The God of This Lower World

The Review of Politics 81 (2019), 47–76.
© University of Notre Dame

doi:10.1017/S0034670518000979
“The God of This Lower World”: Leo Strauss’s

Critique of Historicism in Natural Right and
History
Beau Shaw
Abstract: This paper offers a new account of Leo Strauss’s critique of historicism in
Natural Right and History. According to the general view of this critique, Strauss
tries to show that historicism wrongly denies the possibility of knowledge of
universal and unchangeable principles of right. I argue that this view only reflects
Strauss’s exoteric critique of historicism, and that, apart from it, he gives an esoteric
critique. According to this esoteric critique, historicism ignores the necessity of
prudence, in the sense of making “concrete decisions” which suspend universal and
unchangeable principles of right. In this light, I also show that Strauss’s critique of
historicism depends on Carl Schmitt’s concept of the “decision,” but that Strauss
simultaneously critiques Schmitt in Natural Right and History.
Of all of the philosophical movements that Leo Strauss critiques in his work,
perhaps the most important is historicism.1 Historicism, Strauss writes in
“What Is Political Philosophy?,” is “the serious antagonist of political philos-
ophy.”2 One of the central texts in Strauss’s critique of historicism is Natural
Right and History (NRH), his account of the historical development of the con-
ception of natural right from its beginning in pre-Socratic philosophy to its
Beau Shaw holds a PhD in philosophy from Columbia University, 708 Philosophy
Hall, 1150 Amsterdam Avenue, Mail Code: 4971, New York, NY 10027 (bcs2104@
columbia.edu).
1
Apart from Natural Right and History, the text on which I will focus, Strauss’s most
sustained critiques of historicism are in “On Collingwood’s Philosophy of History,”
Review of Metaphysics 5, no. 4 (1962): 559–86; “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and
Political Philosophy,” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1983); “Political Philosophy and History,” in What Is Political
Philosophy? and Other Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); “The
Three Waves of Modernity,” in An Introduction to Political Philosophy, ed. Hilail
Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989); “Two Lectures by Leo Strauss”
(“Existentialism”), ed. David Bolotin, Christopher Bruell, and Thomas L. Pangle,
Interpretation 22, no. 3 (1995): 301–38.
2
“What Is Political Philosophy?,” in What Is Political Philosophy?, 26 (italics added).
47
48 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS
“crisis” in modern philosophy.3 As part of this account, Strauss provides a cri-

tique of the “contemporary rejection” of natural right,4 which he attributes to
historicism, “the ultimate outcome of the crisis of modern natural right.”5
According to Strauss, historicism holds that all human thought is the
product of chance historical circumstances—“an unforeseeable gift of unfath-
omable fate,” as he describes Heidegger’s “radical historicism”6—and, for
this reason, historicism undermines the possibility of knowledge of “univer-
sal and unchangeable principles” of right, in which natural right was tradi-
tionally thought to consist.7 Through a number of arguments—among
others, that historicism leads to nihilism, and that there is a knowledge
of “fundamental problems” whose possibility historicism does not chal-
lenge—Strauss provides a critique of historicism whose purpose is to
defend natural right, that is, to show that knowledge of “universal and
unchangeable principles” of right is possible.
Most interpreters of Strauss’s critique of historicism in NRH view that cri-
tique in the way just outlined; more generally, this view orients the under-
standing of Strauss’s defense of “political philosophy” against historicism,
its “serious antagonist,” as well as the “conservatism” in his thought,
which is believed to consist in his support of “universal and unchangeable
principles” of right.8 In this article, I argue that the view in question is not
so much false as it is incomplete. For while it accounts for Strauss’s critique
3
Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History [hereafter NRH] (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1953).
4
NRH, 5.
5
NRH, 34.
6
NRH, 28. I will return to Heidegger’s “radical historicism” below.
7
NRH, 18.
8
See Nathan Tarcov, Philosophy & History: Tradition and Interpretation in the Work
of Leo Strauss,” Polity 16, no. 1 (1983): 5–29; Stewart Umphrey, “Natural Right and
Philosophy,” in Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker, ed. Kenneth
L. Deutsch and Walter Nicgorski (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994); Anne
Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2005), chap. 5; Rafael Major, “The Cambridge School and Leo
Strauss: Texts and Contexts of American Political Science,” Political Research
Quarterly 58, no. 3 (2005): 477–85; Steven B. Smith, “Leo Strauss’s Platonic
Liberalism,” in Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2006); Richard L. Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of
Philosophy: On Original Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), chap.
6; Paul Edward Gottfried, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America: A
Critical Appraisal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chap. 2; Arthur
M. Melzer, Philosophy between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2014), chap. 10; Jonathan F. Culp, “‘On Collingwood’s
Philosophy of History’ and ‘On a New Interpretation of Plato’s Political
Philosophy,’” in Brill’s Companion to Leo Strauss’ Writings on Classical Political
Thought, ed. Timothy W. Burns (Leiden: Brill, 2015); and Liisi Keedus, The Crisis of
“THE GOD OF THIS LOWER WORLD” 49
of historicism in the first chapter of NRH, “Natural Right and the Historical
Approach,” Strauss actually shows that this critique fails and proceeds,
later in NRH, to give a radically different one. According to this different cri-
tique, the problem with historicism is not that it undermines the possibility of
knowledge of “universal and unchangeable principles” of right, but rather
that it ignores the necessity of “prudence,” which consists in the “suspension”
of such principles,9 and which Strauss identifies with natural right.
Ultimately, I argue that Strauss’s first critique is “exoteric,” while his second
is “esoteric,” and I consider why Strauss adopts this (so to speak) “multilevel”
critique of historicism.10
Interpreters of Strauss have emphasized the crucial role of “prudence”
in his thought,11 and, more generally, he has been recognized as one of
a number of “neo-Aristotelians” who, in the second half of the twentieth
century, attempted to revive this virtue against predominant deontological
or rule-based conceptions of right.12 As my interpretation suggests, however,
whereas other revivalists of prudence like Hans-Georg Gadamer and
Alasdair MacIntyre view the historicity of thought as a condition of prudence,
for Strauss, that very historicity undermines prudence.13 Even more, Strauss’s
German Historicism: The Early Political Thought of Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), chap. 3.
9
NRH, 160.
10
For the distinction between “exoteric” and “esoteric,” see Paul J. Bagley, “On the
Practice of Esotericism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no. 2 (1992): 231–47. For the
idea of “multilevel” writing, which on the one hand articulates an exoteric or explicit
view that is not strictly justified, and on the other an esoteric or hidden view that is
strictly justified, see Miriam Galston, Politics and Excellence: The Political Philosophy of
Alfarabi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). The question whether
Strauss writes esoterically is controversial; see Rémi Brague, “Leo Strauss and
Maimonides,” in Leo Strauss’s Thought: Towards a Critical Engagement, ed. Alan Udoff
(Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1991); Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2003), 115ff.; Michael Frazer, “Esotericism Ancient and
Modern: Strauss Contra Straussianism on the Art of Political-Philosophical Writing,”
Political Theory 34, no. 1 (2006): 33–61; Catherine Zuckert and Michael Zuckert, The
Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006), 131ff.
11
See, for example, Principle and Prudence in Western Political Thought, ed.
Christopher Lynch and Jonathan Marks (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2016).
12
See Franco Volpi, “The Rehabilitation of Practical Philosophy and Neo-
Aristotelianism,” trans. Eric Buzzetti, in Action and Contemplation: Studies in the
Moral and Political Thought of Aristotle, ed. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).
13
See, for example, Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science,
Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983),
conception of prudence proves to be identical to Carl Schmitt’s conception of

the “decision.” To mention only one consideration here—to which I return—
in his central definition of natural right in NRH, Strauss states that prudence
consists in “concrete decisions,” which is, of course, Schmitt’s usual formula-
tion.14 Strauss’s relation to Schmitt is controversial. Heinrich Meier’s influen-
tial work, for example, has argued that Strauss radically opposes Schmitt’s
ideas,15 whereas more recently scholars have argued that Strauss modifies
them.16 The identity that I propose, however, has not been recognized;
indeed, Meier, in his book on Strauss and Schmitt’s “hidden dialogue,”
only once mentions NRH, in a footnote17—even though, as I will try to
show, Strauss conducts in this text a much less “hidden dialogue” with
Schmitt than the one that Meier considers.18
appendix; Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 393.
14
NRH, 159; Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of
Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 6,
14, 30, 31, 34; Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, expanded ed., trans. George
Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 27, 45–46; Schmitt,
Constitutional Theory, trans. and ed. Jeffrey Seitzer (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2008), 78, 112, 125; Schmitt, Dictatorship: From the Origin of the Modern Concept
of Sovereignty to Proletarian Class Struggle, trans. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward
(Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 7–8, 102, 150–51.
15
Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. J. Harvey
Lomax (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Leo Strauss and the Theologico-
Political Problem, trans. Marcus Brainard (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2006).
16
Miguel Vatter, “Strauss and Schmitt as Readers of Hobbes and Spinoza: On the
Relation between Political Theology and Liberalism,” New Centennial Review 4, no. 3
(2004): 161–214; John McCormick, “Post-Enlightenment Sources of Political
Authority: Biblical Atheism, Political Theology and the Schmitt-Strauss Exchange,”
History of European Ideas 37 (2011): 175–80.
17
Meier, Hidden Dialogue, 86n110.
18
The “hidden dialogue” that Meier considers is that found between Strauss’s 1932
review article of The Concept of the Political and Schmitt’s subsequent revision of his text.
Of course, Meier’s negligence of NRH is justified by his subject. On the other hand, he
attempts to draw general conclusions vis-à-vis Strauss’s relation to Schmitt and
Strauss’s thought as a whole, for example: “Whereas the political does have central sig-
nificance for the thought of Leo Strauss, the enemy and enmity do not” (Hidden
Dialogue, 87). As I will show, NRH, precisely insofar as it depends on Schmitt’s
ideas, contradicts this last suggestion. Other scholars who have addressed Strauss’s
relation to Schmitt have also restricted their attention to Strauss’s 1932 review
article; see, for example, David Janssens, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Philosophy,
Prophecy, and Politics in Leo Strauss’s Early Thought (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2008); Janssens, indeed, overlooks Strauss’s reliance on Schmitt for
his conception of natural right in NRH (Between Athens and Jerusalem, 191).
My argument proceeds as follows. In the first section, I consider Strauss’s

critique of historicism in the first chapter of NRH, and argue that Strauss
shows that this critique fails. In the second section, I look at the different cri-
tique of historicism, according to which it undermines prudence, that Strauss
provides in his discussion of Edmund Burke at the end of NRH. In the third
section, I show that this different critique of historicism defends a conception
of natural right according to which it consists in “concrete decisions.” In the
fourth section, I argue that Strauss’s critique of historicism depends on
Schmitt’s concept of the “decision.”
1. The Failure of Strauss’s Critique of Historicism in the First

