The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

M.F. Burnyeat’s review of Leo Strauss’s Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy [NYR, May 30] bears the same relation to Mr. Strauss’s thought that the accompanying caricature bears to Strauss’s person. Whoever knows or knew the original must be offended by a travesty generated apparently between levity and a gift for deforming the normal. By his deed Mr. Burnyeat vindicates what in words he denounces, namely, Strauss’s view that a serious thought needs to be veiled against ill-natured levity, and Strauss’s insistence that the student (a fortiori the critic) take the trouble to grasp the author’s meaning, i.e. to understand him as he understood himself, before undertaking to discuss that author’s work. By the method of parading elaborated reflections as adages jejune and assertoric, Mr. Burnyeat holds them up to ridicule, as he does Mr. Strauss’s references to gentlemen and philosophers, unworthily lampooning those words by putting them in quotation marks as if they cannot be used without the apology implicit in that tendentious punctuation.

The advice that a reader of a worthy (indeed of any) writing start by clearing his mind of resistance to the author’s purpose is generally reasonable and fair, is obviously repugnant to the principles that guide Mr. Burnyeat’s critical activity, and certainly has nothing to do with the abandoning of self into which Mr. Burnyeat translates it. That objection can safely be left to collapse by itself.

Mr. Burnyeat deduces Mr. Strauss’s influence from the physical presence of the latter before his students in the classroom—a tacit appeal to the hypothesis of charisma voiced some time ago. One knows that Strauss’s books have little influence because “Strauss has no discernible influence in Britain at all.” But books and articles by Strauss have appeared in Polish, Serbo-Croat, Italian, French, Spanish and of course German, both before and since his death. Report used to be made of the British headline: “Storm in Channel: Continent Isolated.” Mr. Burnyeat does nothing to dispel a presumption that the report is apocryphal. In any case, however correct he may be in assessing Strauss’s influence in Britain, nothing may be concluded about Strauss or Britain in the absence of another premise for the syllogism.

Mr. Burnyeat weakens his depreciation of Strauss by providing a quite remarkable demonstration, albeit offered as a mockery, of what Burnyeat might be capable of were he to restrain his ill-will from hindering his judgment. In the last half dozen paragraphs of his section 3, he affects to expose the mechanical simplicity of the Straussian hermeneutic: “You start, always, by taking note of the arrangement of the work.” Mr. Burnyeat is out to show what a simple thing it is to anatomize the organization of a book, and incidentally how useless is the product. Instead, he shows how difficult it is, how well he was himself compelled to think about the contents in their relation to the author’s intention, and how helpful to his—and our—understanding of Strauss’s purpose is the fruit of his derisive effort. Without having been exposed to Mr. Strauss’s charisma, Mr. Burnyeat has been induced to afford his own evidence of the plausibility of a Straussian advice—try to understand a book as the author meant it. (Would Mr. Burnyeat’s intended satire have been amusing, to say nothing of useful, if someone hadn’t let him know that the order of chapters originated with Strauss and not with some editor?)

This would be a thoughtless and in one more respect an incomplete response to Burnyeat’s regrettable article if it failed to try to understand Burnyeat as he might understand himself. Without a great deal to go on—and I know how much that confession subtracts—I surmise that he is uncritically devoted to the intellectually received and the academically authenticated, perhaps because there must indeed be something valid in what has earned the cachet of professionals, and perhaps because there is safety in numbers. His objections to Strauss are not new, as he admits, and in fact are the tediously familiar budget of recriminations coming from a conventional establishment, which is as precisian in scrutinizing the orthodoxy of “rebarbatives” as any coven of philistines sniffing out a bohemian.

It can never do Straussians any harm to look within under the stimulation of such a rebuke as Mr. Burnyeat’s. One could wish that the critics would treat themselves occasionally to the same purification.

Joseph Cropsey

University of Chicago

Chicago, Illinois

To the Editors:

I would like, if I may, to comment on M.F. Burnyeat’s review of Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, by Leo Strauss. Burnyeat’s opinion of Strauss was sufficiently indicated by the cartoonist, who gave Strauss two right hands—neither of which, one presumes, knew what the other was doing.

Burnyeat declares that “There is no doubt that Strauss was an inspiring teacher.” But Burnyeat can find nothing in Strauss’s writings—which he calls “remote and rebarbative”—to explain Strauss’s extraordinary influence on nearly everyone who came into contact with him. What went on in Strauss’s classes was remarkable and powerful, but as far as Burnyeat is concerned, it remains utterly mysterious.

