Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 9

LEO STRAUSS AND THE AMERICAN POLITICAL RELIGION

dominandi that sought to replace reality with
"Second Realities."
Voegelin saw modern ideologies as dis-
tortions of Christian theological truth.
Strauss was reluctant to, or not interested
in, using theological tools in the assess-
ment of problems of political order. Allan
Bloom explained this by observing that
Strauss "found that the teachings of reason
are wholly different from and incompatible
with those of revelation and that neither side
could completely refute the claims of the
other but that a choice had to be made."7
Strauss's decision to rely solely on reason
implied a rejection of revelation or, at least,
in the light of reason, its incomprehensibil-
ity. That seriously limited what ultimately
became known as the "Straussian school" of
political theory. The word school is, in some
ways, an apt description of Strauss's approach
and resonates with the meaning of that term
as it is used to describe the Scholasticism of
the medieval "Schoolmen."
Strauss, a scholar of classical Greek,
consistently used the term "natural right,"
which raises this question: Why not speak
in the terms Aristotle used-"right by
nature"?8 In only two sentences in Natural
Right and History does Strauss use the clas-
sic phrase. "What is by nature right," he
observes, "can find its complete answer only
in the conversation about the best regime"
and "reason determines what is by nature
right" (144, 7). This differentiates Strauss's
approach to his subject from Eric Voege-
lin's. Strauss's choice of the word doctrine
to define his subject suggests that Strauss's
Natural Right and History is concerned with
the development of a doctrine of "natural
right" and not Aristotle's examination of
"what is right by nature." That may explain
why Strauss argued that a continuum exists
between the ancient Greek philosophers
and modern natural right theorists. There

is no continuity on the level of political
theory, but there is continuity if classical
natural right is treated as a doctrine. Such
a doctrinal approach led Strauss to conclude
that the Declaration of Independence was
the defining intellectual form of the Ameri-
can regime. That mistaken view adversely
affected the foreign policy of the United
States in the post-Soviet era.
Strauss seems to have turned the discussion
of why something is right everywhere but is
always changing into a form of propositional
metaphysics capable of discovering universal
rules. Voegelin's classical scholarship empha-
sized the experience of ever-changing imma-
nent reality and experience of an unchanging
transcendent divine reality, which enabled
classical Greek philosophers to achieve what
Voegelin called a "leap in being." When such
a leap occurs, Voegelin writes,
not only will the unseemly symbols be
rejected, but man will turn away from
the world and society as the source of
misleading analogy. He will experience
a turning around, the Platonic periagoge,
an inversion or conversion toward the
true source of order. And this turning
around, this conversion, results in more
than an increase in knowledge concern-
ing the order of being; it is a change in
the order itself. For the participation
in being changes its structure when it
becomes emphatically a partnership with
God, while the participation in mundane
being recedes to second rank. The more
perfect attunement to being through
conversion is not an increase on the same
scale but a qualitative leap. And when
this conversion befalls a society, the con-
verted community will experience itself
as qualitatively different from all other
societies that have not taken the leap.9

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Modern Age - Fall 2014

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