Theory, Practice, and Modernity: Leo Strauss on Rousseau's Epicureanism

Theory, Practice, and Modernity:Leo Strauss on Rousseau’s Epicureanism

Jared Holley

. . . the root of all modern darkness from the seventeenth centuryon is the obscuring of the difference between theory and praxis, anobscuring that first leads to a reduction of praxis to theory (this isthe meaning of so-called rationalism) and then, in retaliation, tothe rejection of theory in the name of praxis that is no longer intel-ligible as praxis.

—Leo Strauss, letter to Eric Voegelin, March 14, 19501

I. INTRODUCTION

Since at least the time of his death in 1974, commentators have debated thecontinuity of Leo Strauss’s work. His student Allan Bloom, for instance,

For helpful comments on earlier drafts, my sincere thanks to Duncan Kelly, Birte Loschen-kohl, Thomas Meier, Joseph Reisert, Nathan Tarcov, and Simon Taylor. I also benefittedfrom discussions with Chris Brooke, Sankar Muthu, Mike Sonenscher, and the partici-pants of both the Society of Fellows Workshop at the University of Chicago and the2014 Association for Political Theory Annual Conference. The article has been greatlyimproved by the criticisms offered by two anonymous reviewers, and the generous edito-rial support at the Journal of the History of Ideas.1 Leo Strauss, “Letter to Eric Voegelin, March 14, 1950,” in Faith and Political Philoso-phy: The Correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934–1964, trans. anded. Peter Emberley and Barry Cooper (University Park: Pennsylvania State UniversityPress, 1993), 66.

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JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2017

memorialized Strauss by characterizing his teacher’s oeuvre as “a unifiedand continuous, ever deepening, investigation into the meaning and possi-bility of philosophy.”2 More recently, Samuel Moyn has conversely arguedthat Strauss’s thinking underwent a turn “from experience to law,” andBenjamin Lazier has identified a “great shift from God to nature” overStrauss’s career.3 The consistency of Strauss’s reading of Jean-JacquesRousseau is similarly debated. While critical attention has been relativelylimited and mostly restricted to either his 1947 article “On the Intention ofRousseau” or the account of Rousseau in 1953’s Natural Right and History(NRH),4 those who first considered the pieces together tended to emphasizetheir inconsistency. Like Hilail Gildin, Heinrich Meier argued that Strauss’saim in NRH to narrate Rousseau’s position in the history of political phi-losophy served to obscure the conflict between the “well-ordered republicand philosophy” that Strauss had earlier revealed as Rousseau’s fundamen-tal concern.5 On the other hand, Jonathan Marks and Victor Gourevitchhave recently argued that Strauss’s reading is indeed consistent, in part bynoting both the concern with historical narrative in “Intention” and theimportance to NRH of the tension between philosophy and politics.6

This article argues that Strauss’s work is unified by an abiding concernwith the problem of theory and practice. It does so precisely by demonstra-ting the consistency of his reading of Rousseau as a modern Epicurean. It

2 Allan Bloom, “Leo Strauss: September 20, 1899–October 18, 1973,” Political Theory2, no. 4 (1974): 376.3 Samuel Moyn, “From Experience to Law: Leo Strauss and the Crisis of the Philosophyof Religion,” History of European Ideas 33 (2007): 174–94; Benjamin Lazier, God Inter-rupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2008), 111–26.4 Stephen B. Smith, “Strauss’s Rousseau and the Second Wave of Modernity,” The Art ofTheory: Conversations in Political Philosophy, http://www.artoftheory.com/strauss%E2%80%99s-rousseau-and-the-second-wave-of-modernity-steven-b-smith/; Robert Pip-pin, “The Modern World of Leo Strauss,” Political Theory 20, no. 3 (1992): 448–72;Celine Spector, Au prisme du Rousseau: Usages politiques contemporains (Oxford: Volta-ire Foundation, 2011), 73–101. The account in NRH is an expansion of a WalgreenLecture delivered in 1949.5 Heinrich Meier, “The History of Philosophy and the Intention of the Philosopher:Reflections on Leo Strauss,” in Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem,trans. Marcus Brainard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 67–69. Cf.Hilail Gildin, “A Note on Leo Strauss’s Interpretation of Rousseau,” Anastaplo Fest-schrift (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), 311–17.6 Victor Gourevitch, “On Strauss on Rousseau,” in The Challenge of Rousseau, ed. EveGrace and Christopher Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 147–67;Jonathan Marks, “Introduction,” in Strauss, Seminar in Political Philosophy: Rousseau,ed. Marks (Estate of Leo Strauss, 2014), i–xiv, https://leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/Rousseau%201962.pdf.

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Holley ✦ Leo Strauss on Rousseau’s Epicureanism

shows, first, that Epicureanism plays a foundational and structuring rolein the historical narrative of the collapse of the distinction between theoryand practice across Strauss’s oeuvre. Discussions of Strauss often empha-size one or more of the fundamental binary oppositions to which hefrequently appealed: reason/revelation, ancients/moderns, nature/artifice,Athens/Jerusalem. As we will see, his account of Epicureanism both in-forms and is informed by these distinctions, and grounds Strauss’s identi-fication of modern philosophy itself as modified Epicureanism. Second,this article shows that Strauss understood Rousseau’s ideas of the generalwill and the sentiment of existence to be instances of modern Epicureanismthat ultimately served to collapse the distinction between the practicaland the theoretical life. We will also see, moreover, that the binary opposi-tions he adduced in his analysis of Rousseau—science/society, philosophy/opinion, man/citizen—themselves resolve upon the tension between theoryand practice. Strauss’s concerns converge in the historicization of modernthought that unites his work and through which he attempted to restorethe classical distinction between theory and practice to the status of a prob-lem in modernity.

Strauss understood the relationship between theory and practice as a“problem” in two interrelated ways, and he related both to Epicureanism.The first concerns the existence of moral principles and the source of stan-dards for moral and political judgment. Epicurus famously argued, first,that while the gods do exist, they are unconcerned with human affairs; and,second, that justice is an artificial agreement between self-interested agents.7

It is in this sense that Strauss characterized modern Epicurean rejectionsof “transcendent” (eternal or divine) standards in favor of “immanent”(transitory or human) standards as subordinating theory to practice. Thesecond concerns the question of the most dignified form of life: the theoreti-cal life of contemplation (bios theoretikos) or the practical life of politicalengagement (bios politikos). The ancients, including Epicurus, answeredemphatically in favor of theory: politics is to be avoided as a source ofunnecessary psychological pain that distracts from the pleasure of philoso-phy, which is stable because grounded in eternal nature. But for Strauss, aswe shall see, the Epicurean motivation to peace of mind (ataraxia) under-went several “modifications” in the history of modern thought that ren-dered the question itself obscure.8 That is, by denying the existence of

7 For Epicurus’s arguments noted in this paragraph, see The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2vols., Volume 1: Translations of the Principal Sources, with Philosophical Commentary,ed. and trans. A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley (New York: Cambridge University Press,1987), 113–16, 125–26, 140, 154–56.8 Cp. Pierre Hadot, for whom precisely the persistence of the original motivation despite

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eternal principles, modern Epicureanism concealed the distinction andthereby denied even the possibility of the truly philosophical life.9 Straussafforded such great importance to Rousseau because he took no modernthinker to have considered as seriously or formulated more clearly the ques-tion of the theoretical versus the practical life. But Rousseau’s attempt torehabilitate theory ultimately failed, according to Strauss, because herejected teleological in favor of modern Epicurean natural philosophy.Rousseau’s standards of both political virtue and individual happiness, thegeneral will and the sentiment of existence, are for Strauss instances ofmodern Epicureanism that eventually served to collapse entirely the distinc-tion between theory and practice.

