Burnyeat vs Strauss, Again

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In a famous polemical essay (1986) in NYRB, my (recall) teacher, Myles Burnyeat, distinguished between two ways of entering Strauss’ thought: either through his “writings” or “one may sign up for initiation with a Straussian teacher.” That is, as Burnyeat notes, Strauss founded a school – he quotes Lewis Coser’s claim that it is “an academic cult” -- with an oral tradition. In the 1986 essay, Burnyeat spends some time on the details of Strauss’ teaching strategy and style that he draws from autobiographical writings by Bloom and Dannhauser[1] as well as by aptly quoting Strauss’ famous (1941) essay "Persecution and the Art of Writing." Somewhat peculiarly, given what follows, Burnyeat does not comment on the surprising fit he [Burnyeat] discerns between Strauss’ writing and teaching!

Burnyeat goes on to imply that without the oral tradition, Strauss’ writings fall flat, or (and these are not the same thing, of course) lack political influence. I quote:

“It is the second method that produces the sense of belonging and believing. The books and papers are freely available on the side of the Atlantic from which I write, but Strauss has no discernible influence in Britain at all. No one writing in the London Review of Books would worry—as Stephen Toulmin worried recently in these pages about the State Department’s policy-planning staff—that Mrs. Thatcher’s civil servants know more about the ideas of Leo Strauss than about the realities of the day. Strauss has no following in the universities where her civil servants are educated. Somehow, the interchange between teacher and pupil gives his ideas a potency that they lack on the printed page.”

I want to draw out to two themes from this quote: first, I’ll focus on the reception of Strauss in the UK. And, second, on the way governing elites are educated. So much for set up.

 

First, this is an extraordinary passage once we remember that already in 1937 Michael Oakeshott wrote an admiring and insightful review of Strauss’ ,The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: its Basis and its Genesis (1936) that is very much worth re-reading. (In his earlier, 1935, essay in Scrutiny on Hobbes, Oakeshott alerts the reader that he is familiar with Strauss’ (1932) French article on Hobbes.) It matters to Burnyeat’s empirical claim because while Oakeshott, who did have an impact British political thinking, certainly is not a slavish follower of Strauss, one would have to be confident that none of Oakeshott’s teachings weren’t taken from Strauss at all. Writing in the London Review of Books a few years later (1992), Perry Anderson alerts his readers to non-trivial differences between Strauss and Oakeshott (which is compatible with my claim), and more importantly for present purposes, treats Strauss as a major influence on the then newish resurgence of the intellectual right (although that can be made compatible with Burnyeat’s claim about Strauss’ purported lack of influence in the UK).[2]

 

But even when taken on its own terms, there is something odd about Burnyeat’s claim. For, even if we grant that Strauss has no following at all in British universities by the mid 1980s, this could have other sources than the lack of potency of Strauss’ ideas. After all, there had been a number of influential polemics against Strauss in the United Kingdom. Most notably, the so-called ‘Cambridge school’ of historiography (associated with Pocock, Dunn, and Skinner amongst others) polemically self-defined, in part, against Strauss and his school; this can be readily ascertained by, for example, word-searching ‘Strauss’ in Quentin Skinner’s (1968) "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas."[3] One can also discern, as I have noted before, such polemics by reading Yolton’s (1958) "Locke on the Law of Nature" in The Philosophical Review.[4] Yolton was then at Kenyon, but he had been an Oxford DPhil student of Ryle’s, who supervised his dissertation on John Locke.[5] Polemic is simply unnecessary with writings one foresees would have no influence or potency at all. So, I am afraid to say that Burnyeat’s presentation does little justice to even the broad outlines of the early reception of Strauss in the U.K.