Chapter of NRH
The first chapter of NRH, “Natural Right and the Historical Approach,” pro-
vides a historical account of the “genesis” of historicism, from its “infancy” in
the conservative reaction to the French Revolution up to its most radical
expression, the “radical historicism” of Heidegger.19 In giving this account,
Strauss clarifies what historicism is, explains why it lies at the basis of the
“present-day rejection of natural right,”20 and critiques it in order to defend
natural right.
According to Strauss, the conservative reaction to the French Revolution
gave rise to the “historical school” of natural right. Taking issue with the rev-
olutionary potential of the invocation of universally held individual rights,
the historical school “denied … the significance of universal norms,” and
instead proposed that all “objective” norms are those which derive from a
particular people’s history, or are “local and temporal”: “rights of
Englishmen, for example, in contradistinction to the rights of man.”21
Historicism, Strauss contends, grew out of the specifically historical reflection
on the historical source of these historical rights. This source is the “historical
process,”
the meaningless web spun by what men did, produced, and thought, not
more than by unmitigated chance—a tale told by an idiot. The historical
standards, the standards thrown up by this meaningless process, could
no longer claim to be hallowed by sacred powers behind that process.
The only standards that remained were of a purely subjective character,
19
NRH, 13, 16. Strauss does not explicitly ascribe “radical historicism” to Heidegger,
but, as I will discuss below, his account of it makes clear that it refers to Heidegger. In
“What Is Political Philosophy?,” 27, while Strauss again does not refer to Heidegger by
name, he writes that “it was the contempt for these permanencies which permitted the
most radical historicist in 1933 to submit to, or rather to welcome, as a dispensation of
fate, the verdict of the least wise.”
20
NRH, 10.
21
NRH, 13–16, 37.
standards that had no other support than the free choice of the individual.
No objective criterion henceforth allowed the distinction between good
and bad choices.22
Whereas, for the historical school, the quaestio facti of historical inheritance
grounds the objectivity of norms, for historicism, the same inheritance
implies that knowledge of objective norms is impossible. Two points
should be emphasized here. First, historicism denies, specifically, the possibil-
ity of knowledge of objective norms; it is a “critique of human thought as such”
and is comparable to the skepticism that resulted from Hume and Kant.23
Second, while this denial applies to both universal and “local and temporal”
norms, Strauss focuses on the former: historicism claims to reveal “the
unheard-of experience of the true situation of man as man—of a situation
which earlier man had concealed from himself by believing in universal
and unchangeable principles.”24 In this respect, historicism is a “rejection”
of natural right in the sense that it rejects the possibility of knowledge of “uni-
versal and unchangeable principles” of right.
Following this characterization of historicism, Strauss turns to his critique
of it. This critique comprises three separate arguments; I will look at each in
turn.
Strauss’s first argument is that since, by virtue of historicism, “no objective
criterion henceforth allowed the distinction between good and bad choices,”
historicism “culminated in nihilism” or carried a “nihilistic consequence.”25
Strauss anticipates this argument in the introduction to NRH, in which he
attacks the contemporary consciousness generated by historicism:
We are in the position of beings who are sane and sober when engaged in
trivial business and who gamble like madmen when confronted with
serious issues—retail sanity and wholesale madness. If our principles
have no other support than our blind preferences, everything a man is
willing to dare will be permissible. The contemporary rejection of
natural right leads to nihilism—nay, it is identical to nihilism.26
According to Liisi Keedus, this argument is Strauss’s “reductio ad nihilismus”

against historicism: historicism is false because it leads to nihilism. Keedus
observes that this reductio is “the hallmark of Strauss’s critique of both histor-
icism and positivism.”27
22
NRH, 18.
23
NRH, 12, 20 (italics added). Compare Herman J. Paul, “A Collapse of Trust:
Reconceptualizing the Crisis of Historicism,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 2
(2008): 63–82.
24
NRH, 18.
25
NRH, 18.
26
NRH, 4–5.
27
Keedus, Crisis of German Historicism, 108.
Curiously, however, Strauss suggests—albeit indirectly—that his reductio is

baseless. In a footnote at the beginning of the first chapter, Strauss notes a dis-
tinction between two arguments made by the legal philosopher Karl
Bergbohm against natural right: “Bergbohm’s strict argument against the pos-
sibility of natural right … [is] distinguished from the argument that is merely
meant to show the disastrous consequences of natural right for the positive
legal order.”28 In light of this distinction, Strauss’s reductio—which appeals
to the “disastrous consequences” of historicism’s denial of natural right—
does not qualify as a “strict argument” against it. Even more, in the second
chapter of NRH, after explaining Max Weber’s thesis that there is no “knowl-
edge” of “the true value system,” Strauss states: “I contend that Weber’s thesis
necessarily leads to nihilism” and even Hitler (“in following this movement
[started by Weber] towards its end we shall inevitably reach a point
beyond which the scene is darkened by the shadow of Hitler”).29 Strauss
then adds, however: “Unfortunately, it does not go without saying that in
our examination we must avoid the fallacy that in the last decades has fre-
quently been used as a substitute for the reductio ad absurdum: the reductio
ad Hitlerum. A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been
shared by Hitler.”30 Strauss’s reductio ad nihilismus is as much a “substitute”
for the reductio ad absurdum as is the reductio ad Hitlerum: rather than pointing
to an absurd consequence, it points to a bad one. Indeed, Keedus is aware of
this fallacy, but does not recognize that Strauss draws attention to it himself:
Strauss, she writes, “was occasionally subject to the temptation known as
reductio ad hitlerum”—without noting that this formula is Strauss’s own.31
Strauss’s second argument begins by distinguishing between what he calls
“fundamental problems” (such as whether the world is eternal or not and
what justice is) and “solutions” to those problems (that the world is eternal,
or that justice is giving each his due). Even if historicism is true, Strauss
then argues, it only undermines the possibility of the knowledge of solutions,
not fundamental problems: “If the fundamental problems persist in all histor-
ical change, human thought is capable of transcending its historical limitation
28
NRH, 10n3.
29
NRH, 41–42.
30
NRH, 43.
31
Keedus, Crisis of German Historicism, 109. Similarly, Nasser Behnegar, Leo Strauss,
Max Weber, and the Scientific Study of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2003), 87, states that “by showing that Weber’s thesis leads to nihilism, Strauss does
not solve the problem underlying that thesis,” but overlooks that Strauss draws atten-
tion to this failure. Strauss elsewhere points to the fallacy of determining truth through
practical consequences; see “Preface to the English Translation,” in Spinoza’s Critique of
Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), 11: “But just as an
assertion does not become true because it is shown to be comforting, so it does not
become true because it is shown to be terrifying. The serious question concerns
man’s certainty or knowledge.”
or of grasping something trans-historical. This would be the case even if it

