Liberty, Equality, Nietzsche

New England Review of Straussian Books, pt.1

I recently read in full Walter Kaufmann’s epochal 1950 study of the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. One imagines that such a book had to be written at the time to rescue Nietzsche from the ill-repute that the self-immolation of the nation of his birth, and one admires the dexterity with which Kauffman makes his argument, envying his command of the material. On the other hand his Nietzsche comes off a little bland, dangerously close to the mode of “live laugh love” atheism that so thoroughly permeates the civilization(s) of the formerly latin (or-by-adoption/colonization) west after the world wars.¹

For me, a willingness to acknowledge the dangerous element of Nietzsche has always been one of the more attractive qualities of the thought of Leo Strauss and the climate of opinion which prevails amongst many of his students (and their students, and so on and so on.)

Now Nietzsche opposed both the moderate and the extreme left, but he saw that conservatism had no future, that its fighting was a rear guard action, and conservatism was being eroded evermore. The consequence of this was that Nietzsche pointed to something which we may call the revolutionary right, an atheism of the right. Nietzsche is then the antagonist of Marx, whom he did not know at all as far as I know. Nietzsche produced the climate in which Fascism and Hitlerism could emerge. One must not be squeamish about admitting this dubious paternity. One must emphasize it. Every fool can see and has seen that Nietzsche abhorred the things for which Hitler in particular stood and to which he owed his success. Some liberals have gone so far as to claim Nietzsche for liberalism. Was Nietzsche not the intellectual ancestor of that great liberal, Sigmund Freud? This partial truth [however] must not be permitted to obscure the more massive and the more superficial fact which I have tried to point out.²

I’ve found the writings of the late Laurence Lampert a useful node in my Straussian Studies/bug collecting, and so I was interested to read through the 2015 Beijing Lectures . The book is structured as a triptych of lecture dyads, each centered around the thought of Leo Strauss, Plato, and Friedrich Nietzsche respectively. In his discussion of Strauss, Lampert mostly reprises the argument of his 1996 Leo Strauss and Nietzsche and 2012 The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss, the first of which was covered on this blog early last year.

An odd combination, this late in the day, of Epicurean and Platonist, Strauss dwelt within a carefully walled garden cultivating an observer's naturalistic understanding of the whole while encouraging a public Platonism outside the garden wall as the only possible preservation of both the public and the garden. Perhaps Strauss saw still less reason than did Nietzsche for any hope and therefore prepared as he thought best for the coming night, the eventual collapse of philosophical inquiry in the modern world.

I have not yet read Lampert’s standalone works on Nietzsche, and I am ultimately (and for a variety of reasons) unpersuaded by his assertions of Nietzsche’s correctness. Moreover one probably agrees that this Nietzscheanism leads him to underrate the ways in which Heidegger differs from Nietzsche (and perhaps most important for the political-philosophical entomologist, the ways in which Strauss was influenced by Heidegger.) All the same, these lectures were nothing if not thought-provoking.

That is what the fact of the exoteric/esoteric distinction results in for Nietzsche—will the philosopher today generate a teaching that will cover over the tragedy, the totality of suffering, and make it seem bearable because there is some deliverance, as philosophers in the Platonic tradition have taught till now? Or does the philosopher now judge that the time has come for a new response to the view from above, down on human suffering? Is it time for a new teaching that does not lie about suffering by inventing or endorsing some comedy of a purpose to existence that gives suffering meaning? Nietzsche’s answer is that, yes, the time has come for such a new teaching.

Leaving Nietzsche behind for a moment, my own half-baked efforts to gaze down into the depths of the “Straussian mystery” have tended to lead in the direction of a suspicion that the ground to which his project seeks to return is perhaps not so much the thought of the ancients as that of the Falsafa of the medieval Islamicate world. Lampert is directionally correct to argue thus in one of his earlier books, citing Strauss’ early essay “Farabi’s Plato” as a major, perhaps too-explicit for republication work.

