Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 7

ESSAY

LEO STR AUSS AND
THE AMERICAN
POLITICAL RELIGION
Richard J. Bishirjian

T

wo political theorists whose works
define the recovery of classical politi-
cal theory in the twentieth century were
Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss. Virtually
at the same moment when the Progressive
movement was about to be given new life
in American politics, Leo Strauss at the
University of Chicago and Eric Voegelin
at Louisiana State University and at Notre
Dame were introducing motivated students
to the mastery of classical Greek political
philosophy. Their students had sought them
out because they were disposed to reject the
"value-free" social science that dominated
American political science, and because
many saw themselves as "conservative" and
believed Strauss's and Voegelin's works rep-
resented a conservative political philosophy.
More important, some had worked on Sena-
tor Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign
and hoped that the conservative movement
he started would outlive his defeat in the
disastrous election of 1964. Many would

become politically influential in American
presidential administrations as political
appointees.
Both Voegelin and Strauss carefully ana-
lyzed and rejected the fact-value approach
of modern political "science"; Strauss for its
rejection of natural right that led, he argued,
to nihilism, and Voegelin for its rejection of
our ability to know truth in the use of such
terms as "value judgments." "Neither classic
nor Christian ethics and politics contain
'value judgments,' " Voegelin wrote in the
The New Science of Politics, "but elaborate,
empirically and critically, the problems
of order which derive from philosophical
anthropology as part of a general ontology."1
Strauss's and Voegelin's criticism of
value-free social science gave their students
critical tools with which to understand why
they had intuitively rejected the dominant
behavioral approach of American political
science. A few years later, when Berkeley,
Columbia, and other major universities

Richard J. Bishirjian is president of Yorktown University. This essay is part of a book, The Conservative Rebellion, made possible by a grant from the Earhart Foundation and to be published by St. Augustine's Press.
7



Modern Age - Fall 2014

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