 

As I noted, there is a second theme lurking in the quoted passage, namely Burnyeat’s interest in how civil servants are educated at university. This theme is developed by Burnyeat as follows in the NYRB essay:

The leading characters in Strauss’s writing are “the gentlemen” and “the philosopher.” “The gentlemen” come, preferably, from patrician urban backgrounds and have money without having to work too hard for it: they are not the wealthy as such, then, but those who have “had an opportunity to be brought up in the proper manner.” Strauss is scornful of mass education. “Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.” Such “gentlemen” are idealistic, devoted to virtuous ends, and sympathetic to philosophy. They are thus ready to be taken in hand by “the philosopher,” who will teach them the great lesson they need to learn before they join the governing elite.

The name of this lesson is “the limits of politics.” Its content is that a just society is so improbable that one can do nothing to bring it about. In the 1960s this became: a just society is impossible. In either case the moral is that “the gentlemen” should rule conservatively, knowing that “the apparently just alternative to aristocracy open or disguised will be permanent revolution, i.e., permanent chaos in which life will be not only poor and short but brutish as well.”

Burnyeat infers these claims from a number of Strauss’s writings in the 1950s and 60s which he has clearly read carefully. In fact, at the end of the second paragraph, Burnyeat adds in his note (after citing Strauss’ What is Political Philosophy? p. 113), “where Strauss indicates that when this argument is applied to the present day, it yields his defense of liberal or constitutional democracy—i.e., modern democracy is justified, according to him, if and because it is aristocracy in disguise.”

Now, even friends of mass education can admit that modern democracy is an aristocracy in disguise. This is not a strange claim at all when we remember that traditionally ‘democracy’ was associated with what we now call ‘direct’ or ‘popular’/’plebiscite’ democracy, whereas our ‘liberal’ or ‘representative’ democracy was understood as aristocratic in form if only because it functionally preserves rule by the relatively few as Tocqueville intimates. This fact is a common complaint from the left, and, on the right, taken as a vindication of the sociological ‘elite’ school (associated with Mosca, Pareto, etc.). It is not limited to the latter, of course, because the claim can be found in the writing of Max Weber on UK/US party politics (which Strauss knew well.)  

Of course, what matters is what kind of aristocracy modern liberal democracy is, and can be. And now we return, anew, to theme of the education of the governing elite(s) as Burnyeat put front and center in NYRB. That a liberal education can produce a ‘natural’ aristocracy is, in fact, staple of writings in what we may call ‘the conservative tradition’ as can be found in Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. The idea is given a famous articulation in the writings of Edmund Burke (1791) “An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.” (I have put the passage from Burke in a note.)[6]

So, as summarized by Burnyeat, Strauss simply echoes a commonplace about how Burke is understood by post WWII conservatives. What’s distinctive then is that Strauss is presented as claiming that the ancient wisdom he discloses is that trying to bring about a fully just society would re-open the Hobbesian state of nature/war, that is, permanent chaos. It won’t surprise that Burnyeat denies this is the unanimous teaching of the ancients (although when I took a seminar with him about fifteen years later he came close to endorsing this himself as a reading of the Republic). For, the closing two paragraphs of his essay, drive this point home:

“Strauss believed that civil society must, of necessity, foster warlike habits and make its citizens apply different rules of conduct to one another and to foreigners. The impossibility of international justice was a considerable part of what persuaded him that “the justice which is possible within the city, can only be imperfect or cannot be unquestionably good.” But Strauss spent his life extolling what he believed to be “the truth” on the grounds that it is the unanimous “wisdom of the ancients.” Hence something more than an academic quarrel is taking place when Strauss defends his eccentric view that Plato’s Socrates agrees with Xenophon’s in teaching that the just citizen is one who helps his friends and harms his enemies.

Plato’s Socrates attacks this very notion early in the Republic. No matter: Strauss will demonstrate that it is the only definition of justice from Book I which is “entirely preserved” in the remainder of the Republic. Plato’s Socrates argues passionately in the Gorgias for a revolutionary morality founded on the thesis that one should not return wrong for wrong. Strauss’s unwritten essay on Plato’s Gorgias would have summoned all his Maimonidean skills to show that Socrates does not mean what he says. Much more is at stake here than the correctness or otherwise of the common scholarly opinion that Xenophon, a military man, was incompetent at philosophy and did not understand Socrates. The real issue is Strauss’s ruthless determination to use these old books to “moderate” that idealistic longing for justice, at home and abroad, which grew in the puppies of America during the years when Strauss was teaching and writing.”

