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access to The Review of Metaphysics
J\t the time Strauss published Natural Right and History (1953)
the state of the question of natural right was a mixture of oblivion and
fitful restoration. Natural right had disappeared from the center of
discussion in political philosophy for well over a century. No philoso
pher of the first rank had written a treatise on, or advocated the ne
cessity of, natural right since the time of German idealism or perhaps
since Rousseau. Kant more than any other had emptied "natural
right" of meaning?by asserting that the moral law must be a law of
reason and not a law of nature. Naturrecht in the subtitle of Hegel's
great treatise on right did not mean right derived from human nature
or from nature as a norm or standard: right was to be sought in the
conjunction of the rational and the historical. By the middle of the
last century there arose a virtually unanimous agreement between
the conservative right and the radical left: the question of right had to
be decided on the plane of "history" and not by reference to "na
ture." The attack on natural right in its explicit form had begun with
the critique of modern natural right by the great conservatives of
"the historical school." It was completed by Nietzsche and Heideg
ger who traced the "nihilism" of the age to the continuing power of
the belief in trans-historical or "eternal" truths, e.g., to the belief in
natural right.
Certainly in this period there were distinguished conservatives
who pointed to the necessity of a "higher law" as distinct from the
positive law, or who sought to restore the claims of natural law. But
the re-assertion or restoration of "the tradition of natural law," as dis
tinct from a specific version of natural law, demands an exact histori
cal understanding of that tradition. The histories of that tradition as
sumed a unity and continuity which was borrowed from or at least in
harmony with the assumptions of Hegel's history of human thought.
Just as Naturrecht could be translated, and was translated by able
scholars, as referring to either natural law or natural right, so both
the partisans and opponents of natural law tended to blur the distinc
tion between "natural right" and "natural law." And the natural law
tradition was often regarded as a single, continuous tradition stretch
ing from the Stoics through the natural law theories of Hobbes,
Locke, and Rousseau. At the same time it was acknowledged that
Stoic and medieval natural law had a considerable dependence on the
teachings of Plato and Aristotle?in which the presence of the term,
or the concept, of natural law is at best problematic. Against this
background, the protagonists of Thomistic natural law possessed the
greatest clarity. Their grasp of the opposition between pre-modern
and modern natural law reflected the awareness of that distinction in
the modern teachers of natural law. The exposition of natural law
within the architectonic of Thomas's thought was and remains their
greatest strength. It proves also a ground for reservation of as
sent. It leads one to wonder whether the ultimate grounds of the
doctrine were accessible to human reason. It forces one to ask
whether the "nature" of the Thomistic doctrine, clearly of mainly
Aristotelian origin, could withstand the claims of the "nature" pre
sumably established for all to see by the victory of modern natural
science. On the other hand, modern "nature" has implied or required
diametrically opposed answers to the question of natural right. Our
contemporaries, in the name of rigor, or at least of methodology, as
sure us that the "facts" of nature supply us with no knowledge what
ever of the "values" of right and justice. But the founders of the
modern natural right doctrines thought that natural right was con
sistent with, and even in part dependent on even the most extreme
"mechanistic" versions of modern nature.
Accordingly for the author of Natural Right and History, "the
problem of natural right is today a matter of recollection rather than
of actual knowledge" (Introduction, p. 7). The first thing needful is
"historical studies." "I had to write a pr?cis raisonn?e of the history
of natural right."1 This is a first reason for the tentative character,
often overlooked, of a book which scarcely ever claims to demon
strate, or to refute, a single doctrine in a final manner. Strauss is
unique in contending that "historicism" raises the utmost jeopardy
for natural right. But he grants that "in the present state of our
knowledge, it is difficult to say at what point in the modern develop
ment the decisive break occurred with the 'unhistorical' approach
that prevailed in all earlier philosophy" (p. 13). In his earlier Hobbes
book (1936) he had explored the turning to history by Hobbes and
others in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He does not even
allude to this earlier turn in Natural Right and History, nor did he
ever publish his related studies of Montesquieu and others: "the dis
covery of history" remained for Strauss an uncompleted inquiry.
Similarly, as regards the first origins of natural right, "the full under
standing of the classic natural right doctrine would require a full un
derstanding of the change in thought that was effected by Socrates.
Such an understanding is not at our disposal" (p. 120). We cannot
say with confidence that Strauss himself believed this gap was elimi
nated by his subsequent books on Socrates. Natural Right and His
tory consists in great part of reasonings for the necessity of investiga
tions rarely if ever undertaken by others yet left incomplete by
Strauss. What was never actual knowledge can never become "a
matter of recollection."
