Natural Right and History (Walgreen Foundation Lectures)

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Summary: A needed bit of classical thought for a modern age
Review: "Nature was discovered when man embarked on the fundamental distinctions between hearsay and seeing with one's own eyes, on the one hand, and between things made by man and things not made by man, on the other."

Strauss provides a powerful and scholarly work in his tracing the idea of natural right. Strauss explains the origins of natural right, classical natural right, modern natural right and more. He includes arguments against Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Burke, and Weber. The depth of thought may be too much for the common reader, I found it difficult to fully grasp all of Strauss's ideas myself, but it is well worth reading for anyone interested in natural law or the history of ideas.

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Summary: Hey Magneto comic book guy!
Review: How do you have the nerve to review a book that you admittedly DID NOT READ????

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Summary: Essential
Review: I first encountered this book in high school, spurred by my american history and american government teachers. It is therefore somewhat elitist to state that this will go over anyone's head. The ideas and the prose may be complex, but it just requires some patience. If it's worth it to you, you'll be able to read it.

Strauss gave these lectures to counter what then was called historicism, the position that, because conceptions of such things as freedom and right have been so varied throughout time, that because nobody has been able to agree on what right is, that right is relative to the time. The upshod of the arguement is then, since nothing can count as right definitively, there is no right. Strauss argues that historicism, by being another appearance in history, is subject to the same criticism (therefore interally inconsistent) and that even if nobody has been able to agree on "right" doesn't mean that there isn't any such thing, but because debate has been so heated on the subject, it is only all the more evident that there is such a thing such as right.

I may be a slightly biased source, but i've read my share of Levi-Strauss and Foucault. Sure, Strauss confines himself to political philosophy, but the larger issues are there. Postmodern thought is showing strains of its own now, and Strauss pointed them out before they realized they were postmodern. Essential reading for both camps.

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Summary: Too Convoluted
Review: I generally do not have a difficult time with complex books, but I had a terrible time understanding and reading this book. I stuck with it, and found I wasn't rewarded. The book's premise is that there are objective philosophical reasons, and upon this premise, one has to consider the validity of doing history the "old" way, rather than submit to historicism. After struggling with the text, I cannot admit I am persuaded by this book, and, in fact, think it naive in light of recent scholarship in both philosophy and history. For those who don't mind obfusication, this probably will be worthwhile reading; but for those of us who do, it was a labor of loss.

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Summary: The Most Important Book Of Our Time
Review: I have always been interested in American History and Political Philosophy. I never imagined that there could be a book more important for recapturing the lost soul of America than Bernard Bailyn's _Ideological Origins of the American Revolution_, but I a can honestly say that this is the book. Quite simply, I was blown away. It put natural right into perfect perspective for me.

The first time I heard of Leo Strauss, it was while reading Dionne's _Why Americans Hate Politics_. Strauss was mentioned as a major philosophical influence behind neoconservatism (the anti-communist liberals who believed in virtue and rebelled against the new left in the 1960s). Dionne mentioned Alan Bloom's _Closing of the American Mind_ as an important work directly influenced by Strauss. After reading _Closing_ (and I must say, being blown away by the truth of it) I knew that I had to read Strauss for myself.

Natural Right and History is everything I wanted it to be. It starts with the modern day rejection of natural right, and it's consequences. Historicism (as well as the value relativism inherent in the social sciences) are exposed for what they are; self contradictory. The book goes on to trace the origin of natural right, and even philosophy itself, by examining the moment that the first philosopher questioned authority and asked the question "what is good?" by nature, as opposed to "what is good?" by convention. From the ancients to the moderns, every step in the development of natural right is traced, and the crisis of modern natural right is analyzed in fine detail.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It should appeal to anyone with a vested interest in America, particularly those with an interest in political philosophy. Dionne, and others, may give credit to Strauss for giving conservatives credibility in intellectual circles, but make no mistake; Strauss himself rises far above partisanship. He is a philosopher in the truest sense.

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Summary: A "Biography" of Natural Right
Review: Now here's a puzzle. We have Leo Strauss, an obscure political philosopher of the 1950's at the University of Chicago. He primarily writes on ancient philosophers, such as Xenophon and Plato. Thirty years after his death, we find neoconservatives like Allan Bloom and Paul Wolfowitz saturated in the mainstream, apparently tutored under Strauss. What's the connection?

Amid the recent Leo Strauss craze, perpetuated by a largely sensationalist media blindly driven towards the holy grail of conspiracy theory, I decided to pick up Natural Right and History. While, obviously, one cannot ascertain his entire political message by merely one book, reading Natural Right and History helps obviate the connection.

