Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 12

MODERN AGE

Christianity places Strauss in the ambiguous
position of an interpreter of ideas who selec-
tively leaves out those ideas he doesn't want
to confront.
Strauss is critical of Max Weber's "fact vs.
value dichotomy" and observes that there
occurred a "politicization of philosophy
in the seventeenth century" (39, 34), but
Strauss does not seem to want to acknowl-
edge that Thomas Hobbes, Machiavelli,
John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
engaged in a reversal of classical philosophy
that is the hallmark of this "politicization"
of philosophy. The modern concepts of these
thinkers, the State of Nature, the Law of
Nature, the Social Contract, and, of course,
Natural Rights are not symbols of experience
complementary to, or rooted in, the philo-
sophic quest of classical philosophy. They
are replacements for that quest, ideological
concepts that lead us into a new, modern era
that is, frankly, arrogant and dismissive of
philosophic truth.
Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau can be
called "modern" in the same sense that
Petrarch viewed the conversion of Rome to
Christianity as a "dark age"16 and revised the
Augustinian revaluation of history by assert-
ing that pre-Christian Rome was an age of
light and glory.17 Had Strauss not made the
common mistake of treating revelation as
"supernatural" (144)18 he might have been
disposed to see the equivalence of experience
that engendered classical philosophy and
revelation, and, by contrast, that the ideas
of Hobbes are not "motivated by fundamen-
tally the same spirit."
While Strauss was pursuing the argument
that a doctrine of natural right can be traced
from classical philosophy to the modern era,
other philosophers were dealing with actual
problems of political order. That, I think,
distinguishes Strauss from Voegelin and
from many of his contemporaries. Strauss's
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FALL 2014

approach in Natural Right and History seems
irrelevant in the light of the very important
analyses of the origins of totalitarianism in
Albert Camus's L'Homme révolté (1951) and
Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism
(1951). They were doing what classical politi-
cal philosophers do, examining problems
in science. Strauss was doing what modern
theorists do, developing topics. Although
this approach was theoretically deficient,
Strauss's analysis of a topic, as opposed to
problems of political order, had value for
the development of a politically acceptable
"school" that had significant consequences
as members of that school gained influence
in academe and American politics.

T

his essential difference in the approach
between Voegelin and Strauss has gen-
erated heated discussions among scholars
influenced by them. Natural Right and History begins, for example, with an assertion
that the American nation was "conceived
and raised" in the propositions of the Dec-
laration of Independence.
For scholars of American political theory
influenced by Eric Voegelin, such as Will-
moore Kendall, Ellis Sandoz, George Carey,
Melvin Bradford, Stanley Parry, and histo-
rians who are appreciative of the works of
David Hackett Fischer, Strauss's statement
is a common but one-sided interpretation of
the Declaration of Independence.
What the Declaration actually meant to
those Americans infused with the "Spirit
of '76" cannot be inferred solely from the
Engrossed Copy of the document.19
When it came time to articulate why we
were engaged in a rebellion against the Eng-
lish Crown, Thomas Jefferson was assigned
to write the first draft of what came to be
known as a Declaration of Independence.
And although the first draft of the Declara-
tion of Independence composed by Jefferson
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