116 book reviews

Winfried Schroeder (ed.)

Reading Between the Lines- Leo Strauss and the History of Early Modern Philosophy,
(Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2015, 226 pp., £82.99).

To claim that Leo Strauss is a controversial figure in the history of political

thought is an understatement. His famous thesis that 17th century philoso-
phers, such as Hobbes, Spinoza and Bayle, were forced to hide their true con-
victions and engage in esoteric writing out of fear of persecution has been
generally received with strong reservations by scholars of early modernity. As
Winfried Schroeder intimates in his introduction, few would deny that the art
of ‘writing between the lines’ is not Strauss’ invention and that persecution
for one’s religious beliefs was a real concern in the history of early modern
philosophy. Yet, Strauss’ approach to the matter has been fiercely attacked on
grounds of inconsistency and lack of rigour. From his broad definition of per-
secution (e.g. spanning from the Spanish Inquisition to social ostracism) to his
idiosyncratic method of spotting contradictions as signs of esoteric messages
in classical texts, Strauss’ hermeneutics has been variously characterized, to
give a few examples, as illegitimate, elitist, ‘notoriously lacking in clarity and
rigour’ (Drury), ‘undisciplined’ (Pocock) or irritatingly contrived to fit his own
preconceived schemas. The eight essays in this volume do not always disagree
with such judgements, yet they certainly take Strauss’ arguments seriously, if
only to submit them to systematic criticism.
In the first essay of the collection, Jonathan Israel takes up Strauss’ treat-
ment of the Enlightenment and, more specifically, the latter’s equation of the
essence of the Enlightenment’s spirit with its radical, atheistic, anti-clerical
wing. Strauss derisively considered moderate Enlightenment figures, such as
Moses Mendelson, Montesquieu, Locke and Leibniz, as faint-hearted compro-
misers or, at best, ‘misguided camp-followers unwittingly serving the cause of
the radicals’ (p. 11). Although sympathetic to key aspects of Strauss’ esoteric
reading, Israel finds a series of faults with his understanding of the main task
of the early radical enlighteners, such as Bayle and Spinoza, and the legacy they
bequeathed to their French revolutionary epigones. He argues that Strauss is
led to downplay Spinoza’s republican credentials and inflate Hobbes’s philo-
sophical radicalism and opposition to religious authority to serve his trans-
historical argument about ‘Radical Enlightenment’ being a discourse of science
and atheism that stretches back to Epicurus and Lucretius. For Israel, such a
dubious lineage, apart from misrepresenting Spinoza’s far deeper influence
on later radicals, accords a political reactionary like Hobbes a significance far
greater than he really enjoyed among 18th century revolutionary republicans,
dilutes the Enlightenment’s originality and obscures the direct link between

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/18750257-03001007

book reviews 117

the attack­on religious authority and the 18th century political and social, re-
formist and revolutionary democratic agendas. That may be so, but Israel’s own
reading might also be seen as too skewed by his unqualified admiration of Spi-
noza as the true demiurge and herald of modernity and his controversial idea
of an umbilical link connecting metaphysical monism and political radicalism.
Adrian Blau’s essay goes to the heart of Strauss’ method of reading between
the lines. In particular, Blau interrogates Strauss’ methodology and finds it
wanting for resting on poor use of evidence and false or misleading method-
ological premises. There is, though, something conspicuously odd in reproach-
ing, as Blau does, a political philosopher such as Strauss who operated on a
more hermeneutical plane for failing to live up to King, Keohane and Verba’s
rigorous methodological principles of hypothesis testing and empirical verifi-
ability. Strauss would have probably treated such a claim as a symptom of the
kind of philosophical impoverishment he witnessed in the rise of positivist
social science and liberal technocratic nihilism. However, there is also some-
thing intuitively right in Blau’s claim that Strauss may have been too sloppy in
applying his hermeneutics of esotericism. Not least, in assuming, as Strauss
often did in a manner not dissimilar to the kind of historicism he criticized,
that he could be sure about what authors ‘really meant’ when dissimulating
their dangerous views. Blau’s general attack, then, on the science of hermeneu-
tics, personified in the work of Ricoeur and Gadamer, rather obscures a valid
point. There can be no doubt that a serious critique of Straussian hermeneu-
tics requires a rigorous, systematic and unbiased examination of his approach
to textual criticism. Yet, to fall back on a version of the unity of science argu-
ment applied to textual interpretation might be taking the whole issue, to put
it mildly, a tad too far.
Dietrich Schotte’s piece casts a more favourable eye on Strauss’ hermeneu-
tics. Like Blau, he does not deny that criticisms of Straussian methodology are
often worth their ink but he, nevertheless, thinks Strauss’ method can be sepa-
rated from its application and that ‘reading between the lines’ is justified as an
interpretive technique as long as one can establish valid criteria according to
which a given text can be said to contain a ‘hidden message’. Schotte argues
that Strauss was rather more interested in defending the Platonic version of
his argument, namely that Enlightenment thinkers would disguise their views,
not exclusively in order to avoid persecution, but, rather, in order to fulfil their
public roles as educators of their societies without disturbing social order
or provoking the vulgar. Yet, while, for Schotte, accepting the validity of the
esoteric reading of a text based on the criteria laid out by Strauss is relatively
straightforward, it is less unproblematic to ascertain what an author’s true
position is. Schotte demonstrates the difficulty of discerning the difference

hobbes studies 30 (2017) 109-120