It is difficult to fit together the "historical" dimension of Strauss's
book with his obvious intent to establish the philosophical grounds for
a decision as regards natural right. This difficulty begins with the
title. Despite the title it has been understood as, and described as,
"[Strauss's] study of natural law."2 The difficulty of grasping his
sense of "natural right" and "natural law" is owing ultimately to his
peculiar mode of exposition. Strauss nowhere gives a "systematic"
or even thematic discussion of the relation of these terms. The ques
tion arises whether his "essentially historical" treatment of these no
tions is meant to elicit their abiding and univocal meaning, or to show
that the "concreteness" of their instantiation defeats such univocity.
Certainly some of Strauss's most iconoclastic historical judgments
seem to presuppose an abiding meaning of "natural law." Thus it is
essential to his understanding of all three major protagonists of mod
ern natural law?Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau?that their teach
ings do not have the genuine character of natural law (pp. 181, 228,
276). It does not follow, however, that the character of natural law
which is absent there is present throughout pre-modern natural law.
Strauss's historical judgments are even more innovative about classic
natural right than about modern. The original form of classic na
tural right?the Socratic-Platonic?divides into a natural right
right and a teleological uni verse.3 It is certainly correct that the ini
tial section of chapter 4 on the Socratic-Platonic "science of the whole"
is devoid of teleology. Read more carefully and in its entirety chap
ter 4 shows that part of the classic natural right doctrine does not re
quire a teleological universe, but that another part?even within the
Socratic-Platonic brand of natural right?does make that require
ment, in so far as it requires natural law and divine providence. The
destructive impact of modern natural science is then limited to those
natural right theories which make such requirements. But this in
turn proves incorrect. The jeopardy raised by modern natural sci
ence is only as severe as the cognitive status ofthat science is secure,
and in so far as its subject matter is comprehensive. Strauss ques
tions the claims of science on both grounds in chapters 2 and 5, using
in both cases primarily the self-understanding of modern philosophy
and science. Accordingly, his implied criticism, in this context, of
"the modern followers of Thomas" is not what it is initially stated to
be in the introduction?that they seek to combine the incombinable, a
teleological account of man with a modern, non-teleological account of
the universe (p. 8). Rather, they fail adequately to recognize that
modern science has never been able to deliver a comprehensive and
intelligible account of nature?if indeed that was ever its promise.
Yet Strauss insists on the necessity of an account of nature or the
whole as the indispensable condition of natural right. A pre-modern
account of nature or the whole is possible or necessary. Only at this
point is the fundamental issue of Natural Right and History finally
joined. It is not modern natural science but radical (or "existen
tialist") historicism which raises the most fundamental objections to
the intelligibility of the whole. The confrontation with historicism in
chapter 1 is the true introduction to the book.
The first two chapters of Natural Right and History treat what
Strauss regards as the two greatest powers of contemporary life,
"History" and "Science." Each is a source of the denial of natural
3 "So far as I can see, Strauss, in his exposition of'classic natural right'
(Natural Right and History, chap. 4), makes no attempt to justify his prom
inent but vague assertion (ibid., 7) that 'natural right in its classic form is
connected with a teleological view of the universe'." Finnis, p. 52.
right. The book as a whole is divided into such pairs. Just as chap
ters 1 and 2 are "contemporary," so chapters 3 and 4 are "ancient"
and 5 and 6 are "modern." Given the length of the two parts of 5 and
of 6, Strauss could easily have given us four "modern" chapters: he
preferred a pair structure in the surface organization. All roads lead
to or from, all doctrines prepare or depart from, "classic natural
right" in chapter 4. It is "central" in its weight, but also central liter
ally, if we count the introduction and the subdivisions of 5 and 6 as
parts. The final chapter turns back upon?forms a pair with?the
first: chapter 5 on the turning to history prepares the first chapter on
historicism. Thus in 6 "Burke paves the way for 'the historical
school'"; in 1 we begin the account of historicism with "the historical
school" without a mention of Burke (pp. 316, 13). The book becomes
something like a whole through the activity of the reader who joins
its end to its beginning; it ceases to be a linear "history" of natural
right. The pairs that articulate this whole are sometimes easily com
binable, the one being the root of which the other is the florescence,
sometimes heterogeneous and difficult to think together.
