Modern Age - Summer 2014 - 55

REVIEWS

for the Jews in the modern world, Straussians are conservative on only two fronts: the
pro-Israel and the anti-Soviet. Essentially
Cold War liberals "with patriotic fanfare,"
Strauss and his followers have adopted "a
certain right-wing style without expressing a right-wing worldview." The appeal of
this stance has "contributed to the process
by which the conservative movement came
to define itself during the Cold War as the
defender of 'democratic values.'"
Unlike Havers, Gottfried recognizes how
the principle of esotericism makes it difficult
to know whether to take Strauss's celebration
of universal American ideals at face value.
"Strauss taught us to revere and fight for our
liberal democratic best of all possible worlds.
What reservations he may have harbored
about this actualized ideal mattered less to
him-and even less to his disciples." It would

seem to be precisely around these reservations that the question of Straussian conservatism in large part revolves: reservations, on
the one hand, regarding the democratization
of thought, taste, and morals accompanying the "lowered sights" of modern political
thought; and on the other, regarding the
elevation of the significance of the individual
as such by Christianity. According to the
final sentence of Natural Right and History,
"Burke himself was still too deeply imbued
with the spirit of 'sound antiquity' to allow
the concern with individuality to overpower
the concern with virtue." What appears here
for Strauss as an irreconcilable contradiction
plaguing Burke's conservatism may appear
as the potential core of a "sound modernity"
for someone admitting the possibility that a
New Law opens history to a new possibility
of reconciliation.

the contours of evil
Jeffrey Folks
Year Zero: A History of 1945 by Ian Buruma
(New York: Penguin Press, 2013)

Y

ear Zero: A History of 1945 is a large,
sweeping, unconstrained, and admittedly personal attempt to understand what
the author regards as the pivotal year of
the twentieth century. It is also a book that
needs to be read on its own terms as it is not
a conventional history of major events, public
figures, or political and economic tendencies.
Rather, Year Zero is an attempt to revisit that
Jeffrey Folks is author of Heartland of the Imagination: Conservative Values in American Literature from
Poe to O'Connor to Haruf, among many other books.

momentous year as it was experienced by
ordinary human beings in Europe, Asia, and
the United States. Such a particularized view
of history is often wrenching in that each
individual's ordeal is probed and the details
fully disclosed. What Buruma uncovers is
not pleasant, but it may be necessary so as to
impress upon the reader the gravity of what
transpired and the importance of its never
happening again. No one who reads Year
Zero will come away with any doubt as to the
depths of evil to which human beings can
sink or the extent of suffering that may result.
55
Modern Age - Summer 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Summer 2014