were true that all attempts to solve these problems are doomed to fail and
that they are doomed to fail on account of the ‘historicity’ of ‘all’ human
thought.”32 Commentators generally regard this argument as Strauss’s
“zetetic” response to historicism and, indeed, his strongest one. Philosophy
is “zetetic” in the sense that it merely tries to articulate, and better under-
stand, “fundamental problems,” but does not thereby presume to answer
them; in this way, philosophy remains untouched by historicism’s denial of
that presumption, that is, that “universal and unchangeable principles” can
be known in respect of questions of justice or even nature.33
No less than with his first argument against historicism, however, Strauss
undermines this one. To begin with, as Robert Pippin points out,34 after pro-
posing it, Strauss explains that while it might defend philosophy in respect of
the possibility of understanding fundamental problems, it does not do so in
respect of the possibility for whose sake it was appealed to in the first
place—knowledge of natural right: “To leave it at this [the zetetic response]
would amount to regarding the cause of natural right as hopeless. There
cannot be natural right if all that man could know about right were the
problem of right, or if the question of the principles of justice would admit
of a variety of mutually exclusive answers, none of which could be proved
to be superior to the others.”35 More radically, however, Strauss suggests
that his zetetic response fails to defend the first possibility mentioned. As
he presents it, this response depends on a major assumption: “If the funda-
mental problems persist in all historical change,” then “human thought is
capable of transcending its historical limitation,” even if historicism is true.
Strauss, however, nowhere justifies this assumption; given its importance,
this appears less a mistake that Strauss is making than one that he is exposing.
Even more, Strauss later asserts that historicism rejects the assumption in
question, implying that his argument, which is made ex concessis or is dialec-
tical,36 collapses. Discussing Weber’s historicism in the second chapter,
Strauss formulates it as follows: “Every conceptual scheme used by social
32
NRH, 24.
33
See Smith, “Leo Strauss’s Platonic Liberalism,” 101ff., and “Destruktion or
Recovery? On Strauss’s Critique of Heidegger,” in Reading Leo Strauss, 119ff.;
Melzer, Philosophy between the Lines, 331, 351–52; Umphrey, “Natural Right and
Philosophy,” 278; Zuckert and Zuckert, Truth about Leo Strauss, 101.
34
Robert Pippin, “The Modern World of Leo Strauss,” in Idealism as Modernism:
Hegelian Variations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 223n35.
35
NRH, 24.
36
Given the first premise, Strauss’s argument might appear only to be ex hypothesi;
however, as the last premise makes clear, the first is true only if it agrees with the his-
toricist thesis (“This would be the case even if it were true…”). Strauss’s first argument
against historicism is also dialectical; it appeals to commonly accepted beliefs about
the unacceptability of nihilism, but this is not a “strict” argument.
science articulates the basic problems, and these problems change with the
change of the social and cultural situation,” in other words, the (apparently)
“fundamental problems” are as historical as their solutions.37
Strauss’s third argument recalls the classical argument against skeptical
and relativist positions: “The historicist thesis,” Strauss claims, “is self-
contradictory or absurd.” Specifically, by denying the possibility of knowl-
edge of the eternal (whether of “universal and unchangeable principles” of
right or “fundamental problems”), historicism actually affirms that possibility,
for historicism itself claims to possess knowledge of the eternal—knowledge
of the eternal impossibility of knowledge of the eternal.38
After stating this argument, Strauss turns abruptly to Heidegger’s “radical
historicism.” This turn, however, is not a non sequitur, for, according to
Strauss, Heidegger’s radical historicism is designed precisely to save histori-
cism from the charge of self-contradictoriness or absurdity. According to that
radical historicism, “All human thought depends on fate, on something that
thought cannot master and whose workings it cannot anticipate”; the
“fate” in question is history.39 Despite this dependence on fate, however,
the principles of thought must ultimately be chosen by the individual: “the
support of the horizon produced by fate is ultimately the choice of the
individual, since that fate has to be accepted by the individual.”40 Strauss
here captures Heidegger’s view of “Dasein,” the human being, as “historical”
(geschichtlich) or a “thrown project” (geworfener Entwurf): Dasein is “thrown,”
from its past, that is, without having chosen, into a way of projecting, that is, a
future-directed way of making sense of itself and its world; however, it must
then choose that way of projecting and thereby make its own “thrownness”
(Geworfenheit) its project.41 So understood, Heidegger’s radical historicism
merely expands historicism’s view of norms into a view of thought in
general; as Strauss explained, for historicism, norms arise from the “unmiti-
gated chance” that is history and have “no other support than the free
37
NRH, 39. Commentators on the zetetic response have overlooked this sentence.
38
NRH, 25. See Steven B. Smith, “Introduction: Leo Strauss Today,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Leo Strauss, ed. Steven B. Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2009), 33.
39
NRH, 28.
40
NRH, 27.
41
See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), ¶74. By emphasizing that Dasein chooses its
thrownness, Strauss is describing, specifically, Heidegger’s conception of Dasein’s
“authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit); Dasein’s “inauthenticity” (Uneigentlichkeit) is its failure
to make such a choice. See Being and Time, ¶9. Also compare Leo Strauss, “Two
Lectures by Leo Strauss,” 329: “[for Heidegger] man is a project which is thrown some-
where (geworfener Entwurf). The leap through which Sein is experienced is primarily
the awareness-acceptance of being thrown, of finiteness, the abandonment of every
thought of a railing, a support” (italics in original).
choice of the individual.” But what, against this background, distinguishes

Heidegger’s radical historicism is that it views its own knowledge—that
thought is a choice of fate—according to its own model of thought, that is,
as a choice of fate: “radical historicism asserts that the basic insight into the
essential limitation of human thought is … an unforeseeable gift of unfathom-
able fate. It is due to fate that the essential dependence of thought on fate is
realized now. … Historicism42 has this in common with all other thought,
that it depends on fate. It differs from all other thought in this, that, thanks
to fate, it has been given to realize the radical dependence of thought on
fate.”43 Owing to this self-understanding, Heidegger’s radical historicism
escapes the charge of self-contradictoriness or absurdity: what it claims of
knowledge in general, it claims of its own knowledge (of knowledge) as well.
Strauss does not offer any argument against Heidegger’s radical histori-
cism.44 After explaining how it escapes the charge of self-contradictoriness
or absurdity, Strauss states that it carries a number of implications that call
into question “the most elementary premises whose validity is presupposed
by philosophy”: that the “whole … can never be grasped”; that “human
thought essentially depends on something … that can never be mastered
by the subject”; that “‘to be’ in the highest sense cannot mean—or, at any
rate, it does not necessarily mean—‘to be always.’”45 Strauss then remarks,
however: “We cannot even attempt to discuss these theses.” Certainly, this
nonattempt at discussion is due to the fact that the theses in question tran-
scend Strauss’s immediate topic, natural right. But it is also due to the more
radical circumstance that, as Strauss has just explained, Heidegger’s radical
historicism would refuse any such discussion: for it, the truth of the theses
42
The context makes it clear that Strauss is referring to radical historicism.
43
NRH, 28.
44
According to Smith, “Leo Strauss’s Platonic Liberalism,” 101, Umphrey, “Natural
Right and Philosophy,” 278, and Zuckert and Zuckert, Truth about Leo Strauss, 101,
Strauss does offer an argument against Heidegger’s radical historicism, namely, his
zetetic conception of philosophy. This view, however, overlooks the dialectical struc-
ture of the first chapter of NRH. Strauss introduces the zetetic conception of philoso-
phy at NRH, 23–24, as an argument against historicism; then proceeds to indicate the
problems with that argument; then—because of those problems—charges historicism
with self-contradictoriness or absurdity; and only then introduces Heidegger’s radical
historicism. So far, then, from being an argument against Heidegger’s radical histori-
cism, the zetetic conception of philosophy is an argument against historicism (simply)
that fails, and whose failure motivates the introduction of another argument, to which
Heidegger’s radical historicism is the rejoinder. Moreover, it is clear that the zetetic
conception of philosophy is as inadequate an argument against Heidegger’s radical
historicism as it is against historicism (simply), for, like the latter, Heidegger’s
radical historicism would deny the assumption that “fundamental problems”
“persist in all historical change.” Additionally, since Heidegger’s radical historicism
views knowledge as a choice of fate, it would deny the relevance of zetetic inquiry.
45
NRH, 31.
in question could only be decided by a choice of fate, not any rational discus-
sion. Indeed, this may be why, in “What Is Political Philosophy?,” Strauss
calls historicism “the serious antagonist of political philosophy”: the serious
antagonist, not interlocutor, for, between it and political philosophy or philos-
ophy generally, no discussion is possible.46
I conclude that, in the first chapter of NRH, Strauss’s critique of historicism
in defense of natural right fails and that Strauss shows that it fails. This con-
clusion, however, is perplexing: Why, then, does Strauss offer this critique?
And does Strauss’s demonstration of its failure not imply that, against the his-
toricist attack, natural right is defenseless, that is, that Strauss himself “regard
[s] the cause of natural right as hopeless”?
2. The Critique of Historicism in the Section on Burke
The first chapter of NRH is not, however, the only place in the text in which
Strauss critiques historicism. In a well-known essay about NRH, Richard
Kennington remarks that the last chapter, “The Crisis of Modern Natural
Right,” and specifically the last section of that chapter, which concerns
Edmund Burke, “turns back upon—forms a pair with—the first” chapter.47
Indeed, in the section on Burke, Strauss comments that “Burke paves the
way for the ‘historical school’”—that school which, in the first chapter, he
calls the “infancy of historicism”;48 and, in accordance with this comment,
Strauss explains how Burke lays the conceptual foundations for the histori-
cism that he treats in the first chapter. As I will try to show, a critique of his-
toricism—different from that provided in the first chapter—emerges from this
explanation.
The section on Burke is not straightforward. According to Steven Lenzner,
Strauss presents three different “Burkes,” that is, three contrasting political-
philosophical perspectives that Burke himself held: a Burke who takes an
Aristotelian approach to “practice”; a Burke who partially breaks from
Aristotle in respect of the relation between “practice” and “theory”; and a
Burke who entirely severs his tie to Aristotle and lays the foundation for
46
The antagonism between historicism and political philosophy thus resembles the
“secular struggle between philosophy and theology” that Strauss discusses in NRH,
74–75. It is important to note that Strauss understands this struggle in the following
manner: “No alternative is more fundamental than this: human guidance or divine
guidance” (NRH, 74); in other words, it is a conflict that concerns the ground of prac-
tical action, not that of knowledge.
47
Richard Kennington, “Strauss’s Natural Right and History,” Review of Metaphysics
35, no. 1 (1981): 62.
48
NRH, 16.
historicism.49 Lenzner suggests that Strauss critiques Burke through this dif-
ferentiation; he shows that the thought of one Burke is “healthy” whereas that
of the others is “unhealthy.”50 Partially following Lenzner, I will look at two
Burkes that Strauss identifies; these two Burkes correspond to Lenzner’s
first and third, and, indeed, he acknowledges that the “real difference”
between his three Burkes is between the latter two.51 Strauss’s critique of his-
toricism emerges from the way in which he plays these two Burkes off against
one another.
According to Strauss, Burke’s central theme is “the old quarrel between
speculation and practice.”52 Strauss’s first Burke takes the side of practice
over speculation, or, more precisely, supports a “political” approach to prac-
tice over a “speculatist” approach. At first, Strauss distinguishes these two
approaches by reference to their subject: whereas the speculatist approach
is concerned with the “end of government,” the political approach is con-
cerned with the “means” to that end. Referring to the speculatist approach
as “theory,” and quoting Burke,53 Strauss writes: “Theory, ‘which regards
man and the affairs of men,’ is primarily concerned with the principles of
morality as well as with ‘the principles of true politics [which] are those of
morality enlarged’ or with ‘the proper ends of government.’ Knowing the
proper ends of government, one does not know anything of how and to
what extent those ends can be realized here and now, under the particular cir-
cumstances both fixed and transitory.”54
No sooner has he made this distinction, however, than Strauss revises it. In
fact, like the political approach, the speculatist approach focuses on means;
the genuine difference between the two is that, whereas the latter chooses
means according to moral rules, the former does so by virtue of the “suspen-
sion” of such rules: “Theory … deals not merely with the proper ends of gov-
ernment but also with the means to those ends. But there is hardly any rule
regarding those means which is universally valid. Sometimes one is con-
fronted even ‘with the dreadful exigence in which morality submits to the
suspension of its own rules in favour of its own principles.’ Since there are
many rules of this kind which are sound in most cases, they have a plausibil-
ity that is positively misleading in regard to the rare cases in which their
application would be fatal.”55 The first Burke’s preference for the political
over the speculatist approach is due to the way in which each handles
49
Steven J. Lenzner, “Strauss’s Three Burkes: The Problem of Edmund Burke in
Natural Right and History,” Political Theory 19, no. 3 (1991): 364–90.
50
Ibid., 368.
51
Ibid., 370.
52
NRH, 303.
53
In this section (specifically, from the following quoted passage to the one cited at
n. 71), all quotations that Strauss provides are to Burke.
54
NRH, 303–4.
55
NRH, 305.
“rare cases.” In such cases, the choice of means according to moral rules
“would be fatal,” whereas only a choice that involves the “suspension” of
such rules would be successful. It is important to emphasize that, in this
respect, the problem with the speculatist approach is less that it chooses
means according to moral rules, than that it chooses them according to
rules: its manner of choice “would be fatal” because, while it is “sound in
most cases,” it is not sound in “rare” ones. Indeed, Strauss explains that
“new situations sometime arise in reaction to the very rules which uncontra-
dicted previous experience pronounced to be universally valid: man is inven-
tive in good and in evil.”56 “Rare cases” are deliberate attempts—products of
man’s being “inventive”—in which an enemy attempts to take advantage of
one’s reliance on universally valid rules (or, more precisely, apparently univer-
sally valid rules, for their “suspension” is necessary); therefore, in a rare case,
to choose means according to such rules would, precisely, be “fatal.” In accor-
dance with this view of the speculatist approach, Strauss calls it “legalistic” or
the “legal approach”: it “act[s] on the assumption that political questions
proper, which, as such, concern the here and now, can be fully answered
by recourse to law, which, as such, is concerned with universals.”57 By con-
trast, the political approach, eschewing such “recourse to law,” is “the pru-
dential, which alone can guide men ‘when a new and troubled scene is
opened.’”58
Immediately following this account of the first Burke’s approach to “rare
cases,” Strauss introduces his second Burke. Like the first Burke, the second
Burke is concerned with “rare cases.” But the kind of rare case in which the
second Burke is interested is different from that of concern to the first
Burke: whereas the first Burke is concerned with rare cases in which an exist-
ing constitution is threatened and needs to be preserved (his political
approach issues in “temporary solutions of continuity”59), the second Burke
is interested in that particular rare case in which a new and, specifically, the
best constitution is to be actualized. In respect of this kind of rare case, the
second Burke “rejects the view that constitutions can be ‘made’ in favor of
the view that they must ‘grow’; he therefore rejects in particular the view
that the best social order can be or ought to be the work of an individual,
of a wise ‘legislator’ or ‘founder.’”60 The view that the second Burke rejects,
Strauss continues, is that of the “classics,” where
the best constitution is a contrivance of reason, i.e., of conscious activity or