Likewise chapter 1 is a succession of pairs. We first learn that
historicism must be distinguished from conventionalism because one
rejects and the other accepts "the idea of philosophy." Historicism
has two forms, naive or "garden variety" historical relativism, and
"radical ('existentialist') historicism." Historical relativism is self
contradictory; radical historicism avoids self-contradiction by jetti
soning the claim to theoretical truth. Underlying both is "the experi
ence of history" which has two premises, one temporal and one atem
poral. The atemporal premise proves to be decisive. Radical
historicism is opposed to philosophy: one denies the intelligibility of
the whole, the other allegedly assumes it dogmatically. The concept
of philosophy in turn divides into "the idea of philosophy" and "the
Socratic notion of philosophy." Only the latter supplies the decisive
basis for a response to radical historicism?to Heidegger.
Strauss begins chapter 1 with the contrast between historicism
and conventionalism in order to establish the primacy of "the idea of
philosophy" for the question of natural right. "The fundamental
premise of conventionalism is . . . nothing other than the idea of
philosophy as the attempt to grasp the eternal" (p. 12). Historicism
is the view that "all philosophizing essentially belongs to a 'historical
world', a 'culture' etc.?to what Plato had called the cave" (p. 12).
The possibility of philosophy is the necessary though not the sufficient
II
The only chapter in Natural Right and History which examines
a twentieth century thinker at length is also the only chapter in which
Strauss permits irony to pass over into jest and ridicule. The chap
ter on Max Weber is also the only chapter in which is discussed a mat
ter of some gravity, "the secular struggle between philosophy and
theology" (p. 75).
The theme of chapter 2 is the rejection of "the idea of natural
right" made on the basis of "the idea of science" in its contemporary,
or at least Weberian, version. Weber understood scientific method to
be autonomous, or devoid of need for philosophic justification in terms
of the nature of reality. His method was "metaphysically neutral" or
" 'scientific' in the present day sense of the term" (chapter 6, p. 266).
Hence chapter 2 seems to exist on a different plane from chapter 1: it
concerns not the possibility of philosophy, but the question of a deter
minate answer to the question of the right life, or of the possibility of
natural right. It could appear that method determines ethics, in so
far as method dictates the necessity of the distinction between "facts"
and "values," and declares that only the former are capable of rational
adjudication. Weber, as distinct from many he influenced, did not
draw this conclusion. To establish that values are a different sort of
thing from facts, it was necessary to show that there are a variety of
insoluble conflicts between values, or between "unchangeable princi
We start with the observation that Strauss went out of his way
to sharpen in his own terms what was only latent in Weber. The
"more precise" version is also what he calls a "bird's-eye view" of the
struggle between philosophy and theology. This reminds us of the
"bird's-eye view" quoted above underlying the "experience of his
tory," a fallacious view in Strauss's judgment. (The phrase occurs
only twice.) The "bird's-eye view" o? Natural Right and History
proves to be identical with Strauss's view in his early book of 1930 on
Spinoza and biblical religion. In both the premise that philosophy
cannot refute the possibility of revelation is fatal to the rationality of
the choice of philosophy. In the 1930 book Strauss concluded that or
thodoxy is superior to the modern rationalism of Spinoza; the relation
to pre-modern philosophy, which was not a live option, did not have to
be considered. In the 1962 preface to the English translation of the
Spinoza book Strauss criticized his earlier views in two respects.
"The victory of orthodoxy through the self-destruction of rational
philosophy was not an unmitigated blessing, for it was a victory not of
Jewish orthodoxy, but of any orthodoxy. . . ."6 Meanwhile, he had
come to believe that a return to pre-modern philosophy is possible.
"Other observations and experiences confirmed the suspicion that it
would be unwise to say farewell to reason" (in the phrase of Spinoza).7
This self-criticism of 1962 can already be found in Natural Right
and History, provided we follow the theme of religion and philosophy
into the "ancient" chapters. In place of a confrontation with the one
"Revelation" as in chapter 2, philosophy confronted the "many ortho
doxies" or the many "divine codes" at its inception, according to chap
ter 3. It was the "contradiction" among the many divine codes (pp.