 

That Xenophon was incompetent at philosophy and did not understand Socrates is, in the context of the debate with Strauss, a petitio principii. That’s compatible with the claim that Burnyeat is right about this. But it's worth noting that this is characteristic of analytic historiography. For example, in his early (1951) review of Strauss, Vlastos also describes Xenophon as having a “pedestrian mind.” (593)

Even so, that international justice between states is impossible is not a strange reading of the Republic (or the other ancients). Plato and Aristotle are not Kant, after all. (Plato may have thought that Kallipolis could have just relations with other Hellenic polities, but I see no reason he thought that this was enduringly possible with non-Greek barbarians.) And if we permit the anachronism by which it is phrased, it strikes me that Strauss is right that for the ancients civil society must, of necessity, foster warlike habits and make its citizens apply different rules of conduct to one another and to foreigners (even if many foreigners could be treated in pacific fashion and in accord with a supra-national moral norms). Part of Plato’s popularity (recall; and here) in the nineteenth century was undoubtedly due to the plausibility of reading him as a pan-hellenic nationalist. It doesn’t follow from this, of course, that for Socrates whatever justice is possible within the city has to be attenuated or imperfect. It is, however, peculiar that even if one rejects Strauss’ purported “great lesson” and if one grants that Kallipolis is, indeed, the ideal city one should treat the effort to bring it into being as anything more than a dangerous fantasy; and while I wouldn’t want to claim that a “just society is so improbable that one can do nothing to bring it about,” it is not odd to wish to moderate those that try knowing, as we do, the crimes of the Gulag or the Great Leap forward, if that's really what Strauss taught.

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[1] “Leo Strauss September 20, 1899–October 18, 1973,” Political Theory 2 (1974), pp. 372–392, which Burnyeat commends, and Werner J. Dannhauser, “Leo Strauss: Becoming Naive Again,” The American Scholar 44 (1974–1975),

[2] Anderson, Perry. "The intransigent right at the end of the century." London Review of Books 14.18 (1992): 7-11. Reprinted in Anderson, Perry. Spectrum. Verso, 2005.

[3] Skinner, Quentin. "Meaning and Understanding in thef History of Ideas." History and theory 8.1 (1969): 3-53. (There is a huge literature on the debates between the Cambridge school and Straussianism.)

[4] John W. Yolton (1958) "Locke on the Law of Nature." The Philosophical Review 67.4: 478.

[5] Buickerood, James G., and John P. Wright. "John William Yolton, 1921-2005." Proceedings and Addresses of The American Philosophical Association. American Philosophical Association, 2006.

[6] “A true natural aristocracy is not a separate interest in the state, or separable from it. It is an essential integrant part of any large body rightly constituted. It is formed out of a class of legitimate presumptions, which, taken as generalities, must be admitted for actual truths. To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing low and sordid from one’s infancy; to be taught to respect one’s self; to be habituated to the censorial inspection of the public eye; to look early to public opinion; to stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled to take a large view of the widespread and infinitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society; to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be enabled to draw and court the attention of the wise and learned, wherever they are to be found; to be habituated in armies to command and to obey; to be taught to despise danger in the pursuit of honour and duty; to be formed to the greatest degree of vigilance, foresight, and circumspection, in a state of things in which no fault is committed with impunity and the slightest mistakes draw on the most ruinous consequences; to be led to a guarded and regulated conduct, from a sense that you are considered as an instructor of your fellow-citizens in their highest concerns, and that you act as a reconciler between God and man; to be employed as an administrator of law and justice, and to be thereby amongst the first benefactors to mankind; to be a professor of high science, or of liberal and ingenious art; to be amongst rich traders, who from their success are presumed to have sharp and vigorous understandings, and to possess the virtues of diligence, order, constancy, and regularity, and to have cultivated an habitual regard to commutative justice: these are the circumstances of men that form what I should call a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation.”