planning on the part of an individual or of a few individuals. It is in accor-
dance with nature, or it is a natural order, since it fulfils to the highest
56
NRH, 305–6.
57
NRH, 307; also see 303.
58
NRH, 307.
59
NRH, 310.
60
NRH, 313.
degree the requirements of the perfection of human nature, or since its

structure imitates the pattern of nature. But it is not natural as regards
the manner of its production: it is a work of design, planning, conscious
making; it does not come into being by a natural process or by the imita-
tion of a natural process. … According to Burke, on the other hand, the
best constitution is in accordance with nature or is natural also and pri-
marily because it has come into being not through planning but
through the imitation of a natural process, i.e., because it has come into
being without guiding reflection, continuously, slowly, not to say imper-
ceptibly, “in a great length of time, and by a great variety of accidents.”61
In respect of the rare case of the actualization of the best constitution, the
second Burke rejects the political approach, that is, the prudence, which the
first Burke endorses in respect of the rare case of the preservation of an exist-
ing constitution. I want to emphasize that, in the quotation provided above, it
is specifically with regard to the actualization (the “production” or “com[ing]
into being”) of the best constitution that the second Burke breaks with the
“classics” and rejects the political approach; in respect of the identity of the
best constitution, and in particular the view that it is “natural,” he agrees
with the “classics” (“the best constitution is in accordance with nature or is
natural also and primarily because…”).62 In any case, it is not as clear that
the approach that the second Burke supports is the speculatist. For him, the
actualization of the best constitution is due to “the imitation of a natural
process,” not any choice in accordance with moral rules; even more, one
might think that the organic view that Strauss ascribes to the second Burke
leaves room for prudence. According to Strauss, however, the second
Burke’s approach is precisely speculatist: insofar as the actualization in ques-
tion is due to “the imitation of a natural process,” and therefore “not through
planning” and “without guiding reflection,” it is due to “accidental causa-
tion,” that is, laws like those operative in nature, as it is understood by
modern science. In other words, the second Burke’s approach is “legalistic”
61
NRH, 314.
62
Lenzner, “Strauss’s Three Burkes,” 370, overlooks this difference; for him, Burke
breaks from the “classics” by opposing the “theoretically best regime” as Aristotle con-
ceives of it. Strauss’s view is the exact opposite: Burke places a comparatively higher
value on “theory” than do the “classics.” Compare Strauss, “On Classical Political
Philosophy,” in What Is Political Philosophy?, 88: “Because of its direct relation to polit-
ical life classical political philosophy was essentially ‘practical’; on the other hand, it is
no accident that modern political philosophy frequently calls itself political ‘theory.’
The primary concern of the former was not the description, or understanding, of polit-
ical life, but its right guidance.” Moreover, Strauss links the “practical” orientation of
“classical political philosophy” to its concern with antagonism: “[classical political
philosophy] is concerned primarily with the inner structure of the political community,
because that inner structure is essentially the subject of such political controversy as
essentially involves the danger of civil war” (“On Classical Political Philosophy,” 85).
or the “legal approach.”63 Indeed, Strauss later adds that, owing to the second
Burke’s approach, the actualization of the best constitution “become[s] a
purely theoretical theme,” susceptible to the same kind of analysis that
“was first applied to the planetary system and thereafter to ‘the system of
wants,’ i.e., to economics.”64
While Strauss does not say so explicitly, this account of the second Burke,
following as it does upon his account of the first Burke, implies a criticism:
the second Burke falls prey to the very error diagnosed by the first Burke,
albeit in respect of a kind of rare case that the latter did not consider.
Specifically, by taking the speculatist approach to the rare case of the actual-
ization of the best constitution, the second Burke rejects the political
approach, that is, the prudence, which that rare case requires. More con-
cretely, against the enemies of the actualization of the best constitution—
people “inventive” “in evil”—the second Burke disregards the prudence nec-
essary to deal with them—being “inventive in good.” As Strauss emphasizes,
this necessity is one that the “classics” understood.
Following his account of the second Burke, Strauss turns to Burke’s role in
the development of historicism; as will become clear, it is specifically the
second Burke who is relevant in this respect. Burke, Strauss explains, is
responsible for “the two most important elements in the ‘discovery’ of
History,” that is, the “historical school” out of which historicism develops.65
First, while Burke did not believe that “a sound political order must be the
product of History,” it was the “application” of his “principle” that “the
sound political order”—the best constitution—“is the unintended outcome
of accidental causation,” which accounts for the historical school’s view
that “the genesis of the sound political order” is historical accidental causa-
tion.66 Second, the historical school applies the same principle to “humanity,”
that is (as Strauss quotes Burke) “the mind of man”: for the historical school,
“man’s humanity was understood as acquired by virtue of accidental causa-
tion,” and, once again, that of history.67
In light of the two foregoing “elements,” the decisive influence of the
second Burke is his—or, more precisely, the second Burke’s—speculatism,
which the historical school even expands: for it, not only the actualization
of the “sound political order,” but also that of the “mind of man” is due to
the accidental causation of history. Strauss therefore suggests that the histor-
ical school commits the same error as the second Burke does, and in this
expanded way: taking the speculatist approach not only to the rare case of
the actualization of the “sound political order,” but also to that of the
63
NRH, 314.
64
NRH, 320, 315.
65
NRH, 315; compare NRH, 316 (“Burke paves the way for the ‘historical school’”).
66
NRH, 314–15.
67
NRH, 315.
“mind of man”—what can be called, in brief, the rare case of the actualization
of rationality—it rejects the political approach, that is, the prudence, which
that rare case requires. Indeed, Strauss earlier indicated that, for the “clas-
sics,” the actualization of the “mind of man” depends on that of the
“sound political order”: for them, there is an “obvious dependence of the
philosophic life on the city.”68
In the section on Burke, Strauss does not address historicism as distinct
from the historical school (with one exception, which I will look at shortly).
In his account of historicism in the first chapter, however, he attributes to it
the same speculatism as he does to the historical school in the section on
Burke (and this attribution becomes apparent, so to speak, only in hindsight):
for historicism, the “standards” governing particular communities are
“thrown up by” the “meaningless [historical] process,” that is, “unmitigated
chance”; and—with reference to Heidegger—“the basic insight” is “an
unforeseeable gift of unfathomable fate,” indeed, a “fateful dispensation.”69
To be sure, the rationality that is thus actualized for historicism is not objec-
tive, as it is for the historical school; for reasons that Strauss gives in the first
chapter, historicism denies that a “sound political order” or sound “mind of
man” can be actualized. In just this respect, however, historicism is actually
closer to the speculatism of the second Burke than is the historical school:
the second Burke, Strauss explains, “denies the possibility of an absolute
moment,” that is, one “in which man, the product of blind fate, becomes
the seeing master of his fate by understanding for the first time in an adequate
manner what is right and wrong politically and morally.”70 Strauss thus sug-
gests that historicism commits the same error as the historical school does,
and which can ultimately be traced back to the second Burke. I want to
emphasize that this error is no less worse for being committed in respect of
a nonobjective rationality; after all, as Strauss himself suggests, the rationality
68
NRH, 152.
69
NRH, 25. Strauss uses this formulation to describe Heidegger’s radical historicism
elsewhere; see “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” 30. This formulation certainly recalls
Heidegger’s “dispensation of being” (Geschick des Seins); see Martin Heidegger,
Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9, Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976), “Brief
über den ‘Humanismus.’” But it also recalls the Christian concept of dispensatio,
and, indeed, Strauss remarks that, for Burke, historical events are a “providential dis-
pensation”; compare the pertinent discussion in Miguel Vatter, “Machiavelli and the
Republican Conception of Providence,” Review of Politics 75, no. 4 (2013): 610–11.
Finally, both “fateful dispensation” and “providential dispensation” recall Socrates’s
statement in the Republic that, absent political skill, the preservation of the philoso-
phers against the corruption by the multitude can only be due to a “divine dispensa-
tion” (theou moiran); see Republic 493a. In “Plato’s Apology of Socrates and Crito,” 48, and
“On the Euthydemus,” 69, in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, Strauss refers to a
“divine dispensation” in connection with Socrates. Also compare n. 19 above.
70
NRH, 315.
that he sets against historicism—the search for “universal and unchangeable

