Modern Age - Summer 2014 - 52

MODERN AGE

he takes to be its primary and determinative
objective: the justification of liberal democracy on universal principles.
Strauss's experience in Germany convinced
him that the liberal democracies established
in England and America were the only decent
and sound bulwarks against the extreme and
inhuman politics spawned by late modernity. At the same time, the failure of German democracy illustrated the vulnerability
of liberalism's intellectual foundations to
the corrosives of historicism, positivism, and
relativism. Thus, says Havers, Strauss judged
that liberal democracy needed intellectual
foundations in universal principles accessible
to all human beings, not just derived from a
tradition bound up with and tainted by distinctly modern first principles. He made it
his mission to articulate these more universal
principles and educate defenders for them.
For Havers, this project sufficiently
explains Strauss's attempt to articulate what
he called "classical natural right." Plato
and Aristotle had to be dehistoricized by
means of a hermeneutics that penetrates past
whatever seems culture-bound (interpreted
as insincere concessions to the prejudices
of their contemporaries) and unearths the
secret rational and timeless core of their
thought (i.e., what accords with the rational
liberal principles Strauss sought to defend).
The result: what presents itself as a recovery
of original intentions ends up as a modern
liberal-universalist whitewashing.
Havers seems fixated on the idea (which
Gottfried flatly dismisses) that Strauss is
appealing to "the Greeks" as a political model
to be emulated, that indeed Strauss believes
that "Athens was a liberal city deserving of
philosophers' devotion." It is not the Greek
cities but the relationship of the Greek philosophers to their cities that Strauss holds
up as a model. Accordingly, the Straussian
agenda is more properly understood as a
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double game: on the one hand, encouraging
the preservation of what is healthiest in the
contemporary regime and its intellectual
and imaginative resources through a rhetoric
meant to appeal to ordinary, nonphilosophic
citizens; on the other hand, to provide a
path for more thoughtful readers to attain
philosophic distance on the prejudices that
underlie and are inculcated by the contemporary regime. It is because of his failure to
explore the latter side of the tension shaping
Straussian rhetoric that Havers reduces the
Straussian project to one of universalist ideology construction.
Failure to take account of this double game
also distorts Havers's stronger critique of the
Straussian sidelining of Christianity. He
ably exposes the lengths to which Straussian
scholarship must go to render inconsequential the influence of the Christian cultural
context on early English liberal thought, the
American Founding, and Lincoln-but in
the cases of Hobbes and Locke, he fails to do
justice to the Straussian claim that their texts
are designed to address multiple audiences
simultaneously. Regarding the Straussian
cult of Churchill, while one may concede
that Straussian admirers fail to appreciate
how much Christian culture and English
tradition did to make Churchill the humane
and judicious man he was, it is hard to deny
that his extraordinary qualities place him in
the ranks of the great statesmen of history,
who exhibit many family resemblances aptly
described by Aristotle.
In his valuable cautionary case studies of
George Parkin Grant and Willmoore Kendall (friends and admirers who saw in Strauss
a defender of permanent things against the
nihilistic drift of modernity), Havers shows
how both eventually ran up against Strauss's
bracketing of Christianity. Grant wondered
whether the apparent agreement between
Strauss and Kojève concerning the historical
Modern Age - Summer 2014

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