Natural Right is a "biography" of the idea of natural right. Strauss traces the idea of natural right, from antiquity to modernity to postmodernity. In classic "Straussian" form, to understand the political implications of this book, you have to read painstakingly between the lines.

Strauss starts the book with a rather standard critique of historicism (historical relativism) and conventionalism. His argument against value relativism is very straight forward; hardly any social scientist today makes the claims that Strauss refutes. The new relativism is a more sophisitcated one, couched behind postmodernist word-games.

However, social science is largely built upon the theories of Max Weber. Thus, Strauss uses a reduction proof. If he can reduce social science to Weber, and if he can reduce Weber to historicism, then he can effectively show that the methodologies social science are fallacious, since he shows that historicism is false. Consequently he can show that a historicist understanding of natural right is also bunk. To be sure, this is an extremely risky strategy since the argument relies on a lengthy chain of reasoning.

Having attacked postmodern notions of natural right, Strauss restarts at antiquity and works his way up to modernity. Strauss shows the evolution of the idea of natural right, from "Socrates" to Plato to Aristotle to Hobbes to Locke to Rousseau to Burke.

So which conception of natural rights does Strauss believe in - the classical or the modern (enlightenment)? In short, he subscribes to the classical. Why? Succinctly, Strauss contends that natural right became doomed the second that Hobbes injected his hedonism into natural right.

A different way approach is to look at Strauss's juxtaposition of (classical vs modern) as (republicanism vs. liberalism). By liberalism, I mean classical liberal, i.e. enlightenment liberal. Classical liberalism is the view that individuals are prior to society. By republicanism, I do not mean anything related to the republican party. Republicanism means that individuals are willing to sacrifice their private interests to the public good, i.e. civic virtue. Republicanism means, in extremely superficial terms, that civil society is prior to the individual.

With that said, I totally disagree with Strauss's analysis, for more reasons I can delve into here. I think that the rights of classical liberalism, as Locke conceived it, is largely correct. However, Strauss plays a vital role in the ongoing conversation of rights in political science and philosophy. For producing a very challenging, thought-provoking analysis, this book gets 5 stars. Beware: it's not a light read!

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Summary: Magneto, where is your Professor X?
Review: The film of the X-Men begins with a horrific sequence where the young Eric Lenscher is separated from his parents. He's in Auschwitz and the Nazi goons are wiping out Jews. Lenscher survives and goes on to become Magneto, a leading mutant with super powers. He is an elitist and believes that mutants are the true inheritors of the Earth and that humans, all of whom lack super powers, should lick the boots of mutant kind. His reasoning is that humans will try to wipe out mutants, just like the Nazis tried to wipe out the Jews, so mutants had best try to wipe out humans.

I found his reasoning to be rather bizarre. It seemed to be that he was using Nazism agains Nazis, which, as far as the bottom line goes, is still Nazism. That the movie and the comic book are seriously popular I chocked up to people liking far-out stories without much intellectual foundation.

Then I heard about Strauss. I haven't read the man. I probably never will. There's too many other esoteric philosophers influenced by Heidegger for me to read that I find more congenial to my tastes. But he literally is Magneto. What was the lesson Strauss learned from Nazi death camps? That they were run by the wrong people. If the Nazi party had been run by Jews who love ancient Greek philosophy more than they love the Bible, Nazi Germany would have been A-OK.

And that seriously begs credulity.

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Summary: A digest of western thought that doesn't oversimplify
Review: This book contains a critique of modern relativism coupled with a historical investigation of the development of the idea of natural right. As moderns we consider our philosophical predecessors as caused by history rather than causing it. Strauss demolishes this view by giving a history of Western thought that explains the historical origin of the idea of natural right far better than those who treat all thought as historically limited.

Although Strauss writes "compactly" (he doesn't waste words in getting to the point), his book is quite revealing about the rationales for certain ancient, medieval, and modern political ideas. For those of us who usually find these ideas outlandish or even perverse, this book is extremely rewarding (contrary to another reviewer's vague suggestion). If you have trouble comprehending everything, consume the book in smaller bites. Those interested in the American founding, for instance, should probably concentrate on the chapter entitled "Modern Natural Right"; others may want to explore what political thought looked like before the rise of "science"; for that look at the chapter entitled "The Origin of the Idea of Natural Right". Etc. Etc.

This book is essential for anybody interested in getting a picture of the whole of Western (and even non-Western) thought, but who finds himself disenchanted with glib postmodernist glosses of what is a very complicated subject.