At the beginning of the treatise with which he prefaces his exposition of the philosophies of Plato and of Aristotle, he employs the distinction between “the happiness of this world in this life” and “the ultimate happiness in the other life” as a matter of course. In the Plato, which is the second and therefore the least exposed part of a tripartite work, the distinction of the two beatitudines is completely dropped. What that silence means, becomes unmistakably clear from the fact that in the whole Plato (which contains after all summaries of the Phaedrus, the Phaedo and the Republic) there is no mention whatsoever of the immortality of the soul: Fārābī’s Plato silently rejects Plato’s doctrine of immortality, or rather he considers it an exoteric doctrine. Fārābī goes so far as to avoid [372] in his summaries of the Phaedo and of the Republic the very term “soul,” and as to observe, throughout the Plato, a deep silence about the νοῦς, to say nothing of the νοῖ.

I have always suspected, on the basis of an essay on Al-Farabi’s Summary of Plato’s Laws that there must be some deeper meaning to Strauss’s own final completed work, the structurally-similar Argument and Action of Plato’s Laws, which on the surface may appear, much as its author once said of Al-Farabi’s “a pedantic, pedestrian and wooden writing which abounds in trivial or insipid remarks.”

Equality on the Right and its Enemies: Harry Jaffa and Sam Francis

I have a hopefully Henry Begler-length piece in the works on the political philosopher and Lincoln scholar Harry Jaffa, who died in 2015. An early American student of Leo Strauss, Jaffa is perhaps best known today as the progenitor of the Claremont school of “West Coast Straussianism,” but this (as I hope to argue at some length) is an unfair reduction of a fascinating, frustrating mind. One of the ways one might think about the various camps of Straussians could be, to borrow one of the late Alasdair MacIntyre’s chapter headings from After Virtue, “Aristotle or Nietzsche.” In his published writings Jaffa was very much of the Aristotle camp, at times in the second half of his very long life almost comedically so.

I concluded long ago that, had Aristotle been called upon, in the latter half of the 17th century, to write a guide book for constitution makers, he would have written something very closely approximating Locke’s Second Treatise. For he would have recognized instantly those differences from his Politics that prudential wisdom required, in the world of Christian monotheism, with all its peculiar dangers of tyranny, especially from the union of divine right monarchy and established church.

Today however, I am looking more at the early Jaffa.³ Equality and Liberty is one of the several essay collections which pad out the four decades and change that separate his two big books on Lincoln, and mostly covers output from the period in which he was still nominally a New Deal liberal. This Jaffa, perhaps best represented by his first Lincoln book Crisis of the House Divided and the Aristotle chapter of the first two editions of the Strauss & Cropsey History of Political Philosophy, was interested in something like an ambitious reinterpretation of the American political tradition, especially at founding and the moment of national rebirth that was the Civil War. That conflict was for Jaffa, and especially the earlier Jaffa, the paradigmatic event in American history, the re-founding of the regime by the providential statesman, Abraham Lincoln.

The Civil War, I have written, is the most characteristic phenomenon in American politics, not because it represents a statistical frequency, but because it represents the innermost character of that politics; it is the event in which the things that forever drive us toward and hinder us from achieving our political salvation emerge in the sharpest and most visible confrontation.

It is indeed these attitudes, which when contrasted with many of Jaffa’s contemporaries, feel distinctly forward looking and surprising in a man so strongly of the right. The historiographic trends of the era tended toward a conciliatory, tragic view of the conflict as fundamentally unnecessary, if also perhaps inevitable. I am on the whole sympathetic to Richard Hofstadter, but this was something he got wrong in his The American Political Tradition and the Men who made It, to say nothing of the outright revisionists of the Dunning School.⁴ The willingness to openly discuss slavery as a moral evil, among other things are admirable aspects of Jaffa’s presentation.

It is in this particular sense that I do not think we have had any American political theory.