In this way, reconstructing his reading of Rousseau’s Epicureanismreciprocally elucidates Strauss’s abiding concern with theory and practice.Methodologically, that reconstruction proceeds by considering “Intention”and NRH in relation to a seminar Strauss led on Rousseau in 1962 at theUniversity of Chicago. Previously available only at the Mansueto Libraryarchives until their recent publication online by the Leo Strauss Center, theseminar transcripts helpfully clarify the treatment of Rousseau, Epicurean-ism, and theory and practice in Strauss’s published works. By makingexplicit the critical junctures in his arguments, they also provide a foilfor challenging the largely predominant views of Strauss’s work as discon-tinuous and of his reading of Rousseau as inconsistent. This article thusexemplifies the value of historicizing Strauss through consideration ofunpublished archival sources.

The article does not aim to evaluate the accuracy of Strauss’s readingof Rousseau’s Epicureanism; it suffices here simply to note its remarkableinfluence. To take but one illuminating example, Meier agrees with Straussthat Lucretius’s De rerum natura was the silent reference point for thesecond Discourse, citing Rousseau’s description of savage society as “laveritable jeunesse du Monde” as “the most unmistakable reference” toLucretius’s phrase novitas mundi.10 Gourevitch concurs, but hastens to addthat the allusion signals Rousseau’s disagreement with Lucretius that the“veritable youth of the world” was not the first but the second stage in the

modern theoretical variations suggests the possibility of recovering Epicureanism as apractical way of life: Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates toFoucault, trans. Arnold Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).9 Cp. Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle toMarx (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967).10 Meier, “The Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men: Onthe Intention of Rousseau’s Most Philosophic Work,” Interpretation 16, no. 2 (1988):214.

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history of mankind. He critiques Meier for his failure to recognize both thisvariation and, relatedly, the conjectural status of what Rousseau calls the“pure state of nature.” Moreover, he implies that this failure derives froman overemphasis on Rousseau’s “rhetorical” or esoteric intentions.11 Inso-far as Gourevitch extends these criticisms to Strauss (whom he elsewherefollows closely)12 a fulsome evaluation of Strauss’s reading would do wellto consider the implications of this disagreement.13

Considered most broadly, the article furthermore suggests how Straussmight be positioned in the intellectual history of the discipline of the historyof political thought. Contextualizing Strauss on Epicureanism via hisaccount of Rousseau demonstrates that his history of the history of politicalphilosophy was concerned from the outset with a critique of the directionof political ideas since seventeenth-century rationalism, a concern sharedby writers such as Michael Oakeshott and Carl Schmitt. Recognizing thissimilarity allows us to see Strauss as one of several twentieth-century histo-rians of political thought who rethought and revised their own disciplinaryhistory in order to show how that history might aid contemporary politicalcriticism. Like Schmitt, for instance, Strauss critiqued liberalism’s belief inthe power of unassisted human reason as an illusion and understood po-litical authority to be grounded ultimately on faith. Against Schmitt’sCatholic-inspired political theology, though, Strauss’s concern with theoryand practice informed the attention to medieval Jewish and Islamic thoughtin his own attempt “to clarify the modern understanding of the State in thelight of religious and political tradition.”14 In this sense, the article showsthat a strict separation between the history of political thought and politicaltheory is problematic in Strauss’s case, and perhaps more broadly.15

II. EPICUREANISM AND MODERNITY

. . . in Epicureanism a universal human motive for rebellionagainst religion finds its expression—the most universal human

11 Gourevitch, “Rousseau’s Pure State of Nature,” Interpretation 16, no. 1 (1988): 25,35, 39. Cp. Meier, “History and Intention,” 53, and Strauss, Seminar, 49.12 Cp. Gourevitch, “Rousseau on Providence,” Review of Metaphysics 53 (2000): 565–611, at 604–5, and Gourevitch, “Rousseau’s Pure State of Nature,” 24–25.13 Cf. William H. F. Altman, The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism(Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2011), 339–42, on the relation of “Intention” to theaccount of Rousseau in Strauss’s “German Nihilism,” eds. David Janssens, Daniel Tan-guay Interpretation 26, no. 3 (1999): 359–64.14 Strauss, “Unidentified Document,” in Leo Strauss Papers, box 3, folder 8, Special Col-lections Department, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.15 Cf., for example, Richard Rorty, “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,” in

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motive, which changes little, if at all, amid all the modificationsand developments in the evolution of human consciousness.

—Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion

Strauss’s first references to Epicureanism reflect the concerns of a youngman who, as he quoted Goethe in 1928, conceived of the “struggle betweenunbelief and belief” to be “the eternal and sole theme of the history of theworld and of man.”16 He would use this same quotation in a 1943 articlethat was republished while he was preparing the essay on Rousseau thatwould be published in NRH.17 As these dates indicate, the tension betweenreason and revelation as the source of moral values connects Strauss’s so-called early and late writings. This section investigates his Weimar writingsand shows both that Strauss’s discussions of Epicureanism stemmed fromhis reflections on reason and revelation, and that his treatment of reasonand revelation is itself based upon his abiding concern with theory andpractice. In this way, it demonstrates that Epicureanism plays a founda-tional and structuring role in the historical narrative of the collapse of thedistinction between theory and practice across Strauss’s oeuvre. Beforeturning to his early writings, however, it is important briefly to outlineStrauss’s account of the general will as marking a decisive moment in the“secular movement” of modernity. For Strauss, the appeal to an “imma-nent” rather than “transcendent” standard identifies Rousseau as a modernEpicurean who failed to uphold the distinction between theory and prac-tice.

In writing his history of modern thought, Strauss distinguished politi-cal philosophy from political theory and political science, both of whichyield merely “political knowledge” of a “given political situation.” By con-trast, political philosophy emerges from reflection on the “mixture of politi-cal knowledge and political opinion” characteristic of “political life,” andattempts through this reflection to replace those opinions in order “truly tounderstand the nature of political things,” including the ultimate standardsby which to judge the “good political order.”18 Strauss argued that modernpolitical thought had reached a crisis point: political philosophy had been

Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy, ed. Richard Rorty,J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984),49–76.16 Strauss, “Sigmund Freud, The Future of An Illusion,” in The Early Writings (1921–1932) [EW], trans. and ed. Michael Zank (New York: SUNY Press, 2002), 204.17 Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe: Free Press, 1952), 107.18 Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies [WIPP] (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1959), 10–17.