principles” and even his zetetic conception of philosophy—is not rationally
justifiable against the historicist attack on it. Indeed, for just this reason,
that rationality is the “serious antagonist” of historicism and therefore
requires, for the sake of its actualization against the historicist attack, the polit-
ical approach or prudence.
Strauss’s one comment about Heidegger—and, indeed, about historicism as
distinct from the historical school—in the section on Burke reflects the critique
just outlined. This comment is particularly noteworthy given Strauss’s refusal,
in the first chapter, to discuss Heidegger’s radical historicism. Remarking that
Hegel inherited the speculatism of the historical school, and that Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche’s backlash against him targeted this speculatism, Strauss writes
that “‘doctrinairism’ and ‘existentialism’ appear to us as the two faulty
extremes. While being opposed to each other, they agree with each other in
the decisive respect—they agree in ignoring prudence, ‘the god of this
lower world.’”71 “Doctrinairism” is another word that Strauss uses for “spec-
ulatism,”72 and refers, in this context, to that of Hegel or the historical school;
and Strauss earlier identified “existentialism” with Heidegger’s radical histor-
icism.73 Now, Heidegger is “opposed” to the speculatism of Hegel or the his-
torical school insofar as he—like historicism generally—denies that objective
rationality can be actualized. As Strauss immediately notes, however, what is
“decisive” is not this opposition—a point that reflects his abandonment, in the
first chapter, of the critique of the denial just mentioned. Rather, what is “deci-
sive” is the respect in which Heidegger agrees with the speculatism of Hegel
or the historical school: in “ignoring prudence,” “the god of this lower world”
according to (the first) Burke.74
But if the foregoing critique of historicism emerges from the section on
Burke, this does not solve, but rather intensifies, the perplexities to which
the first chapter gives rise. For why does Strauss offer the critique that he
does in the first chapter, not only if he shows that it fails, but also proceeds
71
NRH, 321.
72
NRH, 303.
73
See NRH, 32: “radical (‘existentialist’) historicism.”
74
Strauss makes a similar criticism of Heidegger in “Philosophy as Rigorous Science
and Political Philosophy,” 33–34. Comparing Heidegger’s “philosophy of history,” and
specifically his “vision” of “the moment in which the final insight is arriving” to that of
Marx and Nietzsche, Strauss explains that, for Heidegger, the “moment” in question is
brought about, above all, by a “dialogue between the most profound thinkers of the
Occident and the most profound thinkers of the Orient.” Strauss then comments:
“That dialogue and everything that it entails, but surely not political action of any
kind, is perhaps the way. Heidegger severs the connection of the vision with politics
more radically than either Marx or Nietzsche. One is inclined to say that Heidegger
has learned the lesson of 1933 more thoroughly than any other man. Surely he
leaves no place for political philosophy.”
to give a different critique? Even more, does not the critique of historicism in
the section on Burke contradict and even undermine Strauss’s critique in the
first chapter, insofar as it points to the necessity of the “suspension” of “uni-
versally valid rules of morality,” the very kind of rules that the latter critique
defends? In this light, it not only seems that Strauss “regard[s] the cause of
natural right as hopeless,” but also wishes to do so.
3. The Critique of Historicism and Natural Right

Just as, however, the first chapter of NRH is not the only place in the text in
which Strauss discusses historicism, so too the first chapter is not the only
place in which he discusses natural right. To be sure, in view of Strauss’s
project in NRH, this is the most obvious observation possible: the whole
text is devoted to the historical development of the conception of natural
right. Nevertheless, in light of the particular conception that he presents in
the first chapter, as well as his critique of historicism in the section on
Burke, one such discussion stands out: Strauss’s discussion in the fourth
chapter, “Classic Natural Right,” of Aristotle’s thesis that natural right is
“changeable.”75
This discussion actually concerns three interpretations of Aristotle’s thesis:
the “Thomistic,” the “Averroistic,” and Strauss’s own. Strauss’s stated
reason for this approach is Aristotle’s reticence regarding his thesis:
“Aristotle’s own view covers barely one page of the Nicomachean Ethics. …
The passage is singularly elusive; it is not illumined by a single example of
what is by nature right.”76 As I will try to show, Strauss’s own interpretation
shares in Aristotle’s elusiveness, though not to the same degree, and even tries
to establish its necessity.
Strauss begins with the Thomistic interpretation, according to which
Aristotle actually means that natural right is unchangeable, but adds a “qual-
ification”: while the “principles” of natural right are unchangeable (“univer-
sally valid and immutable”), the “specific rules” which, in light of particular
circumstances, must be “derived” from those principles are changeable.77
This derivation is required by the “conscience,” for which Strauss also pro-
vides Aquinas’s word for the habitus of practical principles, “synderesis.”
Strauss rejects this interpretation: it is “alien to Aristotle” and “is of
Patristic origin.”78 The problem is not only that, by allowing natural right
to be fundamentally unchangeable, it betrays Aristotle’s meaning; addition-
ally, since the conscience requires that “specific rules” be “derived” from
unchangeable “principles,” even those rules are not really changeable. At
75
NRH, 157.
76
NRH, 156.
77
NRH, 157.
78
NRH, 158.
the very least, they cannot contradict the principles from which they are
derived.79 Indeed, Strauss refers to the principles in question as “axioms.”80
The Averroistic interpretation seems, at first glance, to fare better in captur-
ing Aristotle’s meaning. On this interpretation, Aristotle identifies natural
right with “legal natural right,” which means that natural right is “conven-
tional.”81 This conventionality, however, is less a matter of agreement, than
it is the fact that while “normally” the “requirements” of natural right
should be obeyed, in “rare exceptions” it is necessary to “disregard” them,
that is, change them: “In spite of the fact that they [the ‘requirements’ of
natural right] seem to be evidently necessary and are universally recognized,
they are conventional for this reason: Civil society is incompatible with any
immutable rules, however basic; for in certain conditions the disregard of
these rules may be needed for the preservation of society. … Since the rules
in question obtain normally, all social teachings proclaim these rules and
not the rare exceptions.”82 As Strauss indicates, the Averroistic interpretation
has an esoteric dimension, and I will return to this. Relevant here is that
Strauss rejects this interpretation just as he does the Thomistic: it “differs
from Aristotle’s view in so far as it implies the denial of natural right
proper.”83 The Averroistic interpretation “denies natural right proper,”
however, not because it denies that natural right consists in “immutable
rules,” for it “agrees with Aristotle in so far as it admits the mutability of
all rules of justice.”84 Rather, the reason is that the laws (or conventions)
with which the Averroistic interpretation identifies natural right are not gen-
uinely natural: they “are not natural right but conventional right.”85
Strauss then turns to his own interpretation. “When speaking of natural
right,” he begins, “Aristotle does not primarily think of any general proposi-
tions but rather of concrete decisions.”86 To be sure, Aristotle does discuss
“general propositions,” namely, the “principles” of distributive and
79
Compare Ernest L. Fortin, “Thomas Aquinas,” in History of Political Philosophy, ed.
Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987),
266–67, and especially his remarks on Aquinas’s treatment of St. Lawrence. Timothy
C. Potts, Conscience in Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1980), 46–47, observes that Aquinas transforms the Platonic distinction between
knowledge of the unchangeable and belief in the changeable, into the distinction
between knowledge of the unchangeable and knowledge of necessary truth—the
latter being synderesis. Aquinas thus radically restricts the flexibility inherent in
Plato’s “belief.”
80
NRH, 157.
81
NRH, 158.
82
NRH, 158.
83
NRH, 159.
84
NRH, 159.
85
NRH, 158.
86
NRH, 159.
commutative justice. However, “there is a meaning of justice which is not

exhausted by” these principles, namely, “the common good.” And while
“normally” the “common good” consists in the aforementioned principles,
the common good also comprises, of course, the mere existence, the mere
survival, the mere independence, of the political community in question.
Let us call an extreme situation a situation in which the very existence or
independence of society is at stake. … In such situations, and only in such
situations, it can justly be said that the public safety is the highest law. A
decent society will not go to war except for a just cause. But what it will do
during a war will depend to a certain extent on what the enemy—possibly
an absolutely unscrupulous and savage enemy—forces it to do. There are
no limits which can be defined in advance, there are no assignable limits to
what might become just reprisals. But war casts its shadow on peace. The
most just society cannot survive without “intelligence,” i.e., espionage.
Espionage is impossible without a suspension of certain rules of
natural right. But societies are not only threatened from without.
Considerations which apply to foreign enemies may well apply to subver-
sive elements within society. Let us leave these sad exigencies covered
with the veil with which they are justly covered. It suffices to repeat
that in extreme situations the normally valid rules of natural right are
justly changed, or changed in accordance with natural right; the excep-
tions are as just as the rules.87
Like the Averroistic interpretation, Strauss’s interpretation holds that, in