See also Kirk, Russell. "Burke and natural rights." The Review of Politics 13.4 (1951): 454.

Aristotle on Friendship: What Does It Take to Be a Good Friend?

What is it to be a friend, especially a good friend? Aristotle’s claims about friendship began debates that continue today. This essay presents his views on friendship and a contemporary debate he inspired.

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Three years in, we stay true to the pulse underlying our philosophical work. Coming from memorable personal relationships, we end with free correspondence.

The Moral Cost of Capitalism

[The following is a talk I gave this afternoon as part of a faculty colloquium on “Radical Futures” at North Central College, part of the Intellectual Community series co-sponsored by the Faculty Development and Recognition Committee (of which I am chair) and the Center for Advancing Faculty Excellence and organized by my colleague Sean Kim Butorac.]

Since I teach in the Shimer Great Books program, I will begin with an experience teaching one of the all-time greats, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. In my ethics class this semester, we were discussing Book 1 and came to a passage where Aristotle had isolated three possible human goods that seemed to be good candidates for happiness—by which he means the human good that we pursue for its own sake, with no need for further justification or explanation. The first is pleasure, which is presumably self-explanatory. The second is honor, which we could paraphrase as respect or esteem. The third is contemplation, which we could see as a form of knowledge or understanding. In all three cases, Aristotle believes, it wouldn’t make sense to ask why we are pursuing these goals. Why do you want pleasure? Why do you want people to like and respect you? Why do you want to figure things out? The question doesn’t make sense.

The list feels pretty exhaustive, but Aristotle goes on to introduce a fourth possible candidate: money. Initially it seems to fit the bill—all things being equal, no one will turn down more money. But Aristotle points out that money is not truly an end in itself, but rather a pure means. We only want money because of the things we can do with it. And this, I point out, is an area where Aristotle is out of date. He can’t imagine living a life for the sake of stockpiling as much money as possible, much less orienting an entire society around it. We can.

The shift to a pure market society, to a kind of totalitarianism of capitalism, was so successful that it has become almost invisible to us. Like many other analysts on the left, I choose to call that transition—ushered in by Pinochet, Thatcher, and Reagan, and then adopted by virtually every governing party in the West and every international organization—the shift from the postwar Fordist economic model to neoliberalism. One way to gauge this shift is to think in terms of means and ends. In the postwar era, the existence of an alternative economic model in the form of the USSR—which at the time was experiencing the highest economic growth in human history up to that point—meant that capitalism had to justify itself. It had to prove that it was better, not just at stockpiling money, but at creating broadly shared prosperity that lays the groundwork for national greatness. And through a combination of heavy government intervention, very high marginal tax rates on the wealthy, and high union concentration, the capitalist system really did mostly fulfill its promises, at least for the stereotypical white suburban family. Hypothetically speaking, capitalism set itself an empirical standard that certainly included economic criteria but was not limited to them—in other words, capitalism was a means to an end.

Since the fall of the USSR, capitalism has felt increasingly unburdened by the need to justify itself. Instead, competitive markets are taken as ends in themselves and as models for every area of social life. The reason we want markets is not that they produce better results or they’re more efficient or whatever else—we want markets because we want markets. Market logic is self-evident, the final standard, the final word. It is no longer the means, but the end. And once money is set up as the ultimate end—not even personal wealth that someone could potentially use, but the depersonalized money of endless “economic growth” and endless increases in asset prices—then everything else becomes a means. Where once we made friends, now we network, in the hopes that our social contacts will advance our career. Where once we relaxed and had fun, now we practice self-care, in order to recharge and guarantee increased future productivity. And to bring it a little closer to home, where once we went to school to develop our full intellectual capacities, now we seek the hot job skills employers crave.