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subordinated to political science, which was unable to provide a stable nor-mative framework for political judgment.19 His classical conception ofpolitical philosophy’s dependence on and tension with political lifeinformed his understanding of this crisis as both theoretical and practical—that is, what was “primarily a crisis of modern political philosophy” wassimultaneously the “crisis of liberal democracy.”20 Indeed, Strauss tookpolitical philosophy’s practical value to lie precisely in its ability to defendreasonable policies against unreasonable or utopian thought.21 His attemptto restore classical political philosophy through a critical history of modernthought, then, was a critique of liberalism that sought to reveal its faultpoints so that liberal democracy might be defended against fascism andtotalitarianism as the least-worst political option available.

Strauss’s “Three Waves of Modernity” thesis of the degradation ofpolitical philosophy through the modern mode of thought initiated byMachiavelli, critiqued and continued by Rousseau, and finally culminatingin Nietzsche’s ushering in the “crisis of our times,” is well known.22 Ofinterest here is the convergence of Strauss’s concerns with theory and prac-tice and Epicureanism in his account of Rousseau in that history. Straussalways read Rousseau as a follower of Hobbes, and he analyzed their com-plicated relationship in terms of what he identified as modern “radicaliza-tions” of several aspects of Epicureanism. Moreover, he critiqued themodern Epicureanism shared by Hobbes and Rousseau precisely for itsreduction of the distinction between theory and practice. While it was onceremarked that the relationship between theory and practice is “one of themost conspicuous themes” of Strauss’s work,23 the only treatment of thattheme neglects its crucial connection to these foundational figures and theirplace in his critical history of modernity.24 Attending to Strauss’s view ofEpicureanism forcefully highlights this connection.25

19 Strauss, “Political Philosophy and the Crisis of Our Time,” in The Post-Behavioral Era:Perspectives on Political Science, ed. George J. Graham and George W. Carey (New York:McKay, 1972), 217.20 Strauss, “The Three Waves of Modernity,” in Strauss, An Introduction to PoliticalPhilosophy: Ten Essays, ed. Hilail Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,1989), 98.21 Strauss, “What Can We Learn from Political Theory?,” The Review of Politics 69, no.4 (2007): 515–29.22 Strauss, WIPP, 9–55.23 Christopher Colmo, “Theory and Practice: Alfarabi’s Plato Revisited,” American Polit-ical Science Review 86, no. 4 (1992): 966–76.24 Liisi Keedus, The Crisis of German Historicism: The Early Political Thought of Han-nah Arendt and Leo Strauss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 161–91.25 Despite his frequent references, there is only one treatment of Epicureanism in Strauss’swork and it does not discuss Rousseau: Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, “From Heresy to

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Rousseau initiated the “second wave” of modernity when, Strausswrote, he sought refuge from the concessions to practice that characterizedmodern political philosophy. Just as, we will see, Strauss’s Rousseau esoter-ically defended the interests of philosophy against its denigration by popu-lar enlightenment, so he sought to reverse the replacement of classical“virtue” by its corrupt modern form of “merely political virtue.” But Rous-seau’s wish for an objective moral ground and limit to political practicewas undermined by his having accepted the Epicurean foundation of allmodern political philosophy after Hobbes—self-preservation. For Strauss,Rousseau recognized that Hobbes’s updated Epicureanism rendered impos-sible the appeal to objective standards in practice: the general will was,therefore, Rousseau’s attempt to solve the problem of theory and practice.Ironically, it could only do so by way of a total capitulation to practice.The general will, on Strauss’s account, was decisive for subsequent attemptsto “guarantee the necessary coincidence of the rational and the real, or toget rid of that which essentially transcends every possible human reality.”26

That is, by creating an “immanent” or conventional standard of moraljudgment, the general will continued what Strauss considered the modernEpicurean assault on “transcendent” or objective limits to political practiceand, thereby, obscured the very distinction between theory and practice.

Strauss understood Rousseau’s general will as a species of Epicurean-ism in part because it reduced the foundation of justice to the basic survivalneeds of the individual.27 But his first engagement with Epicureanismoccurred in a discussion of Jewish philosophy and the erosion of the Jewishtradition in the aftermath of the Enlightenment critique of religion. Discuss-ing the defense of the tradition against this European attack in his 1924piece “On the Argument with European Science,” Strauss instructed hisOrthodox readers to refrain from using a “polemic” that had become obso-lete, for “what happened in the nineteenth century was anything but api-korsut, ‘Epicureanism’ in the literal sense.”28 Strauss was referring to thecommon Orthodox practice of branding unbelievers Epicureans, a contro-versy revealing the origins of one of the Hebrew words for heretic (api-korus) and that for heresy (apikorsut).29 While Strauss was always careful

Nature: Leo Strauss’s History of Modern Epicureanism,” in Dynamic Reading: Studies inthe Reception of Epicureanism, ed. Brooke Holmes and W. H. Shearin (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2012), 267–302.26 Strauss, WIPP, 51.27 Strauss, “On the Intention of Rousseau,” Social Research 14, no. 4 (1947): 481–82.28 Strauss, “On the Argument with European Science,” in The Early Writings (1921–1932) [EW], trans. and ed. Michael Zank (New York: SUNY Press, 2002), 108.29 Lazier, God Interrupted, 101–10.

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to explain that “modern unbelief is indeed no longer Epicurean,” he latercelebrated his choice here to deploy “Epicurean” for having, despite itsphilosophical inaccuracy, forced recognition that the “antagonism . . .between unbelief and belief, is ultimately not theoretical but moral.”30

The methodological presupposition that theoretical reflection isimpelled by a basic practical “motive” is fundamental for Strauss; it wouldinform his interpretation of Rousseau, and it issued from his political-theological predicament.31 As a young Zionist in the twenties, he sought todescribe historically the philosophical response to the Enlightenment cri-tique of religion in order to prevent Jewish defenders of the faith from utter-ing an obsolete polemic that obstructed engagement with “the essentialcause of the defection from tradition.” And the historical story Strauss toldto explain this transformation anticipates what we have just seen on offerin his later writings. “On the Argument with European Science” centeredon the decisive intervention of Kant, claiming that Kant’s assertion of thereligious a priori had eroded the fundamental distinction between faithand reason that had effectively governed theological arguments in the En-lightenment. The post-Kantian “intellectual situation” was therefore “fun-damentally different” than all those previous, for then “the problem oftheology had to be posed anew, as one that could be dealt with scientifi-cally.”32

This understanding of Kant’s importance for modern religious philoso-phy and theology was widespread in Strauss’s context, and he celebratedcontemporary thinkers such as Rudolf Otto who strove to limit the rationalelement in religion by emphasizing the primacy of God rather than throughthe recourse to irrational experience typical of Weimar theology.33 In both“European Science” and a 1923 review of Otto’s The Holy, Strauss wasalso occupied by the thought of the Marburg neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen,whose theology Strauss claimed was “fruitful” because it left “on their ownplane” the dogmas of the Jewish tradition. That is, by not reducing religionto science Cohen’s work retained the fundamental distinction between faithand reason.34 Through his engagement with Otto and Cohen, then, Straussdeveloped his view of the conflict between the supra-rationality of revealed

30 Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion [SCR], trans. E. M. Sinclair (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1965), 29.31 See Stephen Benjamin Smith, “Leo Strauss’s Discovery of the Theologico-Political Prob-lem,” European Journal of Political Theory 12 (2013): 388–408.32 Strauss, “European Science,” 108–9.33 Strauss, “The Holy,” in EW, 75–78.34 Strauss, “European Science,” 110.

