Leo Strauss Between Weimar and America

230 Pages·2019·2.138 MB·English

by  Adi Armon

Leo Strauss Between
Weimar and America
Adi Armon
Leo Strauss Between Weimar and America
Adi Armon
Leo Strauss Between
Weimar and America
Adi Armon
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Madison, WI, USA
Translated by
Michelle Bubis
Jerusalem, Israel
ISBN 978-3-030-24388-3 ISBN 978-3-030-24389-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24389-0
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
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To my mother and father
A
cknowledgements
Ten years ago, I first entered the Special Collections Research Center at
the University of Chicago Library to burrow into the Strauss archive. I
discovered a treasure trove of unpublished documents—audio tapes,
transcriptions of lectures and seminars, letters, notebooks, and more.
Thanks to the Leo Strauss Center, some of these are now available
online, allowing researchers to travel back in time and attend a course
with Strauss. The archive personally transported me back to several
important seminars and courses given by Strauss: on Hegel, Nietzsche,
Thucydides, and—of particular interest to my research—on Marx.
This discovery led me to a reorientation of the doctoral dissertation
I had just begun writing at the Department of Political Science at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I had planned to compare Strauss’
understanding of Judaism and Jewishness with that of Hannah Arendt
and Isaiah Berlin. Instead, the archive led me down a completely differ-
ent path, to the Cold War and to Strauss’ unpublished seminars on polit-
ical philosophy. The dissertation was submitted in 2013, and since then
the manuscript has been updated, revised and translated into English,
while I continued researching Strauss and other nineteenth- and twenti-
eth-century thinkers.
This is an opportunity to thank the people, institutions and foun-
dations whose support enabled and enriched the research that formed
this book. I am deeply grateful to my advisors, Steven E. Aschheim and
Yaron Ezrahi, and to the members of my dissertation committee: Joseph
Mali, Moshe Halbertal and Eyal Chowers. I thank Eugene R. Sheppard,
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thomas Meyer, John P. McCormick, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Avihu Zakai,
Robert Howse, and Efraim Podoksik for their insights and helpful
advice. I also thank Nathan Tarcov, director of the Leo Strauss Center;
Phil Getz, US editor for philosophy and religion at Palgrave Macmillan;
the anonymous readers of the manuscript; and my translator, Michelle
Bubis.
This study was made possible by the George L. Mosse Program in
History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Richard Koebner
Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University, Daat
Hamakom—the Center for the Study of Cultures of Place in the Modern
Jewish World, the Leo Baeck Institute, and Molad—the Center for the
Renewal of Israeli Democracy.
While revising this book, I was also an editor for the Israeli daily
Haaretz. Through working on various texts for the newspaper and the
academic world, addressing different kinds of readers, I learned to appre-
ciate the art of writing. Through closely reading Leo Strauss, as well his
followers and critics, I learned—or so I hope—to read between the lines.
Madison
2019
c
ontents
1 Introduction 1
2 The Political Philosophy of Strauss—Its Basis
and Its Genesis 15
3 Strauss’ Marx 71
4 Note on the Plan of Strauss’ The City and Man 153
5 Epilogue 209
Author Index 221
Subject Index 225
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
As Karl Rossmann, a poor boy of sixteen who had been packed off to
America by his parents because a servant girl had seduced him and got
herself child by him, stood on the liner slowly entering the harbour of
New York, a sudden burst of sunshine seemed to illuminate the Statue of
Liberty, so that he saw it in a new light, although he had sighted it long
before. The arm with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft, and
round the figure blew the free winds of heaven. (Franz Kafka, Amerika)1
The political philosophy that emerged in the second half of the twentieth
century was not above and beyond history. It was very much of its time,
informed by the massive violence, the Holocaust, the ideologies that
dominated the political landscape, and the rapid technological advances.
History was seared into the flesh of various European thinkers, both
Jewish and non-Jewish, such as Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), Eric
Voegelin (1901–1985), Max Horkeimer (1895–1973), Theodor Adorno
(1903–1969), and Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979).
Many of them had to abandon their homes and seek refuge in
other countries, mostly in the United States. Some did not make it
across the Atlantic: Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), for instance, ended
his life before he managed to flee Europe, and his ideas were adopted
and disseminated by others—primarily Arendt, Gershom Scholem
(1897–1982), and Adorno. Others, such as Adorno and Horkheimer,
chose to leave the United States and return to Germany several years
after the end of World War II, having never felt part of American culture
© The Author(s) 2019 1
A. Armon, Leo Strauss Between Weimar and America,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24389-0_1
2 A. ARMON
and politics. Arendt, Marcuse and others elected to stay in the United
States and utterly transformed its political and social thought.2
Among these émigré intellectuals was Leo Strauss (1899–1973).
One of the most complex and fascinating figures of his time, Strauss has
become a highly contested scholar in American discourse in recent years.
He is a striking example of a German-Jewish intellectual whose think-
ing developed as he transitioned from Europe to America—from the
Germany of the fallen Weimar Republic and Adolf Hitler’s (1889–1945)
rise to power to the United States during the Cold War.
History left its mark on Strauss’ thought, which first budded in the
modern, post-assimilatory world of German Jewry and matured into a
coherent political philosophy in the United States. Born in Wilhelmine
Germany at the turn of the century, Strauss carried the complicated bur-
den of his German-Jewish identity and philosophical beginnings in the
Weimar era into America, where he died in 1973 at the age of 74.
Safe in his new shelter, Strauss looked on as death and destruction
spread throughout his homeland on the other side of the Atlantic. With
Europe in ruins and the Soviet Union the new threat, Strauss’ adopted
home became the leader of the Western world. In the United States,
Strauss paved his way among the intelligentsia of European émigrés,
growing interested in American society and politics and especially in the
ideas underlying the giant democracy that was now an economic, cul-
tural, and military superpower.
Strauss’ transition into American life would have been easier had
he been a staunch supporter of democracy. However, in his formative
years, he had spurned the weakness of the Weimar Republic and the
values of liberalism, Enlightenment, and democracy. This continued in
exile and developed into a political philosophy that encapsulated both a
defense of the regime that had taken him in and a rejection of its basic
elements.
This new worldview was deeply ambivalent at its core, combining a
strong distaste for democracy with a desire to protect it. Although drawn
to blatantly anti-liberal and counter-Enlightenment positions, Strauss
also acknowledged—at times explicitly, at other times in more subtle,
obscure ways—the problematic implications of this line of thinking for
politics and violence in the twentieth century. As a result, he developed
an anti-modern approach that despaired over the decline of the West
while seeking to cure Western philosophy of its intellectual poverty. The
land that gave Strauss shelter became a site of philosophical innovation: