To lead a nation wittingly into war on the basis of false pretenses is, short of treason, one of the most egregious misdeeds that a political actor can commit. But this is what happened in 2003. The war in Iraq was preceded by a disinformation blitz alleging that (1) Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that were intended for use against the United States and its allies; and (2) there was a direct link between Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime and Al Qaeda. On the basis of those claims, Congress and the American people were deceived into a war that, according to recent estimates, resulted in half a million deaths.
By degrees, it came to light that the deputy secretary of defense at the time, Paul Wolfowitz, had created a covert intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, in order to counteract the skeptical reports that the State Department and the CIA had provided.
Leo Strauss: Man of Peace
By Robert Howse (Cambridge University Press)
In 1972, Wolfowitz received his Ph.D. under the tutelage of the University of Chicago political philosopher Leo Strauss. Some further digging reveals that Abram Shulsky, director of the Office of Special Plans, had received his doctorate under Strauss’s supervision that same year. The fact that members of the OSP clique openly referred to themselves as the “Cabal” no doubt further whetted the appetites of conspiracy theorists. As it turned out, the Wolfowitz-Shulsky connection was merely the tip of the iceberg. Straussians in charge of the Project for a New American Century, a well-connected Washington think tank, had been urging an invasion of Iraq since the late 1990s.
Under the circumstances, it was almost inevitable that critics would seek out a substantive link between Strauss’s political philosophy and the nefarious practices of his intellectual progeny. Nor was that conjectural association (Strauss himself had died three decades earlier) difficult to discover. After all, as a German Jew who fled Germany in 1932, Strauss mistrusted liberal democracy, whose lack of political resolve he deemed responsible for the Weimar Republic’s rash and ignominious demise.
Moreover, as a Platonist, Strauss was by no means averse to lying in politics. The unwashed masses were incapable of understanding Truth in any event. Suspicion of systematic deception on the part of the Defense Department’s so-called Leo-Cons was reinforced by the Master’s endorsement of esoteric writing. Since wisdom and politics operate at cross-purposes, the philosopher who articulates unpopular truths will be subjected to persecution; or—as the paradigmatic case of Socrates illustrates well—even worse.
Since liberalism, with its ethical relativism and its glorification of public opinion, has permanently undermined the ancient truths of philosophy and religion, as Nietzsche realized, there is nothing standing between modernity and the abyss of nihilism. Thus, in order to cohere, modern societies require “noble lies” or political myths. At the very least, they demand a diabolical enemy capable of uniting citizens in a shared antipathy. As Strauss declared in The City and Man: “The good city is not possible without a fundamental falsehood; it cannot exist in the element of truth.” Also: “Untrue stories are needed not only for little children but also for the grown-up citizens of the good city [and] it is probably best if they are imbued with these stories from the earliest possible moment.”
In an article, “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous),” Strauss’s disciples Shulsky and Gary J. Schmitt echo their master’s words nearly verbatim when they assert that training in the esoteric principle “alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life.”
In Leo Strauss: Man of Peace, the New York University law professor Robert Howse, with the blessing of the Straussian faithful (the University of Chicago political theorist Nathan Tarcov and Strauss’s daughter, the University of Virginia classicist Jenny Strauss Clay), seeks to set the record straight. To accomplish that, Howse draws upon Strauss’s unpublished course transcripts from the 1950s and 1960s. In them, he offered, albeit grudgingly, a qualified endorsement of structures of cosmopolitan governance. In Howse’s view, such instances, though few, demonstrate that Strauss was hardly the bellicose advocate of Machtpolitik (power politics) his detractors make him out to be: a political thinker who, owing to his contempt for the craven banality and ethical vacuousness of political liberalism, approached questions of foreign policy with an unbridled Machiavellian ruthlessness.
What we gain from Howse’s reinterpretation of Strauss’s views in light of casual remarks that Strauss made in his lectures and seminars is a slightly more capacious view of Strauss as a theorist of international relations.
Thus Howse’s reconsideration of Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli demonstrates that, despite Strauss’s approbation of Machiavelli’s cynical view of human nature—not to mention the cold-blooded measures he recommends as a remedy—Strauss ultimately remained uncomfortable with the Florentine secretary’s amoral realism. Once self-preservation becomes the supreme political goal, the Aristotelian distinction between “life” and the “good life” disappears.
Strauss’s critics regard his sympathetic treatment of Thucydides in The City and Man as a cold-hearted justification of unrestrained power politics. But as Howse shows on the basis of observations that Strauss made in a 1962 seminar, Strauss’s understanding of Thucydides is more complex. Thus, via his signature practice of close reading, Strauss was able to highlight Thucydides’ ambivalence concerning the moral costs of unbridled imperial expansion—ambivalences that, in Howse’s view, Strauss himself wholly shared.
During the 1960s, Strauss taught seminars on the twin titans of early modern cosmopolitan law, Hugo Grotius and Immanuel Kant. Since those seminars took place at the height of the Vietnam War, during which the crucial moral and legal distinctions between combatants and civilians were systematically disregarded, the suspicion arises that, late in life, Strauss may have pursued this theme as an ethical riposte to the egregious depredations of American Empire. Disappointingly, Howse offers neither evidence nor conjecture to support such a view.
Although it is clear that Strauss, as a connoisseur of Machiavelli and Carl Schmitt, was hardly an advocate of Kantian “Perpetual Peace,” as Howse demonstrates, Strauss exhibited a grudging and occasional respect for the norms of international law. However, given the diffident nature of those claims, not to mention their status as conversational asides, one wonders how much credit Strauss really deserves on this count.
In the eyes of a Strauss venerator like Howse, the answer is clear: quite a bit. However, were one to evaluate Strauss’s views according to more-general standards, a more adequate characterization might be: too little, too late. Moreover, Howse’s own conclusions are resoundingly timorous: “It is difficult to see how one could draw any strong normative conclusions about the limits of international law as such from Strauss’s [account].” In sum: “Strauss seems to end up where he began, merely with the prudential counsel that the West, in Cold War circumstances, should not invest in trying to realize a distant dream [i.e., internationalism], at least not at the risk of its own security, that is of becoming distracted from the present Soviet threat.”
When all is said and done, Howse has written a book that fellow Straussians alone will love and embrace. Yet, as Nietzsche memorably avowed: One repays a teacher poorly by remaining a disciple.