Of course, the “before” of this “before and after” dynamic is a bit simplified and idealized in my presentation. There were no good old days when people at large pursued only the highest ends with unmixed motives. Yet I would submit that in past eras, people were better equipped to discern that such ends existed and that the mixed motives were less than ideal. This comes through clearly, for example, in a famous essay by John Maynard Keynes, “The Economic Prospects of Our Grandchildren.” As is well known, this text predicts that within two generations, humanity would essentially begin “cashing out” of capitalism by trading productivity gains for reduced working hours so that they could spend time on what was really valuable in life.

By my math, this would have been my parents’ generation, so obviously this did not occur. But for my purposes, the most interesting thing about his failed prediction is how he characterizes the benefits of the transition. One of the architects of the postwar capitalist order, as well as a gifted financial speculator, Keynes proposes that once humanity has leveraged the immense productivity of capitalism to set itself free from economic necessity, it will be a relief to admit that none of those wealthy businessmen was really as admirable as we pretended they were, that there was something a little disreputable and sad about the way they’d chosen to live their lives.

The neoliberals did everything they could to squelch that insight, to the point where we are supposed to believe that an obviously broken and miserable man like Elon Musk is a genius-level benefactor of humankind, for instance. It’s easy to point and laugh at Musk’s pathetic army of admirers on Twitter, but we academics are guilty of our own distortions. The other day I was meeting with a major in our program, a very strong student who I had not had in class before. We wound up talking for a good half hour, and at a certain point the thought slipped into my head that it was a good thing I was doing this and making her feel so supported, because we really need majors…. A very rewarding part of my job, which I was doing for its own sake and even enjoying, suddenly felt like a cynical manipulation.

I know I’m not the only one to fall victim to this line of thinking, because I’ve heard similar remarks in many other discussions. For instance, once a faculty discussion about providing mentoring and support for students of color devolved into a reflection on the importance of reaching Latinx students for our bottom line. A question of justice becomes a question of finances. No one intended for that to happen—it just rolls right off our tongues.

And more broadly, of course, we are all well-versed in defending our disciplines in market terms. The humanities provide valuable job skills! Employers tell us they want liberal arts majors who can think on their feet! Liberal arts majors eventually catch up to and even exceed the incomes of their STEM counterparts! I understand that such rhetoric is tactically necessary, especially in a media sphere full of misinformation about the value of different fields of study. I also happen to think these things are true! But even though it’s true, it’s harmful to frame the value of education in such narrowly instrumental terms. I did not get into this line of work so that Johnny can get that big promotion years down the road or Suzie can contribute to better quarterly results for her department.

But of course Johnny and Suzie need to be able to get those employment outcomes, or else they aren’t going to be able to pay off the student loans that are financing their education here. And this brings me to another way in which the full-saturation capitalism that I call neoliberalism degrades our moral sense: it shrinks our political horizons. Once installed in a given area of life, marketization produces a feedback loop that constrains our choices within a very, very narrow range. And living a life where the most important choices about our lives and livelihoods are made by an impersonal mechanism—by everyone and no one—cultivates habits of deflection and irresponsibility. We aren’t making decisions or value judgments—we are simply responding appropriately to the demands of the market, and if we don’t, we will lose out to someone who does. In practice, this leads to the conformism of “best practices” that one of our colleagues criticized today—the alibi that we should do what everyone is doing because everyone is doing it.

I am not sure in detail how to get out of this self-reinforcing doom loop of marketization, though in my book Neoliberalism’s Demons, I suggest that we need to embrace the abolition of the market and the establishment of a system of democratic economic planning as a long-term goal. In our more immediate context, I would suggest that—beyond changing our rhetoric about the cash value of majors or the financial urgency of student retention—we need to find a way past our competitive zero-sum approach to curriculum design. Instead of outsourcing those decisions to student choices, we need to find ways to discuss, collaboratively and creatively, how we can best deploy the North Central faculty’s massive talents and expertise to deliver the kind of education we want our students to have. Our marketized system has deeply internalized habits of cynicism and fatalism in most of us, but as Aristotle teaches us, the only way to develop more virtuous habits is to practice.