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religion and the truth of reason that he would take to his first extensiveresearch project on Spinoza.

Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (SCR) of 1930 presents an analysis ofSpinoza within a historical narrative of the “tradition” of the critique ofreligion in which Epicureanism plays a foundational and structuring role.35

In both an early summary and in its final form, Strauss’s discussion of Epi-cureanism is based on the aforementioned distinction between “theory”and “motive” characteristic of his work. This distinction furnished Strausswith the conceptual apparatus with which to discuss Epicureanism as akind of modified Weberian ideal type, stemming from an essentialized moti-vation that was identifiable by careful examination of Epicurus’s ownwritings. This motive and these writings provided inherent standards ofjudgment against which any of Epicureanism’s subsequent historical mani-festations could be judged.36 Thus, Epicurus’s theories are simply the thera-peutic means to fulfill his fundamental motive of providing peace of mindand lack of fear. And while Epicurus’s motive was independent of his theo-ries, the prevalence of fear-inducing theologies meant that Epicurus alonetook criticism of religion to be the “fulfillment of his intent.” Strauss’s insis-tence on the essential derivation of theoretical activity from practical moti-vation led him to conclude that “in Epicureanism a universal human motivefor rebellion against religion finds its expression—the most universalhuman motive, which changes little, if at all, amid all the modifications anddevelopments in the evolution of human consciousness.”37 Armed with thisunderstanding of Epicureanism, Strauss could write, “we may take Democ-ritus as the originator of the theory on which, as on a foundation, the theo-ries of Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume, Holbach, Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Marxtake their stand to characterize and define a great tradition which extendsinto the present.”38 This analysis permitted Strauss to identify the Epicureanmotive as the essential motive underlying all subsequent developments inmodern philosophy: from Machiavelli and Hobbes, through Rousseau andromanticism to Heidegger, Epicureanism is the theoretical manifestation ofthe original practical motivation to secure peace of mind and lack of fear.

35 Cf. Gerhard Kruger, “Leo Strauss’ Die Religionskritik Spinozas,” Independent Journalof Philosophy 5–6 (1988): 173–75.36 For Strauss on Weber and nihilism, see Strauss, Natural Right and History [NRH](Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 35–80, and Strauss, “A Giving ofAccounts,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures inModern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: SUNY Press: 1997), 461.37 Strauss, SCR, 42.38 Ibid., 41, 42, 45.

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There is nothing remarkable about Strauss’s presentation of Epicurus’stheories; however, he emphasized three points crucial for his later historicalnarrative. Epicurus’s critique of religion is said, first, to privilege “security”over “purity” of pleasure; second, to privilege past over future pleasure asmost secure, and third, to identify the “intent” of “science” as the elimina-tion of fear of future pains inimical to securing present pleasure. Thesethree points converge in Strauss’s definition of the essential motivation ofthe Epicurean-type of critique of religion as life in tranquility and absenceof fear. In modernity, this Epicurean motive underwent a decisive “fusion”and “transformation”: with Uriel da Costa, the “authentic” Epicurean con-cern was generalized from an interest in individual to social peace, andreligion was rejected because it awakens false hope; with Isaac de la Pey-rere, belief in man’s original perfection is replaced by a vision of man asreliant on labor, culture, and progress; but the connection between thesethree characteristics of the modern critique of religion was given decisivearticulation by Hobbes. Spinoza, Strauss wrote, was “incomparably closer”than his predecessors to “original Epicureanism” because he upheld theclassical notion whereby science and critique of religion are the means toattaining beatitudo, a “stable condition complete in itself.” And while Epi-cureanism recedes from Strauss’s analysis of Spinoza’s political theory, theEpicurean and Christian traditions that became manifest in Spinoza’s cri-tique of Jewish revelation are said by Strauss to have the same “interestcharacteristic of the Enlightenment in general”—namely, the Epicureaninterest in “security and alleviation of the ills of life.”39

The path from Spinoza to Enlightenment is only briefly outlined inSCR. There, it was for Strauss the “convergence” of the “animalism” ofEpicureanism and the “pessimism” of Augustinian Christianity that facili-tated the early modern “rejection” of Stoicism. This convergence foundits greatest manifestation in La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, which marked a“basic departure from the original motive” but nevertheless ensured thatthe Epicurean “concern” and “concept” remained, even in 1928, “stilleffective in the modern physiology of mental life.”40 The Enlightenmentmarked both a return to and a shift from Epicureanism, as Strauss wrote,repeating his analysis from SCR in 1935’s Philosophy and Law, for Epicu-reanism underwent a “fundamental transformation” in the Enlightenmentin which the guiding motivation was generalized from that of internal psy-chological tranquility to external social peace. Thus, though there was a

39 Ibid., 39–40, 47–48, 53–85, 86, 88–90, 209, 210.40 Ibid., 50.

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“turn from Epicureanism to Enlightenment,” it was also true that “the Epi-curean critique is the foundation, or rather the foreground, of the Enlight-enment.”41 In this way, Epicureanism provided the foundation andstructure of the larger historical narrative in both texts: just as in SCR Epi-cureanism refers not to “the teachings of a philosophic school as handeddown to us, but the original inclination of the heart which found its classi-cal expression in the philosophy of Epicurus,” so in Philosophy and Lawthe “Epicurean” became the early modern “idealist” and finally the modern“atheist.”42 Strauss’s self-described “reorientation” toward premodernthought, then, occurred within the framework of “the political-theologicalproblem” that, he insisted, remained continuously “the theme of my inves-tigations.”43 As we have seen, this theme itself stemmed from his concernwith the problem of theory and practice, and he approached both by chart-ing the history of the transformation of Epicureanism in modernity.

III. ROUSSEAU’S EPICUREANISM

. . . there is a[n] . . . element which is not rhetorically presented,also not so frequently stated, but which gives us for this very rea-son perhaps a better entrance into Rousseau’s thought, and this ishis agreement in principle with Hobbes. Regarding the fundamen-tal issues of natural law, he agrees with Hobbes against the tradi-tion . . . I myself find that if I start from that I can find my bearingsin his thought.

—Strauss, Seminar in Political Philosophy: Rousseau

Strauss articulated the relationship between the problem of theory andpractice and what he took to be Rousseau’s Epicureanism most explicitlyin his last recorded statements on Rousseau. In the autumn quarter of 1962,Strauss dedicated his seminar in political philosophy at the University ofChicago to discussion of Rousseau’s Emile—a text on which he never pub-lished. As we will see, the seminar’s references to Epicureanism are bothconsistent with and a valuable elaboration on the accounts of Rousseau,

41 Strauss, Philosophy and Law: Essays toward the Understanding of Maimonides andHis Predecessors, trans. Fred Bauman (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1987),16–17.42 Strauss, SCR, 51; ibid., 18.43 Strauss, SCR, 31; Strauss, “Preface to Hobbes’ Politische Wissenschaft,” Interpretation8 (1979): 1.

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Epicureanism, and theory and practice from Strauss’s published works. Inparticular, as the epigraph to this section shows, Strauss made abundantlyclear that his interpretation of Rousseau is in many ways an interpretationof Rousseau’s complicated relationship to Hobbes. As we have seen, whileStrauss’s primary interest was in Rousseau’s direct relationship to Hobbes,he consistently analyzed and presented it in terms of their shared indirectrelationship to Epicureanism.

The three waves thesis outlined above first appeared in nascent formsome twenty years earlier in Strauss’s The Political Philosophy of Hobbes.As he articulated it in 1932, his turn to Hobbes had been motivated by thetheoretical and practical crisis of liberalism that he saw as crippling modernGerman politics under Weimar. He then identified Hobbes as the “founderof liberalism” because his work contained the “characteristic presupposi-tions and claims” of liberal political philosophy, and he identified “aboveall—his critique of religion” as the fundamental liberal presupposition. Pre-cisely because he was its founder, it was necessary to “return to Hobbes”in order to provide either a defense or a critique of liberalism.44 Strauss hadalso identified Hobbes as the founder of liberalism in his 1932 review ofSchmitt’s The Concept of the Political, in which he discerned precisely sucha return to Hobbes. There, however, Strauss argued that the historical pathto modern liberalism had been paved not by Hobbes’s critique of religionbut, rather, by his notion of natural right: “the right to securing life pureand simple” as the specific claim of an individual that “takes precedenceover the state and determines its limits.”45 For Strauss, then, the critique ofreligion and the priority of right over law in Hobbes were the two funda-mental aspects of liberalism, and he understood each as theoretical manifes-tations of the Epicurean motivation toward tranquility and lack of fear.

Strauss presented Hobbes’s turn from natural law to natural right asthe foundation of modern liberalism most forcefully in 1934. Anticipatinghis three waves thesis, Strauss wrote in the introduction to his Hobbesbook: “the moral philosophy, not merely of eighteenth-century rationalism,but also of Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, would not have been possible with-out Hobbes’ work.”46 Both his unique “recognition of the full significance

44 Strauss, “Some Notes on the Political Science of Hobbes,” in Strauss, Hobbes’s Critiqueof Religion and Related Writings, trans. and ed. Gabriel Bartlett and Svetozar Minkov(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 122.45 Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political,” in Heinrich Meier,Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1995), 91–92.46 Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, trans. E. M.Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 1.

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of the idea of sovereignty” and his elevation of right over law were, Straussconcluded, dependent upon Hobbes’s break with seventeenth-centuryrationalism. From Hobbes’s founding of political society not on individualreason but rather on individual will, there was “only a step . . . to Rous-seau’s theory that the origin and seat of sovereignty is la volonte generale.”Hobbes’s break with rationalism—his “emancipation of passion and theimagination”—was clarified by Rousseau’s general will, thus paving theway for later ideas of the “folk-mind” and “class-consciousness.” Likewise,Hobbes’s denial of “courage” as a fundamental virtue led through Rous-seau, Hegel, and Nietzsche to “relativist skepticism” and culminated in“the view that the ideal is not the object of wisdom, but the hazardousventure of the will.”47 The move from law to right, wisdom to will, is forStrauss a move from theory to practice. And, as indicated here, his readingof Hobbes’s relationship to Epicureanism provided Strauss with the basisof his reading of Rousseau.48

This argument—that Rousseau essentially picked up on Hobbes’sinnovations and clarified them with his idea of the general will—receivedfurther development in NRH.49 And crucially, Strauss there characterizedthose innovations as modifications of several aspects of Epicureanism. Thefirst of these he termed “conventionalism,” the belief that “it is just to dowhat the law commands or that the just is identical with the legal, i.e.,with what human beings establish as legal or agree to regard as legal.”50

Epicureanism had been the most influential form of conventionalism pre-cisely because of its foundation in two other aspects, hedonism and materi-alism: the premises that, first, “the good is identical with the pleasant” and,second, that “the primary pleasure is the pleasure of the body.” Hedonismand materialism culminate in the Epicurean rejection of the Aristoteliandefinition of man as zoon politikon: the assertion that “everyone seeks bynature only his own good; all concern with other people’s good is deriva-tive,” or the denial of natural sociability.51 Hobbes’s fundamental innova-tion was to “politicize” these fundamentally “a-political” or “a-social”premises of Epicureanism by attempting to “instill the spirit of politicalidealism into the hedonistic tradition.” That is, Hobbes “accepted on faith”

47 Ibid., 159–65.48 Cf. Strauss, “German Nihilism,” and Altman, “Strauss on ‘German Nihilism’: Learningthe Art of Writing,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68, no. 4 (2007): 587–612.49 A similar summary of NRH appears in Jared Holley, “ ‘In verba magistri’? AssessingRousseau’s Classicism Today,” in “Rousseau’s Imagined Antiquity,” special issue, His-tory of Political Thought 37 (2016): 64–87.50 Strauss, NRH, 100.51 Ibid., 108, 109.

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the inherent value of political philosophy, the dedication “to the concernwith the right order of society as with something that is choiceworthy forits own sake.” In doing so, he created what Strauss called “political hedo-nism,” the “doctrine which has revolutionized human life everywhere on ascale never yet approached by any other teaching.”52

It is important here to note that Strauss emphasized what he saw as theinextricable connection between Epicureanism’s denial of natural sociabil-ity and its denial of revelation. Indeed, immediately following his introduc-tion of political hedonism, Strauss noted that it “belong[s] together” withthe “distinctly modern phenomenon” of “political atheism.” The connec-tion between these two modern modifications of Epicureanism ultimatelyderived from a third—namely, Hobbes’s mechanistic natural philosophy.Hobbes’s entire philosophy, Strauss wrote, “may be said to be the classicexample of the typically modern combination of political idealism with amaterialistic and atheistic view of the whole.”53 Again in anticipation of histhree waves thesis, Strauss presented the modern fusion of “Platonism” and“Epicureanism,” idealism and materialism, in Hobbes’s political philoso-phy as passing through Rousseau to German idealism. Thus, quoting Hegel,he wrote: “The connection between the developed form of ‘the philosophyof freedom’, i.e., German idealism, and Rousseau, and hence Hobbes, wasrealized by no one more clearly than by Hegel. Hegel noted the kinshipbetween Kant’s and Fichte’s idealism and the ‘anti-socialistic systems ofnatural right’, i.e., those natural right doctrines which deny man’s naturalsociality and ‘posit the being of the individual as the first and highestthing’.”54

