegar encapsulates Strauss' critique of the modern social sciences in an accessible and easy to read text.

The German Jewish historian of political philosophy Leo Strauss is best known for mature works in which he proposed the existence of an esoteric tradition in political philosophy, attacked the liberal tradition of political thought, and defended a classical approach to natural right against its modern counterparts. This essay demonstrates that in his youth, beginning during a scholarly apprenticeship at the Berlin Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, Strauss championed “medievals” (rather than ancients) against “moderns,” and did so through a sparring match with his postdoctoral supervisor Julius Guttmann, whom he cast in the role of representative “modern.” While for Guttmann the stakes were scholarly, for Strauss they were political. Strauss's Weimar Jewish “medievalism” was a deliberate rejection of the tradition of modern Jewish thought Strauss associated with Guttmann's teacher Hermann Cohen, whom Strauss accused of neglecting the political distinctiveness of Jewish thought. While the conflict between Strauss and Guttmann has been neglected in much of the literature on Strauss, it served as the crucible in which many of his mature views, including his famous exoteric (sometimes called “esoteric”) writing thesis, began to take shape.

The two manuscripts published here for the first time were written by Leo Strauss: the first in 1956 and the second between 1957 and 1962. The first, entitled “Lecture in Milwaukee: Michigan Midwest Political Science,” was written for the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Midwest Conference of Political Scientists on May 4, 1956, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The second is an unpublished passage of “An Epilogue” Strauss wrote for Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics, published in 1962. Together these pieces improve our understanding of both the context in which Strauss developed his critique of the new political science and the audience to whom that critique was addressed. These two texts are of “biographical” interest. They are biographical in the sense that they clarify Strauss's thought and its evolution. The “Lecture in Milwaukee” clarifies the context in which Strauss's critique of modern political science was born: confrontation with the political scientists of the 1950s, here represented by Glendon Schubert who is not mentioned in Strauss's published writings. Without this lecture one might overlook the reference to “extrasensory perception” in the ironical discussion of “our man in Missouri” in “Epilogue.” The critique of Arthur Bentley, Bernard Berelson, Harold Laswell, and Herbert Simon by Strauss's students also takes on new meaning if read in the light of this lecture's references and Schubert's published article. Aside from Strauss's view of academia in the 1950s, his references in the lecture to the British Labour Party's policy toward Nazi Germany, to postwar American disarmament, and to prison reform and immigration policy in the United States provide rare and thus important information about Strauss's political views and judgment.

In this study of A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and Measure for Measure I argue that the surface plots of these comedies point us to a philosophic understanding seldom discussed in either contemporary public discourse or in Shakespearean scholarship. The comedies usually involve questions arising from the conflict between the enforcement of law (whether just or not) and the private longings (whether noble or base) of citizens whose yearnings for happiness tend to be sub- or even supra-political. No regime, it appears, is able to respond to the whole variety of circumstances that it may be called upon to judge. Even the best written laws meet with occasional exceptions and these ulterior instances must be judged by something other than a legal code. When these extra-legal instances do arise, political communities become aware of their reliance on a kind of political judgment that is usually unnoticed in the day-to-day affairs of public life. Further, it is evident that the characters who are able to exercise this political judgment, are the very characters whose presence averts a potentially tragic situation and makes a comedy possible. By presenting examples of how moral and political problems are dealt with by the prudent use of wisdom, Shakespeare is pointing the reader to a standard of judgment that transcends any particular (or actual) political arrangement. Once we see the importance of the prudent use of such a standard, we are in a position to judge what this philosophic wisdom consists of and where it is to be acquired. It is just such an education with which Shakespeare intends to aid his readers.

Defence date: 28 January 2010
Examining Board: Prof. Martin Van Gelderen, Supervisor, European University Institute; Prof. Steven Aschheim, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Prof. Raymond Geuss, Cambridge University; Prof. Bo Stråth, Helsinki University
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digital archive of EUI PhD theses
It is my contention that a historically and thus philosophically accurate understanding of Arendt’s and Strauss’s projects cannot be gained without knowledge of the debates and controversies that shaped their early thought. I will also argue that it is insufficient to limit such a reconstruction to a single or few contemporary figures of influence, or even more so, to their engagement with the canon of philosophy or the 'problem of modernity'. Instead, Arendt’s and Strauss’s intellectual and political maturation took place in the broader context of a variety of overlapping contemporary conceptual fields, conventions and concerns. By reconstructing the unfolding of Arendt’s and Strauss’s scholarly and political outlook against the background of these discursive contexts, I hope to show that what are often understood as their critiques of modernity - and confronted as such, in this general sense, or used as a source of inspiration - emerged from their engagement with these particular disputes. Alongide the ways in which the conventions and concerns of their time influenced their philosophical and political sensibilities, I will also spell out their early critiques of these conventions, intellectual or political.They did not only intellectually inherit certain disciplinary traditions of discussion, but also sought to overcome what they deemed had led these astray.