86-87) that was a necessary condition of the original emergence of
philosophy. For the "pre-Socratics" the status of revelation or "su
perhuman information" (p. 87) was settled prior to the emergence of
"the idea of philosophy." But Strauss's auto-critique required a sec
ond phase. In the Socratic concept of philosophy in chapter 4, the
"divine codes" are not dismissed but restored to a place among the
fundamental alternatives (p. 125), without, however, losing their
manyness or their mutual contradiction.
covery of nature, but the way of one's own society, which tends to
comprehend everything, the way of our tradition, the core of which is
the belief that "the good is the ancestral" (pp.82-83). Or rather it
was the discovery that the ancestral good as expressed in the "divine
code" written or unwritten of one's own society is in contradiction
with the divine codes of other societies. The perception of the con
tradiction between the divine codes was the necessary condition for
the discovery of nature. Those who were believed to have estab
lished the divine codes were thought to be gods, or sons of gods, or
"dwelling near the gods" (pp. 83-84). Just as these first beings
were both "first" and "good," so when nature replaced the divine
codes in the emergence of philosophy it was understood as both "the
first things" and an authority or standard for all other things. As
"determined by the original character of authority" the discovery of
nature as "the first things" obscured the manifest articulation of
things into classes or kinds. But "the two most important meanings
of nature" are "the first things" and the essential character of a kind
or class of things (p. 83, footnote 3). The understanding of nature
tended therefore to have the character of a descent from the first or
divine or imperishable things (cf. Sophist 242c8-243bl). In so far as
it ascended from "experience" it did not ascend from the kinds of
things, and in its descent it did not link the first things with the kinds
of things. Its perspective was therefore adverse to the discovery of
the natural within the class of human things. This "divine" perspec
tive is reflected in the text of Heraclitus which is crucial for our grasp
of conventionalism in the first philosophers. "In God's view, all
things are fair [noble] and good and just, but men have made the sup
position that some things are just and others are unjust" (p. 93).
The judgment of the first philosophers that right and justice are
"by convention" had only a loose connection with "nature." What
could be traced to the divine codes could be safely relegated to con
vention. On the other hand, since the first things are the eternal or
imperishable things (p. 89), it was apparent that the class of perish
able things is too wide to be identified with convention, or traced to
the divine codes. Neither the generation of animals, nor their char
acteristic behavior?the barking and wagging the tail of dogs, for in
stance?is amenable to the influence of divine codes. Nor was it possi
ble to derive such features of things from specific versions of the "first
things" such as the atoms and void of Democritus. It was necessary
to embark on an inquiry into the human things to establish what could
between nature and art, on the one hand, and nature and convention
on the other.
Hobbes was the first modern to experiment with the abandon
ment of the ("metaphysical") quest for the first things. Accordingly
he had to abandon the double sense of "nature" in antiquity: as a term
of distinction, and as a standard. He tried to abolish the distinction
between nature and art; he was forced to understand philosophy as
art or "construction" in contradistinction to nature. Philosophy, as
distinct from other human activities, stands or falls by its relatedness
to the first things. Its own quest for knowledge of ultimate things
cannot possess its distinctive character?a good internal and unique
to its own activity?unless the first things are of "higher dignity" (p.
89) because they constitute the order in which everything else is.
This insight into "the idea of philosophy" is not denied but confirmed
by those of our century who suggest that the highest human possibil
ity is the attempt, through authentic despair or "creativity," to con
front the groundlessness of all things in any "first things." Such at
tempts seek to return to the ancestral or "the gods" on the plane of
human reflection without thinking about the nature of the ancestral.
The possibility of philosophy is stamped with the duality of the first
things which both mirrors and departs from the duality of the ances
tral.
IV
8 For the diverse sources of the natural law tradition, see Ernest L.
Fortin, "Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and the Problem of Natural Law,"
Mediaevalia vol. 4 (1978): 179-208.
little constitute the present order of the solar system and the visible
heavens. The further evolution of the animal and human was beyond
Descartes' powers of deduction. In the political constructions of
Hobbes and Locke, it was not characteristic of a temporal process,
but of a constructed and enduring human order. In Rousseau and
Burke the principle was discovered in phenomena both temporal and
human?the workings of history. When Hegel followed their prece
dent, he divorced the manifestations of the principle in history from
the principles of nature (p. 320): the whole is beyond order. When
the historical was said to embrace the natural and all else, the last
vestige of an order which could embrace the modern individual was
lost. The natural whole had become incomplete and therefore unin
telligible in Descartes and Spinoza, because the future manifestations
of the laws of nature were infinite in character;12 unless the exhaus
tion of all possible manifestations compelled "the eternal return of the
same," a possibility recognized by Leibniz.13 The all-comprehensive
historical whole became incomplete and therefore unintelligible when
the possibility of "laws of history" was abandoned.