“extreme situations,” the “suspension” of the “normally valid rules of
natural right” is necessary. But this necessity is not the reason why, according
to Strauss’s interpretation, natural right is changeable, as it is for the
Averroistic interpretation. Rather, the reason is that natural right is identical
to the “concrete decisions” taken out of the necessity in question, and these
decisions cannot be precisely defined: since their purpose is to deal with a
“possibly unscrupulous and savage enemy,” who stands behind the very exis-
tence of “extreme situations,” “there are no limits which can be defined in
advance, there are no assignable limits” to what these decisions can decide.
Strauss elaborates: “Every dangerous external or internal enemy is inventive
to the extent that he is capable of transforming what, on the basis of previous
experience, could reasonably be regarded as a normal situation into an
extreme situation. Natural right must be mutable in order to be able to
cope with the inventiveness of wickedness.”88 As Lenzner notes,89 this
passage directly recalls Strauss’s statement in the section on Burke that
“man is inventive in good and evil,” and I will return to this momentarily.
Important here is that, for Strauss, natural right is changeable because of
the “inventiveness of wickedness”: it must be able to match that
87
NRH, 160.
88
NRH, 161.
89
Lenzner, “Strauss’s Three Burkes,” 369.
“inventiveness” with its own “inventiveness.” Strauss’s interpretation thus

avoids the errors of both the Thomistic and the Averroistic interpretations:
natural right is fundamentally changeable, yet not because it is identical to
unnatural laws or conventions.
Now, the conception of natural right that emerges from Strauss’s interpre-
tation of Aristotle’s thesis is identical to the “political approach,” that is, the
prudence, that the first Burke supports. Like that prudence, this conception
refers to “extreme situations” (“rare cases”); it is based on the necessity
imposed by those extreme situations of the “suspension” of “normally
valid rules of natural right” (the necessity of the “suspension” of “universally
valid rules”); and the reason for this necessity is the “sad exigencies” that
involve, above all, the “inventiveness of wickedness” (the “dreadful exi-
gence” that “man is inventive in good and evil”). If this is the case,
however, then Strauss’s critique of historicism in the section on Burke does
justify natural right, albeit implicitly (and I will return to this below): the pru-
dence that historicism rejects, and which is necessary for the rare case of the
actualization of rationality, is nothing else than natural right.
Strauss’s critique of the Thomistic and Averroistic interpretations of
Aristotle’s thesis also illuminates what, specifically, the problem with histor-
icism is. While the Averroistic interpretation fails to recognize either the nat-
uralness or the rightness of “concrete decisions,” it at least recognizes their
necessity (“in certain conditions the disregard of these rules [the ‘require-
ments’ of natural right] may be needed for the preservation of society”). By
contrast, the Thomistic interpretation even fails to recognize this necessity.
The reason for this failure is the Thomistic interpretation’s conception of the
“conscience”: the conscience requires that, in light of particular situations,
“specific rules” be “derived” from unchangeable “principles,” like those of dis-
tributive and commutative justice;90 for this reason, however, it absolutely
forbids the decisive “suspension” of these principles under such situations.
To put this point simply (if crudely), the conscience requires a derivation,
but therefore never a decision.91 Indeed, this explains why, as Strauss notes
at the end of “Classic Natural Right,” Montesquieu “tried to recover for
statesmanship a latitude which had been considerably restricted by the
Thomistic teaching”;92 and, in Strauss’s one nonexegetical discussion of “con-
science” in NRH, he squarely places the blame for the above-mentioned
restriction on its shoulders: “By virtue of his rationality, man has a latitude
90
Strauss’s example of the derivation in question is the return of deposits (NRH, 157).
91
In “Marsilius of Padua,” in History of Political Philosophy, 292–93, Strauss explains
that, against Aquinas, Marsilius holds that “the universally admitted rules of right are
not rational since there exists a natural necessity to transgress them,” and that
Marsilius’s position can be best understood “if one starts from the fact that he implic-
itly denies the existence of first principles of practical reason,” that is, synderesis accord-
ing to Aquinas.
92
NRH, 164.
of alternatives such as no other earthly being has. The sense of this latitude, of
this freedom, is accompanied by a sense that the full and unrestrained exer-
cise of that freedom is not right. Man’s freedom is accompanied by a sacred
awe, by a kind of divination that not everything is permitted. We may call
this awe-inspired fear ‘man’s natural conscience.’”93 While Strauss does call
“conscience” “natural,” it is specifically that part of nature that restricts the
“rationality” of “man,” that characteristic “such as no other earthly being
has,” and which therefore is no less natural and perhaps more so.94
Strauss’s objection to the Thomistic interpretation prefigures his critique of
historicism: the Thomistic conscience is speculatist. Even more, however,
there is a conspicuous similarity between the Thomistic conscience and histor-
icism. For while historicism certainly does not impose the same requirement
as does the Thomistic conscience, it does require that, in light of particular sit-
uations, choices comply with—be “derived” from—“principles,” namely,
those of historical accidental causation, that is, the “local and temporal”
“norms” “thrown up by” the “historical process.” According to Strauss, his-
toricism brings about “the supersession of the distinction between good and
bad by the distinction between the progressive and the retrograde, or
between what is and what is not in harmony with the historical process.”95
In this respect, historicism projects the function of the Thomistic conscience
—the subordination of choice to principle—onto the “historical process” or
“history,” and even thereby reifies that function into a “fact.”96 Indeed,
Heidegger’s radical historicism gives striking testimony of this projection
and reification, for, in Being and Time, in opposing Kant’s interpretation of
“conscience” (Gewissen) as a “court of justice,” he attempts to ground his inter-
pretation on Dasein’s “historical” character: what the “call of conscience” (Ruf
des Gewissens) calls Dasein “to,” is to choose the particular, “factical” projects
into which it has been thrown; and “what” does this calling, that is, what the
call of conscience is itself, is Dasein’s own historical character—that it has
been thrown into particular, factical projects.97
93
NRH, 130; compare NRH, 164.
94
In “Destruktion or Recovery?,” 120–21, Smith suggests that the passage quoted
above is part of Strauss’s view of “the experience of natural right as a doctrine of
limits and constraints,” and that Strauss opposes this view to historicism and in par-
ticular radical historicism. The unwieldy formulation “experience of … a doctrine”
points to the problem with Smith’s interpretation; Strauss is suggesting that the “expe-
rience” in question, that is, “natural conscience,” precisely “limits and constrains”
natural right.
95
NRH, 318.
96
This reification is connected to Strauss’s suggestion that historicism is the basis of
the positivist conflation of the “is” and the “ought”; see NRH, 73.
97
See Being and Time, ¶¶57–59. For the relation between Aquinas and Kierkegaard,
which is relevant to this issue in Heidegger, see Michael Theunissen, Kierkegaard’s
Finally, the conception of natural right that emerges from Strauss’s interpre-
tation of Aristotle’s thesis helps to clear up the perplexities to which the first
chapter of NRH gives rise. According to Strauss, this conception must be eso-
terically concealed: the “sad exigencies” that it reveals must be “covered with
a veil with which they are justly covered.” In his account of the Averroistic
interpretation, Strauss elaborates on this necessity of concealment, for this
interpretation reveals “sad exigencies” similar to those revealed by his own:
Civil society is incompatible with any immutable rules, however basic; for
in certain conditions the disregard of these rules may be needed for the
preservation of society; but for pedagogic reasons, society must present
as universally valid certain rules which are generally valid. Since the
rules in question obtain normally, all social teachings proclaim these
rules and not the rare exceptions. The effectiveness of the general rules
depends on their being taught without qualifications, without ifs and
buts. But the omission of the qualifications which makes the rules more
effective, makes them at the same time untrue.98
In order for (apparently) “immutable rules” to be effective, it is necessary that

