The challenge of political philosophy is to understand the best way to govern society. Leo Strauss’s reading of ancient and modern philosophers produced a master narrative, a history of ideas, featuring a ‘Socratic turn’ (when philosophy discarded the gods and began to focus on human nature and affairs) and a ‘Machiavellian turn’ (when the pursuit of virtue was lowered to accommodate how humans are commonly seen to behave). Positivism, which distinguishes between scientific fact and all other ‘values’, and historicism, which asserts ideas and events are chained to contemporary interpretation (and is now intertwined with postmodernism), threaten the tenets of this narrative because they tend to nihilism. The book features Strauss’s readings of leading figures and treats his practice of esotericism, which controversially asserts that many philosophers did not write what they really thought, but only left clues, due to threat of political persecution. A final section considers his practical politics and school of disciples. To be re-read.
Political thought
23. Strauss, The City and Man (22 Dec 2015)
Modern political philosophy has become ideology, a phenomenon at the center of the crisis of the West, which is uncertain of its purpose. The modern treatment, which conceives of itself as political science, seeks to separate facts from values, and so cannot accommodate the pursuit of what ought to be, only what is. The classical treatment, best encapsulated in Aristotle’s
- Politics
because it originates the study of moral virtue, is the original and best approach to the ‘common sense’ understanding of political things. In three essays that chronologically work backward, from Aristotle to Plato’s
- Republic
to Thucydides, Strauss elucidates conceptions and problems of the best regime before turning to actual study of political history. In this way, Strauss makes the distinction between what is ‘first for us’ against what is ‘first in nature’, connecting history to philosophy without subsuming one inside the other. Philosophy is the ascendancy of events qua history. The search for the common-sense understanding of the city and man’s role as a good citizen and a good person leads the philosopher back to question: what is the nature of god? To be re-read.
1. Bromwich, Intellectual Life of Burke (31 Jan 2016)
A patiently elaborated intellectual biography of Edmund Burke that falls short of its ulterior objective, to demonstrate the Anglo-Irishman is not a source of modern conservatism. A professor of English literature, Bromwich reads Burke’s published works and private correspondence alike as political action (i.e., thought leadership), concluding Burke treats politics as civic morality. So far so good. However, the author cannot reconcile Burke the reformer with Burke the defender of entailed inheritance qua tradition: he doesn’t or hasn’t understood that Burke ‘changed his stance but not his ground’ — a reasonable description of 20th-century neoconservatism, which is problematic for Bromwich. So he settles on a view of Burke solely as a reformer and seeks to read him out of the conservative canon. The ambition fails both by not considering Burke in contradistinction to, for example, the philosophes, as a historian would, and also in failing to show how the generations of conservatives who have drawn inspiration from Burke were somehow mistaken. Bromwich wrongly suggests that because Burke was not a contemporary Tory, he cannot be seen as the fount of the right. Prone to social psychology, but well written. A promised successor volume, which must cover the years following from the American Revolution, faces the bigger challenge of explaining away
- Reflections
.
2. Hamilton, Echo of Greece (7 Feb 2016)
Most of the leading thinkers of ancient Greece lived in the fourth century, after the democratic triumph of Pericles and the fall of Athens. Hamilton sketches the oeuvre of these men, particularly emphasizing the humanistic qualities and also contrasting Plato with Aristotle, the latter so long in the former’s shade. Ultimately, the Greeks sought to identify freedom, the Romans order. The conclusion is a departure: what would have become of the Christian church had it followed the Greeks?
3. Hazareesingh, How the French Think (27 Feb 2016)
Surveys elite and popular ideas in France since the revolution, in an effort to characterize predominant modes of Gallic thinking. The author begins with the rationalist, deductive thought of Rene Descartes, which spilled from science into the social sciences and the humanities: Cartesian thinking remains the feature of the French worldview. Other conceptual treatments include utopianism, left-right artefacts, and metropolitan-regional oppositions. The final third of the book focuses on postwar notables such as Camus and Sartre, the communist left, and the postmoderns — de Gaulle merits comparatively little notice. Surprisingly, the left-liberal author concludes postmodernism (and implicitly communism) has proven a dead end, and even blames the mindset for spurring contemporary pessimism. Well written and honest, if bien pensant.
Appraising Isaiah Berlin
Berlin deserves a place among the second rank of philosophic greats for his defense of liberalism against the tyranny of communism as well as his definition of ‘negative liberty’.
We should surely forgive him his posture in the face of the Left establishment: what appears now as pusillanimity was probably, at the time, the only effective anti-Communist tactic, even if it did serve to entrench the left-liberal attitudes which have since dominated British intellectual life. His defense of negative liberty (liberty as personal sovereignty) is of enduring value, as is his critique of the ‘positive’ alternative — the idea of liberty as ’empowerment’ — which comes to the fore whenever egalitarians seek to ‘liberate’ us from our traditional freedoms.
Many praise Berlin, too, for his defense of ‘pluralism’, attributing to him the view that human beings have different and incommensurable values, for which no ultimate or shared foundation can be provided. This idea does indeed play a large part in Berlin’s later and more long-winded writings…
Roger Scruton, ‘Back to Berlin‘,
- New Criterion
, September 2009
4. Kramnick (ed.), Edmund Burke (17 Mar 2016)
Presents leading segments of Burke’s most notable works in conjunction with contemporary critiques, and reprints three essays seeking to characterize the whole of his thinking. Kramnick succeeds in simultaneously portraying the genius of Burke’s rhetoric (if not the volume of his erudition) and its more heated qualities, which sometimes took him beyond the pale. The triumvirate of essays – 1 right, 1 Marxist, and 1 centrist — demonstrate Burke’s empirical skepticism toward rationalism.
5. Stanlis, Edmund Burke (10 Apr 2016)
Burke’s understanding of natural law — the spirit of equity — as reflected in English common law is the cornerstone of his largely uncodified body of thought: so Stanlis has contended since his groundbreaking Edmund Burke and the Natural Law. In this monograph, he reiterates and elaborates the basis of those views, while demonstrating he was not a utilitarian. Subsequently he shows Burke’s opposition to the rationalist views of the Enlightenment, particularly the French philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose conception of ‘sensibility’, or abstract moral empathy, which paves the wave for theoretical innovation; Burke preferred an empirical approach to limited reform, in order to preserve the best elements of society. This contrast between revolution and reform is demonstrated in Burke’s view of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a revolution ‘not made but prevented’.
10. Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (2 Jun 2016)
The fox knows many things but cannot produce a unified theory of being; the hedgehog searches for a core certainty that explains all. Isaiah Berlin’s essay studies the extraordinary instance of Leo Tolstoy, who brilliantly portrayed quotidian life but sought for a holistic view. In this history of ideas, the author contends the Russian drew heavily on the French conservative Joseph de Maistre.
14. Smith, Political Philosophy (5 Sep 2016)
The core problems of political philosophy are largely the same as those considered in the Classical age: our contemporary issues are most intelligible when viewed through the lens of democratic-minded masters from Socrates to Tocqueville. That is, the field is not progressive (additive) and certainly not historicist. The main issues deal with law and justice; authority and order; who should rule (what is the statesman)?; what is the best regime, and what is its relationship to the actual (current) regime?; what is a good citizen, and what is the relationship to the ideal (virtuous or perfect) person? The primary subject of political judgement is decision making. The conclusion departs from its study of towering figures to assert the national and the cosmopolitan (i.e., the ideal) each have a role to play is shaping the patriot. The answer depends mightily on the ethos of the people.