The 1980’s ‘culture wars’, abating at Cold War’s end, resurfaced in the late 2010s, latterly the more bitter for the revelation of a Hegelian-Nietzschean split between leftists favoring technocracy (progressives) and latter-day Existentialism (postmoderns). Both strands of thought had already been identified as dead ends by Heidegger and Strauss, whose call for a return to classical rationalism is the main topic. Political thought is not academic but practical, and modern society is rational. When Western academics and government officials lose faith in reason, society is in crisis.

The Philosophes had sought to make reason universal; but the unbridled pursuit of philosophy in government damages the city’s ends (its latter-day myths and gods). What has been lost, as per Strauss’ ‘three waves of modernity’, is the conception of nature and man’s place in it. Inability to test authority by use of reason portends loss of agency, freedom. When social scientists speak of angst, unknowingly they refer to essentially political emptiness, reduced either to soulless technocracy or nihilism. (Foucault, who plays an unlikely role herein, observed power never disappears but takes on new forms, ever-changing because it is not bounded by reason.)

History, properly the imaginative reconstruction of places and events, was often seen by 19th-century intellectuals as a mechanistic process. Historicism failed (and continues to fail) because history is neither rational nor ending; but the view assigns man an uncontrollable place in an inexorable sweep, while isolating him within time. Science, which came on scene with Bacon and Descartes, promises mastery of nature but separates facts from values, and so can’t produce a view of the good. Only the pursuit of political thought free of philosophy of history and historicist determination can liberate the 21st century from nihilism and technocracy (the latter seeming the larger task).

Strauss’ unique contribution is an awareness of the moral-political equilibrium (tension) of philosophy. To become political, to establish conditions for virtuous life, human matters must be elevated to reason; otherwise, all is but a contest of will to power.

Plato’s importance to Strauss is evident. The ancient thought the whole consists of heterogeneous parts which cannot be understood as constitutive; but knowledge of the whole is impossible. His famous analogy of the shadowy cave – an argument for transparent use of reason in government – is reified in Foucault’s portrayal of unaccountable, amorphous sociopolitical elites exercising power (the insight giving rise to an otherwise misleading title). Yet it’s not clear why Plato among Strauss’ many influences is here singled out, just as it’s unclear what ‘narrow passage’ refers to. A bibliography is wonted.