Just as later in the three waves thesis, so here in the grand historicalnarrative of NRH Rousseau provides the conduit through which Epicure-anism is transformed into German historicism. Strauss argued that Rous-seau followed Hobbes’s Epicurean denial of innate sociability and thusconvinced his subsequent German readers that “man’s humanity is theproduct of the historical process.” Strauss’s own attempt to reassert thetheoretical possibility of classical natural right was conducted against whathe took to be the modern “dogma” of historicism, especially its “radical”guise in “existentialist” theology. Strauss’s NRH thus presents a dialecticalnarrative wherein Epicurean materialism, hedonism, and conventionalismare manifest in Hobbes’s denial of both revelation and innate sociability, a

52 Ibid., 168–69.53 Ibid., 93–94, 150, 169–70.54 Ibid., 279.

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package that is transmitted via Rousseau to German idealism and histori-cism, and culminates in modern nihilism and existentialism.55

The first two direct references to Rousseau’s Epicureanism in the semi-nar reproduce this earlier account of Rousseau’s modern or “modified”Epicureanism. In NRH, Strauss noted that, while the “history of man” inthe second Discourse was “modeled” on that given in book five of Lucre-tius’s poem De rerum natura, Rousseau modified his model by transposingit from its “Epicurean context” into that “supplied by modern natural andsocial science.”56 Thus in the seminar he emphasized that the second Dis-course contains an “implicit polemics” against Lucretius: though Rous-seau’s account is consistent with the Epicurean claim that “man is notcreated but had nevertheless a beginning,” he modified his source by adopt-ing the “evolutionary” account of the genesis of reason characteristic ofmodern natural science. Moreover, Rousseau’s praise of pre-political soci-ety is also presented as a modification of that found in Lucretius. For theEpicureans, Strauss noted in the seminar, such praise is related to a commit-ted apolitical stance, a critique of “political society as such” and a celebra-tion of the life of “retirement.” But Rousseau’s praise was impelled by adifferent “motive”—namely, to reject, on the one hand, the biblical accountof man’s origins and fall, and, on the other, the “argument taken fromnatural theology as it was emerging in Rousseau’s time,” which remained a“providential” account. Aside from the reference to natural theology, thisaccount repeats the opposition in NRH between Lucretius, who had“described the fate of the human race in order to show that that fate canbe perfectly understood without recourse to divine activity,” and Rousseau,who “tells the story of man in order to discover that political order that isin accordance with natural right.” Thus in the seminar, Rousseau is said tohave modified Epicureanism, like Hobbes before him, in such a way ascould be consistent with his being “a political philosopher.”57

Strauss’s reading of Rousseau as having followed Hobbes’s Epicureandenial of innate sociability is given further elaboration in the seminar. InNRH, Rousseau is presented as agreeing with Hobbes that life in the stateof nature is “characterized by the absence not only of society but even ofsociability.” In the seminar discussion of a lengthy passage from Plutarch’s“Of the Eating of the Flesh” that Rousseau excerpted in book two of Emile,Strauss emphasized the presentation of “the first men” as “savages and

55 Ibid., 14–15, 274, 32.56 Ibid., 264, 111–12.57 Cp. ibid., 266, 279; Strauss, Seminar, 49–51, 77–78.

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cruel, [who] lived in misery, and were compelled to become cannibals.”For Strauss, the inclusion of this passage constituted a “retraction” of the“official” teaching of the second Discourse, which had been based onLucretius—namely, that the first men were also the happiest. Rousseau“entrusted” this retraction to Plutarch—who unlike Lucretius was a “quot-able author”—and in doing so announced in no uncertain terms his agree-ment with Hobbes that life in the state of nature was indeed nasty, brutish,and short.58 In both NRH and the seminar, then, Rousseau’s attempt toconstruct a viable political philosophy on the basis of the denial of naturalsociability marks him as a political hedonist, a modern Epicurean. And ifStrauss’s primary interest was in Rousseau’s direct relationship to Hobbes,he consistently analyzed and presented that relationship in terms of theirshared indirect relationship to Epicureanism.

For Strauss, however, Rousseau’s status as a modern Epicurean is notreducible to his agreement with Hobbes on the fundamental issues of natu-ral law. Indeed, the seminar transcripts also elucidate the Epicurean dimen-sion of what Strauss had previously identified in “Intention” as Rousseau’s“central theme”—the relationship between theory and practice.59 Helpfullyelaborating on an argument from NRH, Strauss addressed Rousseau’s“sentiment of existence” and its being “incompatible with activity” in areply to a student’s query concerning the potential parallel with Lucretius’sfamous image of the philosopher as a spectator on a cliff observing a ship-wreck. While he acknowledged “a certain kinship,” Strauss emphasizedthat “the general point is the theoretical life and the practical life.” ForStrauss, Rousseau followed the ancients in upholding the primacy of theoryover practice; however, he “replaced” the characteristic activity of the theo-retical life—contemplation—with that of the undisturbed experience of“the sentiment of existence.” And this replacement is for Strauss furtherevidence of what he identified in 1947 as the fundamental tension in Rous-seau’s thought: his attempt to return to classical thought on the basis of thecharacteristic presuppositions of modernity. On a classical view such asthat of Epicurus, the theoretical life is directed to an objective standard:“the truth, and the truth is the most common good . . . something radicallynon-private.” The sentiment of existence, conversely, “is emphatically pri-vate . . . rooted in my feeling of my existence.”60 Of course, Strauss notes,the very concept of the sentiment of existence itself demonstrates that Rous-seau was attempting to break with his modern predecessors—Hobbes and

58 Strauss, Seminar, 192–94; NRH, 266.59 Strauss, “Intention,” 478.60 Strauss, Seminar, 432; my emphases. Cf. NRH, 291–92.

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Locke—who saw no need even to search for such a “substitute” for theancient notion of contemplation.