they appear to be “immutable,” that is, it is necessary to conceal that, in “rare
exceptions,” they must be disregarded: “all social teachings proclaim these
rules and not the rare exceptions.” A fortiori—since at issue is not merely
the necessity, but also the naturalness and rightness of the “suspension” of
the “normally valid rules of justice”—the conception of natural right accord-
ing to which it consists in concrete decisions must be concealed.99 The reason
for this concealment recalls what Arthur Melzer has called the “protective”
purpose of esotericism, that is, the protection of society from the antinomian
implications of a philosophical doctrine.100 However, whereas for Melzer the
doctrine in question is theoretical—a metaphysical doctrine concerning God,
providence, or immortality, for example, or even Strauss’s zetetic conception
of philosophy—for Strauss, it is political: that concrete decisions are naturally
right.
There is a certain irony in Strauss’s asserting the necessity of concealing the
very conception of natural right that he is articulating. For example, when he
writes above, “Let us leave these sad exigencies covered with the veil with
which they are justly covered. It suffices to repeat that in extreme situations
Concept of Despair, trans. Barbara Harshaw and Helmut Illbruck (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005), 95ff.
98
NRH, 158.
99
In the section on Burke, Strauss alludes to this necessity: for Burke, “the very habit
of stating … extreme cases is not very laudable or safe” (Strauss directly quotes Burke),
and “temporary solutions of continuity must be ‘kept from the eye,’ or a ‘politic, well-
wrought veil’ must be thrown over them” (NRH, 300, 310).
100
Melzer, Philosophy between the Lines, 161ff.
the normally valid rules of natural right are justly changed,” Strauss lifts the
very veil that he has just drawn down. To be sure, the conception of natural
right that Strauss here discloses justifies this very transgression; and, besides,
he partly keeps the veil in place, for in writing that “it suffices” to repeat,
Strauss suggests that he discloses only what is presently sufficient.101
Indeed, there is a difference between Strauss’s repetition and the passage it
repeats; whereas the repetition states that, in extreme situations, the normally
valid rules of natural right are “justly changed,” the passage it repeats states
that “there are no assignable limits to what might become just reprisals,” in
other words, natural right justifies changes that might not be just.
The latter considerations aside, Strauss’s exposition in NRH conforms to his
esoteric requirement concerning natural right. To begin with, that Strauss lifts
the veil that he draws down can be explained by the fact that he does so at the
very center of NRH, and, as he explains in Persecution and the Art of Writing,
published one year before NRH, “serious views,” indeed “heterodox” ones,
“are more likely to occur—according to a rule of forensic rhetoric—some-
where in the middle, i.e., in places least exposed to the curiosity of superficial
readers.”102 Likewise, that Strauss justifies the conception of natural right that
emerges from his interpretation of Aristotle’s thesis, only implicitly in the
section on Burke, can be explained by the fact that this section occurs at
the end of the book.103 Finally, that Strauss offers a critique of historicism in
the first chapter that he shows fails, and subsequently provides a different cri-
tique, can be explained in the following way: on the one hand, the purpose of
his critique in the first chapter is the defense of the view of natural right that
“all social teachings proclaim”; and, on the other hand, Strauss means to
prepare the reader, although cautiously, for a different critique of historicism
and indeed a different conception of natural right. In this respect, Strauss’s cri-
tique of historicism in the first chapter is exoteric, whereas his critique in the
section on Burke is esoteric, and he explains the reason for this approach in
the middle of the book, in his interpretation of Aristotle’s thesis that natural
right is changeable.104
101
In Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss discusses “repetition” as a major
element of esoteric writing; see “Introduction,” 15–17, and “The Literary Character
of the Guide for the Perplexed,” 62–64.
102
“How to Study Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise,” in Persecution and the Art of
Writing, 185; also see “Introduction,” 13.
103
Lenzner also suggests that the section on Burke is esoteric, although for different
reasons from those stated here; see “Strauss’s Three Burkes,” 373–74, 377ff.
104
These considerations do not exhaust the significance of NRH for the subject of
esotericism, or for the relation between esotericism and the critique of historicism.
According to Melzer, Philosophy between the Lines, chap. 10, and Zuckert and
Zuckert, Truth about Leo Strauss, 123, Strauss believes the practice of esotericism
itself contributes to the critique of historicism by undermining the evidence frequently
adduced for historicism that philosophers share beliefs that belong to their
4. Strauss and Schmitt

Richard Velkley has written that “taken as a whole [NRH] lays the basis for a
full confrontation with the thinker whom Strauss regarded as the one great
philosopher of the twentieth century,” Heidegger.105 Based on the foregoing,
this certainly seems to be true. But if it is true, the basis of that “confrontation”
is Strauss’s dependence on another thinker of the twentieth century, Carl
Schmitt. As I noted above, this dependence has not been recognized in the
scholarly literature on Strauss’s relation to Schmitt.
Just as with Heidegger, Strauss never refers to Schmitt by name in NRH.
There are, however, a number of small signs of intellectual affinity. The
second footnote indicates that Strauss will disagree with one of Schmitt’s
primary intellectual antagonists, Hans Kelsen, who, according to Schmitt,
left no room for “concrete decisions” in his conception of law.106 Strauss
later uses language that replicates Schmitt’s; for example, in explaining the
speculatism of the “historical school”—a view that, as I mentioned above,
Burke “denies”—Strauss writes: “‘the historical process’ was thought to cul-
minate in an absolute moment: the moment in which man, the product of
historical context: this practice shows that, insofar as philosophers endorse such
beliefs, they do so “exoterically” or insincerely. The critique of historicism that I
have outlined above, however, suggests an alternative view of how, for Strauss, the
practice of esotericism critiques historicism: that practice is prudent—indeed, is the
prudence of philosophers—and therefore is the necessity that historicism ignores
and without which rationality cannot be actualized. While I cannot substantiate this
view here, in “The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed,” in Persecution
and the Art of Writing (published one year before NRH), Strauss understands
Maimonides’s esotericism as prudent and indeed a “decision”: in the Guide,
“Maimonides decided to write down the secret teaching” of the Torah; while he
wrote down this secret teaching esoterically, his decision still “implies a conscious
transgression of an unambiguous prohibition,” namely, the prohibition against any
written explanation of the secret teaching of the Torah; and yet “only an urgent neces-
sity of nation-wide bearing [the Diaspora] can have driven Maimonides to transgress-
ing an explicit prohibition,” or again, “only the necessity of saving the law can have
caused [Maimonides] to break the law” (“The Literary Character of the Guide for the
Perplexed,” 48–51). I can also add that, on Melzer’s and the Zuckerts’ view, the critique
of historicism provided by the practice of esotericism rests on a petitio principii: this
practice only undermines the evidence for historicism if, apart from exoterically
endorsing views that belong to their historical context, philosophers also endorse
views that transcend that context, for otherwise every view that they endorse will
belong to their historical context, as historicism suggests. But that philosophers
endorse such transcendent views cannot be established by their practice of esotericism.
105
Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy, 123. Velkley refers to
Strauss’s remark in “Two Lectures by Leo Strauss,” 305.
106
NRH, 4n2; Schmitt, Political Theology, 14, 71ff.; Constitutional Theory, 63–64.
blind fate, becomes the seeing master of his fate by understanding for the first
time in an adequate manner what is right and wrong politically.”107 In The
Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, in explaining “the way that Marx retains
the concept of a dialectical development of human history” from Hegel,
and yet “shifted this development into the area of economics and technol-
ogy,” Schmitt suggests that Marx thereby attempted “to make human activity
of the master of historical events, the master of the irrationality of human
fate.”108 In the same text, Schmitt also refers to the view held among many
nineteenth-century French thinkers that “the dispensation of providence
[providentielle Fügung] appeared to have decided in favor of democracy,”109
which recalls Strauss’s formulation that radical historicism views all
thought as a “fateful dispensation” and his suggestion that, for Burke, it
was “possible that the victory of the French revolution might have been
decreed by Providence” and indeed could have been “a providential
dispensation.”110
More substantively, however, the conception of natural right that Strauss
articulates in his interpretation of Aristotle’s thesis is identical to Schmitt’s
concept of the “decision” (Entscheidung), and, indeed, Strauss uses Schmitt’s
own language. According to Schmitt, in an “extreme situation,” that is, a sit-
uation in which an existing constitution is threatened or a new one is to be
actualized,111 a “concrete decision” is necessary in order to create a
“normal situation,” that is, a situation of “tranquility, security, and order,”
and which is the “prerequisite for legal norms to be valid.”112 But while the
decision thus guarantees the validity of legal norms, it does so only insofar
as it “suspends” them, for “the precise details of an emergency cannot be
anticipated, nor can one spell out what may take place in such a case, espe-
cially when it is truly a matter of an extreme emergency and how it is to be
eliminated.”113 Owing to this legal imprescriptibility, the decision “is a deci-
sion in the true sense of the word,” as opposed to “a decision in the legal
sense,” which “must be derived [abgeleitet] from the content of a norm.”114
The necessity to suspend legal norms also reveals those norms to be only
107
NRH, 315.
108
Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 54.
109
Ibid., 23.
110
NRH, 318.
111
See Dictatorship, 118–19, and John McCormick, “The Dilemmas of Dictatorship:
Carl Schmitt and Constitutional Emergency Powers,” in Law as Politics: Carl
Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, ed. David Dyzenhaus (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1998).
112
Schmitt, Political Theology, 5–7, 15; Concept of the Political, 46.
113
Schmitt, Political Theology, 6–7.
114
Ibid., 7.
“normally valid.”115 Ultimately, this whole situation—the existence of

extreme situations, the necessity of the decision and the suspension of legal
norms—reflects the fact that “all genuine political theories,” of which
Schmitt’s purports to be one, “presuppose man to be evil, i.e., by no means
an unproblematic but a dangerous and dynamic being.”116 Schmitt also sug-
gests that the decision issues from prudence: it is made “by clearly evaluating
the concrete situation and thereby being able to distinguish correctly the real
friend and the real enemy”; indeed, “only the actual participants can correctly
recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme
case of conflict.”117 And Schmitt identifies the decision with natural right,
specifically the jus belli: “To the state as an essentially political entity
belongs the jus belli, i.e., the real possibility of deciding in a concrete situation
upon the enemy and the ability to fight him with the power emanating from
the entity.”118
Apart from this substantive identity, Schmitt also critiques historicism
for ignoring the necessity of the decision. He does this in Political
Romanticism—a book in which, it is worth noting, Schmitt states Strauss’s
view regarding Burke’s influence on the historical school:
The idea of the new power [apart from God] that, as such, can justify
something is not present in [Burke’s] work, although there is hardly a
115
Ibid.
116
Ibid., 61.
117
Ibid., 37, 27. Many interpreters have therefore wrongly suggested that Schmitt’s
“decision” is absolutely unconstrained and effectively identical to the unfathomable
will of God. See, for example, Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political
Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 39;
Andreas Kalyvas, “From the Act to the Decision: Hannah Arendt and the Question
of Decisionism,” Political Theory 32, no. 3 (2004): 324. To be sure, in Political Theology,
12, Schmitt writes that “the decision frees itself from all normative ties”; however,
as he immediately specifies, “normative” refers only to norms belonging to a “legal
order.” Also compare Dictatorship, 8: “Here we can no longer ask about legal consid-
erations, only about the appropriate means that would lead to a concrete result in a
concrete case. Of course, the decision and the proceedings may be right or wrong,
but the way to judge these matters is only related to the question whether the
means, in a very technical sense, are appropriate or not—that is, whether they have
achieved their goal.” William H. F. Altman, “The Alpine Limits of Jewish Thought:
Leo Strauss, National Socialism, and Judentum ohne Gott,” Journal of Jewish Thought
and Philosophy 17, no. 1 (2009): 1–46, while recognizing that Strauss adopts Schmitt’s
“decisionism,” understands this as the necessity of making “a groundless choice”
(27), but thereby inverts the meaning that the “decision” has for both Schmitt and
Strauss. Tellingly (and although it is his subject), Altman never refers to Strauss’s dis-
cussion of “concrete decisions” in NRH, which is the most explicit treatment of this
theme in his entire work, and never refers to any passage in Schmitt’s work as a
whole dealing with the “decision.”
118
Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 45.
single material argument in the entire historical school of law that would
not already have turned up in Burke. In light of this consideration,
however, the pathos with which he stands for the great, superindividual
national reality, independent of all the power and volition of the individ-
ual person, is all the more effective. … Now the people becomes the
objective reality; historical development, however, which produces the
Volksgeist, becomes the superhuman creator.119
Political Romanticism is devoted to a critique of the romantic development of

