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Title: Natural Right and History by Leo Strauss ISBN: 0-226-77694-8 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: June, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.29 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.11 (9 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A "Biography" of Natural Right
Comment: Now here's a puzzle. We have Leo Strauss, an obscure political philosopher of the 1950's at the University of Chicago. He primarily writes on ancient philosophers, such as Xenophon and Plato. Thirty years after his death, we find neoconservatives like Allan Bloom and Paul Wolfowitz saturated in the mainstream, apparently tutored under Strauss. What's the connection?
Amid the recent Leo Strauss craze, perpetuated by a largely sensationalist media blindly driven towards the holy grail of conspiracy theory, I decided to pick up Natural Right and History. While, obviously, one cannot ascertain his entire political message by merely one book, reading Natural Right and History helps obviate the connection.
Natural Right is a "biography" of the idea of natural right. Strauss traces the idea of natural right, from antiquity to modernity to postmodernity. In classic "Straussian" form, to understand the political implications of this book, you have to read painstakingly between the lines.
Strauss starts the book with a rather standard critique of historicism (historical relativism) and conventionalism. His argument against value relativism is very straight forward; hardly any social scientist today makes the claims that Strauss refutes. The new relativism is a more sophisitcated one, couched behind postmodernist word-games.
However, social science is largely built upon the theories of Max Weber. Thus, Strauss uses a reduction proof. If he can reduce social science to Weber, and if he can reduce Weber to historicism, then he can effectively show that the methodologies social science are fallacious, since he shows that historicism is false. Consequently he can show that a historicist understanding of natural right is also bunk. To be sure, this is an extremely risky strategy since the argument relies on a lengthy chain of reasoning.
Having attacked postmodern notions of natural right, Strauss restarts at antiquity and works his way up to modernity. Strauss shows the evolution of the idea of natural right, from "Socrates" to Plato to Aristotle to Hobbes to Locke to Rousseau to Burke.
So which conception of natural rights does Strauss believe in - the classical or the modern (enlightenment)? In short, he subscribes to the classical. Why? Succinctly, Strauss contends that natural right became doomed the second that Hobbes injected his hedonism into natural right.
A different way approach is to look at Strauss's juxtaposition of (classical vs modern) as (republicanism vs. liberalism). By liberalism, I mean classical liberal, i.e. enlightenment liberal. Classical liberalism is the view that individuals are prior to society. By republicanism, I do not mean anything related to the republican party. Republicanism means that individuals are willing to sacrifice their private interests to the public good, i.e. civic virtue. Republicanism means, in extremely superficial terms, that civil society is prior to the individual.
With that said, I totally disagree with Strauss's analysis, for more reasons I can delve into here. I think that the rights of classical liberalism, as Locke conceived it, is largely correct. However, Strauss plays a vital role in the ongoing conversation of rights in political science and philosophy. For producing a very challenging, thought-provoking analysis, this book gets 5 stars. Beware: it's not a light read!
Rating: 5
Summary: Hey Magneto comic book guy!
Comment: How do you have the nerve to review a book that you admittedly DID NOT READ????
Rating: 1
Summary: Magneto, where is your Professor X?
Comment: The film of the X-Men begins with a horrific sequence where the young Eric Lenscher is separated from his parents. He's in Auschwitz and the Nazi goons are wiping out Jews. Lenscher survives and goes on to become Magneto, a leading mutant with super powers. He is an elitist and believes that mutants are the true inheritors of the Earth and that humans, all of whom lack super powers, should lick the boots of mutant kind. His reasoning is that humans will try to wipe out mutants, just like the Nazis tried to wipe out the Jews, so mutants had best try to wipe out humans.
I found his reasoning to be rather bizarre. It seemed to be that he was using Nazism agains Nazis, which, as far as the bottom line goes, is still Nazism. That the movie and the comic book are seriously popular I chocked up to people liking far-out stories without much intellectual foundation.
Then I heard about Strauss. I haven't read the man. I probably never will. There's too many other esoteric philosophers influenced by Heidegger for me to read that I find more congenial to my tastes. But he literally is Magneto. What was the lesson Strauss learned from Nazi death camps? That they were run by the wrong people. If the Nazi party had been run by Jews who love ancient Greek philosophy more than they love the Bible, Nazi Germany would have been A-OK.
And that seriously begs credulity.
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Title: History of Political Philosophy by Leo Strauss, Joseph Cropsey ISBN: 0226777103 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: December, 1987 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND by Allan Bloom, Saul Bellow ISBN: 0671657151 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 15 May, 1988 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Thoughts on Machiavelli by Leo Strauss ISBN: 0226777022 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: August, 1995 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
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Title: The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss by Leo Strauss ISBN: 0226777154 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: April, 1989 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
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Title: Persecution and the Art of Writing by Leo Strauss ISBN: 0226777111 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: October, 1988 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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