Yet the American experience ranks in some ways, in my opinion, with the Athens of Pericles and Socrates, with the Rome of Brutus and Cicero, with the empire-church of Dante and Aquinas, with the England of Elizabeth and Shakespeare (as well as that of Macaulay and Churchill). The American form of government, in its failures as well as in its successes, reveals possibilities in the nature of man as a political animal as distinctive in their way as any revealed by any other regime in the great drama of Western history, possibilities that may have gone unrevealed but for their American apocalypse.

This week I belatedly read the paleoconservative intellectual Sam Francis’ 1994 essay collection Beautiful Losers. I tend to be skeptical of the idea that “master thinkers” play a significant causal role in the progress of the American right, rather than running behind, justifying. That being said I understand the claims of writers such as John Ganz that Francis is from the grave perhaps the closest thing MAGA has to one. “Message from MARS” in particular feels like a prophecy unfulfilled for 36 years, although this could be said of many of these essays. To a very large extent Francis’ vision of an American Volk whose traditions and way of life is impinged and threatened by alien, near-colonial elites seem to inform the more down-to-earth segments of the intellectual right.

the continuing civilizational crisis, in its economic and political phases, of what James Burnham called “the managerial resolution.” The liquidation of the middle class and its bourgeois cultural order are essential parts of that revolution, which does not consist only in the material dimension of the rolling up of comparatively small owner-operated business enterprises and farming units by colossal corporate organizations and the replacement of local, legislative, and constitutionalist government by centralized. executive, bureaucratic regimes. It also consists, in its cultural dimensions, in the delegitimization and eventual extirpation of bourgeois culture-first on the grounds that that culture is the product of a selfish “capitalist” oligarchy, and later, in our own times, that it is the institutional framework by which a “white, male, heterosexual, Christian” ruling class maintains cultural hegemony. The technically skilled managerial elites that hold power in corporations, unions, universities, mass media, foundations, and government cannot secure and enhance their dominance without also undermining the cultural basis of bourgeois power, which acts as a constraint on the power of the new elite.

This seems like an appropriate note on which to end this post, given the way in which Francis’s worldview ultimately triumphed on the right in our time. As Laura K. Field and others have noted, there has been a significant infusion of paleoconservative views on race and human inequality amongst the Claremonsters. I am drawn to writers upon whom history played cruel tricks, and for the epigones of Jaffa’s school to use his voice to speak words that would not seem out of place in one of Francis’s essays seems an especially bitter fate.

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Alfarabi. Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. Translated by Muhsin Mahdi. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969.

Jaffa, Harry V. “Aristotle.” Essay. In History of Political Philosophy , edited by Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, 1st ed., 64–129. Chicago, IL: Rand McNally, 1963.

Jaffa, Henry V. Equality and liberty: Theory and practice in American politics. New York, NY: Oxford Univ. Pr, 1965.

Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, psychologist. 4th ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974.

Lampert, Laurence. The Beijing Lectures: Strauss, plato, nietzsche: Philosophy and its poetry. Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2024.

Lampert, Laurence. Leo Strauss and Nietzsche. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Strauss, Leo. Leo Strauss’ published but uncollected English writings. Edited by Steven J Lenzner and Svetozar Minkov. South Bend, IN: Saint Augustine’s Press, Inc, 2024.

1. Interestingly enough a friend of mine happened to be making his way through the primary sources himself, and we had an exchange about it.

I’m not trying to dissuade you from reading Nietzsche. I just think you should be wary of the ways in which the post war liberal/left interpretation of him, while well-intentioned in wanting to rescue his work from the Nazis, nonetheless winds up overlooking the ways in which he is a thinker of a profound darkness.

2. Leo Strauss, Seminar on Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil given at St John’s College in 1971-2, session 1.

3. Late in life Jaffa claimed to have switched parties over the bungled Bay of Pigs invasion.

4. This model of conciliatory periods of revisionism regarding the meaning of the American Civil War, followed by periods of recovery of the moral stakes (usually but not always overlapping with “prophetic periods” of reform) has, since the 1960s or so when the first revolution ended, become one of the dialectical patterns of American cultural memory.