the metaphysical doctrine of “occasionalism,” the view that all events are
“occasions” for the activity of the will of God;120 this development leads to
an “extreme passivity” and “the inability to decide.”121 The view that
history is “the superhuman creator” is a stage of the development in question.
Reacting to the French Revolution, conservative romantics replaced the
omnipotent God of occasionalism with what Schmitt calls one of the
“modern demiurges,” “history” (the other “demiurge” is “humanity”):122
Transcending the conscious will of the individual, history realizes itself
involuntarily (Schelling). Persons, peoples, and generations are nothing
but necessary tools that the spirit of life requires in order to temporally
manifest itself in them and by means of them. … In consequence, the
truth never lies in what the individual person comprehends or wants
because everything is the function of a reality that acts beyond him.123
Schmitt continues:
The aversion that Burke, de Maistre, and Bonald have for “artifice” in
political affairs, artificial constitutions based on the calculations of a
clever individual, and fabricators of constitutions and political geometri-
cians arises from the feeling that the basis of all historical-political events
lies in a superindividual power—where basis in their work signifies both
causal explanation and normative justification or legitimation.124
It is worth noting that, in the section on Burke, Strauss claims that the “idea of
History” is “an adaptation of traditional theology to the intellectual climate
produced by modern philosophy or science both natural and political,”
and, specifically, a “modification of the traditional belief in Providence.”125
119
Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1986), 63.
120
Ibid., 85ff.
121
Ibid., 115, 117. Occasionalism plays a major role in theological-political disputes
going back as far as medieval Islamic, Jewish, and Christian philosophy. See Majid
Fakhry, Islamic Occasionalism and Its Critique by Averroës and Aquinas (London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1958).
122
Schmitt, Political Romanticism, 81.
123
Ibid., 80.
124
Ibid., 81 (italics in original).
125
NRH, 317.
Despite this dependence on Schmitt, however, Strauss does seem to break

from and even critique him in NRH. This becomes especially clear in a distinc-
tion Strauss draws, immediately following his interpretation of Aristotle’s
thesis, between the conception of natural right that emerges from that inter-
pretation and Machiavelli’s conception:
Machiavelli denies natural right, because he takes his bearings by the

extreme situations in which the demands of justice are reduced to
the requirements of necessity, and not by the normal situations in which
the demands of justice in the strict sense are the highest law.
Furthermore, he does not have to overcome a reluctance as regards the
deviations from what is normally right. On the contrary, he seems to
derive no small enjoyment from contemplating these deviations, and he
is not concerned with the punctilious investigation of whether any partic-
ular deviation is really necessary or not. The true statesman in the
Aristotelian sense, on the other hand, takes his bearings by the normal sit-
uation and by what is normally right, and he reluctantly deviates from
what is normally right only in order to save the cause of justice and
humanity itself. No legal expression of this difference can be found.126
Machiavelli fails to pay due respect to the requirements of “normal situa-

tions,” preferring rather the “enjoyment from contemplating [the] deviations”
from them. The same criticism can be made of Schmitt, and, perhaps, Strauss’s
Machiavelli is Schmitt in effigie, for, in concluding the first chapter of Political
Theology, Schmitt writes: “Precisely a philosophy of concrete life must not
withdraw from the exception and the extreme case, but must be interested
in it to the highest degree. The exception can be more important to it than
the rule, not because of a romantic irony for the paradox, but because the seri-
ousness of an insight goes deeper than the clear generalizations inferred from
what ordinarily repeats itself. The exception is more interesting than the
rule.”127 Indeed, in his section on Hobbes in NRH, Strauss comments that
Machiavelli “believes that the extreme case is more revealing of the roots of
civil society and therefore of its true character than is the normal case.”128
Viewed in this light, Strauss’s requirement concerning the esoteric teaching
of natural right, and his own approach in accordance with that requirement,
can be understood as his theoretical and practical rebuke to Schmitt (and
Machiavelli).
On the other hand, in his passage on Machiavelli, Strauss does not question
the view that what is “normally right” is, precisely, only “normally” so. Even
more, Strauss not only criticizes Machiavelli for failing to pay due respect to
normal cases, but also for lacking scrupulousness in respect of “extreme”
ones: Machiavelli “is not concerned with the punctilious investigation of
126
NRH, 162.
127
Schmitt, Political Theology, 15.
128
NRH, 179.
whether any particular deviation is really necessary or not.” In other words,

Strauss criticizes Machiavelli—and therefore, perhaps, Schmitt—for im-
prudence, that is, a deficiency in respect of the very virtue that he claims to
be necessary. Indeed, this imprudence is the genuine problem with
Machiavelli’s “enjoyment from contemplating [the] deviations” from what is
normally right. Strauss even suggests that this latter criticism is more funda-
mental than the former. For if “no legal expression of this difference”—
between what is normally right and what is a deviation—“can be found,”
then prudence must decide not only on the latter but also on the former,
that is, must decide what is a normal case or what is normally right.129
Strauss here directly recalls Schmitt’s definition and justification of the sover-
eign, who not only decides what to do in an “extreme emergency” but also
“decides whether there is an extreme emergency,” since such an emergency
“cannot be circumscribed factually and made to conform to a preformed
law.”130 However, unlike Schmitt—who, in this respect, perhaps finds the
sovereign too “interesting”—Strauss emphasizes the prudence that the sover-
eign requires.131
The same emphasis on prudence underlies Strauss’s critique of historicism,
which is not, as has generally been believed, based on his support of “uni-
versal and unchangeable principles” of right. Indeed, as I have argued, the
prudence that Strauss recommends requires the “suspension” of such “prin-
ciples.” This requirement follows from Schmitt’s concept of the “decision,”
which, as he suggests, in contrast to a decision that “must be derived from
the content of a norm,” is a decision “in the true sense of the word.”
129
Strauss makes the same point in his interpretation of Aristotle’s thesis: “it is not
possible to define precisely what constitutes an extreme situation in contradistinction
to a normal situation” (NRH, 161).
130
Schmitt, Political Theology, 6 (italics added).
131
In NRH, Strauss critiques Hobbes’s “doctrine of sovereignty” from this perspec-
tive. According to Strauss, the “boast” of this doctrine is that “it gives its due to the
extreme case, to what holds in emergency situations, whereas those who question
that doctrine are accused of not looking beyond the pale of normality… . It is in the
extreme situation, when the social fabric has completely broken down, that there
comes to sight the solid foundation on which every social order must ultimately
rest: the fear of violent death, which is the strongest force in human life” (NRH,
196). Strauss then objects: “Hobbes was forced to concede that the fear of violent
death is only ‘commonly’ or in most cases the most powerful support. The principle
which was supposed to make possible a political doctrine of universal applicability,
then, is not universally valid and therefore is useless in what, from Hobbes’s point
of view, is the most important case—the extreme case. For how can one exclude the
possibility that precisely in the extreme situation the exception will prevail?”
Hobbes’s doctrine of sovereignty is imprudent: it trusts a merely normal rule, the
fear of violent death, to settle the extreme situation, that is, one in which precisely
not a normal rule but rather “the exception will prevail.”
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The Review of Politics 81 (2019), 47–76.

© University of Notre Dame

“The God of This Lower World”: Leo Strauss’s

“crisis” in modern philosophy.3 As part of this account, Strauss provides a cri-

conception of prudence proves to be identical to Carl Schmitt’s conception of

My argument proceeds as follows. In the ﬁrst section, I consider Strauss’s

1. The Failure of Strauss’s Critique of Historicism in the First

According to Liisi Keedus, this argument is Strauss’s “reductio ad nihilismus”

Curiously, however, Strauss suggests—albeit indirectly—that his reductio is

or of grasping something trans-historical. This would be the case even if it

choice of the individual.” But what, against this background, distinguishes

2. The Critique of Historicism in the Section on Burke

the best constitution is a contrivance of reason, i.e., of conscious activity or

degree the requirements of the perfection of human nature, or since its

that he sets against historicism—the search for “universal and unchangeable

3. The Critique of Historicism and Natural Right

commutative justice. However, “there is a meaning of justice which is not

Like the Averroistic interpretation, Strauss’s interpretation holds that, in

“inventiveness” with its own “inventiveness.” Strauss’s interpretation thus

In order for (apparently) “immutable rules” to be effective, it is necessary that

4. Strauss and Schmitt

“normally valid.”115 Ultimately, this whole situation—the existence of

Political Romanticism is devoted to a critique of the romantic development of

Despite this dependence on Schmitt, however, Strauss does seem to break

Machiavelli denies natural right, because he takes his bearings by the

Machiavelli fails to pay due respect to the requirements of “normal situa-

whether any particular deviation is really necessary or not.” In other words,

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