This is neither the time nor the place for me to offer my own critique of Strauss’s work. It is a subject on which I have written with increasing frequency since Strauss’s death. (See for example “The Legacy of Leo Strauss,” Claremont Review of Books, Fall 1984, and “The Legacy of Leo Strauss’ Defended,” Ibid., Spring 1985.) I would like, however, to offer a few words of personal testimony as to how Strauss differed in my experience from other teachers, and why so many sat so spellbound in his classes.

I might mention that I took my first course with Strauss in the fall of 1944. For the next seven years, in both New York and Chicago, I attended virtually every class he taught, including those in summer sessions. During this period I believe I spent nearly as much time alone with him as in class. But whether in class or alone, every minute was a vital learning experience. Today, I return again and again to his writings. Contrary to Burnyeat, Strauss was a great writer, and his works abound with passages of eloquence and beauty. But he always warned us, when writing, not to sacrifice precision of meaning for mere effect.

My own books, particularly my writings on Lincoln, are often outgrowths of conversations I originally had with Strauss. In the Preface to the 1982 reprinting (by the University of Chicago Press) of Crisis of the House Divided, my book on the Lincoln–Douglas debates (first published in 1959), I wrote that the work had been born in my mind

When I discovered—at a time when I was studying the Republic with Leo Strauss—that the issue between Lincoln and Douglas was in substance, and very nearly in form, identical with the issue between Socrates and Thrasymachus. Douglas’s doctrine of “popular sovereignty” meant no more than that: in a democracy justice is the interest of the majority, which is “the stronger.” Lincoln, however, insisted that the case for popular government depended upon a standard of right and wrong independent of mere opinion and one which was not justified merely by the counting of heads.

Lincoln once described the central proposition of the Declaration of Independence—to which, at Gettysburg, he said the nation at its birth had been dedicated—as “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.” This is a perfect example of what Leo Strauss meant by natural right. And Strauss believed—as did Lincoln—that it was possible to have sufficient knowledge of natural right to guide our lives, in the decisive respects, both individually and politically.

Lincoln once declared that he had “never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” For Lincoln, the Declaration was a timeless source of political wisdom. It was a source of such wisdom for the American people as much as were the tablets of the law brought down by Moses from Sinai for the children of Israel. If we however turn to Carl Becker’s The Declaration of Independence, a book perfectly characteristic of non-Straussian scholarship in political philosophy, we find the following:

To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false is essentially a meaningless question.

What Becker meant—and he spoke for nearly every historian and social scientist of our time—was that to ask what is just or unjust, right or wrong, is a “value judgment,” and as such “subjective” and not susceptible to rational analysis, which can deal only with “facts.”

Before I met Strauss this is what I had been taught, and had never been given any reason to question. I had spent five years at Yale in the 1930s, as undergraduate and graduate student, where no one, so far as I knew, had ever doubted this orthodoxy. To study the Declaration of Independence—or Plato’s Republic—meant to study the “climate of opinion,” “the spirit of the times,” the “weltanschauung” out of which the work came. Strauss however declared that we must understand the great works of the human mind as their authors understood them, before we try to understand them differently or better (although—contrary to Burnyeat—Strauss never hesitated to make such judgments when he believed he had sufficient grounds for doing so). None of the great writers of the past had believed, either in the fact-value distinction, or in the historicist fallacy that the genesis of an idea was the key to the truth about it.

Lincoln’s reading of the Declaration—as embodying an eternal, and eternally applicable truth—was precisely the kind of reading that I had learned from Strauss. Thus Strauss taught me to read with ever growing wonder and gratitude, both Lincoln and the tradition of political philosophy within which Lincoln had his life and being.

It is difficult to convey to anyone who has not shared such an experience the excitement I felt—now nearly forty years ago—when I realized that I had been emancipated from the dungeon of historicism, from that dark place of the soul in which the great questions, the only questions that make life ultimately worth living, are treated as “essentially meaningless.” That excitement has however never left me, and I can have only pity for those—like Professor Burnyeat—who seem likely never to know it.

Harry V. Jaffa

Claremont McKenna College and

Claremont Graduate School

Claremont, California

To the Editors:

M.F. Burnyeat’s attempt to wake a sleeping America to the political threat posed to it by the late Leo Strauss is McCarthyite in the precise sense of the term. His calumny culminates in disgraceful innuendo about Carnes Lord, whose service on the National Security Council staff he takes as evidence of lack of scholarly integrity. With standard paranoid logic, Burnyeat concludes that this corrupt “pupil of a pupil” is proof that Strauss intentionally distorted classical texts as part of a political conspiracy. Contempt is the only appropriate response to such an ugly project of arousing political passion against the legacy of a serious thinker.