This chapter is about how we think about states, natures, and the relationships between them. Despite this book’s assertion that an understanding of the relations between states and natures is vital for any interpretation of contemporary political life or ecological existence, it is important to recognize the growing sense of antipathy towards theories of the state within work on nature. This antipathy is based on two broad critiques of state theory—one epistemological and the other ontological. At an epistemological level, challenges to work on the state can perhaps best be understood in relation to the consistent tendency of certain strands of political theory to use the definite article when referring to ‘the’ state. Reference to ‘the’ state, however innocently deployed, implicitly suggests a clearly designated, singular entity of government. But it is precisely this view of states as sovereign, territorially autonomous containers of political life that has led to a concerted wave of theoretical criticism. The reification of a definitive vision of the state has tended to create a very narrow view of the state within certain strands of contemporary political theory. It is in this context that Rose and Miller (1992) argue that the state is nothing more than a ‘mythical abstraction’ (see Chapter 1), or an attempt to simplify the complex networks and practices through which governmental power is realized into narrowly conceived, centralized visions of authority. Consequently, to many writing within what could broadly be defined as a Foucauldian school (Hobbes 1996: 82) of political theory, notions of the state are anathema to the careful and systematic study of the governmental technologies, modes of calculation, and institutional procedures through which socio-political power is realized. At an ontological level, it is argued that even if vestiges of the mythical abstractions (or ‘fantastic topologies’) associated with state theory persist, the power of states to shape the political, economic, and social worlds has been seriously undermined. Much of the purported reduction in the state’s sovereign power has been associated with the rise of globalization and the associated socio-ecological relations and transactions that now routinely traverse national territories.

As an intellectual tradition, the history of Hegelianism is the history of the reception and influence of the thought of G.W.F. Hegel. This tradition is notoriously complex and many-sided, because while some Hegelians have seen themselves as merely defending and developing his ideas along what they took to be orthodox lines, others have sought to ‘reform’ his system, or to appropriate individual aspects and overturn others, or to offer consciously revisionary readings of his work. This makes it very hard to identify any body of doctrine common to members of this tradition, and a wide range of divergent philosophical views can be found among those who (despite this) can none the less claim to be Hegelians. There are both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ reasons for this: on one hand, Hegel’s position itself brings together many different tendencies (idealism and objectivism, historicism and absolutism, rationalism and empiricism, Christianity and humanism, classicism and modernism, a liberal view of civil society with an organicist view of the state); any balance between them is hermeneutically very unstable, enabling existing readings to be challenged and old orthodoxies to be overturned. On the other hand, the critical response to Hegel’s thought and the many attempts to undermine it have meant that Hegelians have continually needed to reconstruct his ideas and even to turn Hegel against himself, while each new intellectual development, such as Marxism, pragmatism, phenomenology or existential philosophy, has brought about some reassessment of his position. This feature of the Hegelian tradition has been heightened by the fact that Hegel’s work has had an impact at different times over a long period and in a wide range of countries, so that divergent intellectual, social and historical pressures have influenced its distinct appropriations. At the hermeneutic level, these appropriations have contributed greatly to keeping the philosophical understanding of Hegel alive and open-ended, so that our present-day conception of his thought cannot properly be separated from them. Moreover, because questions of Hegel interpretation have so often revolved around the main philosophical, political and religious issues of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hegelianism has also had a significant impact on the development of modern Western thought in its own right. As a result of its complex evolution, Hegelianism is best understood historically, by showing how the changing representation of Hegel’s ideas have come about, shaped by the different critical concerns, sociopolitical conditions and intellectual movements that dominated his reception in different countries at different times. Initially, Hegel’s influence was naturally most strongly felt in Germany as a comprehensive, integrative philosophy that seemed to do justice to all realms of experience and promised to preserve the Christian heritage in a modern and progressive form within a speculative framework. However, this position was quickly challenged, both from other philosophical standpoints (such as F.W.J. Schelling’s ‘positive philosophy’ and F.A. Trendelenburg’s neo-Aristotelian empiricism), and by the celebrated generation of younger thinkers (the so-called ‘Young’ or ‘Left’ Hegelians, such as Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge and the early Karl Marx), who insisted that to discover what made Hegel a truly significant thinker (his dialectical method, his view of alienation, his ‘sublation’ of Christianity), this orthodoxy must be overturned. None the less, both among these radicals and in academic circles, Hegel’s influence was considerably weakened in Germany by the 1860s and 1870s, while by this time developments in Hegelian thought had begun to take place elsewhere. Hegel’s work was known outside Germany from the 1820s onwards, and Hegelian schools developed in northern Europe, Italy, France, Eastern Europe, America and (somewhat later) Britain, each with their own distinctive line of interpretation, but all fairly uncritical in their attempts to assimilate his ideas. However, in each of these countries challenges to the Hegelian position were quick to arise, partly because the influence of Hegel’s German critics soon spread abroad, and partly because of the growing impact of other philosophical positions (such as Neo-Kantianism, materialism and pragmatism). Nevertheless, Hegelianism outside Germany proved more durable in the face of these attacks, as new readings and approaches emerged to counter them, and ways were found to reinterpret Hegel’s work to show that it could accommodate these other positions, once the earlier accounts of Hegel’s metaphysics, political philosophy and philosophy of religion (in particular) were rejected as too crude. This pattern has continued into the twentieth century, as many of the movements that began by defining themselves against Hegel (such as Neo-Kantianism, Marxism, existentialism, pragmatism, post-structuralism and even ‘analytic’ philosophy) have then come to find unexpected common ground, giving a new impetus and depth to Hegelianism as it began to be assimilated within and influenced by these diverse approaches. Such efforts at rapprochement began in the early part of the century with Wilhelm Dilthey’s attempt to link Hegel with his own historicism, and although they were more ambivalent, this connection was reinforced in Italy by Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile. The realignment continued in France in the 1930s, as Jean Wahl brought out the more existentialist themes in Hegel’s thought, followed in the 1940s by Alexander Kojève’s influential Marxist readings. Hegelianism has also had an impact on Western Marxism through the writings of the Hungarian Georg Lukács, and this influence has continued in the critical reinterpretations offered by members of the Frankfurt School, particularly Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas and others. More recently, most of the major schools of philosophical thought (from French post-structuralism to Anglo-American ‘analytic’ philosophy) have emphasized the need to take account of Hegel, and as a result Hegelian thought (both exegetical and constructive) is continually finding new directions.