Strauss’s concern with the tension between the theoretical and thepractical life structured his engagement with Rousseau from the start.“Intention” is framed by his familiar historical narrative, placing Rousseauin the position he would later call the second wave of modernity and includ-ing for the first time Machiavelli as the cofounder of modernity withHobbes.61 The argument is presented as a critical engagement with the viewthat Rousseau’s first Discourse was intended to convey “only that sciencemust not be preferred to, or made independent of morality,” a view that,for Strauss, led “directly to Kant’s assertion of the primacy of practicalreason.” Instead, Strauss advances the thesis that Rousseau’s true teachingwas that “science is bad, not absolutely, but only for the people or forsociety; it is good, or even necessary, for the few among whom Rousseaucounts himself.” And this view led, rather, to the primacy of “theoreticalreason.”62 Moreover, Strauss combatted the former, “Kantian” misreadingof Rousseau through recourse to his own hermeneutic of esoteric writing,presenting the first Discourse as an esoteric work in which Rousseau“entrusted” two “contradictory theses” to two “different characters” ad-dressing “two different audiences.”63 For Strauss, Rousseau concealedthat his attack on the practical orientation of modern philosophy was con-ducted “in the interest of philosophy” because he, like all esoteric philoso-phers, recognized clearly the irreducible tension between theory andpractice.64

The essential premise of that tension, according to Strauss, is that“opinion is the element of society.”65 Philosophy and politics, science andsociety, theory and practice are “incompatible” for at least two interrelatedreasons. In the first place, political life is concerned with the “needs of thebody,” whereas the philosophical life satisfies the “needs of the mind.”Because intellectual needs are not needs properly so-called, their pursuitthreatens society as a potential distraction from its primary end. In the sec-ond place, science threatens society because, as discussed above, philosophy

61 Strauss, “Intention,” 456–60, 462. Cp. Meier, “History of Philosophy,” and Gildin,“Interpretation of Rousseau.”62 Ibid., 465, 482.63 Ibid., 463–66, esp. 466n37. Cf. Strauss, “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” SocialResearch 8, no. 1 (1941): 30, 36.64 Ibid., 468n41. Cf. Strauss, “On a Forgotten Kind of Writing,” Chicago Review 8, no.1 (1954): 64.65 Cf. Laurence Lampert, “Strauss’s Recovery of Esotericism,” in The Cambridge Com-panion to Leo Strauss, ed. Stephen B. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2009), 63–92.

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is the attempt to replace the conventional opinions on which the mainte-nance of social order depends. As Strauss emphasized, even to hold such aview requires that one uphold, like Rousseau, that philosophy is, minimally,“a human possibility” and, maximally, “the highest human possibility.”And precisely its concern with intellectual rather than physical needs revealsthat philosophy is both radically “free” and thus of a “higher dignity” thanpolitics.66 One might suspect that this position casts doubt on the status ofRousseau’s teaching as a political philosophy. But the essence of that teach-ing, Strauss argues, demonstrates precisely that the problem of theory andpractice “can only be stated by political philosophy; it cannot be solved byit.” Where Rousseau resided comfortably in theoretical aporia, the “nextgeneration” rejected Rousseau’s “theoretical premise”—the “primacy oftheoretical reason”—and adopted his “practical solution”—the “primacyof conscience or of sentiment and tradition.”67 This “romantic solution,”Strauss insisted, necessarily culminated in the collapse of theory into prac-tice through the integration of philosophy into “culture” characteristic ofmodern liberalism.68

As its title indicates, Strauss is rather more concerned in “Intention”with Rousseau’s own thought than with the implications of its later recep-tion. Perhaps for this reason, whereas in the seminar he emphasizes thesentiment of existence, in “Intention” Strauss appeals instead to man’s nat-ural “goodness” as the essential contrast to the political “virtue” of thecitizen. Like the sentiment of existence, natural goodness is opposed topractical activity, attending only to those who are “self-sufficient and henceabsolutely happy.” Strauss notes that the natural goodness of “the manwho is good and at the same time wise” is not “merely passive.” But wherein the seminar the experience of the sentiment of existence is said to“replace” the theoretical life, in “Intention” Strauss described the “contem-platif solitaire” as finding enjoyment in the philosophical life of “pure anddisinterested contemplation.” Rather than presenting him as ironicallyobscuring the difference between theory and practice, then, “Intention”puts forth the strongest case for viewing Rousseau as a philosopher writingin defense of philosophy.69 Its concluding note concerning Rousseau’s“fateful combination” of the Machiavellian lowering of moral standardswith “the moral pathos of ‘sincerity’ ” was, however, elaborated in NRH

66 Strauss, “Intention,” 465–68, 473.67 For Strauss’s understanding of aporia, see Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: Univer-sity of Chicago Press, 1978), 105.68 Ibid., 479–83.69 Ibid., 475–77, 487.

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in such a way as to anticipate the seminar. There, Strauss argues that Rous-seau’s appeal to the sentiment of existence served to replace “the philoso-pher . . . with what later came to be called the ‘artist’ ” as the model ofindividual human happiness.70 The potential significance of this differencemight be tempered by noting its harmony with Strauss’s much earlier claimthat it is “not a matter of chance, that la volonte generale and aestheticswere launched at approximately the same time.”71

For Strauss, what he called the “characteristic activity” of both thephilosopher and the artist is fundamentally Epicurean because it stands ata radical remove from politics. Moreover, according to Strauss in the semi-nar, Rousseau understood the end to which their activity is directed, indi-vidual happiness, as a further instance of Epicureanism. “Our unhappinessconsists,” Rousseau wrote in book two of Emile, “in the disproportionbetween our desires and our faculties.” One remedy for such disproportion,Strauss noted, was that offered by “Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and theEpicureans”: “limit your desires; otherwise, you will always be unhappy.”Rousseau famously rejected this classical therapy because simply to limitour desires would be to leave some of “our faculties idle, and we wouldnot enjoy our whole being.” While Rousseau thus “starts from a [modern]Hobbesian basis”—man is miserable, unsociable, and ever more desirous—he rejects the Hobbesian conclusion that happiness as a steady state isimpossible. And he does so by reverting to what Strauss called a “qualified”teleology, which left the content of happiness indefinite: for Rousseau, hap-piness was “only a negative condition” consisting of “the smallest numberof ills.” Crucially, Strauss identified this qualified teleology as “the vulgarunderstanding of Epicureanism: pleasure is the absence of pain—nothingpositive.”72

When Strauss addressed the obverse of vulgar Epicureanism in twoseminar discussions of Rousseau’s account of “taste,” he crucially con-nected what he called Rousseau’s “refined Epicureanism” directly to theproblem of theory and practice.73 The fundamental distinction throughwhich Emile must be read, he instructed, is that between “man and citizen,”opposing ideals that are supposed by Rousseau to be “reconciled” through

70 Cp. ibid., 487, with NRH, 292–93.71 Strauss, Hobbes, 161n2. Cf. Michael Sonenscher, “Sociability, Perfectibility and theIntellectual Legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” History of European Ideas 41, no. 5(2015): 17.72 Strauss, Seminar, 120–26.73 This is Rousseau’s own terminology: Rousseau, Julie, ou la nouvelle Heloıse, in Oeu-vres completes (Paris: Pleiade, 1964), 2:18–20. Cp. Gourevitch, “Rousseau on Provi-dence.”

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the religious teachings of the Savoyard Vicar. And Strauss placed greatemphasis on the two different “moral teachings” surrounding the Profes-sion: preceding it, the generalization of compassion; following it, taste, orrefined Epicureanism—“voluptuousness, but genuine pleasure, not [the]pleasures of vanity.” Strauss was emphatic that the man/citizen binary isbut part of the more fundamental opposition between “the two ways of lifewhich can compete for the highest rank; the theoretical and the politicallife.” Rousseau inherited both this structuring problematic and his responseto it from the ancients: like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—and indeedEpicurus—he concluded that the theoretical life is of greater dignity thanthe practical. But as we have seen, that response was for Strauss also afundamental divergence from the classical tradition: for “what constitutesthe essence of the theoretical life, or the peak of the theoretical life,” whilestill remaining “absolutely beyond the practical political life,” is for Rous-seau the sentiment of existence. And the sentiment of existence effectivelycollapses the distinction between theory and practice because it rejects or atleast modifies classical teleological natural philosophy: it is a model withoutcontent, only to be filled in by the subjective feeling of the individual.

The final use of “refined Epicureanism” in the seminar contains, likemuch of Strauss’s work, a provocation to further investigation. As Straussexplained, Rousseau’s treatment of the theory/practice problem assumes, asdo those of Plato and Aristotle, that “the theoretical life proper, the intellec-tual activities, are surely not sufficient.” Rather, what Strauss called the“sub-theoretical soul . . . the place of the moral virtues, must be properlycultivated.” Expanding suggestively on his previous discussion of compas-sion and taste, Strauss said:

[Rousseau presents here] two alternatives which are perhaps notalternatives, but meant to be supplementary: generalized compas-sion, [and] taste. Now, since compassion is . . . exclusively at homewithin human relations, whereas taste also refers to other things—for example, furniture—the two things are not identical, cannotpossibly cover the same sphere. But they could be compatible; theycould be compatible. But perhaps that would also need an investi-gation, whether they are not really exclusive and yet are both pos-sible as the substructure of the theoretical life.

For Strauss, then, Rousseau’s Epicureanism is evident in his identificationof both the virtue of the good citizen and the happiness of the good man:the general will, the sentiment of existence, pity, and taste are grounded not

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in an objective standard like wisdom but, rather, in the hazardous, subjec-tive venture of the will.74

IV. CONCLUSION

Strauss’s most direct discussion of theory and practice in modernity help-fully elaborates the critique of rationalism quoted as the epigraph to thisarticle. Following his account of Rousseau in NRH, Strauss identified themost important aspect of Edmund Burke’s work as the treatment of “theproblem of theory and practice.” Even more than the substantive moralityof the French Revolution, Burke opposed the “intrusion” of “theory intothe field of practice” on which it was based. But, in Strauss’s estimation,Burke’s attempt to rehabilitate the traditional distinction between theoryand practice obscured by modern rationalism failed for two reasons. First,like Rousseau, he accepted modern “Epicurean physics.” Second, unlikeRousseau, he fell victim to the “delusion” that the distinction might beclarified by turning to history. The modern, post-rationalist distinctionbetween theory and practice developed by Burke and the historical schoolthat followed him was thus not grounded on the “clear conviction of theultimate superiority of theory or of the theoretical life” characteristic of theclassical distinction. This “retaliation” against rationalism, Strauss contin-ued, engendered first “the depreciation of theory in favor of practice” andthen, as a result, “the highest form of practice—the foundation or forma-tion of a political society—was viewed as a quasi natural process not con-trolled by reflection; thus it could become a purely theoretical theme.Political theory became understanding of what practice has produced or ofthe actual and ceased to be the quest for what ought to be; political theoryceased to be ‘theoretically practical’ . . . and became purely theoretical.”75

This modern notion of practice, in the absence of an adequate understand-ing of both theory and of their necessary distinction, was a practice unwor-thy of the name.

As noted in the discussion of the three waves thesis above, the crisis ofmodernity was for Strauss a crisis of both theory and practice. To conclude,we can note that Strauss characterized Alexandre Kojeve in 1948 as a “phi-losopher” precisely because he refused to “rest satisfied” with the modern“vulgar separation of theory from practice.” For Strauss, the philosophic

74 Cp. Strauss, Seminar, 357–63, with 484–90.75 Strauss, NRH, 301–3, 304, 306, 311–12, 319–20.

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or refined understanding of that separation led to the conclusion that “therenever was and there never will be reasonable security for sound practiceexcept after theory has overcome the powerful obstacles to sound practicewhich originate in theoretical misconceptions” generated by modern ratio-nalism.76 In this respect, it is helpful to return to Strauss’s understanding ofphilosophy as a quest for rather than possession of the truth: comfortablein “disquieting” aporia, philosophers seek a “clear grasp” of the “funda-mental problems” that are “coeval with human existence” because theyrecognize that all “human solutions” are always only “variable or provi-sional.”77 As this article has shown, Strauss attempted through his critiqueof modernity to demonstrate that the modern Epicurean solutions to theproblem of theory and practice were not, in fact, solutions at all. Thereby,he sought to restore the distinction between theory and practice to thestatus of a problem, for Strauss took the tension between the philosophicaland the political life to be not simply one of but indeed the most fundamen-tal problem: it conditioned the very possibility of philosophy, of “graspingthese problems as problems.”78

Rousseau’s importance for Strauss lies precisely in his attempt to returnto the classical distinction between theory and practice. As we have seen,this attempt ultimately failed, for Strauss, because it was based on modernEpicurean premises. Denying revelation and natural sociability, Rousseaudeveloped both a conventional standard of political virtue and a subjectivestandard of individual happiness—the general will and the sentiment ofexistence—on the basis of a hedonistic moral psychology and materialistnatural science. But, for Strauss, by setting the relationship between thetheoretical and the practical life as his central theme, Rousseau did indeedmanage to clarify the nature of that fundamental problem. Strauss thusrecognized significant parallels between his own and Rousseau’s project.Indeed, Kojeve saw clearly both that the concern to contrast “the two waysof life” was Strauss’s own central theme and that it was grounded on anunderstanding of the “radical egoism of the philosophical life” that helabeled “Epicurean.” In his reply, Strauss importantly did not disagree, hisown proximity to Epicureanism being from early on evident in his philo-sophical atheism.79 Moreover, we can note in conclusion that Strauss

76 Strauss, “Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero” in On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitchand Michael S. Roth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 186; my emphasis.77 Cp. Strauss, WIPP, 11–12, and NRH, 32, 23.78 Strauss, NRH, 32; my emphasis.79 Cp. Leo Strauss, “On Tyranny,” 78–79, 85, 91, and Alexandre Kojeve, “Tyranny andWisdom,” 135–36, 151–52, 151n3, and Strauss, “Restatement,” 185.

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endorsed and appropriated as an account of his own project the descriptionof Nietzsche offered by Karl Lowith: like Rousseau’s before him, Strauss’sattempt to “recapitulate the ancients at the peak of modernity” was, aboveall, an attempt to clarify the problem of theory and practice.80

University of Chicago.

80 Strauss, “Letter to Lowith, 23.6.1935,” The Independent Journal of Philosophy 2(1978): 5–12.

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Documents

Theory, Practice, and Modernity: Leo Strauss on Rousseau's Epicureanism